Surrogate Protocol Read online

  Tourists, they’re usually the early ones.

  Outside, the flow of shoppers along the mall swells. In the copious shade of angsana trees, a gangly man in suit and tie stands beside a trash bin and lights a cigarette. Someone passes him and drops a Big Gulp into the bin; an emaciated golem of a young girl so thin that the soda was probably all she’d had that morning. The man stubs out on the bin and pops another cigarette between his lips.

  The waitress returns with the brew. Landon takes the French press from her. She remembered his request; the plunger is up and the water is steaming. He feels the glass. A little hot, but with the air-conditioning it should stabilize. Coffee’s foaming—a good sign. He places his palm on the knob and lets the weight of his hand do the plunging—smooth and slow it goes. The plunger reaches the bottom and a tangy aroma rises.

  He looks out of the window and watches another girl dump a Big Gulp in the same bin. Someone must be giving away this stuff. The gangly man draws heavily on his cigarette and turns away from the sun. At the plaza the event now pulsates with the roar of cheering and clapping. The host’s speech, urgent and unintelligible, drowns in the feedback from his microphone.

  A third girl approaches the bin, and just like the ones before her, tosses a Big Gulp into the bin. She wears an expression that might have been hewn from stone—one that is cold, stoic; allusive of something dreadful, something unstoppable.

  A look of conviction.

  And Landon realises with a start that all three girls had that same look.

  Reflex drives him under the table, as the window panels implode in a shower of pulverised glass.

  / / /

  The burrs of something broken ground against his back. His wounded sight drew slowly into focus. A man writhed on the ground near him, his face studded with crystalline shards. Blood dripped from the lacerations in slick, dark strands. Amid a host of muffled noises came the screech of tyres, and then he saw a face.

  / / /

  All is dark; grey smoke rises thickly and masks the daylight. A sharp sulphurous stench pervades the air. Waves of muffled cries lap over the ringing in his ears. He is lying on his side, his back arched. He feels his stomach rising to his chest and constricting his airway. His vision goes white, his head throbs in recurring surges of pain. One leg goes on kicking involuntarily as if unmoored. And this time he is acutely aware of it all.

  It’ll pass…it always does.

  He opens his eyes to a face.

  “There, there,” says the bleary face. “Easy on the gritting.”

  Landon blinks hard to clear his sight. There is spittle around his mouth and a dull, sour ache radiates through his set jaws. A pair of hands is squeezing him all over: his arms, torso, neck; fingers probing over his collarbone, shoulder, and forearm, where a trail of pink blistery scars run like ridges across the skin.

  “Nasty scars you have.” The stranger puts his fingers to Landon’s neck and catches a pulse. “How’d you get them?”

  Landon stares into a spacious face with squinty, sad-looking eyes and craggy cheekbones. Its sun-scorched skin furrows in deep gulches above the brows. He can’t decide if the stranger looks like a lion or a mastiff.

  A prick on the finger jolts him. “You a doctor?” he says in a drawl.

  “Me? No.” The stranger removes a chromium egg-shaped device from Landon’s forefinger. “But I know enough to save lives.”

  They hear muffled whimpering nearby. From elsewhere, a child’s cry.

  Shards of glass litter the floor like diamonds. Landon sits up, flummoxed, dazed. He surveys the damage and sees the waitress leaning against the base of the counter, cradling her arm and elbow. There is some blood across the side of her neck. The manager is crouching beside her and trying to get a bandage over her arm. Otherwise she appears well.

  “She was just beside the window,” says the stranger. “Lucky girl.”

  Landon surveys his precious pool of Hawai‘ian Kona across the floor and fights off a bout of nausea from inhaling a cocktail of gunpowder-stench and the aroma of spilled good coffee. His vision spins. “Who are you?”

  The stranger offers his hand and a dour smile. “John.”

  Landon takes his hand. It is large and abrasive. “Why’d you—”

  “I’m here to help.” John rises to his feet and reveals the full measure of his towering physique. “There might be danger. Wait six hours before heading home, and stay in crowded places for as long as you can.”

