This landscape with its somber skies
Must have fallen in love
With a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
One of its birch trees could be his Eleonora,
And the other, further on, Ligeia.
Life is a dream within a dream,
Whisper the fallen leaves under our feet.
The old house, softly lit from within
By its copper pots and mirrors,
Seems even more abandoned this evening.
What if I were to knock on its door?
Keeping in mind, as I push it open
And enter cautiously, that for Poe
Beauty could be the cause of sudden death.
—Charles Simic, “Dead Season”
Art Credit Jungjin Lee
This is part 5 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here.
 One person I met had an interesting story about her own experience of running away from home. She had gone to London, where she had found work as a hairstylist, illegally, and hid away in an attic with her lesbian lover, who owned the salon. She did what she had to survive, she said, and once you get to a place big enough, it’s easy to disappear. She only came back for her son, whom she had left with her parents, a burden she cannot carry with her. In the end it was the irrepressible desire to see him again that made her come back, and somehow that thought comforted me. As they say, water cannot be cleaved. One day, perhaps kakak will come back, or if I go far enough, she will be the one to see me first.
So all the memories I could carry of my sister, which would tell me who she is, whenever, wherever I would find myself finally face to face with her, are some faint glimmers I could remember of our childhood together and ones which are of every woman but not of her. The only images I have of kakak now, are of her when she had just turned fifteen. In the picture I carry with me in case I had to show anyone, she is a school athlete, trim and slim, with long, dark hair, woven in voluminous pleats that reach her torso. It made her appear thinner than she really was. She was just starting to round out around her hips, and she had her arms crossed awkwardly over her budding breasts, but her face had by that time completely morphed into the face I knew she would carry all her life, already so pronounced and definite, a face that was several years older than the rest of her body. It is this picture that I am holding now, next to the image on my computer screen. It is the spitting image of her, and I am certain that it is her.
Sofi calls me a few days later. Her excitement crackles over the phone. "Sir Dip, bless him, came through for us. Guess where the postcard came from?—it’s here, Malaysia!" So she did have a cable to the Post Secret guy after all. Normally Post Secret would be very tight-lipped over such queries, as their existence depends on guaranteeing the anonymity of their users, many who send in their most private thoughts in the mail, so that they could be exhibited flagrantly to the world. They would say that there is no return address, and there was no signature, and that was normal and to be expected. It was sent from Mersing, in August 2005. Three months ago.
So the picture was recent, and the trail is alive. The beach, must be somewhere around Mersing, or the islands thereabouts. I take out the well-thumbed atlas that my sister and I had once pored over together. A neon sticker glares over Tioman island. "What do you think about joining me for a trip to Tioman?" I ask Sofi. She says yes. Of course.
End of chapter 1. Chapter 2 coming soon. What did you think of the story? Let us know in the comments.
This is part 4 of Reza Rosli's short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here.
So after Sofi confessed that—in different words—she had no desire for me, I secretly started to haunt drinking holes around town, bouncing from bar to bar after school, and returning home by midnight. My parents thought I had been spending time with Sofi as usual. They had long decided that my friendship with Sofi was healthy, and I showed no signs of breaking out the way my sister had, so they never questioned where I went. Outside, nobody suspected I was a minor. By all appearances I blended in easily with the yuppies I befriended, and having read precociously I could engage anyone in any topic of conversation. This was how I bartered for drinks with my yuppie friends, as I was the ideal and able wingman to play the dandy and always ready to strike up conversations with the women and bring them to the team. Years of being close yet distant to Sofi had taught me the art of conversation, peppered with double entrendres yet framed with sexless, unthreatening body language; and ironically I began meeting women who found that attractive and frequently offered to send me home; albeit after brief stopovers at their bachelorette flat or some deserted office parking lot. If Sofi suspected of my activities she never said anything, only huffing with displeasure every now and then when I rebuffed her late-night telephone calls, too inebriated with either alcohol or post-coital stupor to make the effort to listen to her chatter.
