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The Myths of Haw Par Villa
(Part 4 of 9) |
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Story (1): My Grandfather is in Hell
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When I die, I'm not going to have a
funeral like my gong gong’s. My funeral will be a quick and simple
affair. People would arrive at three, say nice things about me,
then leave at five.
When my gong gong died, his funeral lasted forty-nine (7 x 7)
days. An army of priests gathered outside my grandfather’s house,
ready to storm Hell with their rituals and rescue him from the
demonic clutches of Yuen Thou Wong.
During the afternoon, I drank Fanta orange while the saffron-robed
monks beat their gongs under the red canopy. The tock-tock-tock of
their gongs mingled with the background music -- the Bee Gees
singing "Staying Alive." To this day, I don't know who chooses the
music for funerals. The only thing I know is that the same
inappropriate music plays at public functions in Singapore all the
time -- I've yet to attend a wedding where they haven't played,
‘Please release me’.
It’s usually terribly humid in Singapore, but today it was so bad
it was like breathing soup. I hid under the red canopy, because on
a day like this, five minutes under the sun and my black hair
would be hot enough to fry an egg on. We tried that at a Brownies'
camp once, but that's another story.
My grandfather’s photo sat on the red altar, flanked by bronze
urns and brown joss sticks. In that starched, wide-collared white
shirt, he looked unusually mild. In real-life, blown-up size, with
his crew-cut (dark on top, grey at the sides), rough tanned
leathery skin and Marlboro breath, he looked like a sergeant. He
often acted like one, for it was his birth-right, as the
patriarch, the head honcho of the family, to boss people around
until he got what he wanted. Though my grandfather looked
naturally stern, his pot belly, cultivated via the mass
consumption of Guinness Stout and KFC, gave him a cheerful aura
reminiscent of the Laughing Buddha. He didn’t dress fancy -- he
went everywhere in his roach-bitten singlet and khaki bermudas,
but there was one accessory he was genuinely proud of. He loved to
play with his dentures, punctuating his sentences by lifting up
his bottom front tooth. It was a gold tooth, and it was his only
luxury possession.
I coughed. There was smoke everywhere -- grey smoke from the joss
sticks, black smoke from the cars and trucks that whined past, and
puffs of cigarette smoke from the monks having their tea break in
the corner. I finished my twelfth glass of Fanta. Orange is a
lucky colour, so it's the only drink, apart from Chinese tea,
that’s served at our family functions. Though sick of Fanta, I
asked for yet another glass of orange soda because there was
nothing a kid of eleven could do at funerals apart from drink,
choke on smoke, and wonder which level of hell the deceased had
descended to.
*
My grandfather was in Hell, and he was taking me with him. He
always taught me that everyone goes straight to Hell - “You are
guilty until proven innocent.” Two bull-headed, long-tailed,
trident-bearing, toe-tapping creatures waited constantly by your
bedside, ready to drag you in chains once you’ve breathed your
final breath. Our fate was sealed a few years ago when we went to
Haw Par Villa. This was the garden of the gods, a real
tourist-magnet, the home of the Golden Buddha, the Prosperity
Buddha, the Health Buddha, the Longevity Buddha -- well, you get
the idea.
My grandfather couldn’t care less about the statues. No, instead
he made a beeline for the cave with the "Ten Courts of Hell".
Boiling in oil, disembowellment, sawing in two, eye-gouging,
tongue-plucking - all these tortures were re-created in wax, with
a loving attention to detail - we’re talking blood, pus,
intestines, sliced breasts and stray eye balls. Nothing was left
to the imagination. One thing was clear: there is no hell like the
Chinese tei yuk.
My grandfather pointed at the first exhibit, ‘Rats Gnawing Off A
Man’s Tongue.’
"That is what happens to liars," my grandfather said.
I knew then that we were going to hell, for my grandfather lied
about my age at the box office, shaving three years off my actual
age to get me into Haw Par Villa for free.
My grandfather suddenly clamped his fingers on my wrist. "There
are things that even Haw Par Villa dare not show. Tortures like
the Exploding Water Torture. The demons stick a hose into your
mouth, then pump you full of water. When your body gets big big,
they jump on you and -- boom!"
I saw my heart, kidney and intestines sprayed across the walls of
Hell.
"This is what happens to children who are not xiao xun”, my
grandfather said. “This is how they’re punished if they have no
respect and forget their elders.” He flipped his golden tooth out
of his mouth and drew it back again.
