Work Text:
i.
The train ride away from home is always a lonely one. The travel itself is bumpy and uncomfortable, recurring erratic jolts where the wheels roll over uneven parts of the track a reminder of the gracelessness of mechanicality. Beyond the thumping of hardness against roughness, there is no sound in the carriages. Overnight passengers are rare and sparse, and the ones whose journeys at this point in life happen to intersect with Yuet Lian’s tend to be exhausted, or reclusive, or both.
These trains aren’t like the ones she is used to. These trains have dusty windows and faded seat covers; they carry spectral souls and the darkness of obscurity and thin, threadbare slivers of moonbeam from the aching sky, like an inquiry, like an overwhelming question, so dense yet so dilute she could wish on it.
ii.
Yuet Lian is standing in front of a tall, cream-coloured building. Craning her neck skyward, there are more floors in the complex than she cares to count by eye, and, to the credit of the marketing agent who took the photos for the website, the building actually doesn’t look much more run-down than advertised.
She dials Qing Shan’s number, and it is picked up on the sixth ring.
“Yue! This is a pleasant surprise. You never call. Well? How was your flight? And the train ride? I know you hate those usually. Maybe there was a pretty woman this time, in one of the seats at the back?”
Yuet Lian ignores her. “I’m at the apartments. How do I get in?”
“Oh, you’re here already! I thought you must’ve just gotten off the train. My bad—although I didn’t have your schedule, so I guess it isn’t really.”
“You don’t need my transport schedule.”
“How else would I look after my baby sister? I have the keys with me—both for the front entrance and for your room. Are you able to come pick them up? No, of course not; you must still have your luggage with you, don’t you?”
“I travel light.”
“No need to worry. I’ll just take my lunch break early.”
“It’s not even ten a.m. That’s absurd.”
Unaffectedly, Qing Shan repeats, “I’ll just take it early. Be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me, okay? Don’t run off or do anything silly.”
Yuet Lian smushes her finger hard against the red ‘hang up’ icon. It’s a touchscreen, not a button, so the effect isn’t nearly as satisfying. She’s an adult, and to illustrate her independence Yuet Lian glares at the well-manicured strip of grass on the sidewalk. So now of course she has to stray from this spot, explore the neighbourhood, maybe, check out the local minimart. In truth she does not care for the rows of ‘baked not fried’ chips, nor the luminous blue of the to-go slushies, and thusly neither would on a regular occasion motivate her to peruse them in the minimart aisles. But Qing Shan has told her not to wander, which means she has a moral obligation to do precisely that. It’s the principle of the matter.
iii.
Her body is rigid against the hard wall, dim lights spinning overhead. The sound of footsteps grows softer in unhurried retreat. Yuet Lian uncrosses her arms and peels her back off from the wall where she had been leaning seconds earlier.
In her palm is the clink of dull metal. Held in her other is her sports bag, brazenly baring the white bold letters ‘ADDAIS’ and concealing in its interior all the physical mementos of Yuet Lian’s life that she cares to preserve through to the new world.
She’s standing in front of a door. This structure that she is looking at is going to be her home for the next indefinite period. She feels like a stranger. She is a stranger. The keys dig into her fist but polite etiquette is to knock. She knocks. Then, when polite etiquette fails her, she inserts the key and pushes on the door, feeling it give smoothly until she has enough room to squeeze herself through the slight opening.
The transformation is remarkable. Soft yearning sets the air alight, a clear dichotomy from the chill of the hallways outside and the resonant, vacuous concrete stairwells leading up to them. Here there is the warm quiet of faintly audible life, the steady thrum of a machine or electrical appliance; and the scent of something baking, full and round and fire-sweet. The room is designed with the open-plan layout typical of apartment rooms, where space is precious and necessity for structural demarcations low: immediately in front of the door, closer to the entrance than the small lounge space, is the kitchen bench, protruding from the right wall and facing an array of cupboards as well as a microwave and oven. The oven is on, black screen filtering a murky golden glow. Yuet Lian peers inside and makes out the faint outline of an ellipsoid loaf of bread, rising. So that explains the smell.
A door opens to the left, and a woman steps out, hair in a towel and shoulders bare. She jumps, just a little, when she sees Yuet Lian, eyes wide. There is water on the ends of her eyelashes. Yuet Lian feels guilty for startling her, before she reminds herself that she has just as much right to be here as the other woman does.
“Fuck,” the woman mutters, and immediately slaps a hand over her mouth. Then, “Hi, sorry. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“It’s okay,” says Yuet Lian in a rare moment of benevolence. “I wasn’t expecting me either.”
The woman nods sagely, if a little unsure.
