Strange Mammals

by Jason Erik Lundberg

  A few minutes later, Moz tapped my left shoulder and shouted, “There lah,” pointing up ahead to a multi-storey carpark. I swerved past a family of speckled grey cats with pale blue eyes, zipped past the carpark’s pay-gate, and squeezed us through the opening between the tip of the gate and the concrete wall. We spiraled up past three levels sparsely occupied by Merces and Beamers and Minis onto the empty, moonlit roof deck. Moz’s girlfriend Savita stood at the far end, dressed in a white blouse and tight dark slacks more appropriate to someone working in a doctor’s office than to a gangster’s girlfriend. As we pulled up, I could immediately sense tension from Savita’s pose, one arm around her back and gripping the other at the elbow. She wore her big Bollywood sunglasses, which she only used on those rare occasions when Moz smacked her around.

  I cut the engine, the absence of noise sudden and sharp. Moz got off as I put the kickstand down, the knife gone from my side; he pulled the shoulder bag over his head and handed it to Savita, who took it without a word. Then he turned, eyes aglare, and said, “You got something to say me, ang moh?”

  “About what, Moz?” I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice. He was short, but made up for it with fury and intensity.

  Moz stepped around me, slowly, predatory. I knew better than to face him, but also if there was nothing I could do against his anger, I wanted to be staring at Savita . . . even if she wouldn’t meet my gaze. He stood at my back, and I couldn’t see him at all anymore. I tensed, waiting.

  “I think you know about what,” Moz whispered. “Ang moh so smart, think he fuck my Savi and I not find out? Ah? You shit-smoking cuntweasel?”

  When the blow came, it was almost a relief. The back of my head exploded in pain, and I blacked out before I hit the concrete carpark roof.

  ~

  We sit here, you and I, together in this cell, unknowing, unaware. I watch your jerky movements, the twitches of thousands of misfiring neurons. I do not remember you, and from your blank look I can see that the feeling is mutual. I do know that I loved you, even if your identity is gone, like mine.

  The dry cake they feed us, delivered once a day through a wall tube, crumbles like ash, tasteless, void of nutritional value. Water drips somewhere, but I cannot locate its source

  I am thirsty, my lips cracked, my skin parchment. I know nothing other than this cell, and you.

  Why do they, whoever “they” are, keep us here? Flashes of secrets important to the opposition, the rebels, linger in my hippocampus, though there is nothing I can grab on to, vaporous and ephemeral in the eye of my mind.

  Whatever procedure they used to delete my memories seems to have overloaded your poor brain, and you can only communicate in grunts, reversed down the evolutionary chain to your simian ancestors. You were beautiful once, that much is obvious, your dark skin now dulled by continuous lack of sunlight, and your movements become more erratic every day. No one has visited us for three days, after the incident with that one who tried to touch you; the other guards had to drag you off of him after you bit away his right ear and most of his cheek flesh.

  Perhaps they have forgotten about us, now that they know everything we know. Or have just decided to let us starve to death. Maybe our side attacked, and is unaware we are here. Or you were actually the interrogator, and I fought back. Or maybe the reverse is true. It’s impossible to know.

  The air grows thin. I have lost all hope of being released from this place. Either I will starve, or you will kill me in ignorant rage. I hope it happens quickly. The one thing I hang on to is the knowledge—perhaps false, perhaps true—that at one time, long ago, I held you in my arms and kissed you, and you kissed me back.

  ~

  Shivering, I opened my eyes from the strange dream. I was bound to a chair in a drab bedroom, my wrists constrained with what felt like plastic zipcuffs. Was I still dreaming?

  The aircon unit high up on the wall was cranked full blast, the hiss masking any background sounds. The square white floor tiles were cold under my bare feet. Not much light in the room, but with the window behind me, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. The room was sparse: a simple single slat bed, a fold-out table, and a small bookshelf with titles I couldn’t quite make out. Concrete walls, so a gahmen flat then, probably still in the Abdullah Crescent housing estate. Moz wouldn’t have been able to move me very far. The door was, naturally, closed.