  Landon holds his head. “I don’t understand anything.”

  “In time you will,” says the stranger. “You did good taking cover.” The stranger’s face wrinkles sourly into a smile. “Six hours, no less. Stay in crowded places and don’t talk to anyone. Destabilisation has begun.”

  Destabilisation? Landon loses him to the crowds before he can wring an explanation out of him. He inches forward and peers over the shattered windows where drafts of warm air and smoke mingle with the air-conditioning. A starburst blotch of soot now occupies the spot where the marquee used to be. The air-blown streamers, the speakers and the gangly man in suit and tie have disappeared. Survivors hobble amid twisted steel and body parts. Parts of the plaza are burning. A woman is crying somewhere.

  As Landon ponders the impossibility of his reflexes, a fragment of a memory surfaces and sinks quickly into the depths of his mind before he can seize it. He drops away from the window, shaking, and catches the distant wail of an ambulance.

  / / /

  The press arrives and Landon flees the scene, racked with spasms of fear that numb even his fingertips. He speaks to no one and leaves by another route that takes him behind the plaza. He holds on to his elbows, shouldering through squads of arriving paramedics and rescue personnel. He realises he is shaking all over—tiny little quivers that seem impossible to repress. When he tries to run, the ground feels marshy and soft. He slows to a walk. It’s less conspicuous this way. But he will need a lot of walking to lose the tremors inside him. He wanders the streets and ends up spending the next eight hours burrowing into the most crowded restaurants and cafés he can find.

  At nightfall he finds himself sipping his eighth cup of coffee and trying to watch passing shoppers along Victoria Street. But it has turned so dark that from his seat he sees only the stray reflections of the bistro’s interior and its drop-lights against the glass storefront. People outside, however, can see him.

  He takes his mug and napkin and relocates to another seat behind a red cushioned partition. The soft clink of cutlery surrounds him. It is in such settings that a hitman usually appears and shoots someone in the head, he thinks, like they do in movies. But an hour passes, and all is well.

  At 9.30, the waitress calls for last orders. Landon steps reluctantly into a warm, dank night that smells of exhaust and stale pastries. Faces come at him in waves. He sees their eyes looking back at him. He glances over and across his shoulders; he searches the crowds hoping to find someone who might help him…anyone.

  But the city does not recognise him. People he once knew are either dead or dying. And those who find a familiarity in him tend to convince themselves that faces end up looking alike when you’ve seen enough of them.

  Landon isn’t special. He is just a very old man running for his life.

  For once, he takes comfort in being caught in a taxi queue at the rear of a shopping mall. At least if things happen, someone will be there to see it. It would be worse to return to an empty house alone and get knifed in the bath, or smothered in bed. He gets to a cab after a 30-minute wait and looks around before entering it. Once inside, he looks around some more to make sure no one is following. He watches the driver like a hawk the whole way and stiffens when a dark van or a leather-clad rider stops beside his window at traffic junctions.

  When the cab drops him off in front of the old bungalow along Clacton Road, the street appears unusually still. There is no movement, not even a breeze to nudge the leaves. The house looms, drab and forbidding, its windows abyssal e
yes. It appears to be crouching in darkness and waiting to swallow anyone who ventures near.

  A chill pricks at him. Has it been six hours? He has forgotten to check the time. He unlatches the gate and cringes at the din it makes. Then, gritty footfalls approach and his back tingles. He whips around, and finds only a passing neighbour who keeps his head lowered and dispenses no greeting.

  From the other end of the street, an old man conveys a heap of scraps on a bicycle. With every inch of his body poised to spring, Landon watches the man until he passes, and then bolts through the gate and slams it hard behind him. He races across the driveway, through the house, and locks it up tight as a fortress, latching all openings and windows, even the ones in the attic. He decides against showering for fear that someone might slip in through the back, slit his throat and bleed his life away under a running faucet.

  A cursory inspection of his possessions reveals nothing missing. He hauls a rusty dumbbell rod up to his bedroom. Then, compelled by a sliver of recollection, he pores through volumes of old journals and finds an entry inked on yellowed paper.