“I’m your roommate,” Yuet Lian continues, even though she knows it’s obvious. “My name’s Yuet Lian.”
“Yuet Lian.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Halla.”
There is a brief silence where neither of them speak. The gentle waltz of clock-time. The slow birth of a star over millions of years. All these things happen contemporarily, inconceivable and unstoppable. “You’re Halla, you’re—” and here Yuet Lian squints, peering at the warm tint of her faded blue eyes, at the smile lines on her face, “—twenty-three, you find it difficult to fall asleep, you’re a Sagittarius, and you baked bread for your new best friend whom you knew was due to move in today. Warm, fluffy bread.”
When Halla smiles, her nose wrinkles slightly. “I’m twenty-two. The bread is yours, if you want.”
iv.
She can still feel the roll of metal, the dull cry of friction overcome. In reality her unmoving form is curled up on the bed on the left from the door, almost perfectly still except for the rise and fall of breath. But the ghost of movement, of clanging and steady revolution, is etched into her bones like vertigo.
The sound of sirens, piercing and shrill and completely silent. Waves flutter and crash on the shore, blue flames relentlessly resist the dark flare of daybreak in the back, the roar of radial lines of rage in the empyrean. A woman in a black silk dress. She’s smiling.
“I remember you,” Yuet Lian says.
Another woman, this time wrapped in diaphanous gauze. They have the same face. The empyrean continues to scream, but the white of her gown is brighter.
“It’s time to move forward,” says Yuet Lian.
The women remain smiling seamlessly until she realises they are staring right past her.
Yuet Lian is returned to her body in the dark room. Light is emitted from the gap under the doorway, yellow but there. From the living room-kitchen complex is the faint sound of shuffling, of soft, muffled impacts, steady but irregular. She cranes her head and observes, barely, that the covers on her roommates bed are empty.
Naturally, then, Yuet Lian pulls herself out of bed, wraps a coat around the shirt she’s chosen to sleep in in substitute of pyjamas, pads into the living room. Halla is there, at the kitchen counter, punching dough on a chopping board.
She yawns, tilting her head and listening to the thudding. “Hey Halla.”
Halla stops instantly, turning around. “Yuet Lian?” Something strange blooms across her features. “Sorry, did I wake you?”
“No.”
Halla looks at her oddly, and Yuet Lian suddenly recognises that expression for what it is. “Why are you baking bread at this hour?”
“For fun,” says Halla.
Yuet Lian stares at her. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Alright. ‘Night.”
She doesn’t move until the other woman smiles, eyes flickering this way and that.
v.
The rest of the night is dreamless. Waking hour starts with the white cast of cold light through closed windows. The view outside is one of modest branches, earthy brown with a grey tint. There are no birds but at least the branches have leaves.
There are things she discovers about Halla. Information creeps in with surreptitious stealth, a sort of subtle coalescence of disparate images, flashes, little bites of sound. These are things she doesn’t mean to know, like the way she lets her mobile ring on and on and doesn’t pick it up, the half hour she spends standing in front of the full-length mirror fixing her contour and pale eyeshadow, the exactitude of the timer she sets the microwave to, the quarter-beat of silence before she lets herself laugh, the way she never touches Yuet Lian’s leftovers, the way she is consigliere-silent when Qing Shan inquires to the health of her dear sister.
Yuet Lian observes all this with a clinical interest. When she files this data away in her cognitive compartments, it is in open containers far away from the closed ones, the ones that have labels attached to them. Halla plays the violin, sometimes, in the early hours of the evening when darkness is only just beginning to settle into the glow of the sky, and the sound resonates like ripples down a waterfall, like an axe through the extralunary vacuum. But it sounds no different from Yuet Lian’s saved Spotify tracks, or from the occasional live performances she digs up on YouTube. The sound fades away into nightfall and Yuet Lian takes her worn clothes to the laundry room down the hall. Qing Shan doesn’t learn to stop asking.
vi.
There’s a Chinese takeaway three blocks down the street, run by a woman, middle-aged with aquamarine on her wrist, and a young man about Yuet Lian’s own age who is either the son or a university student looking to make rent.
They have the usual things. Taro buns, sweet and sour pork, vegetable fried rice. She orders from there once, asks for fried dumplings, because she is late back from university and it is convenient and she cannot keep leeching off Halla’s baking. That is the only time. It tastes too much like something she knows and which doesn’t belong to her, something she doesn’t know how to say.
She doesn’t love this place. It is too familiar, in a slanted way, and not close enough to real.
vii.
