The Rememberers

This piece was submitted as part of our Her Words on the World digital series, a partnership with Hedgebrook Women’s Writers Retreat to showcase the work of six talented women writers whose work explores nature and the environment. Visit our exhibit page to learn about the authors.

‘The Rememberers’ was first published in McSweeney's Quarterly’s special climate fiction issue.

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“Rubber seeds,” Ma says. “When we visit my cousins, in the swa teng—"

“Countryside,” the woman with the tablet says. “Please try to use standard English. The best results are achieved that way.”

“Swa teng, countryside, aiya you know lah. I ask you before, you are Hokkien, right, girl?”

From the way a certain tendon in the woman’s neck twitches I can tell she does not like being called girl, nor being reminded again of the question that Ma asks her at the start of every single session. The woman’s name is Ms. Tan, a nothing of a name, but I would know her skinny moon face anywhere, I’ve spent so many Remembering sessions staring at it. 

“Rubber seeds,” I say. I touch Ma’s shoulder, and the light pressure is enough to bring her back.

“We always collect them. My cousins’ house there, a lot of rubber trees, you can find the seeds lying around just like that on the floor, so many! Ah, when we find one, we take it and rub against the wall—”

“Wall?” Ms. Tan enquires.

“Any wall also can, just needs to be brick or concrete. The front of the house, the well, last time they get water from the well you know, so poor thing, Ah Bee every morning must wake up and go and take the water, so heavy, her arms become so thick, so muscular, like boy like that.”

I see Ms. Tan’s chest rise ever so slightly then fall, a wisp of a sigh that she keeps inside her. The session is not going well. In Ma’s early sessions she was eager to please, flushed and bright-eyed at the novelty of having an audience, worried, perhaps, that they would stop listening if she said the wrong thing. It seems we’ve done enough sessions now that she’s realized no one will stop listening. I don’t know how she can remember this, when she can’t remember my age or what button to press in the elevator that takes us down to our bunker. 

Sometimes I become convinced that Ma’s only pretending to forget. I look at her sideways as we watch TV at night and try to glimpse some knowing expression or telltale smirk that will confirm my theory. But her face remains a mask, one of liver spots and loose skin and faint silver hairs that grow in places they should not be growing. For a while I’d pluck them from her ears and cheeks, but she’d yelp and shoot me looks so thoroughly betrayed that I stopped.

Still, each day I wait for her to take her mask off. To peel it from her face, laughing in that mocking but not entirely mean way she once had, making me the butt of the joke. To go back to being the real Ma, Ma who told me I was lucky to be tall, since it made my oversized feet look smaller, who’d wax her brows into graceful arcs each and every week, who, even at seventy, still had perfect copper highlights in her crown, who made the six-hour flight from Singapore to Seoul once a year for the latest injectable skin treatments.

“Why don’t we take a break,” Ms. Tan says. An assistant steps up to take the helmet of wires and nodes off Ma’s head.

“Rubber seeds,” Ma says to me. “Rub against the wall, then press against each other’s skin, tssssssst! Aiya! Very hot you know! So fun, we can just spend hours like that every day, chasing each other, trying to burn each other’s arm. Last time always so fun.” 

“Fun,” I say. I stroke Ma’s hair, the bones of her head taut beneath her scalp.

*

I’ve heard the rubber seed story many times. It’s one of Ma’s favorites. I knew the story even before the Remembering began, for it was one she’d tell me at the dinner table in the old times, before the illness hit, on the nights when things were smooth and easy between us. Feeling good, she’d open a bottle of red wine, try to get me to drink even though she knew I’d say no. After the first glass her eyes would grow glassy and she’d begin to reminisce, telling me stories of before Pa left and before Ah Ma died and before this or that brother got mad with this or that sister and everything was the way it should be, everything was better, everyone was happy. 

When an old memory is recalled, it retraces the synaptic pathway in which it originates. One would think this makes it stronger, more indelibly real, and yet the very act of recall is one of authorship. Each retracing affects the pathway. And thus a memory is a fragile thing, disintegrating a little more each time it is summoned.

Sometimes I liked listening to Ma. It was seductive, this remembering, a reconstruction of the before to make the after bearable. Other times I got angry, couldn’t ignore the way that each time a story was told, something would be embellished to make it ever simpler and kinder, ever fuller of bullshit love and harmony. “Pa was already gambling when you met him,” I’d say. “And Ah Ma had always been bitter that Tai Ma wouldn’t let her go to school. She terrorized your sisters, beat them, Ah Ee is always showing me that triangle scar on her shoulder.”

