Vines
37 Minutes Read Time

Peng Soon had knocked the glass of vodka and lime out of Paul’s hand at Taboo the first time they met. He had swung out his arm to illustrate a point in the story he was telling—a recent sexual conquest on a business trip to Taipei—and his hand met Paul’s glass. Unruffled, Peng Soon ran his hand across Paul’s chest to clear away the spill, shouting a hot apology into his face. They had only met a few minutes before, briefly introduced by a mutual friend.
Later, in the toilet, Peng Soon had walked in to witness Paul splashing water on the now-sticky stains, and offered an affected, more laborious apology. He pulled a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser, swabbing it across Paul’s damp jeans. He kept his hand on Paul’s waist, his body giving off a robust heat, a whiff of alcoholic fumes. Peng Soon was tipsy, and he stumbled as they were exiting the toilet; Paul had to hold onto his arm to steady him. “I’m okay, I’m fine,” Peng Soon said, pressing his face to Paul. Peng Soon had a strong craggy face, with rough, unrefined features and thick fleshy lips—cock-sucking lips, Paul thought. It was not an unpleasant face, coarse though it was, and Paul had liked it just enough. Enough to ignore Peng Soon’s drunken state. They left together that night, and Paul stayed over at Peng Soon’s place. By then, Peng Soon was too drunk, too far gone.
“Not even a blow job that night, can you imagine?” Paul would tell their friends after they had gotten together as a couple, part of the narrative they had made of their earliest days, along with their age gap, he being only twenty-three then and Peng Soon forty-five. Paul had the origin story down pat, hardened into facts, and while Peng Soon had his own version of it, he allowed Paul to tell his, to make it the official story, though Peng Soon was a better, more natural, storyteller.
The years ate them up. They had brief, intense affairs, one-night stands, a threesome in the fifth year of their relationship, which Peng Soon had initiated with a stranger they picked up at the public pool where they usually went for their weekly swim. It was an interesting enough experience for Paul, though he had not wanted to try it again. Too much risk, he said. But what risk, Peng Soon countered. There were fights and fleeting interludes when they’d lived apart—Paul had moved in with Peng Soon a year after they met—but they’d always gotten back together, after one or the other had cooled his head, had apologized. Past actions, gross mistakes were remembered, not entirely forgotten or forgiven, though their venom and lingering sting gradually faded over time, like scars forming over wounds, visible, permanent. They loved—had always loved—one another, and it was the knowledge of this that helped bind them together. That, and the long, long years they had put into the relationship to make it work. They had common goals, a mutual understanding, and a longstanding tolerance for one another.
At one point, they had even considered having a child, an adoption. Paul wanted one; he was good with children and volunteered as a play personnel with an organization that assisted families with children with cancer and childhood diseases. At first, Peng Soon was slow to take up the idea and instead proposed having a dog or a cat as a substitute, but Paul killed the suggestion immediately: “They’re not the same, totally different things.” When Peng Soon eventually came around to Paul’s wish, they signed up and attended an adoption meeting where the social worker talked about the priority of married couples over single parents—where were they in this aspect? Not recognized or even considered as potential parents. Peng Soon was indignant, furious, beyond words; he who had not wanted a child initially was confounded, pissed off, by the glaring bias of the system, its blatant unfairness. He wrote spiky emails to the respective ministries and vented his frustration openly, on online forums and to close friends. Paul, on the other hand, took it all in without a word. Yet another thing to live with, he mused, a loss of something he would never have. Well, at least, Paul comforted himself, they still had the nephews and nieces on Peng Soon’s side—his five siblings had broods of them; one even had four sons. Paul was close to a few of these kids, and he learned to make do, to content himself with being an uncle to them.
At first, it had been just a small part of the wall that they allowed Peng Soon’s nephews and nieces to draw on with their crayons and markers and colored pencils, when they were younger and came over to their place for dinners and gatherings. The wall was in the spare room that doubled as the study/entertainment room/storage space/temporary bedroom where one of them would sleep when they had their fights. One of the nephews, Caleb, had first drawn a dog on it with a blue pen, and they found it adorable and let the drawing stay. Then the others started to draw and doodle as well, and over time, these drawings, scribblings, and nonsense, really, began to take up the lower half of the wall. Peng Soon had to set limits after a while—no other walls in the room or the flat; other than that, they were free to “decorate” the wall any way they liked.
