TAY’S DOCTOR WAS an Indian whose name was Gupta. He and Tay argued every day until Tay finally badgered Dr. Gupta into letting him check out of the hospital.
Tay kept telling Gupta he felt fine and that his hearing had come back and was perfectly normal now, but Gupta lectured him on the hidden effects of head injuries and refused to release him. Gupta would have kept him there even longer, Tay was certain, but he was such an obnoxious patient the hospital wanted to get rid of him just as soon as they were absolutely certain it wouldn’t kill him.
The hospital had insisted Tay call a friend to take him home, but he told them he didn’t have any friends. He noticed they didn’t seem surprised. Eventually they gave up arguing with him and just called him a taxi.
Dr. Gupta equipped Tay with a bag of medications and gave him so many different instructions for taking them that Tay didn’t even try to remember what they all were. As soon as he got into the taxi, he just chucked the whole bag out the window without bothering to look inside.
***
Tay knew what little food he had in the house would probably be spoiled by now and he had no cigarettes at all. The ones that had been in his pocket were gone, doubtless seized by the hospital and destroyed specifically to make his life more difficult. He told the taxi driver to take him to the Cold Storage market in Centrepoint on lower Orchard Road where he usually bought his food and his cigarettes so he could get enough stuff to tide him over for a few days.
“Closed,” the driver said.
Tay looked at his watch. It was only a little after five. A supermarket wouldn’t be closed at five o’clock, would it?
“Cold Storage is closed?” Tay asked, thinking he must have misunderstood somehow.
“Don’t know. But Orchard Road closed.”
Tay struggled to get his mind around that. How could one of the city’s major thoroughfares be closed?
“Orchard shut down from Napier Road all the way to Queen Street because of the bombs,” the driver went on. He twisted around and regarded Tay suspiciously. “Where you been?”
Where had he been, indeed?
“Just get me as close to Centrepoint as you can,” he told the driver.
Then he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
***
About twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped on Penang Road next to Istana Park. Tay paid the driver and walked across the small park to Orchard Road. Sure enough, the roadway was deserted.
About a half mile to the west he could see heavy equipment and vehicles scattered in the road among piles of debris and building materials. The gathering didn’t appear particularly sinister. It just looked like somebody was building another of the huge shopping malls for which Singapore was famous and had for some unaccountable reason decided to position it right in the middle of the intersection of Orchard and Scotts Roads.
Where Tay was, nothing moved except for the occasional pedestrian scurrying to cross Orchard Road as if it were a place they didn’t want to be caught out in the open. Tay just stood there and looked both ways in utter amazement. Traffic lanes that were normally jammed with cars, buses, and trucks no matter the time of the day or night were now utterly deserted. He thought if he lived to be a hundred — and right at the moment that concept sounded particularly unlikely to him — he knew he would never see anything like that again.
It was only a short walk up Orchard to Centrepoint and Tay was relieved to find the Cold Storage Market was open. There was something about the market that never failed to lend him comfort, and comfort was something that was in short supply right about then. He liked the wide, clean aisles, shimmering in the blindingly white florescent light, but most of all he loved the orderliness of everything. It was almost enough to convince him there was planning and purpose in the world, and that we lived in a rational and logical universe after all. Almost.
He bought coffee, a bag of bagels, cream cheese, a few frozen dinners, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. Then, seized by a sudden fit of nutritional guilt, he tossed four apples and a bag of dried mangos into his basket, too. At the check-out counter he added six boxes of Marlboro Reds, which was the real reason he had gone to the market in the first place, and asked the cashier to give him several of the packs of matches he saw tucked into the bottom of the rack below the cigarettes. He could find a restaurant somewhere if he got hungry, but he hadn’t had a cigarette in over a week. Priorities were priorities.
***
Tay’s house in Emerald Hill Road was just around the corner from the market so he was home in a few minutes. He took the shopping bag into the kitchen and fished out all six boxes of Marlboros and the matches. He thought about unpacking the other things he had bought, but he couldn’t be bothered so he shoved the entire shopping bag into the refrigerator and took one of the boxes of Marlboros and a pack of matches outside to his little garden.
Stretching out on a teak lounge chair, he shook out a cigarette and lit it. The first puff was harsh and bitter and for just a moment Tay thought about throwing the cigarette away. But then the rush of the nicotine hit him and he couldn’t imagine why he would even consider doing something ridiculous like that.