When I said these things, we’d fight. By then she’d be on her second drink, maybe the third, and the insults would begin. “You don’t know anything, you never even tried to get to know Ah Ma and now she’s dead and it’s too late, you never even learn Hokkien, how can you say you understand anything at all?” At this point, if I backed down, we’d be okay. The night would settle back into a grudging sort of peace—I, contrite; she, wronged but magnanimous. But sometimes I didn’t want peace, I wanted truth. Or maybe I just wanted the pieces of the world to click into the particular pathways I had assembled, just for once. I wanted to be right. I wanted her to say I was right, and of course, she never would. Now, she never could. 

*

“The way the leaves on the trees move,” Ma says. “They think they will be here forever is it?”

She’s looking out the window. An enormous raintree, its trunk whole and unblistered, its canopy luxuriant with green, leaves dry and entire, set aglow by the evening sun. There are still trees here, here being the high areas behind the wall. The scene out the window is one that looks little different from what it might have before the water came: tall building upon tall building; trees, large and old, not unlike the raintree Ma points to; people, everywhere. The trees line the roads, paired neatly with working streetlamps. Overhead, bridges are painted forest green to blend in. We’re far enough from the seawall that we can’t see its grey, looming bulk. Only the swarms of people and glossy rectangular glass boxes on every block give any hint at all that the world has changed. Elevator stations, guarded by uniformed army boys, marked with the underground sectors they serve. The elevators lead to the residential bunkers that crowd the space beneath the earth, inverted skyscrapers that go thirty, forty floors deep. 

They ask for your identification card when you go in. They ask for your identification card when you come out. Exit passes are limited, and even with the system in place, the streets are still overcrowded. Six million people, five and a half of whom are now housed underground in this meagre parcel of dry earth; if everyone were let out at the same time, there would be no place to stand. Yet we are the lucky ones, for at least we live behind the seawall, beyond the reach of the ever-encroaching waves, the famine and disease, the pirate gangs that ply the decommissioned zones.

Still, we cannot help but envy the elite few whose lives continue unchanged, who can afford homes within the last remaining gated enclaves aboveground. Fresh air, the feeling of wind in one’s hair, an unfiltered sky; these, like so many other things, have become luxuries afforded only to the wealthy.

*

Before: It’s not as if the city wasn’t already packed before the water came. 

Singapore, third densest country in the world. Six million on an island thirty-one miles long, seventeen miles wide. Most of us already lived in towers, soaring and densely packed. Back in the old neighbourhood, our flat was on the twenty-eighth floor, high above the tops of trees, close enough to the next block to see into our neighbors’ kitchens. Now we’re on the thirty-fourth floor, only deep beneath the earth. We’re closer than ever before to our neighbors, but there are no windows underground, only ventilation grates and concrete walls.

There is a symmetry to our lives, past height mirrored by present depth. The way we live is a daily reminder that for every action, one equal and opposite waits just around the corner.

We tried to stay in the old flat even after the water came, even after our block was decommissioned. Old Mr. and Mrs. Sulaiman stayed, too, along with the spitting ginger cat that always followed them to the coffeeshop, who turned sweeter and needier as the waters rose. The Lee family, with their brood of six children and noisy canaries they kept in the common corridor, feathers permanently bedraggled from the rain. The young Gupta couple, she pregnant and serene, he perpetually anxious, his cheeks turning hollow as hers filled out. 

We thought we could make it work, all of us banding together, taking turns to catch the water taxi out to the few markets that were still operational, bringing back food and supplies each week. When the electricity went out, we switched to candles and kerosene lamps, the Sulaimans remarking that this was no different to how they used to live before they moved from their kampong into the flats. When the taps in our kitchens ran dry, we bought large plastic kegs of distilled water that we installed in the shared corridor, and the Lees said it was like the common tap they’d line up at in the old wooden shophouses. 

Time seemed to be moving backward, and this did not feel like an entirely unhappy thing. We’d spent so long worrying about what would happen when the waters came, that when they finally did, it was a relief to find ourselves still here. There was a comfort to be had in abstract problems turned concrete, to the hypothetical being made real at last. It narrowed the gaze, turning life into a series of logistical problems that could only be tackled day by day. 

How, for instance, one was to keep meat fresh when the refrigerator no longer worked, and afternoons had turned so hot that food would spoil in its packaging on the way home. We designated Wednesday meat day, and whoever was responsible for the shopping that week would go out in the early morning, as the sun’s first rays were hitting the pale water and the edges of things were still soft and lined with gold. At that time of day, it was cool enough that one could be outside without a sun-blocking umbrella, though dark glasses were encouraged, retina burn being a stealthy and constant threat. We grew accustomed to having our most lavish meals for breakfast—full spreads of pork trotters in dark sauce, chicken thighs fried in prawn paste, cubes of marbled beef stewed soft and sweet and gingery. We gorged ourselves, eating till our bellies ached so we could skip lunch, tolerate plain bread and crackers for dinner. There was no way to keep the food fresh, so we had to eat it all.