On some days when Paul found himself in that room, searching for a book or putting aside a box of old DVDs, he would stare at the drawings on the wall. There were all the things you would expect from a child’s hand and imagination—houses with suns and stars above them, dogs and snakes and fish, lots of hearts of every size, rainbows, balloons, cakes, princesses (princes?) with flowing hair and wands and tiaras, multiheaded monsters, spaceships. Was there a story, or stories, in all of this, he wondered? A frieze unraveling in pithy, contained vignettes? A man emerging from a house, becoming a wolf, becoming a stick figure, transforming into a car, a truck, a sea monster with flailing tentacles, metamorphosis after metamorphosis. Nothing stayed the same, transformation was everything, always constant. Some of the drawings had overlapped, the darker colors hiding and obscuring what lay beneath, and Paul found it hard to make out or distinguish any of the mashed-up sketching.
Occasionally, Paul would add on to a drawing he liked, a minor detail that would enhance the overall composition, he hoped, and not change it. Fill up the toes of a Care Bear, enlarge the blast coming out of Iron Man’s hand, sharpen the horns of a triceratops. He doubted anyone would notice the changes, these touch-ups, and he was pleased with his efforts. He set aside a few stationery containers of pencils and markers for Peng Soon’s nephews and nieces to use, and restocked them when they ran low.
“Maybe let’s give it a new coat of paint, to start all over again,” Peng Soon said when they were cleaning out the spare room one afternoon.
“Let it stay, it doesn’t look that bad,” Paul said. The drawings had only reached shoulder height so far, and one-third of the wall remained empty. The kids could still work on the empty space later on. “Gives the room character, don’t you think?”
“They are just rubbish drawings lah.”
“To you. But they look fine to me,” Paul said, and he meant it.
Paul taught history at a secondary school for twelve years before he quit and became a private tutor, teaching English and math to lower-primary schoolchildren. His credentials as a former teacher granted him a steady flow of students entirely from word-of-mouth recommendations. He worked fewer hours compared to his last job, and the pay as a tutor was good, even better on certain months when the exams period drew near.
“Go, do something you like while you’re still young,” Peng Soon had said when Paul expressed the desire to quit full-time teaching. He wasn’t young then, already thirty-seven, and he wasn’t sure what he would like to do after that. He had taken up private tutoring only after he got bored during a three-month break, aimlessly haunting the flat with nothing better to do. It had felt so much like his old job at first—doing up a lesson plan, keeping his students in check, marking—but the hours were his to manage and control, and after five years, he had gotten used to it.
For most of the days, including Saturdays, Paul would set up a folding table in the living room of the flat and preside over his students, two or three at any one time, supervising their work. Two hours for each session, though he often went beyond this, and usually in the afternoons, when schools ended and the kids came over, still in their uniforms. He would regularly cook a larger-than-normal lunch, sweet-potato-and-minced-meat porridge or fried rice with char siew and egg, and offer it to his students. When one started to doze off after a meal, Paul would turn a blind eye, and only when this began to affect the other students would he rouse them and send them to the bathroom to wash their faces.
At the start, Paul had made sure to check the flat thoroughly to ensure that it was proper to host the students. No photos of him and Peng Soon were on the wall or displayed anywhere, the door to the bedroom was locked, and any piece of laundry, especially underwear, hanging on the poles in the kitchen was cleared and put out of sight. Nothing incriminating or revealing that would lead to unwanted speculation or questions. He would remove Peng Soon’s slippers from the mat outside the flat every time and double-check the bathroom beside the kitchen for Peng Soon’s electric shaver or toothbrush. The trash bins were, of course, emptied out and sheathed with new liners. Peng Soon found all this rather amusing and sometimes annoying, when he had to take his slippers out from the shoe cupboard.
“So ashamed of me, is it?” Peng Soon often said. “Can’t let people know I exist ah?”
“No lah, it’s just to be on the safe side, the kids don’t need to know or ask too much.”