Then he told me a tale that served as a guide, a sort of ‘How to
Reduce Your Time in Hell’ story:
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived with his widowed (of
course) mother. He slogged all day planting rice, but his earnings
only enabled him to buy a single bowl of rice. The conversation at
the dinner-table usually went like this --
"Mother, take this single and only and last bowl of rice that we
might ever get for the next two months."
"No son, I'm not hungry," she lied. "You need the rice to give you
strength to plant more rice."
"Mother, I'm not hungry." His stomach growls.
"But son, you're so thin."
"But mother..."
You get the idea. Of course the mother gets the rice in the end.
That night, a thunderstorm wakes the mother. She screams. The boy
rushes into the room and hugs her all night until the storm dies.
After a few weeks, the mother snuffs it (tuberculosis would be an
appropriate agent of death). So, after his mother is in the grave,
whenever there is a thunderstorm, the son runs to
the graveyard and hugs the grave, crying, "Don't be fearful,
Mother, I'm here to protect you."
After he finished his story, my grandfather dropped his Marlboro
and stamped on it with his flip-flops. "After gong gong die that
time you know what to do right?”
I shook my head.
“You must visit my grave, talk to me, bring things for me to eat.
Are you going to do that?”
I didn’t say anything.
My grandfather nudged me. “After I die, you going to feed me or
not?”
“I can’t.”
He glared at me. “Why?”
“I’m a Christian.”
“Since when?”
“Last week.”
“Who did this to you?” He enquired in that shocked tone people
reserved for victims of child abuse.
“Uncle Cheong.”
*
Children have heroes whom they idolise beyond sense or reason.
Possessing a transformative vision, children invest the object of
their adulation with sublime qualities unseen by the common eye, a
vision one often finds in poets, and second-hand car dealers. In
my eyes, Uncle Cheong could do no wrong. Even his farts smelled
like Aramis No. 7. With the heart of Mother Teresa and the body of
Tom Cruise, Uncle Cheong was my hero, and whenever he came to
visit, for a week I would be ‘Uncle Cheong did this, and Uncle
Cheong did that.’ I loved the way his wavy black hair fell
naturally over his broad shoulders, but Singapore Immigration
didn’t share my admiration for his coiffure -- the airport
officials always demanded that he cut his hair short or they
wouldn’t let him into the country. He just laughed them off. The
skin around his eyes crinkled whenever he smiled, which was often,
and whenever he flashed his dimples, I just melted.
Perhaps, now that I’m older, if I met him today, I would view him
differently. Maybe I would see him through adult eyes, my aunts’
eyes, see him as a rootless, idle, no good, useless bum. But I’d
never know -- he died in a boating accident when I was in my
teens. Who was the real Uncle Cheong? Was he a tramp, beggar,
vagabond, or an adventurer, crusader, pilgrim? Juxtaposing
fragments of malicious gossip with shimmering projections of my
fantasies, I constructed my image of Uncle Cheong -- he was the
collage of our Imaginations.
Uncle Cheong spent his life travelling around the world, doing
missionary work for Operation Mobilisation, or TEFL-ing, teaching
English in Third World cess pits. I always thought Uncle Cheong
was like Michael Landon in ‘Highway to Heaven’ (only less
soft-focus), an angel roaming the universe, going where good
needed to be done. I pictured him wandering around rugged ruins,
all stubbled and bulging-biceps, looking like the guy out of the
Camel ad (only without the cigarettes).
Uncle Cheong was a free spirit, a dreamer. When you listened to
him you could hear fireworks, exploding constellations, sweet jazz
music booping across the muddy banks of a wide emerald river. In
Uncle Cheong I saw a life spent cruising exotic lanes in the East
and hip alleys in the West, working in desert cities where the
humidity frosted the windows, where men cycled through sandy
streets, pulling carts of ice yellow with sawdust. There he would
open his window, to let in the thick smell of spices, the reckless
butterflies and the song from the women, the psalm that rose above
the golden city. Sometimes I dreamt of him wandering streets
innocent of asphalt and corners untainted with street lights,
sleeping in houses that cracked loudly as the cold night air
contracted the wood, waking to walk in fields of gold, chewing
oaten stalks until the sharp sweetness filled his throat.