When it wasn’t Wednesday, we ate soggy vegetables from cans and tepid slop from army ration packets. Then the river banks in Malaysia and Thailand burst, the farms shut down, and meat tripled in price. Meat day went from once a week to once every two weeks, then once a month, then never. Next, fresh vegetables grew dear, then even rice was rationed. It was like the war all over again, the Sulaimans said, when the Japanese invaded. Back, back, the waters were pulling us back. The Sulaimans’ earliest memories were their parents describing the hollow feeling one had in the stomach after a meal of sweet potatoes in watered down rice gruel, and it was this memory that made them decide they had had enough. They were the first of our group to leave the old neighborhood, taking up the government’s offer of a bunker beneath dry ground, with the promise of steady, subsidized rations. 

No such rations were available to citizens who chose to risk their safety in the decommissioned neighborhoods, for these, in the government’s eyes, were quickly becoming havens for the desperate and unlawful travelling into the country from the region. We saw no desperates or unlawfuls, only Thai families making homes in abandoned flats, Cambodian children hard at work on the water taxis, Indonesian women with unfaltering smiles selling packets of Milo and bandung door to door. The edges of our country were dissolving, and yet those in power insisted on those divisions like never before. 

The Sulaimans left, then the Lees, then the rest of the block, until only us and the Guptas remained. Mrs. Gupta, plagued by nightmares of babies with milky white eyes, was terrified of her child being born underground.

*

“That’s enough for today,” Ms. Tan says when she returns. “We’ll call you to arrange our next appointment.”

It’s the first time they’ve cut short a session. I don’t know what that means, but I know what will happen if we do. I shoot a glance at Ma, still looking out the window at the trees.

“Do you mind if we stay here a while?” I say in a low voice. “And I know you’re very busy, you don’t have to stay, but maybe—maybe he can stay too.”

I point at the assistant by the door, a string bean of a man, pale and tall, with the face of a boy. He looks up from scrolling away on his phone.

“I don’t understand,” Ms. Tan says. Her smile growing forced, her gaze already skittering out the door.

“She’s very sensitive to change,” I say. “She doesn’t like it when things change. All we need is to stay here. All we need is someone to listen to her, until the allotted time is up.”

Ms. Tan’s lips contract into a line. 

“Please,” I say. 

*

Before: In a different time, before the water and the power cuts and the blazing, scorching heat, I asked a doctor what was best for Ma. 

She had just started showing early signs of degeneration, and the diagnosis was tentative but likely. He’d said to keep her in a familiar environment, to keep her physically active and mentally engaged. Even then, he warned, the degeneration would be inevitable. Most of all I should tell her that I loved her, for what Alzheimer’s patients cannot comprehend with their minds, they can feel with their hearts. I did not know how to tell him that we were not a family that said such things, that I did not know what it meant to feel love with one’s heart, except through a splinter one either inflicted on or had inflicted by the other, and its subsequent removal. But the familiar environment, physical and mental engagement, I could do.

And so we developed a routine in that flat on the twenty-eighth floor. Each day we got up at seven, Ma preparing toast and a half-boiled egg for me that I swallowed after a quick cold shower. She knew how to do it exactly how I liked, so that the golden yolks trembled with a certain precise degree of liquid, so the whites were congealed but still faintly transparent. Into this I’d tip the usual dark soy sauce and white pepper, swirl the whole semi-solid mixture around until it formed a sweet, bracing mouthful, then slurp directly from the shallow bowl. I’d pick out five crosswords for her to do, and she’d list the errands she had planned for the day. When I came home from work she’d have Channel 8 on, the opening credits of the latest seven o’clock drama just beginning as I stepped through the door. We’d eat dinner in front of the TV, then she’d show me her completed crosswords, tell me all that she’d completed, all the grievances she’d suffered at the hands of impolite store assistants and rude passersby, complained about her knees getting worse. Around nine, after filling out a sudoku together, we’d retire to our respective rooms.

Ma would get ready for bed on her own. She would go to the bank on her own, she would brew an inky herbal broth over a gas fired stove on her own. The early signs showed, of course, items gone missing, stories repeated, new acquaintances forgotten. But for the most part things were good, things were fine, before the illness got bad.

Before the illness got bad. After Pa left. Before Ah Ma died. After Ma’s diagnosis. 