Mist condenses on the window. Yuet Lian is working at her desk in low lamplight when the doorbell sounds, sonorous and unusually deep. Then there is the cool chill of evening air, whistling in. Voices: her flatmate’s, and a slightly crackly timbre. A few more minutes and the door closes, the flow of night breeze stopped.
Halla reappears in their bedroom, peeling off her heels without looking up. Her face, being tilted downwards, is obscured by her bangs so that Yuet Lian cannot tell her expression, but her general demeanor seems to be one that emits the faint glow of quiet mirth. Or maybe it’s just the navy sundress. She’s about to turn back to her study when Halla speaks, suddenly.
“Do you like to read?”
“Yeah,” says Yuet Lian. “Sort of.”
“What kind?”
She considers this, and shrugs. “ Orwell, Dickens. The usual.”
“I’ve always found Brave New World to be more interesting than 1984 .”
Yuet Lian shrugs. Truthfully, it had been years since she’d read any Huxley, and she could barely remember its happenings. “I think 1984 is fine. I read it for the discussion on family.”
Incredulous, Halla repeats, “You read it for the family?”
“Yeah. Like the domestic tragedy and all that. Angst centred on the individual.”
“Huh.”
It’s not the only time. Halla sometimes returns to the flat far into the evening, three times a week maybe, exchanging hushed murmurs by the door before slipping back inside, changing out of her fancier dress acknowledging Yuet Lian’s presence in the room about forty percent of the time, and wiping off her makeup. Rarely, but often enough, it is not a dress, but a slight form-fitting top—halter or spaghetti strap—and loose ripped jeans. Yuet Lian wonders if on those days the occasion is different.
“Do you have club dinners or something?”
There’s a new face now, strange and curious, interposed on Halla’s small smile. One she hasn’t seen before. This one is Secret. The other one, she thinks, the one from that first night, must have been Shame.
“I’m not good with feelings,” Halla confides in her one time, when they are waiting together at the laundry room because Yuet Lian has learnt that leaving the washing there overnight imbues it with a damp, disagreeable smell. “I never know how I’m meant to feel. Easier to just repress everything.”
“It’s not about how you’re meant to feel,” says Yuet Lian.
“Isn’t it?”
viii.
So she’s wrong about a number of things.
It turns out that Halla is a Gemini, because she was born in mid-June. It turns out also that those late nights out aren’t work dinners or club outings, but dates. Halla never tells her, but Yuet Lian infers this from the makeup and the styling, which are more prudent than Halla’s day dress, and the time she spends lingering at the door, and the hushed dual voices—all phenomena she already knew. That, and the time Halla comes home with a bouquet of roses. Yuet Lian doesn’t ask about it, not directly, but Halla obviously sees something in her face, because she freezes and gives her Shame. That’s interesting. And not her business.
Thursday evening, Yuet Lian’s phone rings and she picks it up without looking at the caller ID. It’s Qing Shan, and she wants to know how her baby sister is doing. Instantly the night is darker, the songbirds’ calls a bit more solemn, less hopeful. A shift in the vibrations of the universe. Yuet Lian gives her everything that is requested—that she’s okay, that her room is small, small in a comfortable way, classes are fine, she usually walks, the reason she walks is to save money, her roommate is fine, her name is Halla, she’s good at baking, she doesn’t know, she hasn’t asked, it’s only been two weeks, why does it matter? So maybe she does go overboard and maybe she does feel a hollow sort of soreness, a black hole that consumes and consumes and doesn’t know when to stop. Qing Shan doesn’t yell back. She’s too good for that. The night grows darker still, until the line cuts.
One of the university’s social groups has organised a morning hike. It spans a small number of hours, from the early pre-twilight to sunrise. Here she sits, on a bench atop a mountain low enough that the ground should have been visible if not for the dense morning fog. Everywhere is cast in solemn tones of green and blue until the piercing rays of the sun set the mountains on fire. Now there is orange and blue and black because she accidentally looked at the sun and can’t see anything else. The takeaway guy sits beside her, inches apart, and asks for a selfie. His voice is familiar. She idly wonders what Halla sees in him, but just as a passing thought; if she likes him for his idol-style hair, or his clean dress, or his lack of swagger, or the fact that he’s local and has the boy-next-door air about him.
He taps his head and tells her that his girlfriend has the same one , which is when she realises that somewhere between the mixed laundry and shared bedroom, Halla’s cowboy hat has become temporarily hers.