I didn’t desire these other women, not the way I desired Sofi. Although I found pleasure in seducing them, it was their desire for me that I craved, and I let them consume me. Always at the back of my mind was my lost sister, and the reason I told myself why I must remain distant with the women was because I was looking for kakak. I started constructing imaginary lives for kakak around the worlds of these women that pass through these cycles of instant and fleeting courtship. Is she now using a different name? Has she dyed her hair red and is it blowing free in the wind like wild fire? Or is she behind a hijab, having found a kind of freedom that anonymity can provide? I never spoke to them about kakak, remembering how it affected my relationship with Sofi.
That kind of talk I inflicted on the 'working ladies.' The 'professionals.' I never frequented brothels, although I wondered if I might find kakak inside, for lack of money and the heady cocktail of curiosity and repulsion at entering such places often stopped me just outside of their signages. The pros I met were women who roamed the same kind of places I went to, and I started to recognise and rub shoulders with them. At first they never talked to me. I swear they can spot a dead stick a mile off, a flat wallet from the way you walk. But then as I perfected my modus operandi of the dandy bar-rat, and as the yuppies become as extravagant as their pay scales, hence drunker and looser with their appetites, the pros and I started orbiting the same people, and I became part of their network, the party maker. It was just good business to know each other, and before long I was firmly in their circles. On quiet nights, we would trade war stories. How we were all whores, even I, the man-whore in denial. What was I doing there anyway? Sometimes the subject falls on my sister, what she did and what she would be doing at that moment. "Look at me, I also went off to live my own life, and I’m okay." Sometimes they would give me a free pass, as if to show that what they do is by choice, by their own right, and would take me into their homes and bed. You would not believe the luxuries they have, in their private worlds. Some of the lucky ones anyway. The unlucky ones could not have been so freely hobnobbing with customers out in the open; they would be the ones shadowed by the triads, cloistered behind the walls of a brothel or held captive in some cubicle in an apartment with many others, to be shuttled around in sedans with dark-tinted windows for customers. That could be the worst thing that could happen to kakak, but they said it would not have happened to her. She would have been too educated to be trapped like that, and if it even came to it, a 'talent' like hers would have been privately bought for obscene sums of money, and treated preciously as soon as she hit the market. Was she sending any money back, they ask? When I said no, they just shrug and look away. By the time I turned twenty-one, I had gone to bed with over four-hundred women and all these things I could never tell Sofi, things my 'sister' should never know about.Â
This is part 3 of Reza Rosli's short story. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
Kakak was my best friend. When she didn’t come home, Mama would not tell me where she had gone. My parents constantly argued about what to do, about why she’s gone. That they knew the reason was undisputed. Kakak had left a note. She had made up her mind, and she’s not coming back. We knew it was not a kidnapping. Kakak always had an independent spirit, and sometimes she would tell me of her desires to travel to distant lands. She showed me all the places she’d go to, marked in the family atlas with little neon stickers. I always said I liked it better at home, why should she want to leave, but she just laughed. "You should get out of your books," she said, "I’m going to be living in Talinn, and you can come visit." Then she would fetch the atlas from the sitting room and make me figure out the route to Estonia. So when she finally left I wasn’t surprised. I was happy for her. Why my parents behaved the way they did was what I could not understand.
Not that such serenity came easily. I admired kakak’s courage. Her apparent freedom was alluring... whereas I, already predisposed to be content with the comforts of a sedentary existence, became even more restricted by my parents to stay at home, eventually passing the SPM at the same school I attended since seven years old. That was where Sofi and I met each other. We were in different classes (she was a year ahead) and we would never have spoken to each other had I not—acting out, angsty from the aftermath of my sister’s disappearance—started playing truant to grape with some of the older kids from school, loitering at video game arcades in Sungai Wang Plaza. Sofi was there sometimes—"whenever the cramps hit me, I just can’t deal with classes," she said, to excuse her truancy. One day, while sneaking smokes in the deserted corridors of the top floor of the mall, I told her of the story of my sister who had run away from home. She hugged me and, much to my dismay (as I was hoping to score sympathy points and get hookie with the cute and sassy senior), declared that she would be my sister instead.