Before the bunker. After the water.

Before Ma forgets. 

I don’t think about what comes after.

*

“I can stay,” the assistant says. 

Ms. Tan shoots a violent glance at him, then at her watch. She says we can stay for ten more minutes, but not a moment longer, because the next Rememberer will be there soon.

When she leaves, I get Ma to lie down in the reclining chair, and the assistant wires her into the recording helmet once again. I thank the assistant. His name is Teck, he says with a kind smile. Ma doesn’t notice that Teck doesn’t turn the machine on and starts talking right away. Being children, Ma says, she and her cousin used to bathe together even though he was a boy, sharing a large bucket of well water between the two of them. They’d draw the water—she stops, frowns.

“How come not working,” she says. She shakes her head, squints, then stares at me accusingly. “How come not working!”

I turn to Teck. “Please,” I say in a quiet voice. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Teck’s worried eyes widen, his long, pale face seeming to grow paler, longer. He looks at Ma. Her small hands are clenched into fists and she won’t stop blinking, pupils twitching from side to side, as if hoping that each blink will reset reality, take her out of this cold, grey room and back into her Rememberings. Teck sighs.

“Just ten minutes,” he says, and turns the machine on.

Soon Ma’s back amongst the soaring rubber trees, feet trampling through unruly ferns and twisting tree roots, burning seeds clasped hot like beating hearts in the palm of each hand.

*

The Remembering kicked off around the time we moved underground. A flyer was waiting for us inside our bunker, glossy and tri-fold, a picture of a grey-haired woman sitting in an armchair, a rapt audience of children at her feet. Do you have stories to tell? The brochure said. What do you remember?

I’d heard about the project, of course. Everyone had. Our final, last ditch attempt to fix things as a nation. Once it became clear the water was inevitable, that the biofuels and levies were never going to be enough, the research grew scattered and fantastical, desperate and hare-brained. Floating cities, artificial islands, entire countries elevated on stilts. Perhaps it’s unfair to call them hare-brained, since out of them came the bunkers, and the bunkers saved millions of lives. Situated in the lowest risk areas of the island—that is, the middle. Furthest from the coast, highest above the sea. A wall was built around the area, a fifteen kilometre radius, a citadel of dry land, with the unsaid understanding that everything outside of it would eventually be abandoned.

Everything was about the bunkers, and so when the Remembering project was revealed, it came as a surprise to most. The government had been working on it in secret, the brightest minds in the nation harnessed to develop a machine learning program like no other. The idea was simple. Climate change being too big a problem for the human mind to solve, too complex and multi-variate for scientists or politicians to grapple with, so the thinking went, salvation could only come from the mind of a machine. 

Hence the Remembering: memories gathered from those who still recalled the world as it once was, offered as data points to the program, god of algorithms. All the data was valuable, all of it, for that was the beauty of machine learning. What our limited human minds saw as insignificant could possess great meaning. Answers found in that which our flawed and mortal souls could only perceive as randomness.

Ma picked the flyer up and stared at it for a long time, touching her finger to each of the faces of the children. It had always pained her that I’d never had any, but by this time the disease had advanced enough that she was starting to forget it did.

“I want to do this,” she said, and I didn’t see why not. It worried me to think of Ma underground all day, without the Guptas to check in on or the tops of trees to look at. We had neighbors here, too, hundreds of them, but everyone kept their doors shut, per the protocol. An open or incorrectly sealed door triggered an alarm that involved a dispatch team and a not insignificant fine for the forgetful bunker dweller. All this for our own safety—the warren could flood at any time, and our doors were the only things keeping us safe. In any case, no one wanted to linger in those corridors, fluorescent lit and with the stale smell of recirculated air. 

We filled in the forms for Ma to take part. I worried her condition would disqualify her, but she was only required to remember up to 2020, that is to say, around the time the world got bad. It was the last ten years that Ma had trouble with. Her memory seemed to slip away the higher the waters rose.

“Can she remember her childhood?” The woman on the phone asked.

“Can she,” I said.

In the beginning, it turned out Ma was so good at Remembering that they increased her sessions to twice, then three times a week. At first it was the buildings they were interested in, so Ma regaled them with the particulars of every single home she’d lived in, from the attap house in a kampong that farmed hefty, turgid pigs, to the wooden shophouse with no ceiling, shared with three other noisy families, to the small but shockingly modern one bedroom flat, with electricity and piped water, this, shared with just one other family, to the first home she’d ever had that was truly her own, the larger, even more modern flat she’d moved into after getting married, that had its own bathroom and kitchen. Then they wanted to know about the schools she attended, how many students were in each class, what the classrooms looked like, where the teachers went during breaks. Clothing, friends, jobs, what market she bought her fish at, how much she paid for it.

