Fragments

Interlude

Nicholas says not to worry about describing Fragmentation. He says that there'll be plenty of history books written on the subject - he showed me one just now, when I asked for the precise date - and that I should start my story, the one I promised at the beginning of all this.

Maybe I should start with happier days.

Yes, happier days.

***

When I was younger I lived in a house with a back garden devoted entirely to orchids. My father was the one who gardened; we had a shed at the back filled with pots and bags of fertilisers and spray bottles of unnamed substances. He'd leave his tools around the house. I remember a spade on the counter, a pair of gloves stuck in a fruit basket, a plastic bag of nutrient gels in the medicine cupboard.

Once he left a rake on the kitchen floor. Mom stepped on it and the tines went straight through, sticking out at the top of her feet like metal rusted plants pushing their way up flesh.

I don't remember if she fainted. What I did remember was that she never stopped my father from growing orchids. It was his only passion; nothing else stirred his interest, not even his wife and daughter.

He tried, I think. I remember him holding me, his arms too stiff, both of us not touching, his embrace  an ill-fitting noose around my body. I remember myself, perched half-off, half-on his lap, trying to curl my tongue over the words he said - cultivation, pollination, fertilisation - all big words, only to look up and see the slightest of frowns on his handsome face. And always - after the cuddling, the bedtime stories obediently recited, the cold, deliberate good night kisses, the birthday cakes methodically cut and put on plates - he would sigh, relieved, and retreat into his orchids.

But my mother loved him nonetheless. And so did I; I learnt to love him, watching my mother. She would tell me stories, especially the one of the first time she saw him. It was just a glimpse, she would say, her voice soft, because Father didn't like to talk about himself, didn't like other people to talk about him, but I fell in love right then and there.

My mother was seventeen and skinny when she saw Father. She was a tailor's daughter who sat between bolts of fabric, cross-legged, as she surveyed the shop and its customers. Sometimes she fixed buttons on shirts, sewed a little tear there, or wrote up bills and things like that - nothing complicated, but enough work for a bored teenager in the endless heat of the school holidays.

My father was nineteen. He was handsome - that I remember, even as he aged - and quiet. As my mother's father - Datuk, the word for grandfather in our language, was what I called him - fussed over him, suggesting cuts and fits for his young customer's lean, broad-shouldered form, my mother watched, mesmerised by every detail of him. His eyes, blue, calm, intelligent, a stillness in the midst of a storm; his hair, golden blonde in the tropical sun; the way he held himself, dignified, not proud, not ashamed, but strong, and the way he spoke, like he chose every single word and laid them out in sentences like pearls on a string.

She knew she - a poor local girl - had no business falling in love with an orang putih, a white boy. In those days Caucasians in Kuching were rare; it was only after the Fragmentation pandemic that they started to seek refuge in the Bornean city. His father was probably rich, maybe an investor in the South East Asian market. She didn't know why he came to her father's dingy little shop, with its lone, ancient Singer sewing machine and one-speed ceiling fan that circulated everywhere the smell of new fabric and old mothballs - but she was glad he did.

My mother was a smart girl - an almost straight-A student destined for university. So she formulated a plan to see him more. On the days her father wasn't in the shop she would make appointments for the boy so that he'd down come down to the shop more. She'd make herself up with her mother's rouge and lipstick and wear her best clothes - the hand-me-down velvet skirt, her birthday blouse, a favourite dress of hers - to greet the boy.

The boy was smart as well - he knew that it wasn't that hard for an old, seasoned tailor to sew up a suit for him. He couldn't possibly be that inaccurate with his measurements. But the boy - my father - came anyway, always patient, never asking why. Perhaps he knew. I always blushed, Mom once said. Even when she told me that same rosy glow coloured her cheeks, as though the years had never passed and the boy had never changed.

She got a name out of him - Thomas Faciens, he had told her one day, in case you were wondering.

"Thomas," she had whispered.

"Yes?" And my mother smiled.

She loved him. It consumed her, that love. It carved her up and hollowed her out, and it hurt. Nevertheless, she pursued it. Even when Thomas' father didn't allow her to marry his son because she was poor, because she was local, and because he loved his son too much to let him go, she pursued it. She went to university, graduated at the top of the class and got a job at one of the best engineering firms in the country. I am worthy, she had begged as she spread her certificates on the old man's teak desk, tears staining the papers even as she plead. Young Mr. Faciens just sat quietly, his hands clasped and still on his lap, eyes downcast. Please let me marry your son.

The most incredible thing, she told me, was that when the old man asked Tommy whether he wanted to marry me, he said yes.

She loved him so desperately and so deeply that when my father Fragmented, she broke as well.

***

My father did not work. His inheritance, along with my mother's engineer income, paid the bills. We could afford to live in a house - not a flat or a condo, a house - and to drive our own car. I even went to a private school.

But that all changed after he Fragmented.

I remember screams; glass shattering; pounding, on the walls, on the floor; crying; the smell of rust; the silver glint of a knife; the feeling of walls on all sides, of darkness on all sides, and of my mother's warmth on the right of me; breathing heavily; waiting, our hearts constricted, as his shadow passed our hiding-place in the closet. I remember his taunts - come out, come out, wherever you are - and his boots, how the steel-capped toes of them kicked into my mother's ribs over amd over again. I remember the the crack that followed and the glaring wrongness of bone protuding through bloodied flesh.

She almost died then.

I remember soldiers. I remember them marching into the house, and taking with them a raging monster clothed in the skin and bones of my father.

I was eight then. Eight when my father lost to his Inhabitant. Eight when my mother lost to her grief.

They took my mother away, too. But unlike my father they gave her back to me. She returned happier. Less prone to crying. Less prone to jumping off roofs, which was what got her taken away in the first place.

But when she came back, she forgot.

The reason why she didn't cry anymore was because there was nothing there to cry about.

She forgot the man she fell in love with.

Without her love, she became an echo. Strangely I found myself remembering for her. I kept the stories she told me locked in my journals and his wedding ring on a chain around my neck. I had to tell myself every night that her love story once happened and that just because she forgot how it felt didn't mean that love wasn't real.

***

But over the years I found myself forgetting his face,

and remembering instead his screams.