TAY THOUGHT ABOUT that all the way back to the Cantonment Complex. He sat in the back of the taxi with his arms folded and he thought about Laura Ann Zimmerman and her memories of her father saying her mother was a spy.
Perhaps her father had really told her that. Perhaps he had only told her something like that. The woman seemed certain she remembered the moment exactly. Tay didn’t say anything to challenge her, but he wasn’t nearly so sure.
Tay understood all too well that people had memories of things they didn’t really recall. He had come to believe everyone’s memories were more dream than remembrance. A few recollections of moments that were genuine connected by other moments that were entirely imaginary. He had memories like that himself. It was as if he had found pieces of discarded film lying around in the cutting room of his mind and then worked them up into a coherent narrative by sticking a few bits in between them.
That was the thing about the past. You carried it with you as a jumble of remembrance and imagining. But once you knew that, and once you accepted that some of your memories weren’t real, how could you hope to understand your past?
You might even tell yourself it doesn’t matter whether you understand your past because it is…well, past. Dead and buried. Why does it matter now how much of what we remember is true? Why does it matter whether we can separate the truth of our past from what we have merely imagined?
It matters because the past is not really past. Just when you least expect it, the past returns for you. You can never bury the past. It is always there, just waiting for you to turn your back. And when you do, the fingers of the past rise up out of the ground right at your feet and wrap themselves around your ankle.
Forget Laura Ann Zimmerman.
What was bugging Tay was that he knew the past was just on the verge of returning for him. It was already teasing him with glimpses of secrets he had never known it held. He could feel its fingers reaching for him now.
***
Duncan Tay had been his father, a man of whom Tay now had only the vaguest memories. He remembered he was an accountant, of course. And he remembered what he looked like. At least he thought he did. But that was about it.
Now Tay had a picture of his father taken more than thirty-five years ago with another man he knew had worked for American intelligence most of his life. A man who was apparently a skilled smuggler and who had been found dead in Singapore, his neck broken, three days after terrorist bombings had gutted the city. Tay might have written that off as a coincidence, one of those odd happenstances that occasionally do occur in real life. But after the ISD goon and his CIA sidekick turned up asking questions about his investigation, he realized it wasn’t going to be nearly that easy.
Then, out of nowhere, this woman tells him a story about her long-dead father claiming that her mother, a woman who once worked for Tay’s father, was really a spy.
What, Tay asked himself, was he supposed to think now?
That his father was somehow connected to American intelligence, too? That he might not have been an accountant at all? That his accounting firm had been just some sort of front? And if it had been a front, what had it been a front for?
The past. Rising right out of the ground at his feet. Secrets Tay hadn’t even known were buried were coming back to torment him.
***
The taxi stopped at a light just past Raffles Place and the driver shot a quick look over his shoulder at Tay. Tay wondered if he had spoken out loud without realizing it. He hoped he hadn’t said something he shouldn’t.
The driver was small and dark, possibly a Bangladeshi, and not young, probably in his sixties. When he saw Tay looking at him, he half turned in his seat.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Tay, his face wearing a beatific smile. “I am a Christian. Have you found Jesus Christ in your life?”
Tay felt trapped. He didn’t want to be rude, but wasn’t about to sit there and pretend to listen to the man’s evangelical pitch. Why did people do that? He knew they meant well, but didn’t they have any respect for his privacy? He was just taking a cab ride, for God’s sake, and now here he was the target of a religious pitch. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone?
Tay was suddenly aware of a strong odor of curry coming off the man’s skin.
First a religious pitch and now this.
He didn’t want to look like a racist, but he had to get out of the cab. The smell of curry was making him sick.
***
Tay walked the rest of the way back to the Cantonment Complex. It wasn’t far and it only took him about fifteen minutes, but it was hot and humid and the exertion made him sweat. It was worth it. Anything was better than listening to a religious pitch from an evangelical Christian who stank of curry.
Robbie Kang was at his desk in the squad room and Tay waved him into his office.
“Have you got the list of entries through the Woodlands checkpoint?”
“No, sir. Immigration says it will take another day or two.”
“Isn’t it all in some kind of a database? Can’t they just push a button?”
“They say they’re busy, sir. I think ISD has them running around like crazy.”
Tay drummed his fingers on the desk. Annoying, of course, but it probably didn’t matter. He doubted his dead man would have entered Singapore under a passport that gave his name as Johnny the Mover, and that was all he had. So what good was the list of entries going to do him anyway?
***
That night at home, Tay suddenly got a crazy idea. He resisted it at first, but then he gave in. He picked up a pack of Marlboros and some matches and walked out to his little brick-paved garden.
It was a nice night, at least it was by Singapore standards which meant it wasn’t actually raining. Still, the air was so heavy with humidity Tay thought the sheer weight of it might cause water to start draining from the air at any moment the way a sponge starts dripping when it can’t hold any more water.
He walked around the garden for a minute or two, poking at a plant here and collecting a fallen leaf there. He was stalling, of course, and he knew it. Finally he settled himself in one of the green-cushioned chairs around his small teak table. Then he shook out a Marlboro, lit it, and dropped the pack and matches on the table.
He held the first mouthful of smoke for a moment as he always did and thought about how it tasted sweet and bitter at the same time. He didn’t smoke because he was nervous or because he needed something to do with his hands. And he was reasonably sure he wasn’t addicted to nicotine. He smoked for the same reason other people ate cheeseburgers. He liked the taste. He figured he could quit if he wanted to and switch to cheeseburgers, but he doubted that would make him a whole lot better off. So he took another long pull on his Marlboro and stopped thinking about it.
Tay smoked quietly for a moment, but the longer he stalled the more annoyed he became with himself. Abruptly he stabbed out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray sitting in the middle of the table, then leaned back and folded his arms.
***
“Hello, Mother?” he called. “Are you there?”
He felt like a complete idiot doing it, of course, so the sound of his voice came out somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, but he screwed up his courage and tried it one more time.
“Mother? Can you hear me?”
There was no reply.
Has it really come to this? Tay asked himself.
Here he was, sitting in his garden on a reasonably pleasant night, and was he enjoying a drink and smoke and wondering about his life the way he usually did? No, he was trying to summon up a ghost. And not just any ghost, but the ghost of his mother.
It was ridiculous, he knew, but…well, his mother had known there was some connection between the dead guy at the Woodlands and the bombings. Somehow. He couldn’t have hallucinated that, could he?
And if she knew about that, and particularly now that he could connect the dead guy to his father, he figured questioning his mother was the next logical thing to do. He had talked to her, hadn’t he? So what was the big deal? He would talk to her again.
Of course, the fact that she’d been dead for two years raised the bar a bit in trying to work out exactly how to do that. Raised the crap out of it actually.
“Mother? Would you answer me please?”
But all Tay heard out there in the night was the swishing of the two big coconut palms in his neighbor’s garden rubbing against each other in the warm breeze.
“Fuck it,” he muttered after a moment.
Then he scooped up his cigarette and matches and stalked inside.