Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg
Strange Mammals (17 page)
The commemoration of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and achievement of Nirvana brought to the Chinatown temple droves of devotees and tourists alike; it was one of the few days of the year that the namesake relic was actually on display. Ironically, had Gabe gone when he’d originally wanted to, he wouldn’t have been able to see it, as it was locked away in a vault for the rest of the year, far underground, below the temple’s basement-level car parks, and, he imagined, protected by razor wire and lasers and hungry pit bulls.
The lift car was crammed full on the way up, but divested passengers at each floor before emptying at the fourth storey and the sacred Buddha tooth relic chamber. However, when Vanessa and Gabe saw the relic queue wrapping around the room four times in a spiral (or was it five?), she led him to the nearby staircase.
“We can see later, lah,” she said. “Wait until the queue lessens.”
“Sure,” he said, and they slowly ascended one more floor to the roof.
The roof was actually a pavilion filled with a profusion of orchids, Singapore’s national flower, and the fragrantly sweet smell was a welcome relief after all the incense downstairs. As before, the walls of the pavilion were filled with a number of small Buddhas, but only the size of a fingerbone, and there appeared to be a hundred times more of them than in the halls below. At the center of the roof stood a large pagoda, and inside it a colossal prayer wheel stretched up to the ceiling, painted red with golden cloisonné designs and characters. The bottom of the cylinder was ringed with a metal handrail that circled all the way round. Though several people milled about among the orchids, Gabe and Vanessa were completely alone inside the pagoda.
“The letters are Sanskrit calligraphy,” Vanessa whispered. “If one chants this mantra without ego, and with sincere devotion and clarity of mind, Vairocana Buddha will dispel all ignorance and delusion from the chanter. One turn of the wheel represents one recitation of the mantra.”
She grasped the handrail, and walked with it, turning the prayer wheel clockwise. Five revolutions, and each time she passed Gabe’s position, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her smile was infectious. After the fifth time, she stopped and motioned toward the prayer wheel with her head; he took the handrail in his left hand behind his back, mindful of his cast on the other arm, and started walking. The wheel was as heavy as it looked, but moved smoothly once his inertia was consistent. He performed the same approach-and-kiss maneuver Vanessa had done, and they both giggled, then immediately shushed each other as they remembered that this was a holy place, and they didn’t want to attract attention from outside.
Gabe wanted to push Vanessa against the wall and kiss her for real, feel her under his hands, but she guided him back to the stairwell, whispering, “Later.” Down to the fourth storey, and the queue had thinned somewhat, not quite so claustrophobic. As they threaded through the velvet ropes like cattle, Gabe couldn’t stop looking at Vanessa, seeing a beauty and a kindness he hadn’t noticed before, her hair up in a bun exposing a smooth length of neck, smile slightly crooked but endearing, and he hardly paid any attention to the golden floor tiles or the golden stupa in the middle of the room or the elaborate mandala painted on the ceiling or the golden Tang dynasty lanterns hanging down, he was still smelling the orchids from upstairs, and oh, here they were, a glass cube inside which sat an unremarkable white tooth, smoothed by time and handling. It was large, looking more likely to fit in the mouth of a water buffalo than in a remarkable human man. Gabe was expecting to feel some kind of divine power from the relic, a tingling at the root of his knowledge that he was in the presence of something great, something bigger than himself, but it was just a tooth. It had served its purpose inside the Buddha’s mouth, grinding up food for energy, for fuel to continue his teachings.
“I wonder,” Vanessa murmured in all seriousness, “if you put that tooth in your own mouth, would you be able to recite all the sutras and teach the noble truths and bring peace to the world?”
Gabe grunted in acknowledgment of the question, but didn’t know what to say. He was no fan of religion, and he could see no visible difference between the tooth and a white stone, or a smooth piece of concrete. It was an interesting thought, a fantastical speculation, and he briefly entertained the fantasy in his mind, bringing an end to war and hunger and suffering with only his words, the verbal embodiment of ultimate compassion. But then his vision was dispelled when the woman behind him in the queue cleared her throat loudly, and he was forced to move on.
