THE CITIZEN
“Jia Sen? Jia Sen? Li Jia Sen?” comes the voice, echoing out across the wooden corridors.
The oppressive claustrophobia of the Resistance HQ, the darkness of my future 八字, the stillness of my late cyborg wife, weigh down upon me. Outside, the Singaporeans go about their lives as if nothing has happened, and in a way, they’re right. Their destinies have shuffled, the lines of fate scrambled and redirected, but the overall picture is the same: a clandestine conspiracy by god-knows-who, in kahoots with a unifying cultural hegemony of apathy and reactionism, systematically working to remove the world of agency.
Joanne. Half the body of a robot, the other half human, organic, dead and unknowable. Was she a willing co-conspirator of the lizards? Or simply another victim of our meddling into our 八字? I wonder to myself, had I not neglected her, would she have been driven to peg Indian workers at the loading bay? What was the meaning of the robot? Is there another machine-conspiracy behind the lizard one? Just how many forces converge around this nexus of fate and power?
I trace the contours of her body with my fingers. Contours that I thought belonged to me, but I now realise had an entire life of their own. Our love, through idealism, through opposition and hate, through apathy and silence, the gradual splitting of her body into unbridled sexual freedom and the rigidity of an invisible system of digital control, and now her death -- meaningless save for a death caress as a rebuke to itself. Could it be my fault? If I hadn’t meddled with the mantou, would she still be alive?
“Jia Sen? Jia Sen? Li Jia Sen?”
I turn towards the voice, my head like a stone. It’s Tan Vee Bun, in a yellow raincoat, and Robert Sebastian Cheong, in a transparent one, decked out in flowers. So much for the secret revolution. I shuffle away in fear -- if there’s one thing I’ve begun to learn -- it’s the unpredictability of lizards. In a flash, Robert Sebastian Cheong rushes towards me, blocking off my exit, while Tan Vee Bun edges closer, his arms raised in defence.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
I allow Tan Vee Bun to grab my arm, and the two of them half carry, half support me to an office, where they seat me on a dusty chair. Robert Sebastian Cheong fiddles with some switches, and eventually finds a way to turn on the lights. The hum of fluorescent lamps fills the room, as the lights flicker on -- flashing Robert Sebastian Cheong from human to lizard to human again. Next to me, a himalayan salt block thrums to life.
“Drink some water,” Tan Vee Bun holds out a plastic bottle of Dasani water. Malaysia water.
Meanwhile Robert Sebastian Cheong leans on a wall near the entrance. I keep staring at him, wary of any sudden movements. Faintly, I can see the yellow outlining the circumference of his pupils.
“We’re giving up. We’re done.”
“What?” I snap out of my stupor.
First Joanne. Then Jack. Then Rose. And now Tan Vee Bun is giving up too.
“But your boyfriend is a -”
“- I know, but he’s my lizard, and he always will be my lizard.”
Tan Vee Bun turns to Robert Sebastian Cheong, flashing him a closed-mouth grin. Was it regret? Exhaustion? Or actual love?
“Where will you go?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll get ourselves a HDB flat, both of us to become employed, make just enough money to enjoy our lives, change the world by simply existing.”
“But that’s pathetic!” I spit, “that’s not a cause! That’s a surrender!”
The lizard eyes appear in front of my face. A soft hissing voice echoes in my head, “it’s called living. It’s embracing the reality of gradual, glacial change instead of fighting it...these grand agendas, they don’t really do much, do they? It’s just romance. It’s theatre. It’s your name on a textbook taking credit for the accumulation of decisions made by the populace over long periods of time.”
“You’re a lizard,” I sneer back at him.
HHSSSSSS
Tan Vee Bun pulls us apart.
“You two have never gotten along,” he admonishes us. Turning to Robert Sebastian Cheong, he gives him a packet of Tao Kae Noi, which his partner consumes by flicking his tongue into the packet, reeling in the flavoured seaweed like the disgusting cold blooded monstrosity that he is.
“Look around you,” Tan Vee Bun continues, “it’s two steps forward, three steps back… think of the sweep of history, of the millions of mediocre gestures made over generations that got us here, and the moral grandstanding of dictators and narcissists and activists that punctuate it, all of them judged by a future created by a dispassionate, uncaring, survivalist god.”
I glare at the two of them. I want the struggle. I want the pain. It makes me happy.
I’ve got nothing else to do, anyway.
“We’re all we’ve got,” Tan Vee Bun continues, his arm gesturing towards Robert Sebastian Cheong.
I refuse to speak to them anymore.
“Goodbye, Tan Vee Bun,” I say.
The future, I suppose, is written not by our actions, but our relationships. But I want to remake the future in my own image, over and over and over again. I want to splash paint over everything, a Jia Sen-shaped whiteout all over the world and its people. I want to eradicate everything of all evil. Who cares about the little interactions? The love that blossoms between a man and his lizard? The man who saves the people around him, versus those who strive to change the world. I look over at cyber-Joanne, my abandonment of her, and her abandonment of me, and wonder if the sacrifice is worth it.