On Saturdays that he had to give tuition, Paul would forbid Peng Soon from staying at home, chasing him out of the flat after lunch. “You can find something to do for two, three hours, some errands you can run lah,” he told him. On days he begged to stay at home, Paul confined him to the bedroom and told him not to step out no matter what. He was mostly quiet, though on a few occasions Paul could swear he heard small sounds seeping out of the bedroom, a tinny buzz of TV noise or a rattle of snores. When this happened, Paul would start to talk louder than usual, picking faults in his students’ assignments, admonishing them.
Then one afternoon, he entered the bedroom and found Peng Soon staring at the ceiling with a strange, bewildered expression on his rigid face. He was lying on the bed, motionless, the left side of his face slackened. Paul called out his name several times, but Peng Soon didn’t respond or move. A stroke, the doctor said, and at the back of Paul’s mind, nagging, persistent thoughts gathered: But he’s only sixty-three. He ran, he swam, he ate healthy meals—weren’t these things enough to stave off a stroke? How could this possibly happen to someone like Peng Soon, or to him, really? In the end, Paul had to learn how to live with Peng Soon all over again.
Their families were sympathetic and rallied around them for a while, helping out with meals and tasks and small tokens of money. Paul got by with these little mercies, accepting them as they were. The family members gathered around Peng Soon, quiet and stately in the wheelchair, offering up conversations and stories and thoughtful pats on his hands. Peng Soon’s sisters took turns checking in on them whenever they could, relieving Paul in the afternoons when he had to head out to his students’ places for tuition. He no longer taught them in the flat, which had to be transformed to suit Peng Soon’s current needs, his movements around the place. Paul took up more classes for the extra money, and also for the time he could spend outside the flat, keeping himself occupied with different tasks, something besides his constant worries and fussing over Peng Soon.
Among the people who offered their help, Paul was particularly close to Timothy, the eldest son of Peng Soon’s second sister. Only a five-year-old when Paul met him, the boy had grown into a tall, lanky man now fulfilling his national service in the Guards division in the army. He came by frequently on weekends when he booked out of camp, and stayed late, sometimes sleeping over on the sofa in the living room. He talked to Paul and Peng Soon about his days in camp, funny anecdotes about his platoon mates, his sadistic regimental sergeant major. He had been Paul’s and Peng Soon’s favorite, the one they took out for movies and special treats and shopping trips to Johor Bahru when he was younger. Our unofficial son, Peng Soon had said more than once, with more than a pinch of pride. Timothy was a quiet, docile boy with gentle manners growing up, and they had always suspected—worried—that he might be gay. “My sister would skin us alive for corrupting him,” Peng Soon once joked, “for being a bad influence with our deviant lifestyle.” Paul was cautious, overtly so, not to have any physical contact with Peng Soon when the boy was around them, or to bring up any topics that might stray into the inappropriate or indecent.
“Relax lah,” Peng Soon had said, “if he’s gay, he’s gay, it’s not our doing lah. We can’t change his DNA or groom him to become one if he’s not.”
“Easy for you to say,” Paul replied.
Timothy wasn’t squeamish about the intimate matters to do with his uncle’s body. Wiping away feces, changing diapers, sponge-bathing. Paul had done all this by himself and at first refused any help. But Timothy insisted. “I’m in the army now, I’ve seen shit, I don’t mind,” the boy said. Paul eventually laid down his defenses, allowed Peng Soon’s nephew to take over, but only when he had his hands full.
“Don’t you wanna hire someone to help you with this?” Timothy asked one time when they were alone, after Peng Soon had been put to bed.
“Why? Why spend the money? I can manage,” Paul said. It had been four months since the stroke, and Peng Soon was receiving speech and occupational therapy thrice weekly. His words were slurred, more guttural than human. Paul had to train himself to understand what Peng Soon needed, from the slightest signs he gave through his hands and facial tics. He didn’t always get things right, but things didn’t get worse either. This was not the first time Paul had been advised to find extra help, a caregiver, to take over some of the responsibilities; in fact, Peng Soon’s sisters were all in favor of him hiring someone, even offering to chip in with the expenses.
“It’ll free you up some time to do . . .” Timothy said.
But Paul smiled and waved it off. To let someone take over something that was so private, so intimate, seemed like an indecency, an affront.
