Christian Yeo Xuan

The Christians

Every Tuesday, the Christians come to visit. 

Heng doesn’t actually know where they come from. He calls them the Christians because they declare themselves to be exactly that, Christians. They come, Chinese and wide-leg-trousered, with accented English mushed with great effort to sound more local, more salt of the earth. They come bearing bottles of water and apple juice, sticks of fried food like Taiwan sausage, squid head, chicken karaage, even fishballs. Word on the street is that it’s good shit; not as good as the Muslims, who come with rice and homecooked nasi padang and paper plates and a disposable fork and spoon, but it’s good shit nonetheless. To get a stick of fried food and a bottle of either water or apple juice—though with indignation followed by plaintive need you can get both—you just have to let them pray over you. The Muslims come on Thursday, so Tuesdays are the territory of the Christians. The Christians come, in other words, bearing gifts, and that’s not something Heng would hold against anyone.

Heng doesn’t mind the praying all that much. His father used to call Christianity the white man’s religion. Heng doesn’t remember what his father looked like. When he looks at photos of him, the ones remaining on his phone, it looks like he’s looking at a stranger. Even if he’s the kid in the photo, blowing out a birthday candle, or kicking a football by a playground, clothed only in a diaper. He doesn’t remember what his father’s voice sounds like. When Heng thinks of his father he thinks of boats on a river, somewhere in Malaysia, meshed in a thick, low-hanging fog so that he can barely make out anything but the idea of boats. His father is fog. Heng is old. The Christians have fried food. If it’s the white man’s religion, so be it. A life is a life however you’ve got to fuck or finesse it. 

Heng’s favourite Christian is a young man called Roland. 

“Hi, uncle, I’m Roland,” Roland says. 

“Hi Roland, I’m uncle,” Heng says. 

Roland laughs. It’s the first time Roland is meeting Heng. Roland and his posse have stopped by Heng on their pilgrimage. Some of them are carrying bright yellow boxes. The boys have long, stylish hair and the girls are elegantly made-up.

 Heng rubs his eyes. His fingers stink of cigarettes. He recoils briefly from his own smell. “Boy, you have a stupid name.” 

Roland laughs again, shifting his weight onto one foot. “What’s your name, Uncle?” 

“I am Heng.” 

Roland looks concerned. He pushes his black-framed spectacles up his nose and squats down, eye-level now, with Heng. His wide-leg trousers flap in the wind. Heng will never understand young people. Why wear trousers at all if there’s going to be wind up your balls?

Heng watches Roland wave the others on subtly, his hand behind his back.

“How are you today, uncle?” 

Heng yawns. He stretches out his hands like an otter. Roland moves to help Heng up, but Heng waves him away. 

“Tell me your life story, ah boy.” 

“Of course, uncle.” 

Heng watches Roland’s eyes brighten. Heng knows what’s about to come. Heng knows Roland has prepared for this moment with his leaders. Heng has overheard these briefings. He has heard them pray over each other in unintelligible gibberish, laying hands on shoulders. Let them come to know Christ, they say to each other. Eyes shut tight against the darkening night. It is an opportunity for rehearsal and execution; a chance to go into a trance state, to convert a soul lost and bereft, unmoored, he’s sure they think, by vagabond wanderings.

“My father died,” Roland begins. “I was lost and alone, and I didn’t know what to turn to. I was so incandescent—angry—and I got into fights. I was an alcoholic, I dropped out of school and I was headed for a life of loneliness, destruction, and sin when my friend told me about Heart of God Church, and in that moment, I felt my soul—” 

“My father also die,” Heng says. 

“Ah—he died too? I’m sorry, uncle.” 

“Never mind boy, faster pray for me,” Heng says. “Meet God means happy right?” 

“It changed my life. God is the Alpha and the Omega. It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship. He’s my good, good Father. I am blessed to know and be known by Him.” 

“Hong gan. Sounds good. I need prayer. Give me water and apple juice and Taiwan sausage. Then you pray for me. You pray for the bad things I do to be wash away.” 