  Whose flat was this? The room was small enough to be a child’s, and I had the sudden vision of a future with a baby crib in one corner and a playpen in the other. For a little Eurasian girl, half-white, half-Indian, beautiful, dimpled.

  Where the hell was this coming from? Had I really been deluding myself so badly with Savita? I’d known it wasn’t love, nowhere close to love, just physical infatuation. She was just so classy and so sexy all at once, an intoxicating combination and she knew it. Curvy like most Indian women I knew, and she kept herself in great shape. I smiled at the remembered conversation in bed, where she’d boasted she could crush peanuts with her ass cheeks; I’d never thought to take her up on her braggadocio.

  As if my thoughts had summoned her, Savita opened the door and stepped inside. A quick glance past her revealed compact fluorescents burning cool in the next room: still nighttime then. Or else I’d been unconscious for an entire day. Savita closed the door. At least she’d taken off the ridiculous shades.

  “How’d he find out?” I asked and coughed, my throat dry.

  “I don’t know,” Savita said, her voice soft, hushed. “Not from me. But he does have a way of sniffing things out.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” She glanced quickly at the door, as if expecting Moz to burst in at any moment. “I’ve never seen him this angry.”

  “Then get me loose.” I wiggled my arms, feeling the zipcuffs tighten and dig into my wrists. “We can run. We’ll go to Malaya or Thailand.”

  She shook her head, her loose dark hair swishing in front of her face; in the dim light of the room, I couldn’t tell whether her eye was blackened or bruised. And in spite of the situation, or maybe because of it, I felt an overwhelming need to have her right there on the floor.

  “He’ll find us,” she said. “You know this. His contacts are spread out all over Southeast Asia. And how you going to travel, lah? Last I checked, your passport was not exactly legal here anymore; you’ll get pinched the second we try to go through immigration. The airport, the causeway, the ports, some shithead bureaucrat will notice and call the polis, and then game’s up. Prison and then hanging.”

  “No,” I said. “Not if I give them Moz.”

  “What?”

  “If I get myself caught, yeah, they could get me for some petty drug-running, but if I give them the kingpin, the man who’s been eluding them for years, most likely they’ll just deport me. Could be they extradite me back home, but drug offenses, especially minor ones, are a much smaller deal than they are here. I’ll do some prison time in the US, but it won’t be death.”

  “This is a stupid idea, ang moh. The border guards will get you and then hand you to Moz. He bribes many of them; how you think he’s so able to get so many drugs in and out of the country?”

  “What, government corruption in squeaky clean Tinhau?”

  “Yeah lah,” came Moz’s voice from the doorway, and Savita and I both turned. The door was only slightly cracked, enough for him to eavesdrop, and he now opened it the rest of the way. He glared at Savita, who met his gaze for several long moments. “Out,” he said, and she left. He closed the door behind her, and we were alone.

  “So how, ang moh?” he said. It was a question he’d asked me often. Moz had lots of ideas, but not always a way to implement them; that was where I came in. I could connect the dots in a plan, divine the patterns, put together disparate actions, set meetups on Friendface or Gregslist as fronts for drug exchange; the e-bike gatherings had been my idea. My value to Moz was most likely why I was still alive.

  “I don’t know, Moz
,” I said. “I fucked up, big time. It wasn’t something either of us planned. It just happened.”

  “How many?”

  “What?”

  “How many times it happen?”

  Like I was going to tell him that. “Moz, I don’t think—”

  “No!” he shouted, then took two steps toward me and slapped me hard on the ear. I rocked to the side, and my vision doubled. A high pitched whine started in my cuffed ear. “No, you don’t think, you cuntweasel. That is why you here. Why you think you betray me with no consequence, lorh? And after everything I do for you: fix with Malayan border guard that first time so you not arrested for possessing marijuana, give you a job, a home, and for what!”