“I got nothing else better to do, anyway,” Paul said, deadpan, making a face. It wasn’t an issue he wanted to talk about now. Maybe later, a year or so down the road, but not now. Things were still manageable, still within his control. He, naturally, had to give up a few things—luxuries, in a different time—along the way: dinners with his friends, ex-colleagues from his teaching days; reading; gym; time alone to himself. His life had shrunk considerably, down to the immediate and essential, but his mind, his focus, had sharpened, as if in inverse proportion. He had worked out a schedule and routine in the early days following Peng Soon’s stroke and stuck to it, smoothing out the kinks as he went along. Perhaps it was something carried over from when he was a full-time teacher, the unquestioned need for order and detail. Or maybe, he thought, it was born out of quiet despair, an oar to steer him out of a sudden squall.
The physiotherapist had put Peng Soon through a fixed set of exercises to help him regain some of his mobility, reminding Paul to keep it up on days he wasn’t around to assist. “Best to keep him moving,” the therapist said, “if not, his muscles might atrophy, become lazy.” Peng Soon committed himself fully to the exercises and was soon able to flex his right hand and lift his arm above his head. Two months down, he was able to push himself upright, with some help from Paul, out of the bed, though his steps were shaky, his legs made of soft rubber. Paul had installed support bars in the bedroom and bathroom, on the living room and kitchen walls, to help with Peng Soon’s movements around the flat.
Sometimes, on bad days, Paul found it hard to read Peng Soon’s face and to know what went on inside his head. The latter would do what he had been told, putting up a display of grim effort. There were long periods of frustration and dejection, but so far, no great outburst of rage, as far as Paul knew. The drooping jowl and features on the right side of his face had molded into a hardened wax-mask, giving all his expressions a sad, cryptic quality. Paul couldn’t tell whether the raised left brow was an indication of surprise or confusion, or whether his moist eyes were a sign of exertion or tiredness or even happiness. If Peng Soon smiled—if he ever did—Paul would not know at all.
“He seems happy today,” Timothy said, after he had finished feeding the fish porridge to Peng Soon.
He had called earlier and informed Paul that he would be coming over and wanted to buy lunch for them. Paul had refused, but the boy said it wasn’t any trouble, so he relented. Paul looked over at Peng Soon sitting in a chair—he refused to be kept in a wheelchair unless they were outside—at the dining table. He had trimmed the sides and back of Peng Soon’s hair—a cap of gray now—that morning and parted it to the left. His roguish handsomeness, though waning, was evident in the heavy brows, the soft lines around his eyes. Peng Soon had his hands on the table, one atop the other, businesslike.
“Is he?” Paul said.
They often talked as if Peng Soon weren’t there in the room with them, as if he were deaf or indifferent to what they were saying, though it wasn’t something conscious or intentional. Sometimes, out of the blue, when they were deep in conversation, Peng Soon would call out with a loud trill of mumbles, as if flinging words out of his mouth, making his presence known. They would wait for him to repeat the words or to continue what he wanted to say, and if he didn’t, they would get up to fuss over him, bringing him some water or assisting him out of the room.
Paul smiled at Peng Soon, who grinned—winked?—back at him. He told Timothy to take Peng Soon out to the living room, so that he could clear away the remains of their meal. When he came into the living room later, Paul couldn’t find them there. They were in the spare room, looking at the wall, at the drawings.
Every inch of the lower half of the wall was covered with doodles and crudely drawn sketches. The kids, Peng Soon’s nephews and nieces, were all grown now, the youngest already eleven, and they were no longer interested in such juvenilia. Paul wondered which of these drawings had been done by Timothy and whether he would remember them. The wall stood as a testament to that phase when the kids were still young and full of silly ideas. What would a clean, blank wall look like now?
“I can’t believe you guys keep this,” Timothy said, not for the first time. “They are so fucking ugly.”
Peng Soon muttered a string of words, which Timothy seemed to understand without missing a beat. He smiled and put his hand on the wall. “This one, you said?” Timothy turned to Peng Soon, pointing to a picture of a Minion holding a banana. “Not me, I didn’t draw this lah.” He scanned the densely covered wall.
“What the hell, where are my drawings?” Timothy said, chuckling. “Such a fucking mess, so much nonsense, one on top of another, like vines like that.”
“Isn’t that one of yours?” Paul asked, pointing out a satyr-looking creature holding a stick, or maybe a flute, which had been partially drawn over with a potbellied Spider-Man, a web over their heads.