Tay finished the first cigarette and immediately lit another. For a long while, he sat and he smoked and thought about what he knew about the attack. And what he didn’t know.
***
Four large and sophisticated truck bombs. A meticulously coordinated operation. No claims of responsibility. No obvious motive.
The investigation was going to be a shit storm. ISD had no doubt already taken control and Tay imagined he and his fellow police officers would soon be reduced to running errands and fetching coffee for the people doing the real work of finding the bombers. Worse, the Americans would be right in the middle of everything, no doubt trying to take over the investigation themselves. Three American hotels reduced to rubble? The American embassy and the FBI would have already decided it was their case to solve.
Americans seemed to think terrorism anywhere in the world was their personal territory. The last time Tay had a case in which the Americans had an interest, they had decided that was terrorism as well; and it all had been a bloody mess. His boss had wanted to give the Americans the case and walk away, but Tay knew the Americans would sweep it under a rug if they got control of it and he wasn’t about to let that happen. Eventually he had found a way to serve up a little justice in spite of the politics involved, Tay remembered with a good deal of satisfaction. Not many people knew Tay had been personally responsible for what had happened, thank heaven. But he knew, and that was all that mattered.
Perhaps this time it would be different, he told himself. This was too big, too brutal. It was a direct attack on Singapore, so this time it had to be different, didn’t it? This time his boss wouldn’t let people walk all over Tay and his fellow policemen. Not ISD, and certainly not a bunch of Americans with no last names.
Tay told himself that with all the conviction he could muster. There was even, he honestly thought, at least some remote possibility he might be right.
Tay smoked quietly and looked around his garden. The brick pavers were littered with pieces of plant debris. Several huge, flat leaves had broken off his banana trees and hung grotesquely from their stalks. There must have been a storm while he slept in the hospital, Tay thought. He wondered why Kang hadn’t mentioned it.
It occurred to Tay then that he was in the same spot where he had been when everything had begun, at least for him. He had been in this very spot in his garden when he heard the sounds he couldn’t identify, the sounds that turned out to be the three huge truck bombs obliterating the Marriott, the Hyatt, and the Hilton.
And now he was back in the same place and, but for some broken limbs and scattered leaves, everything was exactly the same for him now as it had been then.
Except, of course, it wasn’t.
Things would never be the same again for anyone in Singapore.
***
Tay didn’t go inside until it was dark. When he finally did, he searched through the kitchen cabinets until he found a bottle of Bushmills he remembered he had and an unopened bottle of mineral water. He poured a couple of fingers of each into a glass, then he took the glass into the living room with him, settled into a brown leather club chair, and lit another cigarette.
He sat like that for a long time, sipping the whiskey and smoking, and when he was finished he went to bed.
***
Tay had no idea what time it was when he eventually slipped off to sleep, but he woke in the night to the sound of rain splashing against his windows and bouncing off the brick pavers in his garden.
He had just had that dream again.
There had been lights. There were always lights. They swirled in the air likes pieces of a shattered mirror propelled by a whirlwind. And his mother had spoken to him from somewhere outside in the rain.
It was a dream he had had several times since his mother died, but when he woke he could never remember what she had said to him. Nothing good, he imagined. His mother had never been happy with his career choice and after he became a policeman she gradually seemed to lose interest in him altogether. After she moved to New York and remarried, he seldom heard from her at all, but to be fair she seldom heard from him either. Over the last fifteen or twenty years they had just gradually slipped out of each other’s lives. It seemed impossible that a man could lose track of his mother, or a mother could lose track of her son, but that was exactly what had happened.
Tay figured he and his mother had communicated more in his dreams over the last year than they had in life during all of the twenty years that had come before. The only problem was, when he woke from his dreams, he could not for the life of him remember what it was they had communicated about.
Tay hoped, at the very least, he had finally said some of the things he should have said to his mother before she died, some of the things he knew now he had wanted to say to her all along. It was a phenomenon he found himself experiencing more and more often recently. People kept dying before Tay could tell them the things he wanted to tell them. The older he got, the more distant his connections to the world became, and the more people there were whom he knew he had failed to communicate with as well as he should.
A progression like that, Tay knew, did not bode particularly well for his future.