Uncle Cheong dazzled me with incredible stories, tales of men who
through faith shut the mouths of lions, slayed giants with a sling
and a stone, turned armies of invaders to flight - stories that
did what all stories should do: announce a history, while
proclaiming a mystery. Stirring me with his smooth voice, his
words came alive, hypnotized me and all around, I could feel the
flower buds buzz, the electricity crackling through the mud of the
earth. Everything became sensitive to the touch.
‘Jesus said that if we had faith as small as a mustard seed, we
could toss mountains into the sea.’ Uncle Cheong said that we
could stop the sun in its tracks, turn rivers to blood, make
locusts sweep through the nation - all these things have happened
before and can happen again. There was more to life than meets the
eye, more than I could possibly imagine. ‘Faith is seeing what you
can’t feel, taste, hear or touch, seeing with your soul, not your
eyes. There exists a parallel universe, an invisible world, where
the unseen is more real than the seen -- that’s the ultimate
reality. What do you see when you look at the sun? Do you see a
golden disc, or thousands of angels singing Holy, Holy, Holy?
That’s what Blake tells us. We need to use our Imagination, see
the world not with, but through the eye.’ Uncle Cheong told me the
story of Elisha, how the army of Syria surrounded his house. His
servant panicked, but Elisha prayed, “Lord, open his eyes, that he
may see, that those who are with us are more than those who are
with them.” Suddenly his servant saw the mountain filled with
angels in fiery chariots.
Uncle Cheong told me that only if I surrendered all - ‘your fears,
your goals, your life - to God,’- only then would I be able to
find something amazing, miraculous, glistening with joy and
rapture, life above the skies, lifted to a kingdom that was way
beyond the blue.
I became a Christian because I wanted to be like Uncle Cheong. I
wanted the jazz alleys, the burning sands, the road black with
ice, a life raised to a visionary pitch, soaring above the earth
to the heavenly kingdoms. On the god-awful streets of man, Uncle
Cheong’s excitement, mystical devotion and sheer hunger torched
me, taught me how to deal with the pit and prunejuice of life. He
could out-road Kerouac any day. I didn’t see Uncle Cheong often,
but whenever he visited me, I knew there would be cries and wild
eyes, rocking and roaring, horns, snares, sticks, kicks. Whenever
he arrived, I could hear a portal whine open, gushing holy white
light onto the grey cement floor. All I had to do was lift my foot
and step into a new, magical world, a world shimmering with
tremendous possibilities. And then I knew -- big deep bass
strumming in the heart kind of knowing -- that if I became a
Christian, somewhere along the line there would be visions and
everything. Somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to
me.
*
“If you become a Christian, after I die, who will take care of
me?” my grandfather said.
“I don’t know.”
He drilled his finger into the side of my forehead. “You
everything also don’t know. You better don’t listen to your Uncle
Cheong. You want to end up like him? He’s so useless. He doesn’t
care about anybody, only care about Jesus. After his wife died,
you see him do anything for her?”
I shook my head.
My grandfather grunted. Then he said, “You’re Chinese. How can you
become a Christian?”
I was going to say “I don’t know” again, but I decided that
silence was the best policy.
“Now you’re a Christian, but you can always change your mind. You
can un-Christian.” His voice grew soft. “So after gong gong die,
you can take care of me. So do you want?”
“Want what?”
“Do you want to un-Christian?”
I couldn’t answer his question.
“You love me more or you love your Uncle Cheong more? You want to
go Chinese heaven or Christian heaven?” He started rubbing my face
with his palm. “Ai-ya, why you girls, always cry for no reason?”
I sucked the mucus up my nose. “I want to go both heavens.”
“Nowadays, you children are so spoilt. Always want both. Well you
can’t have both. You got to choose one. When you die, who do you
want to be with - me, or your Uncle Cheong?
I didn’t say anything.
He patted me on the head and smiled. “Never mind, don’t cry, I
know who you’ll choose.” His golden tooth bobbed in and out of his
mouth. “You’re not a bad person, like him.” He pointed to a man
thrown from a cliff into a field of spikes. “You’re a good, filial
girl.” Then he threw me a dark look, as if any aberrant behaviour
of mine would be punished by a fate too horrible to imagine.
*
Now, some people might think that gambling at your father’s
funeral would be a gross violation of taste and propriety, but not
the Chinese. After all, my relatives reasoned, you need something
to keep you awake. So, as darkness fell and eyelids drooped, my
aunts and uncles clashed mahjong tiles across the plastic table
top, while hired mourners huddled round the coffin, wailing and
weeping. For some reason, these two groups seemed to co-exist
happily: the mahjong players weren’t put off by the flood of grief
by their side, and the mourners weren’t offended by the gaiety at
the gambling table. Consequently, as at all Chinese funerals, sobs
mixed peacefully with the triumphant cries of ‘pong!’.