Ma was so good at Remembering that a few months in, she received a certificate of appreciation, signed by the Deputy Minister himself, recognizing her for valuable services rendered. I put her in her best dress—a navy cheongsam with silver embroidered flowers that once fit her like a glove, but now hung loose as a shift—and together, we attended the prize ceremony. It was ordinary citizens like Ma, they said during the opening speech, who would enable us to overcome these dark times as a nation. Ma didn’t like the ceremony. The auditorium was too cold, she said, and the air conditioning made her eyes hurt. She didn’t understand why she had to go up on the stage, and thought that she had done something wrong that she was being reprimanded for. It was like in secondary school days, she said, where misbehaving students would be caned publicly on stage. I accepted the certificate on her behalf.

Prize ceremony aside, the Remembering was a miracle for Ma. Her moodiness disappeared, and while she still didn’t know certain things like Pa being dead and not just missing, or me being divorced and hence living with her, she stopped, for the most part, asking about them. She took what she didn’t know placidly, without overturning bowls of soup or dashing table lamps to the floor, instead merely saying ‘Oh?’. The Remembering sessions calmed her, gave her tumultuous mind peace. Though we dwelled for the most part like moles beneath the earth, she lived, three times a week, in the dry, old world, a world with grass and trees, where family was loving and neighbors were kind, and there was enough food, water and space for all.

*

Today, Ma disappears. I get home to the bunker at seven in the evening as usual, unlock the usual complex series of locks and seals on the concrete outer door, pass into the safety chamber, then the inside door—three inches of heavy metal, our last line of defense should everything else fail—only to find the living room empty and silent. No upbeat themed music from the TV, no wafting plastic scent of rations warming on the two-burner stove, no pile of completed crosswords, neatly stacked in the center of the coffee table. No Ma. I check the bedroom, the bathroom, but the bunk beds are empty, the toilet unoccupied. There are no other rooms.

I find her, finally, back in the safety chamber. There is a narrow, tall cupboard on the wall between the metal inside door and the concrete outer door, and there Ma is, standing muttering and pale-faced, pressed up against fuse box and gas pipes.

It’s been two weeks, and still I haven’t received the call to schedule Ma’s next session. I can’t figure out what we’ve done wrong—if it’s what happened in the last session, Teck having betrayed us, or if Ma’s memories have simply ceased to be useful. Each time I call the Ministry they tell me Ms. Tan isn’t available, and that they will call me back when she is.

“Where were you going,” I ask, voice steady at first, but then she doesn’t answer, only continues muttering, and I shout my question again. “Where did you think you were going?”

“Ms. Lim, she says. Ms. Lim Hwee Kim, please step on the stage! Careful, careful, ah, wah, so pretty, ravishing, step up, step up, careful! Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Lim Hwee Kim!”

Is this a memory? I can’t tell. She’s told me before about being scouted off the street for a Miss Singapore pageant, but I never got the details other than Ah Ma forbidding her from participating once she found out. Is she in a dream, a reverie of what might had been? Or is there more to the story than she’s ever told me: had she disobeyed Ah Ma, snuck out secretly, joined the pageant anyway, won, even, and concealed it from everyone her entire life? The last person she’d tell is me, of course. In all her stories to me she is the paragon of filial piety, a perfect, obedient daughter, one I will never live up to.

Ma’s disappearance confirms one thing: the illness is getting worse. She’s never tried to leave the bunker without me before. It’s a third the size of our old flat, but I’ve crammed in all our furniture, put up our family photos, the tearaway calendar she likes, the round plastic clock with the incredibly loud second hand. It feels enough like home, and for the most part, I think she thinks it is. She hasn’t questioned the lack of windows or the ventilation hum. The first week we moved here she asked about the Guptas constantly, but hasn’t now, in months. I showed her how the locks and seals on the two doors work, how the second won’t open unless the first is closed and so on, but she appeared not to be listening and showed no inclination of wanting to go out at all. And so, she only leaves the bunker two to three times a week—as many times as Rememberings are scheduled. At least that’s how it’s been in the past year that we’ve lived here, in the past year up till now. 

After I get Ma settled in front of the TV, warmed vegetable curry over rice on a tray on her lap, I call the Ministry again. They’re closed now, so I leave a long, angry message about social responsibility, simple politeness, and basic competence. How do they expect to reverse time, to reconstruct our world as it was before, if they show such utter disorganization in the simple data collection phase? “My mother is aged,” I say, “and still going out of her way to do a service to the nation. The least the nation could do in return is return our calls.” 