So that was how we became close and frustratingly chaste friends. Sofi took her role as a surrogate sister seriously. She introduced me to all her friends as her little brother, and I was frequently invited to play games at her house and escort her to parties hosted by her friends, only to help fend off other boys eagerly suiting her. She wanted nothing to do with those boys, and I was exempted from the rule, being her "lil bro." At first I had surreptitious hopes that I could somehow salvage a romance out of our relationship, reasoning that we made a perfect couple, as a couple of years had passed and we had both spent almost all the time we had after school and on holidays with each other. Sofi decisively quashed these hopes, when at one of these parties, I, heady with the thrill of a crime I had perpetrated (buying my first ever two cans of Tiger at a 7-11 (how my hands shook as I walked to the counter; being a lanky sixteen-year old, sporting a goatee, I was sure I passed for eighteen), and having downed them both) and fuelled by the alcohol-induced courage, suddenly pulled her aside and kissed her full on the lips. She went rigid with shock and the outrage that flashed across her face was as good as a slap to me. She stormed away and I was left to stand awkwardly in the stares of the others who had witnessed my indiscretion. On the way home she told me that being her brother was a privilege no other boy will have, and I must never treat her in such a way again, for she’s just not 'that' type of girl. She made me promise not to desire her if I respected her. It was a few months later, the night when we first installed the Post Secret watcher, and I was invited to sleep over and, having dragged a mattress in front of the computer to watch the exquisite-corpse-ish stream of confessions onscreen together, she touched me under the blankets and, holding my hands tightly, whispered to me that she was a lesbian. This was one of the few certainties she held in her life. I was special, a little brother she never had, and I must never tell anyone she had told me this. Then she gently stroked me all over my body until I climaxed, to seal the deal.
Since then I started keeping secrets from Sofi. At first, when kakak disappeared, we had lodged a police report, but as months went by and after many (increasingly heated) visits and calls to the constable assigned to the case, my father (who rarely raised his voice) bellowed into the phone to demand explanations for the police’s inaction. One day an inspector visited our house and addressed us over coffee. We were told that each week hundreds of teenagers go missing all over the country. Most eventually come back, unable to convert their new-found freedom to sustainable living. He played out for us the possible scenarios, and spat statistics of the likelihoods of her return in the event of each scenario. They made us realise that we for the most part have sheltered lives, that there is much darkness in the world that we had only considered peripherally if at all, or had dismissed what we read in the news as something that could never happen to us. Since then I read the newspapers in a different way. Every story I read could be kakak’s story, her reality, so I understand why Mama stopped reading the news. But unlike Mama, I became more intrigued by the shadowy parts of the world that I was made suddenly aware of.Â
This is part 2 of Reza Rosli's short story. Read part 1 here.
Today my sister’s photo showed up and Sofi emailed it to me, which I am looking at now.
“It is her isn’t it?” the IM from Sofi says.
I say I’m not sure, weary of the years we had argued over what appears on these images, whether they mean anything or not. At one point, it was like when everything that appears means something in some way, and we looked to it for answers. We grew out of that, after learning of the nature of randomness and our own propensity to apply meaning to things when none exists; but Sofi remains convinced that God tells us things in many ways.
“If it’s her... do you think you can find her? Hang on lil bro! I’ll ask Sir Dip if he can get me a return address.”
“Sir Dip,” is a cheeky contraction of Serendip, her nickname for the guy who runs Post Secret. Whoever he is. She writes to him sometimes to share her philosophical musings on the images she sees on Post Secret. It’s sweet of her to offer to do it, but I can’t help rolling my eyes. Does the guy even write back to her? Still, if there could be a clue as to where my sister is now, it doesn’t hurt to ask.