After class Yuet Lian walks to the supermarket, and she’s about two-thirds of the way there when the sky crackles and starts raining. The downpour is sudden and fast, and beats down angrily on her eyelids. But the fifth circle is the briefest of the nine. Yuet Lian is anguishing over her soaked blouse when an umbrella appears over her head, and it is connected to a smiling man with piercing eyes that glitter in the dreary daylight. He walks her there and they part ways at the entrance. She goes direct to the whole foods section, picks up a bulk bag of rice, and has already made it to the check-out when her phone chimes. Halla is grateful, and she would like chocolate, but only the nut and berry flavour from this particular brand that doesn’t use palm oil. So now she has to turn back. It takes Yuet Lian twice as long to find the chocolate as it did to heave her sack of rice to the check-out. She thinks about the stranger with the umbrella. If there is time for anything in this life, she decides, anything at all, then it is to buy chocolate for her flatmate. It is why she is here.
When she exits the store, she doesn’t have an umbrella. But the rain has stopped.
ix.
Takeaway Boy has lasted three days, as far as she can tell. By the next week Halla is still coming back late, as usual, but this time the other voice is distinctly different. Two days later, the voice is different yet again—less raucous, more reserved, a baritone instead of a bass. Yuet Lian gives up on trying not to notice. Halla doesn’t seem to mind, anyway.
“Look,” says Halla, squeezing herself against Yuet Lian’s side sitting on the small rectangular stool. A phone is shoved in her face; Yuet Lian has to push it down to see the screen. “Isn’t he cute?”
It’s a selfie of a man’s face, broad smile and eyes that crease warmly at the corners. Expression open, relaxed. More private, probably, than a profile picture. He has dark eyes and hair dyed blond.
“Yeah,” Yuet Lian says in what she hopes sounds like an agreeable tone. Halla smiles at her, content and slow, but there’s something else. Ah. It’s Secret. “Are you dating him?”
Halla replies, “Can you help me with my assignment? It’s due tomorrow and I have no idea how to start.”
So it turns out Halla has a type. Weeks later, Yuet Lian has seen enough of these men come and go as to have the data to generalise a statistical conglomerate of Halla’s average boyfriend , in the abstract. Four-fifths of them have dark brown eyes, and those tend to be the more recent ones. The first few had blue eyes. Thirty-three percent of them bring flowers at some point in the affair, and those are only the ones Yuet Lian has been able to observe: the man whose picture Halla had shown her that night later went on to bring roses for the both of them, which made for an awkward encounter. Halla had been embarrassed. Yuet Lian thought it hilarious. The guy was forthcoming and ostentatious, and his name was Jing. The only other name Yuet Lian had been given was Maxime, whom she had stumbled into by chance as she’d gotten home the same time as the couple were standing at the entrance of the main door. He had introduced himself, but softly, almost reluctantly, as if they shared a personal vendetta that Yuet Lian happened to know nothing about. Takeaway Boy still doesn’t have a name, but he has sparkles in his eyes when he smiles, so he is Jing. He is to date the only one who’d been allowed to walk Halla to their room door, rather than the main lobby door. Yuet Lian points this out with vague interest.
Halla is confused. “Jing?”
“Yeah, Takeaway Boy.”
“His name’s not Jing.”
“I don’t know how else to keep track of them.”
To her horror, Shame has made a reappearance, blooming in gradual steps across Halla’s features from the inside out. So Yuet Lian doesn’t say anything more, even though that is probably a mistake. But she doesn’t know what to say.
The time that they are around for is getting shorter, from one week in the beginning to mostly single days now. About half the time Halla comes home happy, or at least serene. This happens more with Maxime than Jing, but it had been Jing the single time Halla had gone as far as to spring a skip in her step after a date. Halla had baked muffins once. Yuet Lian is not sure who for, but she thinks it was probably Jing, with blonde hair and skinny jeans and the right type of vibe to take on a summery picnic in a season that isn’t summer.
One hundred percent of Halla’s partners have been male, and Yuet Lian is surprised to find that she doesn’t want to think too much about that.
x.
“Hello, little sis! Hasn’t the sun been really kind lately? I can’t believe it’s October. What have you been up to? I heard the literature department organised a chalk art event—did you go?”
“No.”
“Aw!” Qing Shan laughs, in that way of hers. “Give things a try every once in a while. You never know what’s going to happen until they happen.”
“Are you my mother?”
The line is silent. Fuck. But before Yuet Lian has time to dwell on it, words come through again, effortlessly revived as though there had never been a hitch at all. “Well! A good thing, too, I suppose. Either way, it’s not too late, baby sister. Astronomy is doing something too, aren’t they? A stargazing trip?”
“What’s the point of this flat if I’m just going to be sleeping outside in a tent.”
The remark doesn’t really make sense, not when one thinks about it in earnest, so Qing Shan doesn’t dignify it. “What about you, Yuet Lian?”
“What about me? We’ve been talking about me the whole time.”
“Are you making friends? How are you handling classes?”
