THE CITIZEN
The Toa Payoh Seu Teck Sean Tong: the last place I saw Jack and Rose. I remember that fateful day when they told me that I was the reincarnation of Lee Kuan Yew. Tan Vee Bun had met me on these stairs, in that uncle-ish short sleeved, blue checked, button up shirt. His acne and face oil glistening in the sunlight. But now it’s just me, limping up the same staircase towards an empty temple at 4.44pm, Tuesday afternoon traffic hissing behind me, the smell of sweat and incense hanging in the air.
The entrance to the hideaway remains the same: a discreet wooden door hidden behind a disused gong. But the warrens beneath the temple feel wrong: the air stale, the walls damp, and the lights dim. It feels empty. I tip-toe my way around the complex, which feels smaller the second time round. My steps echo down the corridors, and I push forward, finally coming to the room where I’d met the two leaders of the resistance, the twin show of codename Jack and codename Rose. The wooden table and the two chairs. The CRT monitor and the 1990s desktop. And the footprints of a lizard scratched into the dust…am I already too late?
I think back to the dilemmas the lizards were speaking of back at Bukit Brown. The realities of the world economy, the flows of goods and services across borders, transformed into information and power and influence -- amplified by capital, diminished by politics. Singapore as a lens, a channel among many, facilitating the reverse osmosis of wealth across the world -- Maxwell’s demon as a country, as long as you save a little piece for me. The architecture of a soul, commodified. My own soul, a husk to be occupied by the machinations of a machine -- spurting out numbers, reducing, degree by degree, the freedom of the citizenry with every machine modified character of the 八字. I refuse to be a puppet. I refuse to be manipulated by the currents of economics and politics. I refuse to be a semen producing cow for the establishment. I am the reincarnation of Lee Kuan Yew, and I put on my knuckle dusters, and I will fight the lizards and the lizards’ masters in the cul de sac of history.
On the floor is a statue of the god of fortune. Big, fat, happy Cai Shen. I pick him up, brandishing his laughing face as I leave the room, exploring the eerily silent corridor, lit sparsely by small ceiling windows, colouring the entire scene in the undead pallor of shades of grey. Right and wrong. Fully wrong and less wrong. Right and less right. My previously reliable moral compass spinning madly in the half-light of recent events -- the lizards, Hidayat, Joanne, the Indian worker...and poor Tan Vee Bun, my loyal companion to the end. John the Baptist to my Jesus. Li Jia Sen -- leader of the resistance, the representative of the people as ordained by the zodiac. Behind me, clouds of dust emerge in little whirlpools of dead light, stalking me like the ghosts of ancestry as the future remains a cipher of danger. The loss of our humanity in our abandonment of the soul.
The metallic creaking pulls me out of my ruminations on the future of Singapore. The sound of an unoiled machine tirelessly going about its business. I am reminded again of the common man of Singapore. The heartlander. Our “Singaporean Son”. Buried under the bureaucracy of normal life, working in jobs deemed unnecessary, developing new social problems that create more jobs to heal the gaping maw of our connection to the heat, the passion, the power of our inner dreams and desires, to become a barely functioning part of the larger machine of Work. I tip-toe towards the direction of the sound, passing empty, ruined offices separated by damp woodboard walls, reams of paper rotting on the floor, lice taking in the feast -- the revenge of the earth upon our cruel invasion. Turning a corner, I catch a glimpse of the reflection of a green light -- the same shade as the ape’s eyes. Under the metallic creaking, I hear the sound of someone’s laboured breathing, undoubtedly it’s latest victim being tortured by an unholy procedure, perhaps even another milking. I tighten my grip on Cai Shen, sneak my way to the blind spot, and spin round the corner screaming, swinging the figurine round at a height approximately one head above me.
I hear a hollow clank and open my eyes, taking in the sight of the Cai Shen statue broken in two, now positioned at a small dent in the metallic skin of the robot, its eyes turning from green to red. On its left arm the luminous figure of Joanne, my missing wife lying naked and supine against its forearm and bicep. Her eyes shut, her mouth open in sexual surrender while the robots gleaming right hand massages her vagina. In a second, the robot lets out a bloodcurdling metallic screech, causing me to jump backwards while Joanne opens her eyes, spots me pressed against a wall, and then twists her face into a contemptuous sneer. She covers her breasts with one arm and flings the other round the neck of the robot, which screeches again and runs. Head-down, it crashes through walls concrete and wooden till it bursts out into daylight. The rush of the wind into the stuffy office energises me, and I give chase to the two of them, emerging into an empty canal, running along moldy concrete, the HDB flats towering above me, the citizenry oppressing me, cheering on the one of their own -- that damn robot caught red handed pleasuring my wife.
The robot blasts itself across the scenery, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster granted the powers of rocketry. The more I chase, the further it gets from me, eventually launching itself a full ten feet in the air to land on the ledge of the canal. Whereas I have to use the stairs, my glasses fogging up so I can barely make out the monster and the naked girl disappearing into a narrow concrete gorge of HDB flats. I chase after them again, but my running has slowed and I think this will just be in vain, they have to be long gone by now.
I reach the flats and, as expected, the robot has disappeared. Panting, I think to myself I should start doing something Lee Kuan Yew used to do to keep fit, like swimming. I lean back onto a pillar in a void deck, and then I realise I’m standing, soaked in sweat and drain water, in front of a man in office clothes. I wipe my glasses and then it hits me, I’m standing in front of Robert Sebastian Cheong.
Robert Sebastian Cheong, eating vietnamese spring rolls out of a paper bag. Robert Sebastian Cheong, in tailored shirt and trousers, nipples peaking out from beneath cotton fabric. Robert Sebastian Cheong, finishing his last spring roll, taking out a vape, and proceeding to suck on it, blowing raspberry scented smoke in my direction before offering me a drag.