I feel better after I put down the phone, but the next morning, the Ministry calls back to say that Ma’s been cut from the program, and that is why no sessions have been arranged. Her service has been very much appreciated, and a certificate of exceptional contribution will be coming by mail within three business days.

*

I’ve never Remembered myself. From what I understand, the wires create the world in the mind’s eye of the Rememberer as they speak, plunging them into the reality that they recall into being. It’s a sophisticated data gathering tool, designed to glean input directly from the Rememberer’s synapses and then feed the images, sights, and sounds back to them directly, so as to stimulate a deeper quality of recollection.

There are things I want to say to Ma that she will not understand now. Things like: I’m sorry I fought you until you couldn’t fight anymore. That I know now that what I saw as a battle of wills was really a battle of love.

I don’t remember what our strife was about anymore. I know the material details: my childhood swinging wildly between extreme strictness and borderline neglect; the occasional, mild acts of violence; her hatred and torment of Chor Seng—your wastrel husband—as she called him, as he frustratingly turned out to be. Me running away, to a different country, a different life, because I thought that everything she stood for was wrong. I can recite them by heart, these old stories of love and hurt, and yet the more I go over them in my mind, the more they feel like they happened to someone else. They certainly don’t feel as dire as I once thought. In fact they are embarrassing, mundane in the cold light of passed time. Where the anger use to dwell in me there is nothing but a dent—smooth, hollow, soft darkness pooled under the awning of a bruised collarbone.

*

Today I come home to silence again, no synthesized TV violin when the concrete outer door thuds open. In the safety chamber, I check the utility closet before even going into the bunker—I’ve found her there three times now in the past week alone—but it is empty except for a tangle of wires, no Ma. I unlock the metal inner door with dread in my stomach, knowing that this is yet another new low, another thing to get used to. Finding her in the utility closet has become its own routine in the past month since the Remembering sessions have stopped, a new normal to which we have both become accustomed. But now—no TV, no closet.

The metal door swings open and I see why the TV isn’t on. It’s on the floor, broken glass strewn over the concrete, catching the fluorescent light in a cruel way. The coffee table’s tipped over, too, cushions from the sofa ripped and oozing stuffing. All the pictures have been pulled off the wall. It looks like a crime scene, but in the middle of it all is Ma, sitting on the floor, cradling air in her hands. She’s shaking, her bone-thin arms trembling in the girlish off-shoulder blouse she picked out that morning. When she looks up at me, eyes red-rimmed and feral, my heart squeezes so hard I too want to smash everything that hasn’t already been broken. 

Instead I go to her, press my body to her side, wrap my arms around her cold, thin form. I feel the knobs of her elbows dig into my side, smell the familiar papery salt of her hair, rest my forehead against her cheek. She places a hand on the back of my head, and my eyes grow hot. I know I’m meant to be comforting her, but I can’t help feel like I am the child. Which, of course, I am.

“How come here got no windows,” Ma says. “What happen to our flat? Where are the windows? Where is Mrs Gupta? She give birth already? I thought I was dying. Like nightmare like that. Cannot breathe. I thought you left me here to die.”

I squeeze her tighter. How to explain that we’re thirty floors beneath the earth, how to say that our flat might be underwater by now, that I have no idea where the Guptas are or what happened to them but in all likelihood, if they stayed put, they have either starved or drowned to death.

“I won’t leave you,” I say instead. “I’ll never leave you.”

“I want to go home,” Ma says. 

“We are home. This is home. Look!” I say, pointing to the uncomfortable rattan couch she bought for our flat three decades ago, the knick-knacks gathered on trips to Australia, little ceramic owls with yellow eyes and cheerful gnomes in old-timey overalls. Hanging by the door: the wooden sign with ugly purple flowers weaving their way around the word home.

“I want to go home,” Ma says. “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.”

*

I take a leave of absence from my job at the textile distribution firm. They’ll keep the position for me for a week, but beyond that, no promises can be made. “It’s the way things are now,” my supervisor says apologetically. “You understand.”

I do. Nine job-seekers to every vacant position, record unemployment, entire industries brought to their knees by current conditions—I’ve seen the headlines, over and over. The only positions really open these days are in engineering and crisis response, and neither are skills I possess. Besides, I don’t want a job that has anything to do with the water.

I call the Ministry again and again. At first they put me on hold repeatedly, then the line clicks begins clicking off after just one ring. I try calling at different times of day, early morning, mid-afternoon, evening, middle of the night. All to the same result.

