by O Thiam Chin
As she came around to the idea, Yifan was able to get a better grip of the man’s thoughts. Each thought generated a rush of images before dissolving, followed swiftly by another thought and its cluster of images. Some of the man’s thoughts were trivial, day-today stuff—tasks to complete, errands to run—while others were a mishmash of odds and ends cobbled together without any particular sequence or meaning. But what puzzled Yifan most were those murky, shapeless thoughts that hovered at the edge of her mind. She could not get a firm sense of what they were. If she could not read these thoughts, how about the man? Was he failing to understand his own thoughts too? She had no idea.
• • •
After Yifan started telling me about her past, I found myself unable to write. I’d turn on the laptop and stare at the blank page on the screen, not a single word or image stirring in my head. At that point, I was working on a novel about two young couples trying to find one another on a devastated island after a tsunami. But I simply could not continue the story, even though I had started with a clear direction and knew what I wanted to achieve with it. To get around this stalemate, I tried writing longhand on a notepad. I managed to scribble one sentence on the paper, but found myself revising it over and over again. Eventually I gave up and turned to the story Yifan had been telling me instead.
I wrote slowly at first, trying to distill a story from the cluster of images and impressions, careful to leave out my initial surprise and fascination. After a while, my writing picked up pace, propelling itself forward. When my back started to ache, I would stir from the writing and make more coffee or have a quick snack. I wondered where it was all going ultimately. Why had Yifan started telling me her story? And more importantly—why had I felt the need to write it all down?
My mind was racked with doubt, with questions that raised more questions. Was Yifan really a fox spirit? Could she really transform herself into an animal? And if she really could, what was I supposed to do with the knowledge? Run out and tell someone else about it? Would anyone believe me? And if the story wasn’t true, was she crazy? How well did I know her after all, this woman with her irresistible hold on my life? And what could I do really—stop seeing her, and get as far away from her as possible? None of these options seemed feasible or realistic, in any case. I wanted answers— and I knew I was about to have them, soon. I just had to be patient.
As evening drew near and the flat fell into shadows, I finished up the last sentence and put away the story. I took out the leftovers from the fridge—stir-fried fish slices with ginger, and fried eggs with onions—and popped them into the microwave. I scooped out two cups of rice for the rice cooker and laid out an additional set of cutlery on the dining table.
While waiting for the rice to cook, I thought about Yifan as a moth in the man’s room and the man lying on the bed, both of them thinking the same thoughts. If Yifan could read the man’s thoughts, could she also read mine, too? I smiled briefly at the thought of this—what did it matter? I could not stop her if she did, and if it was beyond my control, why should I care about it?
Yifan came over at 11pm, as usual. We ate the dinner that I had prepared and made aimless small talk across a range of topics: food, movies, mobile game apps. She washed up and put away the leftovers. As far as I could tell, Yifan was her usual self, affable and artless. Later, after I initiated it, we had sex. Perhaps because of what I knew, I went into the lovemaking with greater abandon. Yifan kept up her part, immersing herself fully in the act, unrestrained in her passion. When we were done, she collapsed into my arms, her body warm and flushed, covered in tiny beads of perspiration. I held her and waited for her to continue her story.
• • •
“I kept listening to his thoughts night after night. I don’t think I could have stopped, and I didn’t want to. There was so much I didn’t know about him, and this window into his mind was all I had to peek into. I knew, in the back of my mind, that it was wrong. But I didn’t care.”
“He never caught on?”
“How would he know that there was someone able to read his mind? Would you believe it, if you had never heard of such things?”
“And what you were doing never bothered you at all?”
“No, not at the time. I only did what I had to do, and I wasn’t thinking about what would happen next. I was in too deep to see anything else.”
“You never told anyone?”
“How could I, really? Not after I found out what I could actually do. There was no turning back then.”
“What do you mean?”
“A week after I realised I could hear his thoughts, I discovered something else by accident. That night, he was about to fall asleep, and just as I was about to leave, I did something out of the blue: I decided to give him a nudge by sneaking a thought into his head. It was a simple thought: look at me. And then, almost immediately, he scanned the room and saw me—a moth on the wall. He stared for such a long time that I wondered whether he could tell who I was. I was scared out of my wits. But of course, he couldn’t have known. When he broke his stare, I flew out of the room in haste. I was shaken by the whole episode—but also secretly thrilled that he could hear me in his head. I felt overjoyed, in fact. I could finally make myself known to him.
“And then things took a different turn.”
• • •
Late afternoon the following day, Yifan disguised herself as a sparrow and took up her usual spot in the tree, above the man on the bench. This time she imprinted herself right into his mind, with simple instructions: Look up. Look at me. The man took some time, craning his neck around. Finally he spotted Yifan in the branches, looking down at him. His face took on a slight hint of a recognition, as if he were trying to recall a distant, long-forgotten memory. Quickly, she left an image in his head: a pair of hands—hers. The man’s sight turned inwards as his mind scampered after the image. She sensed his thoughts coalescing around the image she had created. She fed him more images: a bare shoulder, her legs, her peach-shaped breasts. Except her face—that she had intentionally blanked out. She animated these parts of her with delicate movements and suggestive gestures—move, arch, tremble, touch, prod, feel. She let the man’s thoughts wrap themselves around hers, intertwining, amassing and building themselves up; in no time, they were thinking the same thoughts, playing the same images in their heads. Yifan could feel her heart pounding outside the tiny sparrow body she was in, as if it had been ripped out of her.