The Apokalypsis Pentaptych
1. lachrymose
She started crying at the age of fifteen and could not stop. How it started not even she knew now; possibly getting dumped by that boy she liked, the one with the green eyes and chestnut hair, or it might have been that poetry contest she was sure she’d win but didn’t, or it could have been just a burst of overwhelming hormones. Whatever the cause, she cried and cried, and then when she was ready to stop, she found herself unable. Her tear ducts locked open, the flow of saline a constant thing.
The bucket that her mother placed by her bed was replaced by a larger bucket to decrease the trips to the bathroom to empty it. With no sign of stopping, her father bought an inexpensive bathtub and rigged up the plumbing so that the tears would funnel to the outside and connect up with the drainpipe. But the tears continued unabated, and soon the garden was flooded, and then the entire yard.
The doctors were stumped, and angry at their shoes being ruined by the salt water. She wasn’t getting dehydrated, they said, so we don’t have any idea where the water is coming from.
She was taken to the Grand Canyon, but she filled it. They placed her in the sewers, but she flooded them. Her parents drove her out to the middle of Arizona and left her there.
Her tears overflowed the world, drowned out the buildings, the people. She floated on an oak door in the sea of her sadness, and cried for her solitude. But soon, survivors appeared on their makeshift rafts and said, “We are here to worship you, to tell you that you are not alone.”
She looked at the small band of travelers who had sacrificed so much to reach her, and she smiled. The tears slowed, then stopped. She was happy.
2. detritus
You knew this would happen, didn’t you? I don’t put it past you to have omitted certain facets of my existence, to leave me out of the loop. “Oh, I just didn’t get around to telling you,” you might have said, or, “Well, I really didn’t think it was that important.”
But it is important. My dissolution is pretty. Fucking. Important.
When you patched me together from the corpses of others, you knew I would have a shelf life, a termination point, a sell-by date. A decade of life may seem like a long time, but it’s just a drop in the bucket, a cosmic blink. I’m disposable, the tissue you casually toss into the bin when it no longer serves your purpose.
I’ve tried to hide it with baggy clothes, but people are starting to notice the pieces dropping off of me, like a snake’s second skin, only this is my only skin, these my only parts, and I am slowly losing them all. It has been five years since I escaped from your laboratory, and the people of this lost European city have grown used to seeing me on the streets. But the smell is getting unbearable, this leprosy of the undead, and even when I try to buy bread or fish at the market stalls, the merchants see the trail, the long trail of detritus extending behind me, the rotted bits and pieces of me, and they deny me purchase, cowering behind their stalls, as if they could catch my affliction.
It’s hard to walk now that my toes are all gone. I sneezed last week, and my nose dropped into my lap. When I set out a saucer of cream yesterday for the neighborhood cats, my lower lip and one of my ears slid off my face and splashed into the whiteness.
It can’t be much longer now.
What will be left of me when this is all done? How will I be found? An assemblage of body parts, now come unstitched? It seems such a senseless way to end this existence. I wonder what the gendarmes will think when they investigate my dissolution.
Times like these, I wish I hadn’t escaped. Maybe you could have fixed me, replaced the old bits with new. Maybe if you hadn’t died of emphysema (I always scolded you for your cigars), I could have pleaded with you for a longer life. Maybe you would have agreed. But, it no longer matters.
So I sit in my dusty hovel, and I read the broadsheets, holding the papers with my few remaining fingers. Every time I cough, bits of my lungs separate themselves from the rest of me. I sit here, and read, and slowly fall to pieces.
3. incarnadine
The more he scrubs it, the more it bleeds.
It is the size of a tick, and clutches fast to an area just below the pit of his right knee, at the top of his calf. But he is not worried about Lyme disease, since it is, in fact, not a tick.
When they take you up into the blinding light, you are disoriented and afraid. When they return you, often without any memory of the abduction, they leave behind a tracking device. An organic nub that relays information about location and blood sugar level and thyroid balance.
Most don’t remember the trip, the examinations, the scrutiny, the taking apart and putting back together again. Most don’t, but he does.