“Nah, not my style, not that creative. I’d such a poor imagination.”
Peng Soon lifted his hand and gestured to another spot. He uttered something that Paul understood as: How about that? Again Timothy said no. They went on for a while before Timothy threw up his hands in the air, feigning a surrender.
“They’re not here anymore!”
Later, after Timothy left for a movie and dinner appointment with his platoon mates, Peng Soon asked to be wheeled into the spare room. He fell silent as he studied the wall, his eyes darting around, feral like a rat. A great part of the wall was so filled with layers of drawings that when Paul took several steps back, giving himself a wider perspective, it seemed they were broad swaths of painted ink, riddled with shrapnel of colors. Like heavy vines overlapping, thick and impenetrable. What was his part, his contributions, in all of this? Where were his add-ons, improvements, to this mess of a wall?
Peng Soon made a nasal sound and lifted his finger to a pin-dot of white space right in front of him, touching the tiny spot. Could he have meant the drawing beside it, the one of a—Paul couldn’t quite identify what it was he was looking at, the squiggly lines and shadings. Perhaps he was pointing at something else. Peng Soon’s right hand was still weak and often trembled. How he had once loved Peng Soon’s hands, with their knobby knuckles and wide span, the roughness of them, the strength, the calloused paws of a beast.
Paul put his finger on the spot, looked at Peng Soon, and said: “Do you mean this?”
Peng Soon shook his head, swung his outstretched hand to a spot slightly to the left of where Paul was indicating. Nothing there but a black dense mass of lines and ovals, a black sun.
“Yes, what about it?” Paul asked. Peng Soon reeled off a stream of noises. Paul listened, parsing the utterances into words, and nodded.
“They are just nonsense, they mean nothing,” Paul said.
Peng Soon’s face shut down to a blank, though he blinked his left eye several times, mechanically. Paul tried to read something from Peng Soon’s features, but he was gone, already disappearing inside himself.
The swing in Peng Soon’s moods from day to day was unpredictable, sometimes toggling quickly between moments. He would be placid and accommodating while working on his leg-rotation exercises one moment and then, in the next, cold and rigid when Paul was wiping his face, body, with a hand towel. He peed and shat into freshly changed Tena diapers and made a nuisance about the mess, jolting his body around manically, voicelessly. On occasion, he had knocked a plate or bowl of food from Paul’s hand. You’re a fucking baby, Paul would yell as he bent to pick up the shards.
At the worst of times, Paul could feel himself coming apart, thread by thread, as if his body were a piece of badly sewn garment. He didn’t deserve this, didn’t want it, couldn’t bear it anymore. He was only forty-five, an age when he should still feel unburdened, free to make other plans—but what, he couldn’t imagine; all his plans had twinned with Peng Soon’s, the holiday trips they were going to take, the new condo apartment they were thinking of upgrading to, a dog they could adopt. What did he want for himself, what did he lack? His mind could open that gaping hole in him and reveal the void, but there was no light, or anything, to show him what he should do. His life was an empty core surrounded by the pulp of Peng Soon’s urgent, pressing needs; he had almost nothing to call his own.
When Peng Soon was moody or depressed, he tended to ignore everything around him, slipping into a persistent dreamy state, his eyes glazed over. He didn’t make a sound even if he was hungry or in pain or tired. He simply sat in the wheelchair, wherever he was placed, silent as a ghost. Once, he had shat copiously into the Tena and sat on it for half a day without alerting anyone to it. By the time Paul got around to it—there was so much to do in the first few weeks, with the meds and change of diet and cooking and washing—an ugly map of rashes had sprung up over his backside, inner thighs, and scrotum. Paul gasped when he peeled off the sticky diaper, which stuck onto Peng Soon’s body like Velcro. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why? Can’t you make some noise? Now you see, what a mess! What do you want me to do now? What the fuck do you want?” he screamed, out of control, unable to keep his hands from shaking. He wiped up the mess in a fit of rage, scattered handfuls of talcum powder over the affected areas and left Peng Soon half-naked on the bed, refusing to see or touch or even come close to him for the rest of the day. Peng Soon barely made a single sound through it all.