After Ma’s episode, I put the living room back in order, throwing out the trashed television and torn cushions, sweeping the broken glass into a paper bag that’s sitting by the door now, the only remaining sign of her outburst. But something’s changed. Ma won’t do her crosswords anymore, only stares at them blankly when I put them in her lap. It doesn’t even work when I half-fill them with the wrong words; normally she’d be jumping at the opportunity to correct me, to show me how it’s done, but now all she does is color the squares in till the pencil lead’s down to a nub.

*

I put in a request for a second-hand bike helmet and electrical wires. They’re delivered with our next batch of weekly rations. It’s a child’s helmet, bright pink with glittery stars printed on its plastic shell, but it will do all the same. I attach the wires to its base and twist them into a crude simulation of the device Teck puts on Ma at each Remembering session. Ma lies down in the tatty old recliner in our living room and I place the child’s bike helmet over her head, taping the loose end of each wire to her cheek and jaw.

“Tell me about your cousin Ah Eng,” I say. “Where did he live? What did you do when you visited him?”

Ma’s face lights up. “Ah Eng,” she says. “Ah Eng live near the temple, Telok Ayer there, very busy you know, a lot of people—"

She stops, frowns. “How come not working?”

“It’s working,” I say. “Ah Eng lives near the temple, where Chinatown is today, right? Above the medicine shop, where he worked with his father?”

Ma’s shaking her head. “Not working,” she says. “You think I stupid?”

“Tell me about Ah Eng,” I say, and tears spill down my cheeks. “At least try. You’re not even trying.”

Ma’s still now, and I can’t read her face. Her eyes have a hard, flinty look to them, her mouth is a small, wretched knot of flesh. She turns to me. The glitter on the helmet flashes prettily under the fluorescent light, the pink stars are silly and sad, her hair’s caught in the tape. I want to take the whole ridiculous contraption off.

“When you were a baby,” she says. “You never cry. Such a good girl, we can bring you everywhere, your Pa and I. Go to restaurant, go walk at the beach, just bring you in the pram. You just lie there, always smiling, eating your hands, saliva everywhere. Everyone say you so good. The best baby. Best daughter.” 

It’s the first time in a long, long time that Ma’s remembered anything from my childhood. Suddenly I notice that the ceiling, the walls, the floor are all the same seamless grey, that depending on how the light hits, it is hard to tell where one plane begins and another ends. Or how large or small the room we’re in really is. I suddenly become aware of how far from the surface of the earth we are. Safe from the water, yes, but also from the light of the sun, the touch of the wind.

And yet we are the lucky ones. Every day, there are stories of the wretched souls crowding the decommissioned zones outside the seawalls, horrific stories of plundered water taxis, ruthless pirate gangs, squatters crushed under the weight of wet, crumbling buildings. Every day, the news reminds how lucky we are to be alive. And yet. 

“Why don’t you get dressed, Ma,” I say. “Let’s go out.” 

She blinks, and the sad, knowing look falls from her face.

“Go where,” she says, and she is an old, tired owl once again, resigned and confused.

“The Ministry. We have a session, remember?”

She frowns but allows me to take the bike helmet off and goes to get dressed. While she’s gone, I call the Ministry again. It rings twice, then goes to the automated message I’ve heard countless times now. The Ministry values your call and regret that we are presently unable to attend to you. Please try again later.

Ma appears, a vision in yellow. She has on a bright linen top she used to only wear on holiday, a maroon brooch in the shape of a bee, cobalt slacks. She’s combed her thin, shoulder-length hair with a little water, and her lips are dabbed with her favorite mauve lipstick. She’s smiling, she looks better than she has in weeks.

“Let’s go,” I say. As we leave, I grab the paper bag containing the broken TV glass. It clinks delicately, a windchime in a windless place. I remember picking the shards from the floor the night before, weighing each piece in the palm of my hand, testing their pointed edges with the soft pads of my fingertips.

*

Here we are in the hallway, long, airless and bright. Here we are in the elevator lobby, scanning our identity cards in the reader. Here is the elevator. B34. Two people already inside, sallow strangers who nod and look away. Here we step in. Despite the elevator’s sleek glass and metal, the smell of dust and damp only intensifies. Here we go, up and up, Ma clinging to the banister pale-faced as if she hasn’t been in here hundreds of times before. Here I am, comforting her with one hand, holding the bag of glass in the other. We passed the rubbish chute on the way to the elevator lobby, and I did not stop. Here I am, thinking about the possibilities for all this glass.

The light changes, growing warm and soft. The ache inside me is a bruise being pressed. When the elevator doors open, it is almost too much to bear. The smell of dust and damp turns to salt laced with the sweetness of trees, the acrid smoke of cars. The ventilation hum gives way to the pliant cries of oriole birds and the quiet lapping of distant waves everywhere. The wind and sun touch my skin, and I can taste the late morning on the tip of my tongue.

