Night Ride

The night sky smelled of crushed papayas as Hui and I drove on, driving through the PIE, leaving a contrail of cigarette ash. Hui asleep in the shotgun seat, dreaming, soaring like a butterfly, not knowing that the police are on my trail, our trails. One moment I was dancing in a club at Clarke Quay; the next I punched a man, heard the sickening crunch of his skull on concrete, and looked at my bloodied hand in horror. I began calling Hui, didn’t even think about calling anybody else, ran to my car, the pavement retracting away from me like in a dolly zoom. No time to vomit, even though the bile tickled the edges of my throat. Now, I exit the PIE, drive past the izakayas and trattorias, the late-night coffeeshops with their LED signboards, drive past the HDBs flats jutting out like rows of crooked teeth, thinking about what I should do next. This tiny red dot has never felt tinier. Sirens went off behind me. I was waiting at a red light, and I jumped, turning to the window expecting an officer, taser, and handcuffs gleaming under the moonlight, but it turned out to just be an ambulance. How I wish I were in that ambulance. Tremors all over my body, and I felt the bile rising again; I felt like puking all over Hui and her shiny blue dress.

Where was the ice? Of course she had to finish all of it first. Our nightly ritual. I pull open her eyelids and see the snow dancing in her retina. ‘Come back to my world,’ I whisper to her, ‘I need you here.’

I could go to JB, hope that the checkpoint was empty, and speed past the causeway up north all the way to Thailand. A good plan, except that I didn’t have my passport with me. But what if they couldn’t be bothered to chase me? The Malaysian police were not like the Singaporean police, and I had modified my Honda Civic, juiced up the engine, and installed the nitrous; I could blast through the gate, a gift of orange and blue fireworks to the officers in their booths. Perhaps I would be forgotten, disappearing from their lives when I race out of vision, like wisps of exhaust in the wind. And was it so bad if the officers activated every emergency protocol, their entire fleet, before sitting down to watch the chase through a television screen, laughing while watching me burn, go supernova?

I didn’t know exactly what had happened. I was dancing, I think, the shafts of purple-yellow light indistinct, my eyes submerged under lager, when somebody came over and accused me of being the asshole grinding on his girlfriend. A ‘hum sup lou’ who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Ridiculous—my hands have only touched Hui. I worshipped her, prayed over her, and left my fingerprints on her skin, and here somebody was telling me that I was a blasphemer. I told him that I would never lay my hands on another girl. He told me to meet with him outside, and I remembered how the air tasted like ice kacang, the kueh lapis clouds almost touching the streetlights. The rumble of house music somehow sounded much clearer through the metal door, the melodic bass speaking to me, setting my stage.

There was no honor in what I did, turning around and striking him first in the face. I hadn’t spoken to him once. And when I felt the thud of my knuckles against bone, I was so happy, thinking of the many times that I, as an NSF, wished to hit my encik’s face while I was being humiliated, a left hook out of nowhere that would leave him sputtering. I hated people with all bark and no bite. What I didn’t anticipate was him completely losing his balance, smacking face-down into reinforced concrete, and, don’t ask me how, but I instantly knew that he was dead. I should’ve begun running, but I couldn’t help myself staring at the blood and brain fluid oozing out of his ear, hierograms on the black pavement. You didn’t need to be a scholar to know what it said.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Hui, half-awake. ‘This isn’t your home.’

‘I don’t have a home anymore,’ I replied.

Hui giggled. ‘Come on, you don’t need to be afraid of him; you’re big enough to take him on.

In the dark, Hui’s collarbones rose and fell, two smiling faces, faces split apart by her yawning and her slow breathing.

I wondered what life in prison would be like. I would first be detained at Cantonment, probably, and the tiny white crystals in my urine would betray me, adding more years behind bars and adding more strokes of the cane. It wasn’t prison that I was afraid of—I had seen those documentaries online, the lives of different inmates in Changi prison. They were kind enough to at least give you a mat to sleep on, stop your back from touching the cold concrete flooring, the same dull grey which the man had cracked his skull open on. The real prison isn’t the metal bars holding you in, people say, it’s the mind. I could already see myself staring at the spiderwebbed cracks in the concrete, trying to scry my future from them, as if they were lines on my palm. The lifeline curving downwards, like the man’s ashen hair, gravity’s rainbow, the motion blur from a video game, his head splitting open like a piñata. Blood and tissue trickling down into the ground’s pores, leaving his body to nourish the ants, scuttling under the moss.