When Paul finally cooled down, he came into the bedroom, humbled with shame, and found Peng Soon on the floor, lying on his side, a pool of dark-yellow pee surrounding him. His right hand was twitching, making tiny ripples across the surface of the pee. Paul fell to his knees, bent his head towards Peng Soon’s chest, and whispered: “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” Peng Soon didn’t stir or open his eyes, but Paul could hear the unruly thrashing of his heart against his ear, loud, alive, savage.
Lying on the bed at night—they still slept together, Paul had insisted—Paul thought about Peng Soon’s life and the many good years they had before the stroke. In the dark, Paul’s mind moved like a skilled, seasoned thief, venturing into hidden spaces of their past.
The first night Peng Soon brought him home, Paul had lain beside him, quiet and observant, waiting to respond to any cue that Peng Soon might give him. He didn’t have much experience then in one-night stands—none, in fact—and he was wary about foreign surroundings, being in someone’s bedroom, a stranger’s no less. Drunk as he was, Peng Soon had stripped himself of his damp alcohol-sodden clothes and nearly tore the sleeve off Paul’s shirt when he tried to help him out of it. When they were naked, Peng Soon collapsed into bed and immediately fell asleep. Paul was alone and awake in an unfamiliar room, and for some time, he wondered whether he should get dressed and leave. There was no point in staying around; the man was dead to the world, and there was nothing he could do.
Instead, Paul got into the bed and lay beside Peng Soon, drawing his body right up into the cocoon of Peng Soon’s embrace, putting the latter’s arm around his. Peng Soon’s body heat was febrile, near scorching, skin to skin, but intimate, alimentary. This body is mine, Paul thought then, fleetingly; I belong to it. He was still feeling horny, so he moved closer to the man, this hulk of a man with his broad chest of thick hair—he only just met him, and now he’s in his bed, it’s crazy!—and pressed his swollen cock against his. Paul ran his hand down the length of the man’s thick, soft cock, pulled on the loose skin of his ball sack, twirled a curl of his pubic hair with his fingers. He’s mine, Paul asserted quietly to himself, his whole body tingling like exposed nerve endings.
It wasn’t love he felt that night, Paul knew. That came later. But it was something close to it, an approximate feeling, and he could hold on to this new, unknown thing for the moment. It was a weight and an anchor, a physical thing that he could hold in his hands, like Peng Soon’s body, his very real presence beside him breathing, giving off heat.
Peng Soon’s improvements were slow but progressing. He could raise his left arm above his head and lift his body out of the wheelchair, mostly unassisted. His speech was still impaired, slurred, the words coming out of the good side of his mouth. It was hard to look into his face and not feel something, a tinge of guilt or sadness, so Paul took to looking at Peng Soon’s chin or his brows when he had to talk to him. It was best to avoid his eyes, which gave away too much.
On weekends when Timothy was around, Paul would excuse himself from the flat with an errand to run, and wander around the neighborhood for an hour or so, two if he needed to get something out of his system. He would walk and sit down at a kopitiam with a mug of kopi-o and then walk some more. He would visit the supermarket and glide down the aisles, an empty basket in hand, his mind rife with a cycle of anxieties, inconsequential. His thoughts often ran back to the flat, to Peng Soon, to his condition, the long-term effects, and though he tried not to, Paul couldn’t quite control the tide and flow of his worries.
When he got back home from his wanderings, Paul would find Timothy in the living room with Peng Soon parked beside the sofa, the boy on his mobile, angling the screen in Peng Soon’s direction. A YouTube video perhaps, some funny clip; Paul would hear the laugh track when he stepped into the flat with a bag of potato chips or prawn crackers or a four-pack of Coke Zero. The boy would give him an odd look, evidently puzzled about the purchase, not saying anything. Peng Soon would glance up and attempt a smile, his face scrunched into a tight grimace, and Paul would be reminded of his roguish grin, a smile intended to draw people to him, to unlock their resistance, their wariness. A smile Paul remembered from a different time, an ephemeral gesture. He would take in that smile for a second, and then he would turn away, not wanting to be reminded of what it meant, or what was already lost.
On days Paul had his hands full, he would place Peng Soon in front of the TV, giving him the remote, or put an iPad on his lap and leave him alone. Peng Soon very rarely changed the channel, sticking to whatever program was on, and sometimes, between chores, Paul would find him slouching in the wheelchair, head lowered to chest, sleeping, a thick line of drool leaking from his mouth, darkening his shirt. When Paul tried to wheel him into the bedroom for a nap, Peng Soon would grunt and put up a small struggle, twisting in his seat.