Roland pauses. “Uncle, can only take water or apple juice.” 

Heng shrieks. “You want to make uncle choose? I sleep on cardboard, boy.” 

Roland sighs. He looks at Heng, then gives him everything he asked for. Fear and pity and pride and compassion and disgust. “What do you want me to pray for you for?” 

Heng shakes his head. “I been to prison, boy. Uncle seen it all. Uncle seen everything.” 

“Like what?” 

“How you think my father die?” 

**

They come to the Bras Brasah rooftop, the Christians. Heng’s stomping ground is squirreled away below a bunch of housing blocks but above a shopping mall so old-time it doesn’t even have air-conditioning, what with its printer shops and second-hand bookstores and massage parlours and Jack’s Place chicken chop lunch sets and iced milk tea. It is an old place, caught between the old and the new, next to the national library and near Bugis Junction and Bugis Street. Bugis Junction hosts the dating lives of young Singaporeans. Bugis Street used to be where Heng would watch transwomen strip on stage so he could stuff dollar bills into their bras. Now Bugis Street also hosts the dating lives of young Singaporeans.

Heng did not always live on the Bras Brasah rooftop. Once, he had a normal life. Then came Tampines hub. Ten years at the hub, and then he was a runner for a brothel in Geylang, living out of a small utility shed next to where the girls made their cash. His Geylang place got busted. Tampines hub became policed. He started having to relocate every few hours as the police chased him away. Heng moved to the Bras Brasah rooftop because he didn’t like the sandflies at Changi Beach. Still, he isn’t always able to stay here too long, because sometimes the police come anyway to get him to move somewhere else. Three hours of sleep is good for him. Heng can’t remember the last time he slept in, really slept in, on a cardboard bed. It has something to do with the rooftop being a high, windy place. Not having rain belt down on him is good enough. The only thing about secluded places is that sometimes other people steal his things; but he knows now enough to recognise crazy, who will steal from him and who won’t.

One time, three, five, seven years ago, he walked into the sea to try and kill himself. Sadly, he lacked the willpower to stay submerged below the surface. He tried holding his breath, but just floated up. He tried swimming a reverse vertical breaststroke, as in scooping water on either side of him, making arcs in the water like a dove, such that he was actively fighting against the water. He failed. Then he tried filling his pockets with sand and rocks, but that, too, failed. He emptied his pockets once water flooded his throat and nose, and then his head crashed out from the water, spluttering and alive. Eventually Heng emerged, wet with seawater and humiliation, skulking back to his towel. His bare feet left a trail of footprints in the sand, erased by the incoming tide almost as quickly as it formed.

Heng wants validation. He knows that to be true. He wants to be more than a myth, an old man so miserable he can’t even commit suicide properly. He wants to be known for discipline, for being able to live or die by his own hand. If his life has gone mostly unobserved, he can at least make a spectacle of its cessation.

**

Roland sees Heng every Tuesday. Roland always gives Heng apple juice and water. Roland always prays for Heng. 

Some weeks the prayers are repetitive, generic, almost as if Roland has them ready to go. Lord, deliver Heng from his temptation, Lord, let Heng overcome the darkness, Lord, let Heng worship at your feet. Other weeks the prayers are hyper specific and targeted. Roland is inquisitive, in a way that belies his youth.

“Uncle, have you killed many people?” Roland asks. 

Roland is sitting on the floor, by Heng. He has come to speak to Heng alone. The other Christians have gone to massage the grievances of other old men on the Bras Brasah rooftop.

“Just one,” Heng says. 

Roland doesn’t say anything. He raises his eyebrows.

“You want to ask me how I did it.” 

“No, I don’t really want—you can keep that to yourself.” 

“First he attack me,” Heng says, “so I respond. Then after we fight I take kettle and fill with cooking oil, and sugar. I learn from my friends at Changi. That time we call it morning coffee.” 

“Does that kill a man?” 