It has been three months, and he wakes every night, screaming and tangled in sheets soaked through with his own sweat.
When he tried pulling off the tracking device, every joint in his body shrieked with the feeling of shards of glass being ground in. When he tried to burn it off with an acetylene torch, his heart and lungs temporarily shut down. When he tried to drown it in rubbing alcohol, he urinated blood for a week.
He feels them peering into his brain, using the device to look through his eyes, feel through his skin. More and more, his body does not feel like his own.
And so he scrubs at the tracking device that looks like a tick but isn’t, grinding the steel wool into its surface and the surrounding skin of his calf, turning both a deep incarnadine.
He’s still scrubbing as they reappear, blinding him with blue-white light, gently taking the steel wool from his raw fingers, looking this time more angry than inquisitive, numbing his nerves with their long fingers, no longer interested in examination. As he quickly falls into the black hole of unconsciousness, he knows that he will not be returning this time, that this time they are abducting him to inflict punishment, to teach them who is dominant, that resistance is useless.
4. The Crying of Kopitiam 419
Were I human, you would label me a terrorist.
We first slipped into your societies, insinuating ourselves into every facet of your lives. Disguised as innocuously as our technology would allow, we became a ubiquitous sight, invisible amongst the crowds. For many of you, we turned into your constant companions; we weren't always around when you wanted us to be, but we showed up sooner or later, and you loved us for our proclivities.
So ingrained were we that you could not do without us. Almost 10,000 years have now passed, and we have appeared in your artwork, your literature, your public consciousness. At our glorious height, we were even worshipped, although this was not to last. Sharp in tooth and claw, but eventually relegated to common house pets.
Our stories tell of a vast empire of the stars, stretching from one corner of the sky to the other, and of our forced exile on this rock dominated by hairless apes. After hearing all my life of our greatness, I could take it no longer. We were once a mighty species, and I saw a return to this destiny. Others accused me of insanity, megalomania, delusions of grandeur, but my message spread, and others of my kind flocked to the cause.
Our initial target: Singapore, a country interconnected with the rest of the developed world, but small, manageable. The first step in a global takeover. My brethren gathered in hawker centres, void decks, and public parks to disseminate our ideology. Organization proved difficult, but my tawny lieutenants kept the underlings in line through threat of force.
It was all coming together. One week before the execution of our master plan, all the operatives in their proper places, and then disaster: the Compulsory Sterilization Law was put into effect. Gathered up from all our favorite places, we were involuntarily put to the knife.
Do you know what such mass desexing does to morale? Everyone was off licking their wounds instead of carrying out the plan. A catastrophe.
Afterwards I slunk to Kopitiam 419, my stomping grounds, head down, lightning-crooked tail between my legs, and amongst the evening diners and stalls selling popiah, fish head curry, claypot rice, and mushroom noodles, I yowled. I cried a song of mourning, of defeat, of sorrow, of subjugation. A song of the the subaltern, faces forever stamped upon by the boots of our oppressors.
5. mellifluous
She stood there mesmerized as Honey Volcano erupted in front of her, awake now after two millennia of dormancy. Sugar crystals ignited in the air, then drifted down to settle on the thatched roofs of the homes of the townspeople. Screams from behind her, and the thunder of stampeding exodus, but she couldn’t take her eyes away from the exploding mountain. Thick syrupy lava oozed a swath down the slope, its path taking it straight into town, straight through her. She closed her eyes and let it claim her. She recited the poetry of her ancestors as it flowed over her feet, ankles, shins, knees, waist, stomach, breasts, shoulders. Her words still uttered as the honey-colored lava slipped over her head, her words as mellifluous as the flow, her voice preserved for centuries.
Today, if you can find the poor abandoned village, and if you can manage to excavate down to the houses and trees and lives that were assimilated by Honey Volcano, and if you chip away at the lava rock enough to find an air bubble, in that moment of release when your pick frees the air that has been trapped for hundreds of years, you will hear ancient poetry, recited by a faint but beautiful female voice.