The lower part of the sky was lighted dully and all the pale green grass and the palm leaves turned olive, and tree trunks blackened. The birds disappeared: a last blown one straggled over Dr. Lim’s hedge. The fronds of the traveler’s palms parted and the larger trees swayed, and in the darkness the widely spaced drops began, as big as half dollars, staining the driveway. There was a rumble of faraway thunder. At the beginning it was still dark, but with the torrent it grew silvery, the air brightened as the rain came down, and softened to daylight as the larger clouds collapsed into the dense glassy streaks of the downpour flooding the garden. Soon it was all revolving sound and water and light; the trees that had thrashed grew heavy, the drooping leaves seeming to force the branches downward. Water foamed and bubbled down the roof tiles and flooded the gutters of Dr. Lim’s bungalow.
It continued for less than an hour, and before it was over the sun came out and made the last falling drops and the mist from the hot street shine brilliantly. Everything the rain touched glistened and dripped, and afterward all the houses and trees and pushcart awnings and bamboo fences were changed. The wetness gave everything in the sun the look of having swelled, and just perceptibly, buckled.
Some months later, in the old shop on Beach Road, Gopi the peon sidled into my cubicle, showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes, and said, “Mr. Hing vaunting Mr. Jack in a hurry-lah.” You know what for.
PART THREE
1
THE SMOKE behind me — Leigh combusted — as I drove from the crematorium with Gladys, was the same pale color as the mid-morning Singapore cloud that sinks in a steamy mass over the island and grows yellow and suffocating throughout the afternoon, making the night air an inky cool surprise. I felt relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise: a change of air.
Leaving, I was reminded of the chase of my past, my season of flights and reverses; and I began to understand why I had never risen. The novelist’s gimmick, the dying man seeing his life flash before him, is a convenient device but probably dishonest. I had once been clobbered on the head: my vision was an unglued network of blood canals at the back of my eyes and the feeble sight of the sausage I’d had for breakfast. Pain made my memory small, and Leigh had looked so numb and haunted I doubt that he had remembered his lunch. A life? Well, the dying man risks pain’s abbreviations or death’s halting the recollection at a misleading moment. The live glad soul I was, bumping away from the crematorium, had access to the past and could pause to dwell on the taste of an ambiguity, or to relish an irony: “Let’s face it, Flowers,” the feller had said, “you’re an institution!” I was ruefuclass="underline" feeling chummy I had helped so many, stretching myself willingly supine on the rack of their fickleness — any service short of martyrdom, and what snatchings had been repeated on me! But, ah, I wasn’t dead.
Leigh was dead. He had told me his plans, everything he wanted. It amounted to very little, a quiet cottage on that rainy island, a few flowers, some peace — an inexpensive fantasy. He had got nothing. His example unsettled me; and as death rephrases the life of everyone who’s near, I felt I was reading something new in my mind, an altered rendering of a previous hope. It was a correction, needling me to act. It worried me. My resolution, inspired by his death, was also mocked by his death, which appeared like an urging to hope at the same moment it demonstrated the futility of all hope. His life said: Act soon. His death said: Expect nothing. My annoyance with him as a rude stranger who messed up my plans was small compared to my frustration at seeing him dead — there was no way to reply. And worse, his staring astonished look had suggested the unexpected, the onset of a new vision irritatingly coupled with an end to speech. Behind me, clouding Upper Aljunied Road, was the smoke of that dumb prophet, made private by death, who had stared at an unsharable revelation, which might have been nothing at all.
“Where I am dropping?” Gladys’s voice ended my reverie.
“Palm Grove.”
“Air-con?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“I like Palm Grove.” Gladys hugged herself. Her skinny hands and the back of her neck were heartbreaking.
“Good for you,” I muttered.
“You sad, Jack. I know. You friend dead,” said Gladys. “He was a nice man, I think.”
“He wasn’t,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Marry with a wife?”
“Yeah,” I said. “In Hong Kong. The cremation was her idea. She chose the hymn. The ashes go off to Hong Kong in the morning, by registered mail. She thought it would be better that way.” I could see the mailman climbing off his bike and pulling a brown paper parcel out of his knapsack. Your husband, one pound, eight ounces; customs declaration and so forth: Sign here, missy.
“Why you not marry?”
“That’s all I need.” Marriage! Any mention of the Chinese gave me a memory picture of a caged shop near Muscat Lane, the family seated grumbling around a table (Junior doing his homework), beneath an unshaded bulb of uselessly distracting brightness; I couldn’t think of the Chinese singly — they lived in gangs and family clans, their yelling a simulation of speech. The word marriage gave me another picture, a clinical American bathroom, locked for the enactment of marriage: Dad shaving, Mom on the hopper with her knees pressed together, the kids splashing in the tub, all of them naked and yakking at once. It was unholy, safety’s wedded agony; I had been tempted, but I had never sinned that way. I said to Gladys, “What about you?”
“Me? Sure, I get marry every night!” She cackled. My girls were always asked the same questions — name, age, status — and they built a fund of stock replies. It was possible for me to tell by the speed and ingenuity of the reply how long a girl had been in the business. I get marry every night: Gladys was an old-timer.
In the lobby of the Palm Grove Hotel a huddle of tourists gave us the eye as we walked toward the elevator. If I needed any proof that there was no future in hustling for tourists there it was: two wizened fellers gasping on a sofa, another propped on crutches, a vacant wheelchair, a white-haired man asleep or dead in the embrace of a large armchair. Struldbrugs. Like the joke about the old duffer who says he has sex fifty weeks a year with his young wife. “Amazing,” says a youngster, “but what about the other two weeks?” The old duffer says, “Oh, that’s when the feller that lifts me on and off goes on vacation.”
Gladys was no beauty, I wasn’t young; the tourists were watching, trying to determine the relationship between the red-faced American and the skinny Chinese girl. I hooked my arm on hers like a stiff old-fashioned lover and began remarking loudly on the tasteful decor of the lobby and the thick carpet, pleased that the suit I was wearing would deflect some of the scorn. Who does that jackass think he is?