She watched as the man reached into his pants and began to tug. He had closed his eyes, deep lines at the sides of his eyes, as if in strained concentration. She watched him—from the branch and inside his head—and an intense current coursed through her senses, her body electrified from tip to tip. In her mind—and in his?—they were inseparable, united in spirit. The feeling was intolerable, yet it filled every space inside her. She had created herself in the man’s mind, and he had taken her whole, without question, without resistance. In many ways, she was ecstatic beyond measure. The man had wanted every part of her.
Yet in the dark pit of her heart, she also felt a greater sense of reality was still missing. Where was she, the real Yifan, in all this? She was, after all, merely a thought in the man’s head, and this absence sat stubbornly in her, hard and intractable. She needed more— needed to fill the void, though she had no idea how to do it.
She watched as the man finally collapsed into a heap of spasms, his mind exploding in bright fragments, his thoughts scattered in torn, twisted pieces. She fled his mind like a thief taking flight, escaping into the safety of darkness.
• • •
“And I appeared to him more and more, sneaking into his mind whenever I was near him. From being inside his head, I was quite sure he didn’t find anything amiss. He was completely clueless. And I knew with certainty that he had been entertaining thoughts about me the whole time. Not the real me, but the one I had created in his head. I was glad, I thought he was falling for me. But I was wrong, in the end.
“The more I entered his mind, the easier it became to influence him. I thought by giving him what he had wanted—my body, my thoughts, my love—I was securing a place for myself in his life, though I barely talked to him except for cursory greetings or a brief chat here and there. I don’t think he paid any real attention to me during that time. But this didn’t matter to me; I was already in his thoughts all the time. And it felt enough.
“I was so deep into what I was doing that I didn’t notice what was happening to him. It was only later, when his health started to fail, that these changes became apparent to me: his gaunt face, his sunken cheeks, the void of light in his eyes. His hair turned grey overnight. I didn’t link any of this to what I was doing to him, but of course, these things have their effects.
“After a while I started to get complacent and a little careless. I would leave small tracks behind in his head: a glimpse of the birthmark on my shoulder, the mole on my left cheek; little signs that would give me away. Was it intentional? I don’t know. But I don’t think he picked up any of these, and if he had, it didn’t register in his mind right away. As I said, I could not read some of his thoughts; those that were more ambiguous and obscure in nature. Also, I wasn’t with him all day, so it was impossible to know everything that went on in his head.
“This carried on for four months, and things seemed to be going where they should. But I was wrong. I might have overlooked the changes in his appearance or behaviour, but they had already aroused the suspicions of his parents. They must have tried to find out from him what was going on, and had taken steps to help him. All I could tell was that his thoughts got slow and heavy, as if his mind had been sedated or cast down with an unseen load. Whatever they were doing—visits to the doctor or mediums, medications, talismans, pills, herbal drinks—dulled him significantly. His mind became like a swamp, thick and coagulated, barely letting in any light.
“Eventually, this came to a head so suddenly I wasn’t able to do anything about it. I didn’t know it would be the last time I would be in his head until it happened. That night, I was in his thoughts, and we were in the thick of the act. I was careless, and had turned my back to him for a moment. When I glanced back, I saw a look of terror on his face. Then I realised my tail was wagging wildly in the air between us. I swiftly retracted the tail, but it was too late. The man’s thoughts started to run riotous, his face torn by alarm and fear. We stared at each other and I knew, without any doubt, that whatever we’d had between us was lost for good. I would not be able to get into his head anymore. He had seen through me. I exited from his head, and left quickly.
They found him in bed the next day, unconscious but still alive. When he came to, three days later, he was no longer the same: a little off in his head, they said. I didn’t try to find out more, though I could not help hearing things from my parents. And although I kept my distance and my silence, I could not stop blaming myself for what had happened. I had destroyed the only good thing in my life.
“That was when I decided to leave Ipoh and head down to Singapore. I wanted to leave it all behind me. Yet I knew the consequences of my actions would stay with me for as long as I lived. But I would have to deal with it, in my own time.
“And now you know all there is to know about me, about my past. What do you want to do now?”
• • •
After Yifan left I went around the flat, restless and agitated, unable to sit or stand still even for a moment. I wondered whether I understood any of Yifan’s story. The details were all there, but I did not know what to do with them. If I believed any part of it, what was next? I was at a loss. I knew I did not want to lose Yifan. But there was no guarantee, not even in the intimacy we had shared, that she would stay. Things hadn’t worked out the first time. But now I had a chance to make them right.
And it boiled down to this: my decision. How quickly life could unravel and come to naught. There for a moment, and then gone. People, loves, stories—it was only a matter of time.