Once, Peng Soon had gone into the spare room and stared at the wall. Paul tried to offer him a box of markers. It was good to keep him active, keep his hands busy, the physiotherapist said. Paul thought maybe this was something Peng Soon could do, draw or color, to fill up the long hours. He simply couldn’t tolerate Peng Soon sitting around and doing nothing all day, which seemed like pure hell to Paul. Maybe this would be good for him, and for his mind as well, to keep it occupied.
But Peng Soon did not take up a marker or draw anything on the wall.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Paul asked.
Peng Soon mumbled for something, and Paul found a board, a broad wooden panel he extracted from a bookshelf, and put it across the front of the wheelchair. He got him a few blank pieces of paper too, and some pencils. He waited beside Peng Soon, who stared back at him.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone,” Paul said.
Paul had assumed Peng Soon would draw something from his imagination. But when he peeked at the drawings later, he saw that they were just rough sketches of what was drawn on the wall, ugly, infantile imitations of those childish drawings. Was his mind going off? He remembered something his ex-colleague had said about her father-in-law who had Parkinson’s, that he watched Tom and Jerry cartoons all day long, nonstop. “An eighty-year-old man, like a kid now, can you believe,” she had gushed in mock bemusement. Was this what Peng Soon had come to? A regression into the past, a permanent, irreversible state? Was this something new Paul had to learn to understand, to handle? He let the troubling thought sit inside him for a time, a heavy stone in his chest. He continued to put out fresh pieces of paper for Peng Soon, who seemed happy enough with this fun, childish activity.
Paul had woken up earlier than Peng Soon that first morning after they met. He could smell a deep musk rising from his and Peng Soon’s sweaty bodies. Peng Soon was snoring beside him, one arm over Paul’s shoulders, chest to back. It was a Sunday, just past seven, and Paul was wondering whether he should get up and quietly slip away. What would be the right thing to do, he thought. Perhaps he should wait awhile, his mind still foggy with a slight hangover. He needed a drink of water—his throat was a lick of flames—and also to pee, quite badly. He closed his eyes, fell into a brief nap, and woke again, moments later, with a jolt.
“You’re awake.” Peng Soon’s rusty voice.
“Yes. How’re you feeling?” Paul asked, turning to face him. A waft of cool air seeped between the gaps of their sticky bodies as Peng Soon moved to retract his arm. He was looking at Paul through half-open, sleepy eyes. His stubble was showing, and up close in daylight, Paul saw that the edges of his brows were flecked with white. The lines at the corners of his eyes fanned out in small sharp streaks. It was a rough-hewn, rugged face, not the type Paul would find attractive at first glance.
“Not so good. My head is killing me,” Peng Soon said, putting his face on Paul’s shoulder, rubbing against it. “I feel like dying.”
“Let me get you a drink. I need one too,” Paul said.
“No need, just lie here with me for a while more,” Peng Soon said, drawing himself up to Paul, taking a deep breath. They lay quietly for some time, and Paul thought Peng Soon might have fallen asleep again before the latter suddenly spoke up:
“Do you need to go?”
“No.”
“Good. Then stay.”
“But I need to pee.”
“Go, go, toilet’s there.”
Peng Soon released Paul, who stumbled out of the bed, unsure whether he should put on his underwear—where was it?—and then decided against it. The pee was long and satisfying, a thrill of tingles at the end. When he came back into the bedroom, Peng Soon was smiling at him, hand on his crotch.
“We didn’t do anything last night, did we?”
Paul smiled and shook his head. He got into the bed, leaving a small gulf between him and Peng Soon. He thought about last night, his hands all over Peng Soon’s body, his daring, proprietary claim. He felt stupid now, his inexperience a cumbersome liability, exposed. He knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the ways a man loved or lusted or made his desire known. Peng Soon leaned into him then, taking away Paul’s last thought.
“Well, if you want.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I want.”