A wave of murmurs rippled through the crowd. Heads twitched and
eyes cast snide sideways glances – signs that always marked Uncle
Cheong’s arrival. Many years ago, he had offended everyone because
of the funeral arrangements (or rather, the lack of) for his wife.
My aunts always gossiped -- ‘After his wife died, he couldn’t be
bothered. Her funeral, just any how do, can already. He just put
her in a coffin, dump in church, that’s all. Then the next month
after she died, you know what he did? Go world tour. Wife not even
cold in her grave yet, he go London, India, China, go all over the
place, enjoy himself. All these men are all the same, so useless.
Their wife die already, they so happy, can do whatever they want.
No more wife, can get a life.’
But no matter what they said, they couldn’t poison my heart
against Uncle Cheong. When he arrived, I ran to him, screaming,
‘Uncle Cheong, Uncle Cheong!’
He grunted as I crashed into his chest. ‘Woah, woah, and I missed
you too.’
‘Play Superman!’
‘Ai-ya, girl, how come you got no taste, your grandfather’s
funeral and you still want to play?’ He grinned. ‘If your mother
sees us playing, she’ll scold us.’
‘I’m not afraid of my mother.’
‘Well, I am. Your mother is the fiercest woman I know. They didn’t
make her disciplinary mistress at her school for nothing. Just one
black look from her and I’ll curl up in a foetal position.’
‘But I’m so xian, this funeral is so boring.’
‘Your gong gong was so close to you, aren’t you sad?’
‘Yah, but you can be sad and xian at the same time. All I do here
is sit and drink Fanta.’ I dropped my head. “Gong-gong love me so
much, but I can’t even cry at his funeral.’
‘Sometimes we’re so sad we can’t cry. When my wife died, I never
cried at the funeral, so everyone thought I wasn’t sad. I looked
at her but it didn’t look like her. She was so white, so hard, it
wasn’t her. She was packed in this big, black box, like something
on display. It was like everyone was crying to this ice statue. So
I couldn’t cry. But every night I dream about her, dream about how
she was really like - living, breathing, laughing, and when I wake
up - my T-shirt is all wet.’
Uncle Cheong told me about his dream: He saw the coffin that his
wife laid in, heavily draped. It had twelve escutcheons, and
twelve locks with twelve different keys. He sought those keys,
crossed the wastes of sea, made runes in the rainless sands.
Finally, he came upon the black beach. There, on the dark water,
the dead lake, was the black-browed boat man, the guide of
shadows, his cold pale hand at the oar. He boarded the boat. The
oarsman toiled, bending his body, climbing through the night and
the water, beating the oar until they reached the other side.
There, on the dark sand, she stood, all in white, pure as her
mind. She opened her arms to embrace him, her voice echoed his
call. Echoed like an angel dissolving in the air, like a shapeless
flame. He woke, and the echoes became mere echoes, sounds shaking
dust in empty spaces - waking up to absences, to air without
angels.
After he told me his dream, Uncle Cheong didn’t say anything for a
long time.
‘When I die, I want everyone to cry,’ I said, ‘I want everyone to
really miss me. I want buckets, real tubs of tears, Niagara falls.
I want them to declare a National Day Of Mourning, and make
everyone hang a black flag outside their flat. People better be
upset, if not I come back and haunt them.’
Uncle Cheong laughed.
“What are you going to do now?”
Uncle Cheong shrugged. “Sit here and try not to fall asleep.”
“But isn’t that bad?”
“Why?”
“My mother always tells me that gong gong loved me the most. Last
time, he always bring me go out, go to Haw Par Villa, go K.F.C. He
never did that for any of his other grandchildren. But I never did
anything nice for him.” I was only a kid, and there was nothing I
could give my grandfather that he didn’t already have. “And now
he’s dead. I have to do something for him.”
“But there’s nothing we can do. We just have to leave him in God’s
hands.”
“But God will send him to Hell.”
Uncle Cheong spread his hands. ‘You have to be willing to be
helpless, and let God be your help. You can struggle with your own
power, try and fix things with your own flawed schemes, but you’ll
find that it’s useless in the end. Better just to surrender it all
to God. His strength fills us when our strength is gone.”
