Singapore Noir

“Take some Ambien,” Mr. Inoue replied tersely. “Your figures are dropping a little. Are you worried about financial matters?”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Then see if you can’t get yourself back on track, Ryu. We all know relocation can be a tough time.”

In reality, Ryu had never felt more alive. He bought extravagant presents for Cheryl, watching her face carefully as she opened them. He masturbated himself to sleep thinking about her while Natsuo snored next to him. The lovemaking on the side street of Geylang had become more fluid and indifferent to time, more childishly wild. He had fallen in love.

Sometimes, because he was stubbornly awake, he heard Tomiko stirring in the room at the end of the long corridor, crying out in his sleep, and he would creep into the corridor for a moment and listen before returning nonplussed to his bed. It all seemed increasingly unreal. When his insomnia grew more severe, he sat in the front room looking down at the operatic tropic sea and the empty beach wondering what his mother would think of him now. The dutiful good son had turned on an enigmatic axis; the city had played a delicious trick on him and his jolly old character had begun to erode.

Natsuo was now aware that something had changed. His behavior was becoming erratic and he no longer spent as much time with Tomiko. Ryu smelled strange as well. It was as if his aftershave had suddenly turned sour. One night, during a storm, it was she who woke up and heard the boy slamming his door, and she went quietly down the corridor to see what was wrong. Tomiko was wide awake but lying in his bed. He had been drawing in the dark, and the sheets of paper lay all over the floor. She went in and calmed him down and asked him why he was awake.

“Bad dream,” he said.

“What kind of bad dream?”

He turned on his side to look into her face, and his lips were pressed in a half-smile, his eyes suddenly malicious.

“Can’t remember, Mummy. Something nasty.”

“All right, but now you can go back to sleep and not worry about it. It won’t come back.”

“How do you know it won’t come back?”

“Because I know. Do you want your rabbit?”

Slowly, he shook his head. “You don’t know,” he said.

She scooped up one of the sheets and took it with her into the corridor, then closed the door behind her. To her surprise, her hands were shaking. It was impossible to imagine from where the merry malice in his eyes had come. Glancing down at the sheet, meanwhile, she saw that it was covered with scribbled kanji, but the more she looked at them the less she could read them. They were Chinese, and not familiar at all. As she returned to her bedroom she felt a subtle unease. It was not a variety of different characters but the same one repeated over and over. She folded the sheet of paper and put it away in a drawer in her closet. If it happened again, she would have to see if a therapist might have an answer.

But as it happened, Tomiko’s performance at school was exemplary. When he was at home he sat quietly in his room learning English words on a laptop. His behavior was so unremarkable that before long she forgot about the sheet of paper folded inside her closet. She became more and more immersed in her weekly bridge games at the Raffles — where the ladies played in a parlor as white as an iceberg — and she even began to think a little less about her husband. How boring his stress and their now nonexistent sexual intimacy were. The other Japanese wives assured her that this lugubrious situation was normal. Their men were overworked by their companies and it was the wives who paid the price. Such was life.

“Yes,” Natsuo burst out one night, on the brink of tears, “but is that what I was born to put up with? Is that all there is?”

Reassured in the end, however, she busied herself as these other women did, with part-time work, shopping, and Bridge, with daydreaming and fantasies and books of Buddhist aphorisms. This self-distraction would not last forever, she calculated, but for the time being it was a kind of pain reliever. She organized their household as briskly as she could. When Tomiko started waking up again in the middle of the night, she made sure she had enough chocolate milk in the fridge to calm him down and told him he would stop dreaming of the Chinese character soon. Ryu, she thought, hardly noticed anyway. More than ever he was “detained” at the office, and she knew he was lying.

To compensate for this dreary absence of her husband, she decided one night to take him out to one of the city’s better restaurants and pay the nanny extra to babysit. She insisted that he come home early from work (it was a Wednesday and he had to cancel his tryst at the Golden Happy Massage) and made him cocktails as they dressed for their now unusual night out.