Her area was privileged even in this context, at Nassim, nestled off the Bukit Timah canal, and right across from the Botanic Gardens, the green and ordered legacy from colonial times. Her apartment building was one of the newest and most prestigious, designed by some world-famous name, and developed by a company that targets only the uppermost elite. Its price could be matched by only a few other neighborhoods in the world. The rent is far beyond what she earns at the office, where I observed her at work, learned her job title and responsibilities.
She was either from a rich family or else a kept woman, I surmised — without judgment — but kept by whom? Possibilities and theories are useful, I have learned, but in the end can only be resolved by surveillance.
So it was late one night that I saw the black Mercedes S, accompanied by two Toyota Mark X’s, all with heavily tinted windows, pull up to her apartment block. The heavyset men emerged in dark suits and white shirts, with hard eyes that peered around; it was apparent that they had been drinking, and I knew they were Japanese even before they spoke.
I was not surprised. Not wholly. The Japanese community is large in Singapore, and where their people go, these people will follow.
It did not surprise me to learn, as I did by the next day, that the man who goes up to her apartment is the gang boss for not just Singapore, but the whole region; he is on a list of people that we watch and monitor but allow in and out of the country so long as they do nothing here. It did not surprise me that he travels often for weeks or even months or that his returns too often coincide with her visits to the doctor for a bruise, a fall, a slip, a welt. What surprised me is how, just nights after we met under a thief’s moon, and before I did any of this checking, we became lovers.
How did I steal you? Or is it that you — for whatever reason — stole me?
4. How Some Die, and Others Live
I begin to write this in bed, when you are still asleep, your dark hair spilling over the white pillow, your slim arm reaching out for something in a dream beyond this room. I move slightly, slowly, so as not to wake you, take the beautiful lacquered fountain pen and stern black notebook you gave me, and begin to write.
I look at you. Your leg peers out from under the white duvet. From the ankle to the back of the knee and the first curve of thigh is a path of delight. Along this path, we move from the simple pleasure of eye and mind seeing something of so much beauty to the awkward, heart-quickening, and limb-entwining physical act of possessing that beauty. To look upon you is to gaze and to desire. Then to possess.
We return to this path, repeatedly. Day after day, and night after night. In our repeated journeys, we find byways of desire, possession, and so much else, until we are covered in a fine sheen of perspiration, until we ache to stand, until we are uncertain whether what we do is acceptable to anyone other than us inside this room.
I have seen people die. What I have seen explains to me the uncertainty about a soul. One moment I see their eyes catch the light, move and flicker, fragile and also overflowing with life. Then the eyes glaze, turn gray and black, dull, dulled, blunt, opaque, oblique, closed, gone. Perhaps to another place none of us knows, that none can prove in a court with testimony. These are the eyes I have looked into when death came.
When we make love, I grasp your slender jaw in my thick palm and turn your eyes to mine when you are about to come, and do so again and again, until it is my turn. And what I see in your eyes becomes something to hold back the memories of what I have seen in the eyes of the dying.
When we are in bed, I know what it is to live. Every part of my body, every sense of being I have, is alive. And from this, I began to want to have that feeling in other parts of my day, to have you with me in more places beyond this bed, this room, this apartment. I investigate your days. I follow you, jotting down your routines in the black book you gave me to write my stories.
9:15 a.m. You get into your dark blue Maserati, and drive to the cold storage down the road from your apartment. You park in B3 and go to the elevators. A young Australian mother and child come out chattering in broad accents, and bump into you with their grocery cart laden with beef and wine. You do not complain.
9:30. You buy the bottled oolong tea that I like, the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie that we eat together some evenings, and then other basics for the apartment. You also buy a Japanese instant ramen with a sour-hot Korean kimchi flavor that I don’t like, and I have never seen you eat. But I know immediately who the item is for — I remember thinking it strange that a Japanese person would like kimchi so much — and I feel my pulse rise at this inventory.
10:01. You push your trolley into the elevator, headed back to B3. I race down the stairs and catch you as you are unloading the bags into the trunk. I come up behind you, and hold you tight. You turn in shock but do not cry out before I have my hand clamped over your lips. Perhaps you recognize me, perhaps not. I push you over so you are halfway into the trunk, and your feet are off the ground. I hold your arms tight behind you, as you wriggle, quite helpless. I shush you. I reach under your quiet navy-blue skirt and pull your sheer blue panties to one side.
I finger you, slowly at first, and then, as your breathing grows heavy, I go faster. My fingers get slippery and I begin to slowly open up your other hole. One sharp gasp, and after that suspension of breath, you moan. I unzip and it is brief, and I do not look into your eyes.
10:19. You drive back to the apartment. I follow in my car. We head upstairs. We do not fuck. We lock the door securely behind us, we unload the groceries into the fridge and storeroom, fold away the plastic bags. We shower and then we make love. Sweetly, tenderly, with the curtains drawn, like some newly married couple who were school sweethearts in a small town and have never known much of anything else.
Afterward we go out for lunch around the corner to the French place at the little row of shops along Bukit Timah that gentrified as the property values raced and richer people with richer tastes moved there. A Frenchman who married local and never left runs it; a small place with some comfy tables amidst racks of food and wine that they stock for sale and which feels like a warehouse.
We come here often because of convenience but also, I realize, perhaps because there is a sense of a couple here, making a home and comfort food amidst the commerce and bare floors.
Then we are back, in the big bed with the rumpled white cotton sheets and comfortable pillows, even as the city busies itself with commerce and common things. We nap, holding each other, and wake and make love again. Then evening comes.
Sometimes in this place and time, between us, there is nothing that can be said. Perhaps I feel silly for the pangs I felt when you stocked up things for him, what he and no one else likes, when I know it is his money that pays for not just whatever is in the fridge, but the fridge and the apartment, and that he is the reason that you are here in the first place and that we met. Perhaps I feel guilty for the way I have forced myself on you, in such a place and manner.
But you do not ask and I do not speak of these things. In bed together, there is no need for such things.
In my life, I have known sex and death. Now in this time, I have begun to know life — what that might truly mean. But I still know death better.
And in such moments, I know that no matter why this started between us, no matter how long this goes on, no matter how alive we are in bed, in our passion, when I am in you, this must end and it will end in death.