THE CITIZEN
The years of Lee Kuan Yew's life, transposed onto a copy lived by my namesake, buried in a secret tomb in the middle of Bukit Brown cemetery. Could this be the proof of my destiny, as ordained by heaven and the infernal meddlings of machine learning technology? Tan Vee Bun pulls me along, past the tombstone towards a small hole, no larger than my waist, cut into the ground.
Frowning, with a complex syntax of finger pointing and circular gestures, he signals for me to follow him into the hole. He strips to his singlet and underwear and edges himself into the hold, one arm holding a torch and the other a crowbar. First his legs disappear, and then his torso. He lifts up his arms as the hole’s circumference creeps up to his shoulders and suddenly, with a puff of air, he disappears. And then it’s just me standing alone next to my grave.
Grunting, I pull off my clothes till I’m just in my shoes and my white briefs, and I gingerly slide into the hole. Warm, humid air exhales around me as the earth swallows my body. Inside, I can feel my legs beginning to sweat, and I gasp for the relatively cool air above the surface, at which point a vacuum forms below me and I am sucked into the inky blackness.
The hole is so small I can barely move; my legs and arms stretched out above and below my head, and the temperature begins to rise and I am pulled into damp earth, which turns to stone, slimy with condensation and sweat. I close my eyes and concentrate on breathing, but the air gets heavier and heavier, and the tunnel gets smaller and smaller, constricting my rib cage till I can barely fill my lungs, and for the third time in six hours, I black out.
I come to with Tan Vee Bun’s calloused hands rubbing blood back around my body. I smell body odour and algae. Under me, and soaking into my underwear, is a thin puddle of rancid water. Somewhere behind me, the distant thumping and whirring of some ungodly machine. And on my right forearm, I feel the unmistakable prick of a mosquito forcing its proboscis into my skin. Instinctively, my hand rears up and slaps my forearm. The machine sounds stop, and Tan Vee Bun grabs my hand, hissing, “You idiot! They’ve heard us!”.
He grabs my wrist and drags me out into a badly lit concrete passage -- flickering light bulbs casting liquid shadows of flies and moths every ten metres, all the way to a black, pulsing hole at the end of my sanity, where two red lights blink open, and begin to clatter their way towards us.
Thump, thump, thump.
Tan Vee Bun and I run the other way, finding refuge in an offshoot passage lit by bioluminescent algae -- a faint coating of green guiding us further into the bowels of oppression; an ancient bunker, for hiding, for conspiracies, for the clandestine battles for the subjugation of the very soul of Singapore. And in the half-light, we find ourselves in a kind of kitchen, the smell of rotting vegetables and half eaten papayas and the thin gleam of fishbones sitting atop a heap of protoplasm in the corner. We squeeze ourselves into an empty pantry cupboard and hope that the malevolent pair of red eyes bypasses us.
Thump, thump, thump.
His breath and sweat, hot and humid, press against my flesh. Tan Vee Bun’s musk -- a concoction of garlic and oil and durian -- and the metallic scent of adrenaline overwhelms me, but before I have the chance to retch, the thump and clank reaches a crescendo, and a dim red glow permeates through the slats of the pantry cupboard.
Thump, thump, thump.
We hold our breaths, as the red glow strengthens and sharpens as the clanking reaches a deafening volume. Beneath it, I discern a steady drone oscillating between a low rumble and a high, keening, whine. Through the slats of the cupboard, the red light resolves into two circular, saucer shaped eyes. They blink once, the clack of a cassette tape recorder opening and shutting rapidly, and the eyes turn away, leading the robotic figure past us, around the room and fading away, thumping, clanging and whirring into the darkness.
Slowly, we open the pantry cupboard, and creep further into the bunker. On the far side of the kitchen, a smaller passageway, about waist-high, presents itself. Within the hole, more bioluminescence. Tan Vee Bun goes in first, motioning me to follow him. The air grows even more humid. Before me, I notice Tan Vee Bun’s boxer shorts now soaked with sweat, his thighs glistening green and silver in the half-light. I poke his buttocks with my finger, “Where are we supposed to be going? How are we going to find my semen in this maze?”
