THE CITIZEN
My wife Joanne welcomes me home with a post-it pointing to a half finished bowl of curry flavoured Maggi Mee (she’s on a diet), while my nose detects a curious stench of shit coming from the bedroom. “How’s the revolution?” she asks, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
I tell her about the policeman, about my humiliation at the MRT station, the bruises on my thighs and my side. She looks back, her face impassive. “Are you sure?” she says.
I can’t tell if she is concerned, amused or exasperated. Does she not understand -- the momentum of revolution is akin to Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill, a constant struggle into eternity, violent eruptions into civil society -- chewing gum on train doors, World Cup HDB flat parties, beer on the padang, dirt paths carved into green lawns by the feet of a thousand sheeple...covered up the next morning with cement and orchid gardens?
I plead with her, I ask her to remember her past, when we first met at Hong Lim Park years ago -- a firebrand visionary who could see the upcoming changes to our public transportation woes, as the storefronts began to spread in our MRT stations like an insult to the Japanese underground malls?
Back then, she told me, she missed the days of brown leaves floating down upon a half filled carpark as she exited the Somerset station, turning left to be greeted by a hawker centre on the banks of the canal, the excitement of Bishan MRT, neither above ground nor below it, without the crush of the crowds filtering in from the Circle Line, the refreshing emptiness of Marina Bay station, actually looking out to the sea, and not-yet-another office building.
But today:
“What’s wrong with you ah? Can you please eat something? I need to study,” she says, picking up a book on sociology, her second university degree after mass communications, paid for by a broke husband and a loan from her parents.
She was lost, she told me. The government, through its high pressure society it had created, had pushed her into a career of, believe it or not, headhunting, while she did what she could to protest against the status quo, joining yours truly in a glorious explosion of the human will -- one hundred protesters and a megaphone -- that fateful day in the September of 2011. The great big general election of hope.
Nothing happened, as you may have guessed by now, but we made a mark, we alerted the populace, and one day these little seeds of dissent will blossom into a world where one can be content in freedom.
In the meantime, I had met my love, my future wife, and now a competitor for space in a shrinking 2-room flat in Hougang.
I sigh and slurp up my noodles, pensively looking out the window at the playground below, where I see the same policeman, his arms akimbo, with a posse of five other individuals, some in uniform, some in plainclothes. In a V-shaped formation, they walk down the valley between the two blocks, searching for god-knows-what. One of them, in a pink office shirt, lights a cigarette that, for some inexplicable reason, burns green. The policeman stops, squats onto the ground, and picks up something small from the gravel. He examines it in the light. His friends crowd round him. Pink shirt stands apart, smoking his strange cigarette, leaning on a swing frame. He turns his head to the right, and then up, and he stares right at me, his sunglasses glinting in the evening light. I move out of his sight and look towards Joanne, sitting on the kitchen table focussing on a blazing white laptop screen. Part of me believes Pink Shirt randomly looked up in my direction, while another part, deep in my gut, knows that he knew I was there all along. He’s biding his time, playing with me like a cat with its prey.
I get up, walk into the room with its faint smell of shit, and fall into bed where, if anything, the smell is stronger. I shan’t tell her about the posse, or the smell of shit, for now. And so I find myself staring at the ceiling for one, two hours, alone with my fears of an impending visit from the police to take me in for “questioning”. I imagine Joanne’s face, her fears of quietly buried rebellion being brought to the surface, replaced by relief as I am led out of the flat, and confusion and anger -- why me? Why my husband? Why anyone at all? The sunlight dims for orange to purple to black, and a faint yellow reflection from the ground emanates into my room, and the smell of shit dissipates into nothing.
I’m walking along Beach Road holding Joanne’s hand. Opposite us is Golden Mile Tower, crumbling, half lit, derelict and proud. We walk towards Arab Street, and she’s singing “Hey Jude” loudly over the stream of taxis cruising past us. We turn a corner and the smell of pandan leaves, rice and curry from the nasi padang stall. Ahead of us is a shisha place where our friends await. This is our area, a little corner of town between condominiums and shopping malls, previously a red light district, slowly being gentrified to hipster hangout, and who knows what in the future. But for now, it’s ours. Water trickles in a drain, the hiss of car tyres of old asphalt, the distant chatter of friends old and new, dead and alive, free and imprisoned, just round the corner. Joanne takes my hand and we push past the white door frame, where two rows of men in white greet me. I follow along like a pliant dog -- my memories of our past, beautiful and unassailable in my dreams, leading me along. And in the corner, I see the policeman. His truncheon no longer straight and black, but white, with one end molded as a pair of testicles, and the other as a penis. A white dildo. Next to him, a skinny Sikh boy holding a toilet plunger. Joanne is nowhere to be found. A warm sensation starts crawling its way up my legs, up my torso, squeezes my neck, and enters my mouth and nostrils and eyes, my sight turning pink and I can feel my temples throbbing and I attempt to scream but, I have no air, I have no room to move, I have nothing as the warmth, like a malevolent slime, smothers me in a tight embrace as I continue to struggle in vain...
And then I wake up. Joanne’s still studying, I’m covered in sweat, and the smell of shit is gone.