  I opened and closed my mouth several times in an attempt to dull the tinnitus, but the ringing remained. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “What is necessary,” he said, then in one fast motion punched me hard in the nose. The world exploded around me, and my eyes felt as if they would pop. I tasted blood. When my vision returned, more of my nose was present on the right side of my face than the left. I spat and reddish sputum landed on the floor at my feet.

  I readied myself for another assault, but Moz just looked down at me, eyes quivering in their sockets, sweat standing out on his face despite the chill of the room. He reached into his pocket. The memory of his blade poking into my side sent a tremor through my body. But he pulled out a syringe, not his knife. The liquid inside was dark, the color indeterminate in the dim light.

  “Gave you a taste of this earlier,” Moz said, “after knocking you out. But we need to test a full dose before selling to the dealers. Good shit or just shit, right?” He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

  The designer drugs we’d picked up at the e-bike meetup, snuck in from Sumatra. Untested, cut with other chemicals. No one quite knew what effect they had other than their hallucinatory properties. Shooting me up would have been crueler than sticking a gun in my mouth. But Moz didn’t go for a vein. He stepped up, uncapped the syringe, and jabbed the needle into the top of my thigh.

  After depressing the plunger all the way to the bottom, he yanked out the needle and stomped from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  ~

  The door to the cell opens, and I shrink back, involuntarily reminded of truncheons and military boots with steel toes, but no, it is not further humiliation and cruel excruciation that await, but deliverance. The short man is clad in green fatigues and a Che cap, a lit cigar clamped between his teeth, assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Guerilla in aspect and manner, and in he strides, swagger in his step; a small cloud of mosquitoes buzzes and flits around the man’s head, hovering and orbiting but not landing, the noise filling the silence of the bare cell.

  The man looks at me and asks if I am ready to go home.

  Where is home?

  The man laughs. Far away from here, he says.

  It is then that you leap from your coiled form on the floor, as if releasing the kinetic energy of a compression spring, and before I can cry a warning, you pounce on our liberator, showering him not with flowers and praise but misguided incoherent rage. You punch and bite and scratch and kick, your tornadic brutality overwhelming his revolutionary reflexes, and I reflexively shove myself hard against the cinderblock wall at my back, wanting to push straight through to the other side, knowing that I will be next.

  When you have finished pounding his skull repeatedly into the concrete floor as easily as you would crack a coconut, you stand up, hands filthy with blood, and you turn your gaze toward me. An involuntary squeak escapes my lips. But rather than advance on my pathetic figure, you wipe your hands on your tattered prison greys, and then begin to disrobe. Your body is all hard muscle, any softness eliminated by your lengthy incarceration, and though stirrings of attraction flit throughout my chest and loins at your nude form, they subside quickly in recognition of the predator you have become.

  You reach down and undress our dead savior, pulling his clothes on quickly and efficiently, as if they have been yours all along. You leave the cap on the man’s head, then spit twice in the corpse’s face. You turn to me, your eyes clear for the first time I have known you.

  “Come,” you say, your voice deep and melodic. “Let’s go.”

  ~

  A loud crash from the room outside awakened me, as if a wooden door had been kicked open. Had I slept again? Shouts, loud, some deep, some high, unintelligible on this side of the door, more crashes (furniture? glass?), muffled thumps, a high-pitched scream, and then the room’s door was flung inward followed quickly by Moz’s airborne body, which landed in a heap at my feet. I looked up as a second figure entered the room and flicked the light switch on. I cringed under the sudden illumination, and when I could focus again, I beheld Savita, in the same clothes as before (had so little time passed?), but now wearing a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the recognizable logo of the Central Narcotics Bureau.

  She stood over Moz’s groaning form, then flipped him over and began punching him repeatedly in the balls. Moz screeched and tried to protect his groin, but she slapped his hands away and continued.

  “Give me black eye, you fuck! Like to beat up women so much, ah? Fuck you, you pissoir!”

  After several long moments, but not before Savita had reduced Moz to a weeping fetus, several more CNB officers stepped in the room to pull her off of him. As she stood, she gave his cullions a final kick, and I swore I could hear a popping sound.

