THE CITIZEN

The first thing I feel upon opening my eyes is the light touch of an ant crawling along my forearm. I decide to ignore it. I have other things to attend to: Why am I here? How am I here? And should I not be dead? My last memory before blacking out from the orgasm was the lizards chattering away, ignoring me and my attempts to prevent ejaculation. For ‘redundancy’.

I remember the other three molting right after the first one had swallowed his own skin. A grotesque display of reptilian pleasure, each of them rubbing against the other, pleasurable hissing interleaved with the whine of a pliant robot and the regular chugging of the penis milker, and my sobbing at the new failure of protecting my legacy, the future of Singapore as a place with a soul, with real people, with real dreams, the freedom from the soma of efficiency and precision. 

The ant continues to crawl, reaching my elbow and then making a turn, moving back towards my wrist. 

And then my memory comes flooding back. The shame, the helplessness, the guilt. I ejaculated, I screamed, and then I blacked out to wake up here. Where is here? I shift up and look around. It’s in a clearing at the Bukit Brown cemetery. It’s still cool, so it must be the morning. But, like everything in Singapore, it’s also still unbearably humid. I can already feel myself sweating, onto what?

I panic and look down, breathing a sigh of relief. I realise I’m dressed in a blue flannel shirt and jeans, both too big for me. I’m even wearing Birkenstocks. Why am I not naked? Did the lizards dress me? Why would they dress me? 

A sharp pain pierces my wrist as the ant decides to bite down upon my skin. I yelp and brush it off, standing up. 

And then I realise that my clothes aren’t totally unfamiliar; I’m wearing Tan Vee Bun’s clothes. I breath in sharply: what has happened to Tan Vee Bun?

He was with me, in the bunker. He stood there in that room, as I smashed receptacle after receptacle holding my semen, the white stuff coating the walls, ceiling and floors, and our skin and feet -- soaked in the collected residue over what must have been years of clandestine milking. I remember he pulled me away, both of us slipping on the thick coating of ejaculate, whispering to me to be quiet, while the thump thump of the robot just got closer. 

I remember being cradled in the cold arms of the machine, my head spinning as Tan Vee Bun in slow motion reached out to me, falling to the ground, failing to rescue me from my fate at the hands of the monitor lizards. Those yellow eyes and blue-green skin burned into my nightmares and fantasies for an eternity to come. 

I’m jolted from my trauma by a male voice. It sounded like malay. An unmistakable rapid fire rhythm that, unlike the brutish dialects of my ethnicity, was also furnished with a birdsong-like melody. My Chinese-ness, my shame. I ask myself, why must I be born to such a heinous race? A race of privilege, of guilt, connected to communists and privacy violators. The kind of sub-people who would hide submarines in the sea. I think about punching myself in the balls in front of all my chinese friends. I think about punching myself in the balls in the Bukit Brown cemetery. 

Cautiously, I peep round a tree and am greeted with the vision of the policeman Hidayat standing in a clearing with his back to me. He is speaking to a furry silhouette standing just inside the treeline, a giant humanoid ape, it’s eyes glowing green in the shade. The monkey’s arms were moving slowly, gesticulating deliberately as it continued its speech. Hidayat. The conspirator. The race traitor joining up with the ranks of a Chinese majority government to procure my semen. And the ape. Why is there an ape?

I feel another ant crawling up my calf, and I instinctively slap it away, earning the attention of Hidayat and the humanoid ape, whose eyes shift from green to red. I gasp and run away, racing to the treeline behind me and diving into the brush. Hidden by giant tropical leaves and the doppled shade of small-leafed ferns, I leopard crawl forward, hopefully in the opposite direction to the policeman and the ape. 

Somewhere in the distance, I hear the rustling of leaves and the heavy thump of the ape’s feet. Hidayat’s voice rings out in the air, punctuated with the crackle of a walkie talkie. I lay still, praying to the agnostic ground to spare me from the furry arms of the race traitors of Singapore. At last, I notice the rustling and the footsteps fade away, and I breathe easier, my ragged heartbeat slowing down to something approaching a sense of calm. 

Quietly, I climb up a nearby tree for added safety, reclining onto a tree branch with the searching Hidayat and his ape-friend below, and the rustling leaves making their music above. It’s a warm day, I tell myself, and the sky is blue.