“Yeah, I’ve made friends with three of my roommate’s dates. Jing, Jing, and Jing.” As an afterthought, “and Maxime.”
“Yue, I’m trying my best. I know you think I’m clingy and overbearing. But I don’t know what else you want me to do. How can I ask you about the things I don’t know about?”
Yuet Lian freezes. The lights are spinning again, and she forces her shoulders to drop. “I wasn’t mocking you. I was being serious.”
“Alright.” Qing Shan’s voice sounds distant.
“No, really.” Qing Shan doesn’t usually let Yuet Lian’s lack of enthusiasm deter the conversation, carrying on blithely and able to pretend on her own that something meaningful is being shared even when it’s just one-sided small talk. It’s different this time and Yuet Lian doesn’t know why. “That’s who they are to me, in my head.”
“I believe you, little sister.” Her voice is smooth and forgiving. “I just miss you, is all.”
Yuet Lian has to fight to breathe.
xi.
Halla’s laundry is piling up in the basket, so Yuet Lian takes it in with her own load to the washing machines. Halla makes food for her sometimes, anyway. It is only fair.
There are things to think about, and a slice of space to think about them in. Halla is crazy about musicals in a way that Yuet Lian is not. The best-received musicals, Halla explains when they are chatting idly one morning, tend to start with an ‘I Want’ song that establishes the motivating desires of the singer. To put the show in context, to provide a metric with which to grade the end, to imply the shadowy form of an ideal resolution.
If Yuet Lian’s life were a musical, it would likely not start before the accident. Not enough happens immediately after the accident—there is some paperwork, and some therapy, but she had already been going to therapy before the accident. Mostly her life then was just a gaping hole. So it would have to start much later for any coherent plot to form. Maybe the beginning of summer break, when she packed her bags and went home to visit her mother. It is always a nostalgic and stressful trip all at once, but it was worse that time, the quiet a little deeper, the silence a little broader. But who wants to watch a musical about a mother and daughter, miserable in the same way, struggling to make amends?
And either way, it would not work, because the expositional song would be all wrong. It would start with coming home, but she does not wish against all else to be home. And, now, a gruesome thought: she doesn’t even wish, really, that her father were still around. It is more complicated than that, which is her way of saying she does not understand why.
When the question comes, she’s helping Halla wash up all the pots and pans. Halla is much more efficient than she is, being more accustomed to the process. Each specialised tool has its own intricacies and warnings, which Yuet Lian marvels at as she scrubs.
“Why do you need all these discs?”
“They line the bottoms of the cake tins. Which are different sizes.”
Ah. Yuet Lian has seen Halla use the pieces in exactly that manner, deep in the fissure of midnight past. She just hadn’t connected the dots.
“What about these?”
“Special icing tips.”
Yuet Lian picks one up, skewers it on a chopstick, and aims it squarely at Halla’s face. Halla is humming serenely, and takes ten seconds to notice. Her eyes widen, but a smile splits across her face irresistibly. Yuet Lian mimes shooting her, flicking the chopstick up swiftly. Pew, pew , she mouths.
But Halla is faster, wrenching the makeshift weapon from her grip and turning it around, while using her knee to shove Yuet Lian up against the wall. Her eyes glitter, twin galaxies intense like a supermassive black hole. She’s laughing; both of them are. The icing tip slides off the chopstick and clutters to the hard ground.
“Damn,” says Halla, between chortles. “Now we have to clean it again.”
Yuet Lian is still giggling uncontrollably, and the other woman waits patiently, with an amused grin, until she calms down enough to speak. So now there’s something she wants to ask. And she has to ask it. “When did your musical start?”
Surprise lines her open eyes. “My musical?”
“Yeah,” affirms Yuet Lian. “The one you’re in. The one we’re all in. When did it start?”
Halla gives her a look, then, suddenly even and so profound Yuet Lian can’t quite tear her gaze away. Secret, she recognises. Her heart beats wildly. Secret, secret, secret. Halla gazes at her like she’s staring into the eternal antumbra, and whispers.
“Right now.”
xii.
So now they have reached this point. The plane has taken off and steadied its flight; the mechanical fan whirs at a constant pace. Nobody knows that something monumental is about to happen, because monumental things happen all the time and go unnoticed.
This time, fridge magnets start appearing on the fridge. The letter kind, all in bright round lowercase, a unique colour assigned to each letter of the Icelandic alphabet.
g-o-o-d m-ö-r-n-i-n-g
says the fridge on Thursday morning. It is November, and rain falls like dreams on the tear-stained ground. The amber sky is electric and swollen like a nebula. Haze settles in the city-people’s hearts at night while they are unaware, stealthy and lonely and blind, a dappling sort of thing. Yuet Lian doesn’t see the letters the first time. She is in a hurry to get to class, and her fingers and nose are numb, bitten by the chill of the season. The second time, the fridge is much less expressive.
f
‘F’ should be purple, Yuet Lian tells Halla, impassioned. Not green. It doesn’t make sense.