  March 10th, 1965, Wednesday

  My name is Arthur. I awoke in a hotel room darker than most I’ve seen. Tinted windows and dull green walls, beige-coloured drapes, a green telephone, a floral carpet, a card that reads Cathay Hotel. I remember passing a large Tiger Beer mural at the gable wall of a shophouse. Can’t see it from my window.

  I got cuts all over the left side of my body; arms, legs, neck, some on my face. My head throbs. Can’t remember where I got them. The guy who brought me here said I was lucky to have survived a blast this afternoon. It had to be the concussion because I remember nothing beyond the moment they brought me out of the car and I woke up in a room I didn’t recognise. The guy said he’s going to bring me to England. I keep getting the feeling that I’m leaving something behind.

  He reaches the end of the journal and takes up another. England? He flips a page and scans it from top to bottom.

  …the feeling lingers. Maybe it’s nothing. I’ve left too many people behind. They all become one in my broken memory.

  Faces I see on the streets represent them all.

  Unnerved by the day’s encounter, he tosses the volumes back into the old trunk, lumbers over to the desk and begins to write in a state of haste and compulsion: My name is Landon…

  The street lamps reveal two glinting spots in the crown of a frangipani tree behind the old house. The spots hold still for a moment, then streak soundlessly into the night.

  2

  CONTACT

  LANDON WAKES FROM a dreamless sleep to red digital numerals reading twelve minutes past ten. He sits up and drops his legs to the floor, the hair at the back of his head tousled and standing. His shift schedule at the FourBees café, pinned to a small corkboard on a wall beside the writing desk, says he’s not due in until one.

  He snatches his journal from the nightstand and opens to yesterday’s entry:

  Adam was born today. Count to Adam: 1 of 5,475. In another fifteen years Landon will be dead. Met someone who calls himself John. He said to stay in crowded places for as long as I could. He mentioned something else I cannot remember.

  Who the hell is John? His face appears in Landon’s head all fuzzed-up like an old Polaroid. Polaroids and facsimiles—perfect epitomes of my busted memory. It’s frustrating to be forgetting something all the time but the irony is that you would forget the frustration before you could remember what caused it. You find pieces of your day missing, and before the day ends you won’t even remember what’s missing from it.

  And that’s only a part of what amnesia is about.

  He unlatches the window and pushes the panes open. The sound of sweeping—swish, swish, swish. And with the same regularity comes the call of cicadas. A row of azaleas line the front of the patio. He looks down and sees Cheok at the driveway with the old besom.

  He calls from his window, relieved. Cheok looks up at him and lifts a thick arm in greeting, his face shadowed under a straw hat. He is shaped like an urn, with a sturdy build and brown leathery skin, and chooses to wear only weathered denim shirts and khaki cargoes. Contracted to work the lawn once a week over a four-hour session, Cheok visits more frequently than he has to. Supposedly, his wife can’t stand his bonsai obsession. The truth is, he can’t stand her badgering over everything domestic.

  Landon comes through the front door with coffee. “Unusual of you to start so late. Weather’s getting hot.”

  “Got trouble with the truck.” Cheok finishes shearing the ixora hedges and shoves the trimmings into a garbage bag. “I brought the fertiliser for the hibiscus.”

  “I never asked for them.” Landon sips out of his own mug.

  “They’re good quality.” Cheok points to a canvas sack nearby. “Organic vegetable waste, very good for the plants.”

  “I meant the hibiscus.”

  “You need the hibiscus lah, give your garden some red.”

  “It’s turning into your garden, Cheok.”

  Cheok pushes the straw hat behind his head, wipes his hands on his trousers and takes the mug from Landon. “Anyone who see your house will think you own a café instead of working for one.”

  Landon thumbs at his door. “They should look inside.”

  “Your shift what time?”

  “One. Got to leave by twelve.”

  Cheok drinks his coffee and looks admiringly over the garden.

  “You got any jobs after this?” says Landon.