He whispers back, “We look for the sound. All the controllers will be here to supervise the ritual, and they’ll be making plenty of noise.”
As if on cue, I hear a kind of heavy scuttling to my right. I keep still. It grows louder as I hold my breath, and suddenly my vision of Tan Vee Bun’s buttocks blinks out momentarily, before the scuttling fades away to my left.
“Something just ran past us.”
“I know. Be quiet.”
Tan Vee Bun maneuvers his body to turn round, his round glasses facing me.
“We’re going to follow that,” he says.
Why is it he can speak but I can’t? Why should we follow that horrible, unnatural sound? How is that supposed to be any indication that the Singapore government has gathered here to observe the reincarnation of Lee Kuan Yew? Vee Bun rushes ahead of me, in hot pursuit of that thing rumbling ahead of us. Reluctantly, I follow suit, keeping a safe distance behind him.
Sweat is beginning to get in my eyes, and the passageway seems to reach a saturation point of humidity, so that Tan Vee Bun and I find ourselves crawling through a miasma of tepid steam. The walls begin to pulsate, as our crawling becomes more and more laboured and the scuttling merges with the water dripping from the walls, from the ceilings, off our barely covered bodies.
When the passageway opens up again, we look and feel like slugs in human underwear, a thin veil of slime propelling us forward, inch by inch, along smooth concrete. My eyes adjust slowly to the light, and I watch a blurred image of Tan Vee Bun morph from a smooth brown oval lump to a stout rectangle stretching itself up to the light, stumbling and falling to a wall, whereupon it slides back down its original shape, as if gravity itself has robbed him of features and bones, forcing him to assume the most efficient shape of land survival, of invisibility, the unmistakable flat-top shape of the scavenger par excellence -- the cockroach.
He moans and gets up, pulling me up by the arm and edging towards a door labelled “storage”. With my free arm I wipe grease and sweat from my eyes, just in time to watch Tan Vee Bun push the door open, and enter a refrigerated room lit by soft blue lights, filled with a myriad of test tubes, beakers, bottles and containers, all holding a white liquid -- and the incomparable smell of semen floating malevolently in the air. Tan Vee Bun turns to me, wiping sweat from from his chest and armpit.
“It’s yours.”
How did they obtain all this semen? Have they been sneaking into my house every night to milk me? Maybe it’s house lizards, surreptitiously draining my testicles in the deep of the night? Or worse, could it be from Joanne? I flash back to the footage of her sodomising the Bangladeshi, her betrayal of our cause for a fairer, more equitable Singapore. And then I imagine her, storing my semen in her vagina and draining it into sterile receptacles post-sex, or stimulating me over the course of my daily nightmares -- dystopian scenarios of Singapore engaging increased semen production and an inflated penis.
Fueled by this image, I fly into a rage and attack the containers, smashing every single one of them against any and all hard surface I can find so that the room’s walls, ceilings, floors, tables and chairs gets coated with a thick layer of my semen. The stink is unbearable. When I finish, I turn to Tan Vee Bun, wiping his eyebrow from the flashback, and I realise both of us are coated in my semen as well.
Thump, thump, thump.
Tan Vee Bun spins round in alarm.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I lost contro-”
Tan Vee Bun places his hand over my mouth, and pulls me out of the room. The thumping has reached deafening levels again. Panicking, Tan Vee Bun runs towards the light. I give chase, adrenaline filling my mouth with a keen metallic taste, and slip falling on my face. Ten metres before me I see Tan Vee Bun’s silhouette spin round as he realises my absence, and then the light blocks out as a hulking figure steps between the two of us; big, stout, square, and emitting a faint whine. Two red eyes expand in recognition as the robot thumps its way towards me and picks me up by the torso.
Tan Vee Bun runs to my aid, grabbing my outstretched hand as I am carried deeper and deeper into darkness. But the robot is too strong, and our hands are slippery with grease and semen, and he falls away. I feel a metallic hand gently squeeze the back of my neck, and my vision goes dark.