A shrill voice pierced the air. It was my mother - “Mei, stop
sitting around doing nothing and come over here and help these
people cry.”
She dragged me to the altar. The King of Hades judged the
deceased’s popularity by the amount of tears shed for him, hence,
the professional mourners. Volume, not sincerity, counted.
I stood there, trying to cry, bashing my heart with images that
would bring tears: my grandfather after his stroke, sitting on the
bed, his brain gone, a recipient of Interact Club care. Now, the
Interact Club is a society at my school that visits old folks’
homes every week. Bearing gifts that they made during their Art
classes - wooden clothes pegs glued together into toy chairs,
bookmarks made out of dried orchids stuck on yellow construction
paper, lanterns stapled together from red ang-pow envelopes - the
Interact members act as surrogate grandchildren, chatting with the
old folks. They always rounded off their visit by singing “That’s
What Friends Are For”, only they never ever complete the song
because by the time they reach the middle of the chorus, the
sopranos (that is, the girls) have become a blubbering wreck. In
Moral Education class, the Interact chairman would always share
the latest “Granny Abandoned by Ungrateful Children” story, and my
teacher would conclude with a lecture on filial piety, one of the
core Confucian values found in the national curriculum. During
these classes, my face had one of those mug shot moments, my
features fixed in a vacant stare, emotionless, inscrutable,
revealing nothing. I focused on the full stop chalked on the black
board behind my teacher’s head, hiding what I felt, hoping my
class mates would never find out that my grandfather was an
Interact Club charity case.
During the few occasions when we did visit my grandfather at the
Evergreen Moral Home For The Aged Sick And Handicapped, I never
wanted to go back. It’s the smell that hits you first, the
nauseatingly sweet smell of open sores and wet bandages, reeking
of urine, saliva, sweat, pus - the stench of incurable sickness
blanketed by the pungent odor of strong medicine. I stood at the
doorway, gagging, my lungs fighting to adapt to the atmosphere.
This wasn’t the smell of death - that would be bearable - no, this
was the noxious smell of decomposition, when flesh and soul and
heart and bone separate, then rot, deteriorate until all is
reduced to a putrid pile of rubbish, ready to be wheeled out. The
syrupy smell of decay.
The Home popped all the nasty ‘D’ words into my mind -- dark,
dank, dungeony -- it was like walking into a giant sewer. Blades
of light slid in from the steel-shuttered windows, stenciling the
emaciated silhouettes crouched on their beds, skeletons draped
with over-sized pajamas. The room seemed semi-liquid, the floor
wet, the walls sweating, a sick dampness infused the air. There
was nothing to do here, just old people on beds in the blackness,
and the occasional nurse in white marching down the corridor, the
steel bedpan glistening in her hand.
I couldn’t recognize my grandfather. His pajamas were too big for
him, something I never thought would ever happen. The pot belly I
always rubbed for luck had melted away, replaced by sagging folds
of helpless flesh. He didn’t bark orders to his children, instead
he just lay there nodding at their inane icebreakers.
“Look! It’s Mei Mei!” My mother would point at me. “Your favourite
grand child come and visit you. Don’t you recognise her? Can you
say the words -- ‘Mei Mei’? She bought you some oranges to eat.”
Technically, it wasn’t me, but my mother, who bought the oranges,
but usually I was the one who offered the gift to my grandfather.
My mother told me that -- “Whenever your aunts and I give him
anything, he always push our hand away, but he love you so much,
he will take anything from you.”
So I held the oranges towards him and said, “Gong Gong, eat
oranges.”
The fruit hovered in his line of vision, but he didn’t seem to see
them, his watery grey eyes remained blank. After a while, he said,
“Oh!”
He didn’t say anything for the rest of the visit. My Second Aunt
peeled the orange and stuffed it in his mouth.
This was not my grandfather, not the man who raised me, but a
stranger I couldn’t connect with. It was like my grandfather had
died, and this stygian pit was the first level of hell.
I thought about all this, standing in front of the altar at his
funeral. God knows I didn’t do enough for him while he lived, the
least I could do now was cry for him, but I couldn’t even do that.
And I knew that because I couldn’t cry, the King of Hell would
think that I didn’t love my grandfather and make him stay in Hell
longer, which made me feel even more guilty. This line of thought
dried me up completely.
Meanwhile, the pro mourners wailed on, the Nile flowing down their
faces. I don’t know how they make themselves weep buckets, maybe
it’s because they’re lamenting how Fate has been so cruel as to
consign them to such a degrading occupation.
