Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

SINGAPORE ISN’T STERILE like everyone says. It’s full of secrets. Take me, for instance. I’m an anomaly and I think the world ought to know this. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing because if the world found out, I’d probably be cut open.

Maybe being cut open is better than hiding in the shadows.

Did you know that déjà vu is prophetic?

I do. I’ve lived long enough to know that déjà vu is a glimpse of an unchanging future, however you live your present. So do yourself a favour and live it well. That’s something I’d offer.

So says Landon Lock.

The old house sits like a crypt; the light from streetlamps filters through the murky panes and floods its interior with a sepulchral glow. Every night he comes home alone and confides to an imaginary interviewer in an imaginary interview he’d want to give if only the world accepted who he is.

Life has been bland but not necessarily bad. He isn’t given to making friends because friends often do more harm than good to his kind. Some old gaffer would stop him on the street insisting they had been acquainted fifty years ago and that it was impossible he should look so young. A hunch would tell him the person was probably right. Still, he would have to walk away.

Truth is, Landon Lock doesn’t die and doesn’t really live either.

He just sort of… exists.

Longevity is a bizarre affair because it makes you crave death at one point and be inordinately terrified of it at another. The notion of death is at once edifying and fearful. So he observes it from afar, like a child watching a cavorting clown.

Presently, he leans against the peeling door frame of the lavatory and watches a dying gecko twist its way up the wall tiles. The lavatory is set inside the kitchen—a shabby little appendix behind the old house. Its nooks and crannies carry a depressing degree of gloom, from a shelf made out of bricks and rotting planks to the row of archaic stone stoves.

Guilt steals into him. That gecko had emerged from behind an earthenware vat and given him a nasty scare. But that wasn’t just cause for death. It would’ve been better if it had put up a fight instead of running. Landon sprays more insecticide into the creature’s face—a lingering, gentle mist—and prays for a swift death. But the poison delivers only a slow, agonising torment. The toxins are corroding its flesh and dissolving its consciousness, and the little greying creature thrashes wildly.

Someone once told him the closest you can get to observing Death is to poison a common house gecko with insecticide and watch it die. It was a long time ago when the world first saw DDTs in FLIT spray pumps.

Now he believes every word of it.

When he can take no more of Death, he leaves the kitchen and abandons himself to a couch. The living room, cavernous and mouldering, is immured in century-old wallpaper that flakes like plaster. He reaches over and turns a lamp on.

A dusty fan hangs from a mould-mottled ceiling, spinning and creaking on a long wobbly stem. A wire leads from it, down a wall and into an old timber-backed breaker panel with rows of black Bakelite switches.

Landon stretches his legs, and the cold surface of the green terrazzo feels good against his bare heels. He unbuttons his uniform—a black collared tee with a yellow brocaded emblem bearing the name of a café: FourBees—and drops his head over the edge of the backrest, pretending to be a corpse, as if someone might enter a week later and find him putrefying in this posture.

Perhaps I’ve forgotten my kind.

You see, my memory works like an old bulging scrapbook. It is one thing to be assured of the fact that it holds everything, and it’s another to be able to find in it what you’re looking for. Memories of my recent past span days, sometimes a week. They never used to be like that. I’m finding it progressively harder to retain them. They leave me easily—like sand from an eroding shoal. Memories of a distant past I retain better. But only in fragments that hold little meaning. I don’t remember people very well. That’s a problem.

I remember coffee better than people.

My doctor said a point in the past might have caused it—maybe something that gave me head trauma or the like. And events that occur after that point work like quick-fading polaroids in my head.

No, I don’t recall this point in my life. Unfortunately.

You know how it’s like, don’t you? Sometimes my existence feels ethereal, disembodied. A good half of my life had been excised, perhaps more.

I’ve never felt complete.

I remember, though, the day mother died. There was no pain. She just slipped away and went cold hours after we spoke for the last time. But I’ve lost her face. I remember only the sallow, waxen skin and sunken cheeks. I don’t recall a heartbeat monitor or an oxygen tube. They didn’t have such things then. Most of my recollection comes in bursts; a red and white metal bedpan, a sooty kerosene lamp, valance skirting the bedposts quivering in a breeze, the gentle sway of a gauzy mosquito net in the hot, dusty air of the late afternoon.

Late afternoon is a terrible time to die, when the world is winding up for the day. I was sorry that I had to leave her in her bedroom. Memories work better with senses. I remember little else but the subtle stench of decay. Though nascent, it already felt like an intrusion of something foreign and malevolent that was beginning to overpower the familiar scents of balms and ointments of her bedroom.

When did the ageing stop? When I was thirty, thereabouts. Maybe younger.

How young do you think I look?

Like I said, I don’t recall that point in my life, so I can never tell.

When it comes to looking my age it’s really hard to find the sweet spot. It isn’t a good thing to be looking too young or too old. Every fifteen years I start a new life as a new person. Passing off for a young man is easy with the way I look and the job I do. People hardly ask your age when it comes to making coffee. But I’ll be in trouble if I’m overdue. It’s more difficult explaining how I’m looking thirty when my registered age is sixty.

My real age? I think I’ve lived decades.

Or has it been centuries? I don’t know. My journals will tell.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a vampire.

Vampires are crappy creatures once you strip them of their pearly skin and sex appeal. They’re rabid in a way, much like wild dogs and zombies. I find zombies more appealing because they waste less: they gobble up everything, blood, bones and all. And if they don’t eat you up good enough you turn into one of them.

Sickness? I don’t remember the sensation of being ill. I wake up every day with this blandness that tells me nothing changes and nothing ever will. My breaths are clear and deep. There is the same strength and litheness in my limbs.

No, I’m not complaining. It would be an unpardonable sin to complain. But you have no idea how lonely it gets.

I often wonder: if Death doesn’t come knocking, should I go to it?