June 1986
Twice in his forty-two years Cyril Dragon has been afraid: once while peering through the upstairs shutters of his father’s shophouse on the May 13th, 1969, and now. This second time is not like the first. Not a single moment or even a single day, but a diffuse and agonizing thing. It stretches out his guts and tangles them in knots.
It began (as so many terrors do) with a smell. He remembered it from his father’s pipe: tobacco. First in the lavatory she smoked. Spraying some foul floral concoction and then flushing to throw them off the trail. It was the flushing that irked him most of all: the childish deceit of it! Flushing when there was ash all over the floor. More often than not the cigarette butt was left bobbing in the bowl like the dropping of some tiny creature. Then—perhaps thinking why should I hide like a hunted animal—she graduated to smoking in the room—their room!—with the door locked. If he knocked she would call out “One minute please!” her tongue dry from the smoke. And then—because what was the point of the whole locked-door farce when the smell smacked him left right centre as soon as she had to open the door—she began to smoke on the front porch. Later she would say, “Where else? The back porch is Neela’s territory isn’t it? And aren’t the boys always hanging around there? Did you want me to be blowing smoke into their pure young faces?”
But before all that, there she is smoking on the front porch and the sight reminds him of nothing so much as a wild animal. Something about her hunched prowling posture: like she’s waiting to pounce. And the way she stretches her arms between cigarettes.
Yet it is not her emerging beast nature that surprises him. After all hasn’t he always said Man is a beast among beasts. We can choose to give in to our animal side or we can choose to tame it but first we have to see it acknowledge it understand it yes or not? And the taming of it is a lifelong struggle. The company we keep the words we think and speak the foods we eat: these are the ways to tame the beast or to whip it into a frenzy. But the beast itself is not something to be feared because listen brothers and sisters: we are smarter and stronger than it. So let Salmah’s beast come out and soft-foot the perimeter. Let it growl and mark its supposed territory. In the end it can be coaxed back into submission.
Except that he finds himself unable to speak in its presence. This is what chills his blood: he can open his mouth and make inconsequential noises that imitate language but he cannot form words out of what he actually feels. He says to Salmah, “Surely I do not need to remind you that the body is a temple.”
And she snorts and rolls her eyes and says, “If the body is a temple then why shouldn’t I burn incense in it?”
He lowers his eyes and smiles a pinched-tight smile. His tongue a feeble pink slab in his mouth. A flopping fish quoting scripture and fairy tales when right there at the top of his throat the truth is flaming and spitting and burning itself out: You need cigarettes now because I am not longer enough for you. The novelty of The Dream The Vision The Movement has worn off and so—because you cannot separate me from The Dream—you are growing tired of me. Or is it the other way around? That our passion cooled first and with it your infatuation with our grand and unattainable ideals? Either way this much is clear: it was a package deal and now you are finished with all of it. Will I wake up one morning and find you gone? Moved on to your next stop? With two boys this time. A growing band of wanderers. And what tales will you spin of this life? What is the story you will tell yourself about us?
He knows he ought to pray. To leave everything in God’s hands. Would that he could believe in that kind of God! There it is: the great lie of his so-called vocation. If sitting back and trusting God was all there was to it then why had he put them through all of this? Why had he made them leave everything behind to come here and claw moss off the walls with their fingernails and dig in the dirt with their soft government-servant hands? Surely at least some of them must have stopped to ask themselves these questions.
Supposing that fairy godfather of a God did exist—then what? He can think of only one request: Take me back. But even God does not meddle with the laws of time and space. And back to when and what? To the day Salmah arrived? To be relived over and over again for eternity? For in moving forward something is always lost. Further back then: to the May 13th, 1969. Let him stand at that window again. Let him hear the voice in his ear. But then let him stand up to it. Let him answer back: I cannot. One man cannot save a country. One man cannot change the past or shape the future. And how many others will I gather under my banner? Five-ten-fifteen. Fifteen against the tides of tribalism; we may as well each live a good life separately quietly with no lofty ambitions.
But the truth is that by the time he stood at that window on the May 13th, 1969, it was already too late. He was already who he was. The boy who could not ignore the voice in his ear. The boy who bore all the sorrows of the world on his shoulders. There is only one moment to which he should go back and that is the moment of his birth. Let him slip out of his mother and let her take him in her warm arms. Let her live. There: in her daffodil dress she cradles him and sings to him. He is cared for instead of being the eternal caretaker. He no longer bears responsibility for the ills of the world.