  “Enough, Savi!” said the officer closest to her, a tall Malay man. “We got him, it’s over! Enough!” I didn’t like his familiarity with her, the way he held her upper arms, nuzzling his mouth to her ear. He led her outside, as two other CNBs bent down to carry Moz away. A third stepped behind me, and there was a cutting sound, then a plastic snap, and my hands came free. The CNB lifted me under the armpits into a standing position, and I stomped the numbness out of my feet.

  “Come,” he said, “let’s go.”

  He escorted me out of the air-conditioned bedroom and into the living room. Tables and chairs lay in smashed ruins, the front door hanging by one hinge. Out the open window, the light blue of dawn signaled brighter times ahead. Moz was dragged, limp, groaning, outside. Savita was talking to the Malay officer in low tones, and as she reached up to touch his face, I felt my stomach drop. I’d been even more deluded than I thought.

  She saw me and walked back over, her eyes glowing. “Told you it would have been a stupid plan.”

  “Yeah, but now I know why.”

  “Thanks for your accidental assistance, but I’m sorry it won’t help you. I’m afraid Tinhau’s laws apply to citizen and foreigner alike.”

  “But what . . .” I swallowed. “What about us?”

  “Take it however you like. It was real as it was happening, if that’s any comfort.”

  “What’s happening to your face?”

  “What?”

  Her eyes blazed with light now, twin suns in the darkness of her face. Her lips rippled, parted, and a flood of tiny ikan bilis swam out and puddled on the floor between us. The gushing sound of a fierce river rose in my ears, and past Savita the walls were gone, were they ever really there?, a massive river of time flowing and roaring into the past and the future. Flying fish leapt and cavorted from the river, growing improbable wings and lifting up into the skies. Savita had grown wings herself, as had her Malay colleague, who also sported the head of a speckled grey cat with pale blue eyes. Everyone had wings now, even me; I wiggled my shoulders and could feel them bounce on the muscles of my back.

  “You’re all . . .” I searched for the word, unable to drag it up from the depths of my mind.

  Savita smiled with her wavering lips, then turned and joined hands with what must have been her real lover, and with a small hop that launched them upward, they flapped their strong fleshy wings and took flight. I couldn’t let her go, I loved her, right? You don’t just allow the kind of love we had to get away so easily. I ran
after her, disregarding the “Oi!” behind me, stretched out my wings, and at the banks of that mighty chronic river I jumped, hurtling upward, the wind rushing past my ears, Savita still in sight as I accelerated, closer and closer, her hair swishing wildly about her head in a halo, so close, so close, almost in reach.

  ~

  You lead us through endless low-ceilinged corridors, following some inscrutable pattern of piping lines or electrical trunking overhead. I can see no end to this labyrinth of greyness, but you seem to know exactly where we are headed, guided by some internal positioning system of which I am unaware. Gone completely is your feral animalistic nature, purged by your killing of the revolutionary. Now you are the apotheosis of purpose and confidence.

  After the hundred thousandth corner, I tentatively reach out and touch your shoulder, and ask you to stop for a moment. I need to catch my breath. You do not startle at the contact, or fly into a frenzy, but simply turn, and say, “Very well.”

  Hands on knees, I breathe deeply, oxygenating aching alveoli, trying to regain some semblance of myself. You lean against the wall, one booted foot crossed over the other, tapping a cryptic rhythm which echoes lightly around us, the ticking a code of your mind’s inner processes. You are no less dangerous than before; in fact, with your newly rediscovered cognizance, you may be a great deal more.

  I ask if you know who I am.

  “Yes. I have always known.”

  Who am I?

  “It is unimportant in this place. You are you. In the outside world, you completely replace all the cells in your body every seven years, meaning that you are a totally different person than the one you were seven years ago. You are now, right now, a different person than before you entered this place. Once you leave, once you alight this existence, you will be different yet again, and it will be up to you and the actions you take that will determine the you whom you will become.”