“Then I chop his neck with parang.”

Roland whistles through his teeth. He doesn’t say anything, but he sips from his iced coffee. Heng sips from his too, the one Roland brought with him. “Yes they catch me,” Heng says, “no one can escape like that in Singapore.” 

Heng falls silent. He doesn’t want to tell this young man about his days in the tiny room, this young man with intelligent eyes and downward-sloping eyebrows, who appears to him week after week like a visitation. How he watched the shadows on the wall all day and time itself seemed to mildew, the jobs in prison to pass the time and make extra cash, being served divorce papers by his wife inside, the occasional releases to attend court until the final judgement was released. How he’d had to call his legal aid officer from a payphone during late afternoon breaks before dinner, the conversations limited to short bursts where the person on the other line was impatient and barely conversant. How his two children, a boy and a girl—they must be big by now, Heng thinks, man and woman—never spoke to him again, his ex stopping him from contacting them. They’d moved addresses and changed their numbers so that even if he tried to find them he couldn’t. How it didn’t matter anyway because he’d spent so long in prison—released, anyway, on good behaviour—so that by the time he came out the city was unrecognisable and his old place at Dakota Crescent had a new family living in it. All of a sudden he was an old man, and time had kept on running and the sickly, stopped-up feeling in his chest failed to evaporate. In fact, Heng feels that it is still there.

“Ah boy, how is your father?” Heng asks. 

Roland hesitates. “He’s okay. He’s like the rest.” 

Heng looks down and starts chewing on his fishballs. He doesn’t look at Roland, he lets the silence sit. 

“He’s, you know, a gaslighter,” Roland starts abruptly, and then once he starts he can’t seem to stop. Roland traverses the turf of his childhood—he talks freely, it seems, because he thinks Heng won’t understand much of what he’s saying. Roland talks about the caning, the long nights at the law firm, the unimaginative air stewardess turned mistress, the purse strings dangled as bait. As Roland talks, spit gathers on the corner of his bottom lip. Heng stares at it. He wants to reach out and clear it. He wants to remove it with his hands. He does. He reaches out and ever so gently thumbs off the spit. 

To Heng’s surprise, Roland doesn’t recoil. His eyes just hold Heng’s, like a deer’s. Unblinking. Roland keeps talking. Heng puts the thumb—spit and all—in his mouth. Now Roland notices. Roland stops talking about family trips to the zoo in his youth. Roland was somewhere else, he was even looking somewhere else while talking, but now he’s all here, in the present. Heng can feel his heart pounding in his chest. What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Roland says. Heng cries, fat globs dripping down into his cheek bristles. Heng has not tasted someone else’s spit in a long time. He does not remember if this is what love constitutes, but he cannot remember when he last had to ponder that question. 

**

Roland doesn’t come back to see Heng for months, maybe a year. It’s hard for Heng to track time; days slip into months into years into hours. Time passes. The monsoon comes and goes. 

Heng’s memories get foggier but he doesn’t know how to arrest that slide. He concentrates on each visit to collect his monthly $300 at the Social Services Office, the shifts he gets helping out at the drinks stall at the Tuas tuckshop. He keeps his change handy, but sometimes he has to ask for more. Bus fares are not as they once were. The days at the tuckshop are best—he gets free lunches and dinners from the other stores. As he looks out the window of the bus he lets his thoughts travel, slink over the passing street signs and the buildings changing before his very eyes. He goes backward into the past, over the ships that have long since sailed, and into the future, where he dreams up a home with a woman tending to a pot of ABC soup over the stove, even children running to him and hugging his legs. Is he still a child? Does he have to resign himself to the things of fantasy?

“Uncle, I’m back.” 

A gruff voice. Heng looks up, stops picking the scabs on his legs. He looks up, and it’s Roland, standing over him, holding a few sticks of fried sotong head from Old Chang Kee. It’s a rainy day, and Roland’s hair is wet. He has a new earring, a tight silver one, though only one sits on his left ear. 