F should absolutely be green, says Halla. Invisible flames. They are all around, darting about at the extremities of their consciousnesses. But Halla has the decency to concede something. Maybe not this shade of green though. A bluer shade. This one’s too sunny.
Yuet Lian is adamant. Purple. Lavender. The embarrassment of the sky when it forgets how to love.
Halla doesn’t say anything, hardly blinks. Stares into her eyes. There is no confusion. Yuet Lian thinks maybe she can see Secret, maybe, but it’s hard to tell. Today it is softer, like something has shifted very slightly, almost imperceptible.
Somewhere, volcanoes rage against the eternal blizzard, angry. Fierce.
xiii.
Takeaway Boy has taken a shine to her, it appears.
It stuns her, at first. She doesn’t know what to do with his friendliness, and even less so their budding mutual affection. Because—yes—it’s mutual. He carries a rare earnestness about him, as if he believes in the goodness of other people, or that the universe has a way of working out. He says it with the peculiar sunshine in his eyes. He says it when he takes her hand and pays for her milkshake and tells her it isn’t a date, and that she reminds him of peanuts that grow in the ground.
It makes it that much harder to consider that she might disappoint him.
What do you want from me, Yuet Lian says as they are about to leave. But she already knows. He wants Halla, or closure.
He pauses, hand halfway aloft digging through his handbag. A grin spreads irresistibly across his face. What?
Why do you want to be friends with me?
He smiles again, sheepish but unashamed. For your help with astronomy, kinda. If you’re okay with it. Since you did so good in the prereq.
She stares at him. He mistakes it for reluctance, disapproval, and hurries to explain: I’m falling behind a little. But it’s not unsalvageable! And I’m not using you, I promise. Well. I kind of am. But you can set limits and stuff and I’ll respect them.
They walk around the downtown central after that, and he points out all the best thrift stores and scores each restaurant they pass on authenticity, quality, and hygiene.
What about economicality? she questions.
He wrinkles his nose and tells her that if one wants to eat cheap, they may as well eat at home. She tells him that cooking takes time and investment, and social and work events sometimes mandate restaurant visits.
Fair enough , Takeaway Boy says, and starts including descriptors of price range in his offhand assessments. Indicating a small building displaying ‘Ferru’s Kitchen and Desserts’, he muses, high quality, though not authentic; moderate price. The last girl I went on a date with really liked this one. Maybe it’s a girl thing.
Yuet Lian stops, abruptly, and peers at it from across the street. Yeah. Halla is a fan of sweet things.
The man beside her visibly jolts. You know her?
“Yeah,” says Yuet Lian.
“How?”
“You know. From, around.” She fights the urge to clamp a hand over her mouth.
“Huh.” Interest sparks, extinguishes, and relights on the man’s face in a matter of seconds. “How’s she doing?”
“It’s hard to say. Why?”
One hand travels upwards to meekly scratch at the base of his neck. “She said she enjoyed the date, but I never got a call back. And, well, maybe this is a bit naïve of me, but I’d say she looked like she meant it. It wasn’t just a formality, or like a cordial sort of “I enjoyed it”. And I want to believe that. And I guess, looking back, she sometimes had this sad look in her eyes in those little moments of silence between us talking and doing stuff. So maybe it was something completely unrelated, and not the fact that I’m not attractive enough.”
“I know what you mean,” says Yuet Lian, speaking to the soft glow of amber in his hopelit eyes. “She gets this look, sometimes. Like. Like she’s waiting for the storm.”
Takeaway Boy hums contemplatively. Then, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you waiting for the storm?”
“No.” But then she considers it. “I suppose. But it’s a different kind of waiting.”
He doesn’t ask why. Maybe he understands. Maybe the answer would not make sense to him either way.
xiv.
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xv.
The next morning, the sun rises like a soul condemned, sending rays of distress all about the curvature of the earth. It is, quite unwillingly, a stellar macrocosm of them and their own minute miseries, and a microcosm of Schopenhauer’s universal fury. The fridge has something new to say, which is this:
l-o-n-e-l-y r-e-d b-o-d-y
Yuet Lian stares at it. Stares at it some more. Wonders if she really knows Halla at all, or, for that matter, anyone she has ever lived with, ever. Wonders if it’s too late to change. By evening the fridge says something different.
b-l-o-o-d r-e-d
“Mm, sexy,” says Halla.
