TWENTY MINUTES LATER Tay was sitting in his garden lighting his first Marlboro of the evening. His city lay in ruins, hundreds were dead, thousands were injured, and he was investigating a single dead man found in an apartment at the Woodlands HDB estate. That seemed to him about as important as what he was doing right then: smoking a cigarette.
He had wanted a cigarette the whole time he was sitting on that metal chest in the middle of the security area and struggling to take in the destruction all around him. But it had seemed wrong to smoke there, disrespectful somehow, and so he hadn’t. He was ready now to make up for lost time.
While he smoked, he thought about the dead man in the Woodlands apartment. He pictured the man’s face. Did he know him?
He did. He was sure of it.
But then again, he didn’t.
And at exactly the moment he was thinking that, he heard a woman’s voice.
***
“Of course, you know him, Samuel,” she said, startling him out of his reverie. “You’re not senile. Not yet, at least.”
Tay looked around, but he was alone in the garden. Of course, he was alone in the garden. Had a neighbor spoken from beyond his wall?
“You don’t even recognize my voice, do you?”
He did, but how could he? His mother was dead.
“A son who forgets his own mother’s voice. What kind of a son is that?”
Tay looked around again. Was this an elaborate prank of some sort? Surely not. No one pulled pranks on Sam Tay.
“My God, Samuel, are you just going to sit there like a moron? Speak up, boy.”
“Uh…hello, Mother.”
He felt like an idiot, but something made him afraid to keep silent.
“That’s better. How are you, boy?”
“I’m fine,” Tay offered, his voice tentative. “How are you?”
“How am I? I’m dead, Samuel. That’s how I am. Dead.”
“So…how is it?”
“How is it to be dead? Is this your idea of small talk, Samuel?”
“No, I just don’t know what to say and—”
“If you must know, it’s not a barrel of laughs. But you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”
Tay’s heart began to beat faster. Was that what this meant? Was he about to die and this is how it happened? Someone from your past appeared to you and told you that you were about to die?
“Are you telling me I’m going to die, Mother.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” The tone in his mother’s voice was one he remembered all too well. “Of course, you’re going to die, Samuel. But probably not tonight. How should I know? I’m dead, not clairvoyant.”
“I just thought—”
“Stop talking, Samuel. I don’t have much time here so I want you to listen to me carefully.”
Tay said nothing. Were the dead given something like a cosmic phone card which provided them only limited minutes to communicate with the living, or was his mother just following her usual pattern of trying to keep their conversations as short as possible?
“Are you listening, Samuel? Are you listening carefully?”
“Yes, Mother. I am listening carefully.”
“What you are doing is important. Because he was only one man, do not think finding out what happened to him, and why it happened, is any less important than finding out why the many died.”
Tay had no idea what to say to that. He wasn’t even sure what it meant.
“It’s all connected, Samuel. All of it.”
“What’s connected?”
“For Christ’s sake, Samuel, listen to yourself! Pay attention, boy!”
Tay was paying attention. He was fairly sure he was imagining this entire conversation, of course, but he was still paying attention. He didn’t have the vaguest idea what his mother was talking about. If he was talking to her at all. Which obviously he wasn’t.
“You must find someone to help you,” his mother went on when he didn’t reply.
“Help me do what, Mother?”
“Help you to remember, Samuel. That’s what life is really about: remembering. In the end, remembering is all we have left to us.”
Tay hoped that wasn’t true. There were all sorts of things in his life he didn’t want to remember.
“Mother, I don’t really understand—”
“Find somebody to help you. Do you understand?”
“Who?”
“For God’s sake, do you expect me to do everything for you?”
“No, Mother.”
“Maybe this will help. It will be a woman.”
“A woman,” Tay repeated flatly.
“Yes, Samuel. A woman. You do still remember what a woman is, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mother. I remember what a woman is.”
“Good. Then what are you going to do?”
Tay said nothing. Everything he did say just seemed to give his mother another way to take a shot at him.
“Tell me what you are going to do, Samuel,” his mother prompted.
Before he could stop them, the reflexes of his childhood kicked in. “I am going to find someone to help me remember,” he responded dutifully. “A woman.”
Then something suddenly occurred to him.
“How do you know about the man at the Woodlands, Mother?”
“Because you know about him.”
“You know everything I know?”
“Of course, Samuel. Being dead doesn’t have many benefits, but that’s one of them.”
That gave Tay pause. His mother now knew everything he knew? Did she know everything everyone knew, or just everything he knew? He paused to formulate a careful question.
“Mother, does that mean—”
“Never mind what it means, Samuel. Just do what I tell you to do.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I’ve got to go. I’m almost out of time. For once in your life, do what I tell you to do. It’s important.”
“Mother, please don’t—”
“Good-bye, Samuel. Don’t be a stranger.”
“Mother?”
Silence.
“Are you there, Mother?”
Silence.
***
Tay sat perfectly still and threaded what had just happened back and forth through his mind as if it had been preserved on the spinning reels of an old fashioned tape recorder.
Had he experienced a psychotic episode of some kind? Most people would say so, of that he had no doubt, and he wasn’t ready to argue with them. Samuel Tay was a rational man above all else, and rational men knew people don’t carry on conversations with the dead.
Still, he knew what he had heard. God help him, he felt like he really had just talked to his mother, whether he had or not. Perhaps the dead laid greater claim to us than did the living. Perhaps they had found both significance and permanence inside their own demise.
And what was all this about finding someone to help him remember? Remember what? Who the dead man was?
Surely he had just imagined the entire conversation. That had to be all there was to it.
But then again, even if he altogether discarded the possibility of supernatural intervention, what if it had been his subconscious prodding him toward the direction in which he should be going? Perhaps that was what was really happening here.
Tay was prepared to follow the flashes of intuition that bubbled up in his subconscious every now and then. He was even willing to let the less rational part of his being take flight occasionally and accept the possibly of random intervention from the cosmos. But was he willing to start asking every woman he knew if she could help him remember?
Well…no, he wasn’t going to do that. They would think he had lost his mind.
A man had his limits.