There was a moment of hesitation, a flicker of doubt. Paul didn’t know what to expect from what was coming. Peng Soon was all over him in no time, and Paul didn’t have a chance to gather his thoughts, let alone think. The man seemed decent enough and knew exactly what to do, what to give. Paul would go along with it, would see how far it would take him. All he needed to do was to stay in the moment, to be here, right now, beside this man, taking it all in, taking it all the way. The rest could wait.
Timothy asked to invite a friend over for dinner, if Paul and Peng Soon were open to the idea. One of his platoon mates, his buddy from basic military training days. Nothing much, just a dinner, the boy said, we can go out or we can eat in, I can tabao food back. Paul threw a glance at Peng Soon, hoping to catch his response. A glimmer in his eyes: Told you so. Paul gave another purposeful look: Too soon to tell. Timothy cried out: “Hey, hey, are you guys bitching about me?”
Paul smiled and brushed off the charge. “Sure, ask him over, we’ll be happy to see him.”
On the day of the dinner, Paul gave Peng Soon a thorough shave, then trimmed his nose hairs and clipped his fingernails. Peng Soon was silent and submissive as Paul fussed over his appearance. When he was done, he wheeled Peng Soon into the spare room and left him to his markers and papers. Paul had agreed to cook—no eating out, not for the first time—nothing fancy, he promised Timothy, just three or four simple dishes. Seafood chowder, Timothy’s favorite, as a starter. And also, a dessert, steamed papaya with coconut cream. Timothy argued to cut down on the dishes—“Fried rice is good enough for us lah”—but Paul was adamant about serving good and proper food, something to make a good impression, end of discussion.
After he had put the lamb ribs to roast in the oven and set the table, Paul went to check on Peng Soon. He was drawing on a sheaf of paper. He looked up when Paul entered the room, moving his lips. Paul glanced at the drawing, then sought to find the original artwork on the wall. There was nothing there that looked even remotely similar to the sketch that Peng Soon had drawn.
“Is this new?”
Peng Soon shook his head, smiling. Then he began to draw on a new piece of paper, his attention focused fully on keeping the marker in his hand steady. He drew in a jerky motion, making unintelligible marks, scratching hard. Then a form slowly started to take shape. Thick, unruly, and sprawling. Paul slid his eyes to the wall again. Behind the layers of ink and paint and colors was something he couldn’t see. He stared long and hard at the wall, trained his eyes on everything that was on it. It was only when he closed his eyes that he saw, on the canvas of his veiled vision, the vines. Endless ropes of dark vines, tangling, strangulating.
Paul let the image stay with him.
When he put his hand on Peng Soon’s shoulder, it was with a firmness he had never felt sure he could muster. But it was there, in his grip, the strength; it was as much for Peng Soon as it was for him. How long would it take to know someone, he thought, and to return that knowledge with love? Would it suffice to know so little, after so long, and yet to love so much? It was a mystery then, to fall in love with Peng Soon, and even now, after what had happened and what would happen next, there was no knowing what he, Paul, would make out of this thing that had bound him to Peng Soon, and Peng Soon to him. The vines and their hold, the impenetrability, the enigma.
Peng Soon made a flutter of noise with his ragged breath and gave a light shrug. When Paul opened his eyes, he noticed Peng Soon looking at him, a silent gaze of longing and delight, as if he had made known something that Paul was now seeing, perhaps for the first time, a thing hidden and obscured over time, now revealed, shared. Peng Soon contorted his lips to utter a string of hard sounds, then bent his head low to the drawing in front of him, his hand moving firmly, more decisively across the paper, the ink spilling in thicker curls and tendrils over the expanse of the white space, filling it up, encroaching the borders, now brimming, finally overflowing.
There were noises at the front door of the flat, and voices. Paul had given a set of house keys to Timothy for convenience’s sake when he started helping out at their place. He was here, with his friend.
Paul gripped Peng Soon’s shoulder again, exerting the lightest of strength, pausing him in his drawing. Peng Soon looked up at Paul, a flash of annoyance on his face before it faded into a wan confusion. Under his hands, on the paper and across the surface of the table, spools of dark intertwining lines, branching out in every direction, each vine charting its own course. A quiet voice called out from somewhere in the living room, beckoning, waiting. Peng Soon broke the stare, turning to look behind Paul, at the wall, as if something there had caught his attention once again.
“It’s enough,” Paul said. “They’re here.”
Read more from Issue 20.1.