  “Only yours loh. I’ll work till three then go cook for missus.”

  “Stay as long as you want. I’ll leave the keys with you.”

  “No need. I’ll latch the gate when I leave. I hope you haven’t forgot?”

  Landon stares vacantly at him.

  “Dinner tonight—” Cheok prompts, lifting a pudgy finger.

  “Nine at my place.” Landon blurts in a hurry. “I had it written down.”

  “Good. Don’t forget the match tonight. You can forget anything but football.”

  Cheok drains his mug in a single swig and Landon throws him a disapproving look because good coffee is never meant to be abused that way. They part and he goes back into the house and skims through the news on his tablet.

  An article about the explosion at Orchard Road; 26 dead, over 50 wounded. Eight bodies only partially recovered, needing DNA identification. Glass facades of two nearby shopping malls shattered. Over 30 million dollars in property damage. Estimated 23 kilos of plastique explosives with thumbtacks for fragmentation. No one has claimed responsibility for the act but the police suspect domestic extremists vying for anarchism against organised religion and meritocratic policies.

  Thumbtacks? What were they thinking?

  From the window of his living room, Landon catches sight of a young man rubbernecking at his property from the gate. He is dressed in a business shirt, fair of skin and rather lanky and fragile of build. His hair is waxed and parted in an outmoded manner. Cheok walks over to him and initiates an inaudible conversation.

  Landon emerges from the house and the young man pricks up, looking past Cheok to get a better view of him.

  “Morning,” he greets with a nod.

  Landon finds in him a likeness to a dark-haired Tin-Tin. “Can I help?”

  The young man flashes his ID and offers a hand through the gate. “I’m Julian, Police Intelligence Department.”

  Landon holds his breath. It has got to be about the bombing and the stranger named John must have had something to do with it. This fellow might be a colleague, perhaps assigned the task of gathering eyewitnesses, testimonies, those sort of things.

  The officer named Julian articulates a name in a Mandarin dialect followed by an IC number, which Landon affirms as his own. “Says here you’re Chinese.” Julian consults a document. “You don’t look Chinese.”

  Landon feigns a laugh. “I get that a lot. I think I’m part Malay, part Chinese and a dash of Dutch. The ancestor-thing, you know,” he l
ies. “Never could tell when everything’s blended so well.”

  Julian isn’t amused. His eyes flit over to the pink, blistery bulges on Landon’s forearm. “Looks like trauma,” he points to them with his pen. “An accident?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. What’s this about?”

  “We think you might be implicated in a recent incident, and we’re hoping you could help us with the investigation.”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “Good.” Julian’s unflinching gaze unsettles Landon. “Where were you yesterday morning between seven and nine?”

  “Home.” Landon keeps a straight face. “I went to Café Kinos at about ten.”

  “Got an alibi?”

  “I’ve been living alone since my mother’s passing years ago.” Here Landon frowns a little. “Am I suspected of something?”

  “My apologies.” Julian appears all but apologetic. “Just the usual background checks. You got ID?”

  “It’s inside. I’ll go get it.”

  Landon returns to the house. Cheok, besom in hand and looking rather awkward in their presence, grins at Julian and gets a twitch of the lips in return. Julian resumes his inspection of the grand old house, observing its grey stucco walls blackened with fungi at its base, its shuttered windows painted many times over and the untrimmed bougainvillea creeping all over its chicken-wire fence. He scribbles something in his notepad. The patches of perspiration on his thin chest and underarms expand in the blustering morning heat.

  Five minutes later Landon jogs down the driveway and reveals the fluster in his face. “Couldn’t find it…” he pants. “Must’ve misplaced it. You have my IC number, I’m sure you’ll know if it checks out.”

  Julian doesn’t blink. “Unfortunate. You said you live alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “No extended family?”

  “I have a very small family. I’m afraid they’ve passed on.” Landon creases the corners of his lips in an attempt to smile. “Would you mind telling me if there’s something wrong? I was at the café when the bomb went off,” he blurts a little too hastily.