Singapore Noir

They drove west. It was a Thursday night in the rainy season, unremarkable in every way, the streets swept with wind and rain, and Ryu didn’t ask again where the driver intended to take him. It seemed so innocuous and unexceptional that he felt embarrassed to ask something that would make him appear a rube. He sat back and enjoyed a ride into Geylang, and soon they were passing along streets of what looked like suburban villas and shop houses.

Some of these were clearly brothels, with dark red lights and a couple of girls sitting outside on metal stools, watching the cars floating by. So that was what the driver had in mind. And yet he was neither surprised nor put off. His curiosity was lightly aroused. The area away from the white neon of the main streets seemed calm and matter-of-fact, and the red-light houses with their girls gave off no energy that could be interpreted as menacing. When they came to a quiet halt in front of one, halfway down a leafy street, he got out with a falsely cheery wave and wondered what commission the driver was given for bringing naïve expats there. The man, holding open the door for him, told him that he would wait for him and take him home afterward for a set price, to which Ryu agreed at once. There didn’t seem any point complicating things unnecessarily.

He went up to an entrance where an older woman sat reading a paper by a garage light, and when he had gone through the bead curtain into the foyer there was a quiet commotion, a pleasurable rustle, and a mama-san appeared with a kettle in one hand and a pair of glasses wrapped around her neck with a glittering string. He had to use his awkward, slightly broken English to make it understood that he did not have much time. That it was his first time, however, was easy enough to disguise.

The room was half-dark, with a Guan Yin shrine in a corner and a walnut coffee table piled with travel magazines. He was served tea while five girls were brought out from the room beyond, all of them dressed in below-the-knee black silk skirts, and from these he had to choose his one-hour paramour. It would have been easier, he reflected, to do so with his eyes closed, not seeing the way they subjected him to their own smiling scrutiny. But as it was, he had to look each one in the eye and cast a quick glance over her shoulder, the obscured curve of the breast and stomach, the hips in their locked poise, the angle of the mouth. Though the air-conditioning had been turned up as soon as he entered, he began to perspire and mopped his forehead with one of the napkins which had come with the tea.

Then he turned his eye back to the girl at the dead center of the row, whose shoulders were bared by her strapless dress. She was the shortest of the line-up and her hair was dyed a curious dark blond at the tips. Her eyes looked green from a distance, as though she were wearing colored contact lenses. She did not smile, but in any case his eye had not returned to her face but to a small tattoo on her left shoulder.

It was a dark blue Chinese character which did not correspond to a kanji which he could decipher. Suddenly prompted by something in this spidery character, with its radiating lines and disciplined geometry, he nodded to her without a moment’s further indecision and rose unsteadily, unsure as to whether his equipment would rise to the occasion of so pretty and relaxed a girl. Such an unflappable professional.

And on top of that, he thought, you’re a swine and a low-life, and now you have a secret, the first secret you have ever had from Natsuo—

The world of secrets. As he followed the girl — he just about caught her name as Cheryl — he wondered if every man had this moment of grim initiation into the world that lay beyond and around marriage.

Certainly, nobody ever talked about it until they were older and it no longer mattered as much. But as soon as one had entered it, there was no going back. It was an irreversible decay, a one-way slide. Everything one had known up to that point as sexual happiness and wonder became instantly foreshortened and relativized. It was this that was arousing. One of his more lewd colleagues at work, now that he thought about it, had expressed it crudely when explaining why he had gotten divorced from his wife in Tokyo: “Like the wondrous and fastidious panda,” he’d said, “I found it impossible to mate in captivity.”

They went into a small back room garishly adorned with a small droplet chandelier and silver-framed mirrors.

“You like short time one hour?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Take shower together.”

He paid her, and they disrobed under the absurd chandelier.