It was fifteen years ago that my sister ran away from home. I was twelve, and my sister was fifteen at the time she vanished. Mama used to sing every morning. She sang to us when we were babies, songs that she learned from others, which eventually became hers, and songs she made up on her own, in meaningless, wordless sounds, but she only cared about their tune. She cried for a very long time when my sister left us, and then she went silent for a while, but then she started singing again. She sang slowly, tumultuously, in long, drawn-out tunes, heavy with ineffable grief, pining for my sister. For hours on end she sang in this way until she had not the strength to sing anymore, and only her laboured breathing can be heard, and yet it was as if the world shook with her every exhalation. Then one day she stopped singing. Even on the sunniest days, when her spirit had a certain lightness it seemed the walls glowed with warmth, she would start humming a tune that would after a while peter out into staccato bursts of cries. People say that mothers would never so easily give up a child, and certainly not my Mama, but I could tell when she stopped singing that she had started to grieve for my sister. Yet, she keeps on looking over the tree tops and, from the rhythm of her breathing, I know she still sings for God.
My father, he is as taciturn as always. I have never seen him cry, but he holds on to my sister’s photographs. He’s taken all her pictures and put them in an album that he keeps behind his desk. He flips through it sometimes. I’ve seen him do it, when I come home in the dead of the night and walk past the study. He would quickly close the album and put it aside, clearing his throat and suddenly appearing interested in something outside the window. In public, or even with me, he never talks of her. But I guess he does so with Mama.Â
My sister’s eyes, staring dolefully from the image on my computer screen, struck me dumb. Submissions made to the Post Secret site are known to be anonymous, so I knew any effort to find the one who had sent in the postcard would be futile.
Here is a portrait of her smiling widely on a sunlit beach, nondescript, except for a long, jutting rock formation looming in the background. These words, made of letters cut out of a magazine, or a newspaper, are pasted over it, “I’m sorry.” The postcard is undated.
Hope flares in my heart. She is alive. After all these years.
My laptop whoops. Sofi had sent me a message on Instant Messenger.
Sofi has a Pentium in a corner of her room that serves only one purpose: display Post Secret. This it does on a bygone-era cathode-ray-tube monitor, displaying Internet Explorer 6 running a frameset and a javascript loop that refreshes the Post Secret home page once a minute and another script which copies the image that appears and saves it on the local hard drive. We had written the software together, one school holiday, based on tutorials from a Javascript for Beginners book, which now props the monitor up, like a pedestal to a monument. She’s had it on for five years now, and the “revelations,” as she calls the burgeoning archive of Post Secret images (as opposed to “confessions”), sprawl in a collection of blinking, whirring hard disks that were a JBOD experiment that had improbably survived years past its useful lifetime; the result of another productive holiday. “Built like the Mars Rovers,” goes our braggadocio. Sometimes we joke about building a data warehouse to keep everyone’s secrets for Judgement Day, but as the space in the disks filled up, she learned some batch programming and then wrote a script to randomly delete old pictures every now and then, and we left it there. Like a sculpture, the jumble of machines just whirs on in the corner, a reminder of a time when everything we touched was a plaything.
The whine of the monitor; the constant stream of images; the soft ticks of the browser’s sound effect as it reloads the page—they comfort her, she says. She could not sleep otherwise. And when she complains of hearing sounds in the closet, now she knows it is just the constant activity of hard disks. (She hasn’t heard of solid-state drives yet, silent as ghosts, and I am getting her one for Christmas.) She would stay up for long hours in the night, watching the computer screen, as thousands of confessions, most private thoughts and images of strangers from all over the world, stream past. She calls me sometimes, telling mind-spinning stories that she has threaded from the images she sees. The “revelations” she receives.
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