“Can I sit down?” Roland asks. He bites his lower lip.

Heng shrugs, gestures vaguely in front of him. Roland sits. They each take a stick of sotong head, rip off chunks of meat with their teeth, the detritus falling onto their shorts, which they each brush off. 

Neither of them says anything while they eat. Heng wonders what Roland wants. It feels like no time has passed since he was last visited by the boy, though he knows at some level that much has. Finally Roland puts his sticks into the plastic bag he brought them in, takes Heng’s as well, then looks up and looks at him. His gaze is the same, locked-in, unblinking. Heng has spent his whole life reading people but this boy is inscrutable. 

“Uncle, I want to pray for you,” Roland says. “What do you want me to pray for?” 

“Okay,” Heng says. He looks at his fingers. He picks at his legs. He looks up. “Pray I know what to do next. What come after.” 

Roland nods. He reaches out and grabs Heng’s hands in his own. Heng flinches but doesn’t pull away. Roland’s hands are soft and warm. They hold his like expensive fish at the market, sea bass or red snapper. Roland closes his eyes. Heng closes his too.

Lord, I pray for my Uncle Heng. I thank you that he is your child, that you love him deeply, that you hold him in your hands. I thank you for bringing him into my life, that you brought us together. Lord, you love your children entirely. You love your children how a shepherd loves his sheep, you make us lie down in green pastures. You lead us by still waters. You take us out of the wilderness and make the walls of Jericho come down, Lord, it all belongs to you.

Heng closes his eyes so tight a constellation of stars light up. As if it’s the only thing he can do, he leans over, and reaches out and, sliding his hand over Roland’s shorts, unbuttons and unzips it. Roland’s breath catches but he doesn’t stop. Heng pulls his shorts and underwear down, and takes Roland’s cock out. He holds it in his hands, considers it.

Lord, you know the life Uncle Heng has led, you know how he has thirsted for a home. Lord, you know the hole he is in, you climb down and are there with him. O Jehovah-Jireh, O merciful God, you are there with us in the suffering, you were there with Uncle Heng as he killed his father, as he was in prison, as he loved and lost, as he moved from place to place until he is here now. Lord, come and meet your child. Lord, come and meet your beloved again and show him the good news, show him there are no irredeemable people, everything is cleansed in your name. The only home there is is in you. The only home there is is in you. The only home.

Heng is jerking Roland off now, profusely, with smooth, fluid motions that accelerate organically. He hasn’t done this since the man he loved with his whole heart, the man after he had done his time, the second one, the long one, the man who had seen his broken wing and sought to nurse him back to health who, in the end, had himself died, of a long-running battle with dialysis that they’d run out of money to treat. Roland; the only man he had ever loved. All of it blends together, melds and bleeds. As Roland’s breath syncopates with Heng’s strokes, the prayer increases in tempo, Heng is suddenly in the hospice again, palliative care the only thing they’d had left after Medishield was exhausted, their savings, their favours, doing sudoku in the last days, playing I-spy and drawing little picture notes on each other’s hands. Roland is praying and everything’s coming up stars, Heng’s hands are his hands, there is still time.

 God of the sacred, God of the mundane. God of the wicked, God of the lame. Mighty God, El Shaddai, come and be with us again. Elohim, come and meet your sons. Come and meet us here, the real thing, come and tarry with us in our becoming. We are here, O God, to meet with your embrace. 

Now Heng is crying, his forehead against Roland’s. Roland’s eyes are his eyes, and his eyes are his father’s. Now he’s on a walk with them all, he gets to say everything he wants to say. He doesn’t have to let only the buildings hear him, those long bus rides. Roland is circling the end but doesn’t seem able to land. Then finally, in quick breath, Roland comes, and it sprays all over Heng’s hands. Heng heaves, at last, like a wounded bear. He smiles.

Amen.

Amen.

**

The next day, Heng goes back to the sea. He fills his pockets with all the rocks he can find. His pockets bulge and blister but they do not break. This time, he doesn’t fail.