Yuet Lian wordlessly hands over the letters she had removed and which were in her possession for the greater part of the day: one ‘e’, one ‘l’, one ‘n’, and both ‘y’s. “Lonely red body?” she asks.
“I think it’s meant to be a planet. Something astronomical.”
“Could be a red dwarf. Or pulsar. Or laser signals from aliens.”
Halla’s brow furrows, but there is a glint in her eyes, a sort of penetrating focus that Yuet Lian has only seen when the other woman drags Sibelius or Nielsen through the space between her bow and her violin. It’s Wonder, she thinks, whole and beautiful and unaware.
“Those are cool,” Halla admits, “but not quite what I was feeling.”
“Then what?”
“Something sadder. Not so majestic or grandiose. Something weak and confused and which you can’t forgive, like a smoke alarm in the ocean.”
“And that,” drawls Yuet Lian, slowly, for effect, “to you, would be a planet.”
Halla looks at her then, a bit defensively, but for the first time like she’s really looking at her, complexion flickering between Wonder and Secret before the warring equilibrium finally collapses into wholly the latter. It’s a bit uncanny, a bit uncomfortable, the way Halla’s gaze pierces through her even though she’s been careful the whole time to say nothing. So then there is the peculiar feeling that despite her having not sent out any distress signals into the black and the empty, Halla has found her anyway, and it feels like the ultimate confession, like her heart has been turned inside out. All this, she realises within the span of a few inanimate moments. All this, and the fact that they only have two copies of each letter of the alphabet, probably because Halla only bought two packs of fridge magnets, so eventually absurd substitutions that are not correct but still comprehensible start making their way onto the glacial plain of arctic countenance. A perfect vacuity of white, or maybe of space, a sojourn for language that is at once meaningful and disturbed.
r-e-d s-p-a-c-é j-u-n-k y-u-e-t l-i-a-n
xvi.
Halla is baking at two a.m. again.
There was a dream, Yuet Lian recalls. Something with wispy tendrils and the ground falling away. No faces that she could recognise, and it didn’t end with her dying, or the death of anyone else she’s ever loved, so it was relatively speaking a pretty good dream. She doesn’t care to examine it any further than that.
“Hi,” she says, foggily.
“Hey,” says Halla.
“Why?”
A shrug, nondescript and noncommittal. “It helps me relax.”
“No it doesn’t.”
She says it in jest. Or maybe not. It’s too early to really think about what she does and doesn’t mean. Either way, it’s a mistake. Sleepy and muddled as she may be, it is impossible to miss Shame crossing Halla’s face like a backhanded slap. It should jolt her into apology, if she were even half a decent person, or at the very least lucidity.
“I—”
“It’s for your dates, isn’t it? To impress them?”
“No! You—I’m not even going on dates anymore.”
“Two-thirds of them compliment you on your baking. It’s cute, and it sets you apart.”
Halla stares at her, eyes wide open.
Yuet Lian’s mouth turns to lead, and it takes an eternity to summon her voice again. “Wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it in a condescending way.” She fumbles for the words, the right ones, anything that could make it better, but it’s too late. Weeks of slow affection, like a marble statue or fine charcoal canvas, undone with a single misstep. Like missing a train. Like downpour, or a hailstorm, cold and unexpected and inescapable.
When Halla speaks, it is in a near-silent whisper. “Your sister called. She’s been calling for weeks. Each time she tells me the same thing. Protect Yuet Lian. Don’t let her get hurt. Don’t hurt her. So I told her I wouldn’t.”
“Oh,” says Yuet Lian. Oh. And then her eyes start stinging, the sensation building uncomfortably in her nasal area. Then come the tears. Inside she’s screaming. It’s so overwhelming, these feelings like she’s committed murder and fraud all at once and like she’s come home to an empty house and like she can never come back. She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, but the tears keep coming, and she has to part her lips to breathe because her nose has blocked itself up.
And then there are arms around her. “Oh, God, Yuet Lian. I’m sorry. Are you alright? I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Yuet Lian, it’s okay.”
It’s really bad. This is no pull of the tides by the fabric of the moon. This is the moon plummeting into the water, inconsolable, inconsolable. Waiting on the banks and waiting for it to fizzle out. But there are thumbs rubbing wonky ellipsoids into her back and arms holding her tightly, with a fervour she doesn’t understand. Because she really doesn’t get it at all, does she? It’s a strange catharsis, this, a cosmic epiphany, the afterimage of ignorance. She doesn’t understand.
“I don’t know you at all,” Yuet Lian manages when her throat lets her speak.
