Ghost City Blues: Love and Death in the time of Corona Virus

Seven

Singapore, the past.

Anna's Story

Me?

Oh, mine is not so dramatic. It was just a single, strange experience which freed me from – well, which freed me from all the things I'd ever thought about the world before.

It happened in Singapore, when I was about four or five years old.

We lived in a small house and the island was very different then, nothing like the modern metropolis it is now. There were still some kampungs at that time, which were like huts, not concrete but wooden, typical Malay buildings. Poor people used to live in them, builders and amahs. There were still areas of jungle then and the roads were muddy, although new places like ours were popping up, condos and brick houses and things were changing.

Anyway, one of these kampung villages was behind where we lived and I liked to look out at it at night because they burned coconut husks to ward off the mosquitoes and you could see the people living outside, gathered around the fires. We lived behind glass and walls, of course. We had nets for the mosquitoes, of course, and purple lamps that used to flash when the insects hit them and fried – they were quite barbaric!

This one night, anyway, my grandfather came to see me. He woke me up when I was asleep, that's the first thing I remember. I hadn't seen him for a long time and I remember seeing his face there in the dark and hugging him close. He was always my best friend because I think, of all the people I have known in my life, family and friends, he never judged me. I could really say anything to him and he would believe me and listen. Nobody else in my life has ever done that. And the strange thing is, he made me feel normal, not weird. Everyone else thinks I'm weird when I talk.

That night he told me he wanted me to come outside with him and of course I got up out of bed and was ready immediately. In my mind, my memory, he looked a little strange. Very thin, but he was always very thin and I hadn't seen him because he had been ill for a long time. He wore short grey pants and carried a rattan stick to help him walk. He was very bald, with dark spots on his little smooth head, but had a long beard and wore an old shirt and old leather sandals. I remember him in blue light, standing at my window. There was a full moon and he said: "Ah, with this moon, we will be able to go outside. You will see me!"

This will sound strange but I don't remember walking outside. I only remember standing, suddenly, with my grandfather near the kampung village. The night was very loud. There were a lot of insects and birdsong at night. I remember the red lights of the coconut husk fires and we walked through the smoke together. I think I was holding his hand, singing a song and lizards and snakes skipped away from the path as we walked.

"I want to show you something." My grandfather moved me until I could see ants crawling up the tree trunk beside us. "Look. Look here."

They were black and oily, racing up and down in two long, fast-moving trails. "Ants?"

"Do you see them?" he asked me. I think then, because half of his head was in moonlight and half was not, that I noticed the part in darkness was a bare skull. The eye socket in the darkness was empty and hollow while the eye lit by moonlight sparkled like stars on the sea. "Do you see them?" he asked, irritated that I was distracted by his appearance.

I only wanted to make him happy. I know it sounds strange now but I knew he was dead, or that something was very wrong, and he knew that I knew something was very wrong but he obviously wanted to speak to me, to give me a message, and so I answered, obediently. "Yes, grandpa, I see them."

He was happy. He turned to the trunk again and tapped it with his rattan cane. "And do they see you?"

"No. No, they can't see me."

"Do they know I am doing this?" He was tapping the trunk near the ants with his stick. Tap-tap-tap, a steady rhythm.

They were moving about, not steadily up and down, not too disturbed, but obviously aware of something. Maybe they thought it was rain or a predator. "They notice something," I said.

"Ah." He smiled: half of his mouth was good; the other half, lipless, toothless. "So they do not know we are there but they can be affected by our presence."

This was given to me as a great truth. I nodded, understanding nothing.

He held me then, close, as though protecting me and we drifted up the trunk of the tree, although we didn't touch anything. It was like ascending in the smoothest elevator you could imagine, rising gently but unstoppably.

At the top of canopy, in the sweaty, still night, we could see the lights of the business district, of the pretty skyscrapers, and he said: "Look. Here. Through the hole in my eye."

He had turned a part of his head, the skull part, out of the moonlight. The night was humid and sweaty and I could hear the far-off drone of traffic. I did as I was asked. I looked through the hole where his eye should have been and I saw clouds above the skyscrapers, glittering clouds.

I told my grandfather this and he said, impatiently: "Ya, ya – but what is sitting in the clouds?"

And now when I looked I saw that what I had seen were not clouds but robes. There was a great figure sitting on the clouds, an enormous figure, so fat and high I couldn't tell if it was a man or woman. I only knew something was sitting there in the clouds above the skyscrapers, above the city.

"I think I see a person. Maybe a god?"

"It is the god of money," my grandfather said.

And then I was down on the ground, softly in the mud, toads croaking, by the kampung, alone.

Dogs were barking and I could see them, eyes flashing.

"There!" someone shouted.

I was scooped up into someone's arms, handed to my mother.

"Sleepwalking," someone else said.

I was carried back to the house. I already knew what they were going to tell me. About my grandfather. About him dying. About him being dead.

And I never told them what had happened.

I've never told anyone but you.

But you told me your crazy story, so that's mine.