“Hey, you stand here so long, why you still don’t cry?” My mother
dug her sharp nails into my arm, drawing blood. “Hurry up, pray to
your grandfather.”
“Ouch,” I said. A tear finally trickled down my cheek.
*
Finally came the time that I dreaded the most, the few hours
before the body is coffined - the Death Watch. Boredom, I could
handle, but dealing with the threat of turning into a lump of coal
was another matter altogether. According to my mother, if a
pregnant cat jumped over the corpse during the Death Watch, the
deceased would jerk up and start a mad dash, running in a straight
line, uprooting trees in his path and killing anyone within his
reach.
One touch, just one touch and the demon would choke all the breath
out of you, turning you black.
Shoulders jerked at the unexpected clap of thunder, and a few of
my aunts turned their heads from their mahjong tiles to glare at
Uncle Cheong, like it was his fault. Two aunts volunteered to
stand over the corpse with paper umbrellas to protect it from the
lightning.
I heard a meow. I knew I was a bad person, an ungrateful, no-good
non-crier. If a pregnant cat resurrected my grandfather, I’d be
the first person he’d kill. I had to hide.
In the corner, two monks dozed at a table, the areas around their
necks and armpits wet with sweat. I crawled under the table.
Hidden by the thick table cloth, I hugged my knees tight to my
chest, but I could still hear it, the cat’s long, cold meow. Did
pregnant cats sound any different from normal cats? I wasn’t
taking any chances. I shut my eyes but the vision wouldn’t go away
- my grandfather bearing down on me, black, demonic, his arms
flung out, clawing for me, droning, why you never cry for me? Now
because of you, I have to stay in Hell. Why you never pray to me?
Now I’m going to take you with me, forever.
The cold sweat soaked my clothes, made dark rings under my armpits
and damp, freezing patches around the small of my back. It was no
use hiding, my grandfather would find me anyway: the thump, boom,
thump, boom of my heart filled my ears, drumming out my location
to him. I didn’t know what to do. Should I un-Christian myself so
I could save my grandfather by my own power? But if I un-Christianed
myself, what about Uncle Cheong? Who should I choose?
This phrase suddenly popped into my head - Christ took my sins and
cleansed every stain. Of course I always knew this, Uncle Cheong
always repeated this to me, but before today, it was nothing but a
dry, empty slogan, Christian auto-pilot words, a mantra chanted in
church so often until it became nothing but a hollow noise. But
under the table that day, I suddenly realized what it really
meant, and I don’t know why.
Everything which God sees as bad is not there any more. Now things
which other people might consider bad about me, things which my
parents and teachers always scolded me for - like abandoning my
grandfather at the old folks’ home, not crying at his funeral,
crooked margins in my maths exercise books, forgetting to switch
off the video - I still had these horrible flaws, but everything
which God considered bad about me - that’s all been removed. In
His eyes, I can do no wrong. Can you imagine having a relationship
with someone like that? Someone who sees no faults in you, who
finds nothing offensive or deficient, who weeps and sings songs of
adoration to you, because in His eyes, you are flawless.
Nobody else I know can ever be as completely satisfied with me as
God is - for other people, there will always be some flaw in me
that makes me less than perfect in their eyes - maybe I’m too
short, or too logical, or don’t squeeze the toothpaste in the
right way. Christ is the only person who loves me because I am
perfect in his eyes. At that moment, it didn’t matter how much my
mother scolded me, or how my grandfather hated me, I’d found
someone who would always love me to the point of near-worship, and
I knew that that was the only thing I’d ever want for the rest of
my life. All my guilt disappeared. My soul fed on Something,
tasted the tears - were they mine or God’s? - for each drop
lighted my mind, altered my genes, turned me into something new,
from soul to soul, from blood to blood.
His spirit filled me until He became my very breath and my only
desire: when I breathed I was using His breath and all I wanted to
breathe was Him. Thus, panting after him and panting him, I opened
my mouth and felt the unutterable kiss.
I opened my eyes. The thunderstorm stopped, and moonlight trickled
under the table cloth like silver water.
One of the monks stirred. His hand went under his robe, pushing it
aside. Before this incident, I’d always wondered what priestly
underwear looked like. Was it spotless? Was it holy? The monk's
robe fell open, revealing – Levi 501s.
Author: Hwee Hwee Tan from Foreign Bodies, 171 Madison Avenue, New
York, NY 10016. |
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