They would let you out to the exercise yard, and I would see more people getting pushed while playing basketball, pushed while fighting, and pushed while doing push-ups, toppling over so that their heads too hit the concrete. That was how I would cure my guilt, looking at so many split heads that you no longer thought that there was a human underneath all that skin and hair. Strangely, I might become more human myself, rehabilitated, as they call it. Become a well-adjusted member of society.

I might even be able to meet my old friends. How long have they been locked up? It had to be at least five or six years. They were the ones who offered me my first pill, glistening with sweat from their palms, and dragged me down into a musty room in the club’s basement, initiated me into the brotherhood by cutting my thumb open. My blood dripped into an aluminum bowl, brown ten-cent coins. That was how I met Hui, barely conscious on a moldy sofa, looking up at me in a daze when I approached her. I tried saving her to save me, tried to get her off the stuff, and let her sleep in my living room in Jalan Kukoh when my father wasn’t around. He was a 酒鬼, an alcohol ghost, who loved to smash bottles on the vinyl flooring, and I learned to see it coming and dodge the shrapnel before he had even swung his arm. My kindness was rewarded when the police raided the club’s basement when Hui and I weren’t there, making love in the toilet upstairs. Just like that, my entire family was gone, and Hui and I clung to each other like a pair of leeches, never letting the other person go.

Could you blame us when we relapsed? We both learned that we couldn’t live without family and had to get it replaced with another dealer, another needle.

‘Where the fuck are we going?’ Hui said, her eyes wide open.

‘Somewhere safe,’ I said.

‘Safe from what?’ She asked.

‘Don’t worry, just a couple of angry Bengs. ‘They won’t catch us,’ I said.

‘What did you do? Raced them and flipped them off?’ She said, giggling.

The cane they used, I heard, was a thick bundle of rattan, and they used enough force on your buttocks such that your skin would burst open, like a flytrap opening its maw. I wouldn’t be able to move, would spend all day sleeping on my chest, trying to keep myself from screaming, from shitting myself. The doctors would offer you Panadol, but nobody would take it, would rather endure the pain of being whipped than the pain of humiliation. I’ve heard stories from those around me, those who have been caned more than twenty times in a day, that somebody would appear and save you from the suffering near the end. The last strokes wouldn’t hurt at all. Some claimed to see Jesus, some felt Allah. Some saw their mothers.

Now I’ve done it. How would Hui react when the officers handcuff her, detain her too? She would hit me, hook me in the face just like what I did to that man, and call me a fucking traitor, but I wasn’t worried. I knew that she would be there for me when the cane is lifted for the tenth time, my buttocks a bleeding mess.

Faraway blares of car horns as I speed on, and a wave of vehicles swerve to avoid me as I enter the PIE again, but this time against traffic. In the mirror, I could see the police cars stop; the officers hesitated, asking themselves whether it was worth their lives. On the other side of the highway, cars were slowing down. I imagined these drivers craning their necks, watching my modified Civic going a hundred kilometers per hour, pulled in by my gravity, as if they were mere planets and I was the sun.

I rolled down the windows, felt the warm wind in my nostrils, and I was in Clarke Quay again. I smelled pizza and buffalo wings from the bars around me, the frangipani in bloom, and the vomit in the drains. Smelled the whiskey from his rapid breaths. 

I heard bus 851 pulling into the station, heard piano music drifting out from somebody’s apartment, and heard moths flitting above my head. And I could hear the man’s mouth, each opening and closing, count each second by each agonal breath.

‘Meet me,’ I had told her. ‘Meet me tonight.’ I drove on, driving against the PIE, leaving a contrail of screeches and screams, Hui crying, hitting me in the groin and chest, trying to wrestle the steering wheel away. The entire car was a shuddering jukebox, Guanyinma smiling at me from the dashboard, blessing me with her mudra. I held on to Hui’s flailing hand, looked right into the photograph of us hanging on the rear-view mirror, and saw the incoming headlights. Trust me. I knew that, when all of this was over, we would be alive.