“IC,” the army boy at the elevator station says. “Purpose of exit?”

I hand over our identity cards. “Recreational,” I say.

He beeps them with his hand scanner and reads the screen.

“Please note you only have two recreational exits left for the month,” he says. “Any other exits will have to be applied and paid for three days in advance.”

I thank him and we leave. Ma asks why I used a recreational pass when we get free exit passes from the Ministry for Rememberings, but I distract her with a question about the umbrellas, which we have forgotten. It’s only a short walk to the bus, and we both have SPF 70+ on, so we keep going.

I walk slowly. Each step is a sensory overload, the dry, clean pavement beneath our feet a miracle to behold. The broad raintrees that line the roads tower overhead, their rustling canopies glowing with light. Cars pass by, government vehicles or private ones belonging to the extremely wealthy, who maintain residences aboveground at exorbitant cost. We pass one such complex, a collection of slate towers with vertical gardens spilling down their sides, armed guards flanking trickling fountains at their high iron gates. 

We’re waiting for the bus, and then we’re on it. I marvel at the ordinariness of the morning, the people pressed tight around us in shoes and pants and dresses all going places of their own. You can tell who lives aboveground by who is on their phones and who isn’t. I recognize those on exit passes. Like me, their faces are filled with greed, straining with hunger for the sunlit world. Our eyes dart from outside to inside to outside again, linger on the faces of strangers, skitter across the landscape feverishly. You can almost see our ears pricked, our nostrils flared. Our spit-slick mouths hang just slightly open.

Ma and I disembark in front of the Ministry. The entrance, a set of tall glass doors that open into an expansive lobby, is usually crowded with silver-haired Rememberers and their relatives or case managers, men and women upright or with canes, bright or cloudy-eyed. It’s usually a fight to get in line to check in. But today the lobby is mostly empty as we step inside, with only a few Rememberers sitting on plush sofas in the waiting area.

“How can I help you?” the receptionist asks.

“Checking in Ms. Lim Hwee Kim,” I say.

My skin is sensitive, raw, like I’ve been out in the sun too long, and perhaps I have. It is as if I can feel every single hair on my skin moving in its follicle, as if each follicle is connected directly to my brain. Every light breeze, every accidental jostle amplified and overwhelming.

The woman types, stares the screen, types again, stares.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have her in the system,” she says. “You must be mistaken.”

I think of our home. Our old home, my childhood home, the breezy flat on the twenty-eighth floor, out in the decommissioned zone. The living room, where we watched soaps and variety shows together each night. The kitchen where Ma made pork trotters so soft they melted on your tongue, cubes of chicken crackling with sweet sesame glaze. Ma’s bedroom, where as a girl I’d stumble to in the middle of the night when woken by a nightmare. Crawl into the warm nest that smelled of her, a smell I could disappear into, a smell that did not end where I began. Those rooms are empty now. Waterlogged and rotting, sinking into the sea.

“Why?” Ma says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. I ask the woman to check again.

I know we don’t have an appointment. I know Ma’s not in there, not anymore. I just want to be here a little longer. To stand in this lobby with a sense of purpose, to participate in the world in some insignificant but visible way. I want the receptionist to enter Ma’s name into the search function on her database again and again. I want the cameras overhead to record our presence, to have a security officer in some darkened room somewhere see our figures flit across the grainy screens. 

I’m lying, that’s not all I want. I want our lives back. I want our world back, dry and whole, unblistered and perfect, the way things were before. Before, before, before. I don’t need you to tell me these are impossible things. 

Not for Ma though. 

Ma can Remember. She can have her childhood again, her cousins, the thick undergrowth and soaring rubber trees. I can’t go back in time, I can’t be the best daughter, but I can give her this.

The paper bag is heavy in my left hand. It clinks as I reach into it, touch the cold, smooth chunks. A jagged edge scratches my palm, and the pain is both a reminder and a promise. I test each piece, picking them up, putting them down, feeling their shapes with the tips of my fingers. Eventually I find one that will do: a little larger than my hand, elongated with a sharp, eager tip. I take it out, step behind the receptionist’s desk. The Rememberers on the sofa are drowsing, no one else is in line. Only Ma sees me grab the receptionist’s arm, press the glass to her wrist. 

“Check again,” I say.

---

Rachel Heng was born and raised in Singapore, and currently lives in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novels The Great Reclamation (forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2022) and Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018). Read our Q&A with Rachel here, and visit her website here. 

Banner image: Flickr user Barbara Eckstein