Pausing under the kitchen lights, I felt a slight nudge in my mind, my thoughts pushing my consciousness towards something hidden in its crevices. How much had I lost up to now—including my grasp on my own life? I had tried to take it once and failed, and I did not have it in me to try again. Since that attempt, my existence had felt suspended, stuck in time, a pathetic figure drawn in air and shadow. What story could I make out of my life? Nothing that would matter to anyone, not even to Yifan.
And yet I had somehow found a way to live: in the stories that I had written, stories caught between life and the void, between fact and make-believe, holding up the truths that were the sum of every real or imagined thing I had felt or known or seen. These stories mattered to me. And what was Yifan’s story but another way for me to get back into the flow of life? It might not be the best way to live, but it was all I had. It was sufficient—I would make it so, in time.
Taking in a deep, muddled breath, I let my thoughts settle. My mind flat-lined. Then, with a sudden flicker of shadows, I saw the moth at the edge of my vision. It had hidden itself in a dark corner of the kitchen, still and observant. For a full moment, I wondered: did it think or feel? If so, would its thoughts cross with mine, merging, taking the same path? In that instant, I saw myself as the moth—in its wings and feathered antennae, feeling its way through the long night. I could take flight any time. But instead I waited. I watched myself through the eyes of the moth, and felt my thoughts stirring alive inside its dark, cavernous mind.
Around me, the night spread its wings and darkness was upon us, full and fathomless.
THERE WERE ONLY two things Tien Chen knew about his mother: she married his father 28 years ago, and died a week after giving birth to him. She was 30 when she died, and his father had thrown away all her photos, except two, one of which he kept in his wallet, and which had faded into a murky paleness, his mother’s features barely outlined against the background. The other was framed as a portrait and placed on the altar in the living room. How they had met, and everything that happened before she died—these his father had chosen not to reveal.
From the little he knew about his parents’ lives, Tien Chen pieced together a composite of their history, filled with gaps and silences. What kind of woman had his mother been? Why had she fallen in love with his father, a slight, shy man who was partially blind in the right eye? What had she seen in him? Growing up, Tien Chen tried to answer his own questions by paying close attention to what his father said and did, and attempting to form his own impressions of their past. But it had never felt sufficient.
What troubled Tien Chen was the death of his mother, something that occurred as an unfortunate result of unseen complications from a tough birth, according to his father. Tien Chen did not know whether his mother was buried or cremated; his father had never brought him to a cemetery or columbarium to pay his respects, not even during Qing Ming. It was as if his father had chosen deliberately to erase her existence, to wipe her from memory as if she had not mattered at all, a flicker of dust scattered into nothingness.
As a child, Tien Chen had felt the absence of his mother sharply, even though he had no memory of her. She was an emptiness in his head, exerting its own weight and presence. But based on what he’d gathered from his classmates’ stories and accounts of their mothers, he was able to form an image of a mother he never had, one that grew more complex as he attributed more traits and features to her, willing her into existence. Sometimes, in his fervent imagining—when the figure of his mother appeared vividly alive to him—he could almost feel the reality of this person he had made up entirely in his head, a person who seemed as real to him as any other living being.
It was in such moments, or shortly after, that the ache of his loss would crush him. The made-up memories of his mother and the fact of her death—they nestled side by side in his mind like a pair of close, feuding beasts feeding on his obsession, nurtured by his deep longing. He never told anyone about these thoughts, knowing deep
in his bones that it was something he had to carry alone. He often felt separated from the people around him, and nothing gave him more relief from the pressure and friction of daily life than escaping into this secret place inside him.
Yet, Tien Chen was not blind to all that his father did to make his childhood a little easier to bear. His father had allowed Tien Chen an unthinkable breadth of freedom from an age of five, just as long as he did not get into trouble, or come back home crying at every little cut or bruise. If you want to cry then don’t play, his father would tell him, a little pain now and then won’t kill you; it might even be good for you. Tien Chen held on to his father’s words tightly, like cold, flinty stones in his palm. He bore all the pain he encountered—whether from his own carelessness or inflicted by others—with barely a whimper. He learnt ways to inure himself to it, to make himself braver than he actually was.
When he started primary school, his father gave him the keys to the flat and a weekly allowance. You’re old enough to take care of yourself now, he’d said. As a drinks stall helper, his father clocked a 14-hour shift at a kopitiam in the housing estate where they lived, and was rarely home before ten-thirty at night. Tien Chen took to preparing his meals at home, after growing tired of eating the food from the neighbourhood kopitiams—simple-enough meals of white rice with canned luncheon meat, or instant noodles with a fried egg. Sometimes he cooked more and set aside the leftovers for his father, who would eat them cold after taking a quick shower. Tien Chen would sit at the dining table with his homework as his father ate quietly and swiftly, hardly pausing between mouthfuls. When his father asked about school, Tien Chen offered short replies with little or no elaboration that were always received with a slight nod or a blank expression. Occasionally the meals would pass with nary a word exchanged between them. This came as a relief to Tien Chen, who often worried about what he was supposed to say to his father.