Halla hums and says nothing, still tracing arbitrary sequences with her thumbs.
“All this time I thought I’d had you figured out. Sagittarius, was it, I said? Thought I knew your secrets. Thought you felt the same feeling Sibelius felt. Romanticised you. Thought I even knew the kind of guy you liked. But none of that is really it, is it?”
“Shhh.” Halla says. “You don’t have to tell me.”
So she doesn’t, and she sobs harder instead. They stay like this, a slanted embrace in the quiet reticence of the hour. It is dark, and cold, and there are still splatters of Halla’s wet mixture of raw egg and flour and cocoa powder on the kitchen bench that will be a pain to clean. All the while, the moon, sunken to the depths of the ocean, begins to glow. Faintly. Weakly. A little bit uneven, like a heartbeat, the kind even pulsars don’t have.
When she can bear it, Yuet Lian pulls herself away from Halla’s arms and looks at her, directly, afraid of what she might see on her face. But Halla smiles down at her, not happy, not beatific. There is no Shame, or Secret, or Wonder, but something she can’t even begin to describe.
xvii.
The shop is not the same as how she’d left it.
The potted plant in the corner has sprouted flowers, little pink buds, fickle but there. Yuet Lian had assumed the plant had been fake the last time she had come here.
Qing Shan is delighted, and starts cooing about the plant. Even to the plant. “This place looks really good! I love this little green guy. Look how it’s blooming already! Even before midwinter. So resilient, this plant, nature’s toughest soldier. No, actually—this one’s a lover, not a fighter.”
“Feels a bit like spring,” Yuet Lian remarks. She waves at the takeaway guy and smiles when his attention lands on them. “Hey! This is my sister, Qing Shan. Qing Shan, this is…” She stops, feeling heat rise.
“Gavin,” he says without missing a beat. Gavin holds out his hand, and Qing Shan takes it. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise! I am really glad that Yuet Lian is making friends. I worry about her so much. She has no idea.”
“I have plenty idea.”
They place their orders, and Yuet Lian turns to Qing Shan. She takes the time, now, to really study her half-sister, who is grinning widely. But there is a sadness in Qing Shan’s eyes, inexplicable and dim. Yuet Lian thinks she’s known of it even way back. She just hadn’t heeded it. It’s driven a wedge between them for all this time, because in the aftermath of the accident, Yuet Lian still had one parent whom she could take overnight trains to visit. They have the same grief, and yet it is slightly different. But that does not have to be a finality. I read this book recently.
Ah! Thought you would have been too busy. But that is good. Which one?
‘A Wrinkle in Time’. Madeleine L’Engle. She hesitates. They have never spoken about this, breached the fence in this way. But she’s got to move forward. There was this part that reminded me of you. When Meg’s father is held hostage by this great evil entity, and she tries to rescue him, and the entity asks her why. And she says something like, “Didn’t you ever have a father yourself? You don’t want him for a reason. You want him because he’s your father.”
Qing Shan smiles at her and doesn’t speak. But Yuet Lian can’t say any more than that. The words get stuck in her throat and she has to leave them implicit.
There is something else though. Something easier to articulate. This takeaway shop, too. Everywhere. I see you everywhere.
I’m right here. Qing Shan looks at her with an emotion almost unfathomable, a mirror image of Halla’s the other night. The grey sky has folded at last. Snowfall drifts down from the firmament above, spiralling in incoherent arcs and pirouettes. White earthly comets of the planet’s very own; a system, a peace.
“The plant is fake,” says Gavin. “My boss liked it better than the old one. She has a weakness for pretty things.”
So: it’s mercy. It’s mercy.
xviii.
t-h-e b-r-o-w-n-i-e-s w-é-r-é f-o-r y-ö-u
Halla has titled a ‘v’ sideways to indicate an ‘r’. It’s obvious, because the regular ‘r’s are pale yellow, almost ivory, but the makeshift ‘r’ is deep crimson. So Yuet Lian leaves it there, does the same thing.
w-e w-o-n f-i-f-t-y d-o-l-l-a-r-s i-n g-r-ö-c-e-r-í-é-s
The next message Halla leaves for her is handwritten, on haphazardly torn lined paper:
We already have all the materials we need to build the void. Look, a flower on your doorstep. Look, those secret documents in a language everyone can read. I am the spaceship, and you are the descent into darkness, and I unerringly will follow you down our jointly bleached souls. So that is the timber, that is the rusted iron, that is your childhood home in flames under the morning fumes, that is the art of the trade. And you are with me still, and that is the only part I still don’t understand.
In reply:
þ-í-n
The brownies have pieces of dried berry and almond in them.
fin.