Totentanz (Part 2)

5. The Sound And The Fury (Part 1: My Name Is Red)

His daughter was cupping his hands, tears rolling down her cheek. She looked paler and this left his heart broken. She was never a tearful type of person. As a matter of fact, he seldom saw her crying even when her mother was canning her when she was young. He once joked to her wife, “she is going to be a tough one,” his wife insisted that her daughter would be a fine lady, graceful and refined.

And she became a piano teacher, following her father footstep. When she was graduated from a music college in London, in spite of the lure of higher paycheck there, she came back to serve with her father, a decision which made everyone raise their eyebrows.

He looked straight into his daughter’s eyes just like what he did many years ago. The gaze was unforgettable and it didn’t change much. Her stare was very consoling but he still felt disorientated, maybe the effect anesthesia hadn’t worn off. He found it hard to focus on his daughter’s eyes but this didn’t concern him more than his numb legs. Ripple of panic spread inside his body with each successful circulation of blood through his body when he found out his legs were none other than two lumps of dead meats.

He turned to his daughter. He thought he saw flicker of regret in her eyes but he brushed it off as senseless paranoia. But this paranoia felt realer than any usual paranoia. No, he told himself to think at the bright side. What colour would make him more optimistic? The green colour of the curtain? No, he hated green colour, it reminded of veggie which he loathed. The white bed sheet? No, it prompted the brutal memory of the death of his dog when he was young. How about the brown colour of the window frame? Worse still, the brown colour mocked him of his immobile and out-of-control legs.

Before finding the right colour, which could cheer him up, he realized he was paralyzed. Exactly 11 months ago, he was diagnosed as second-stage bone cancer patient. He was no fool though. As he attempted to seek for the right colour, which could easily be the relic to his illness, he stumbled on different kinds of emotions. It wasn’t too tough to identify fury as red. Upon the unveil of the diagnosis, he nearly blew his top. For so many years, he had put his thrust on doctors, so faithfully, almost zealously that regular medical check-up could save a life. He could still spell out the how the intensity of red colour escalating in his life even after 11 months, even after red had vanished. Everything morphed into indisputable red, plants, notes, clothing, piano and etc, quite incredibly but not unbelievably.

He almost likened the idea that there’s no tyranny in this world because nobody could be spared from being power-happy. Watching numerous of tyrants falling one by one from 20th to 21st century, the sensation was thrilling to him. He himself couldn’t explain the exhilaration, perhaps the news of the fallen grace served as a testimony or a congratulation to his little cult-like belief. But this time, he sincerely hoped red could be the last tyrant in this world because red, at the end of the day, was the least tormenting one.

As his condition deteriorated over time, the red was diluted gradually and eventually it became something he could no longer identify. It was something between maroon and lilac. He had no mood to determine what kind of emotion it represented but the thought just came to him in one morning after he was told by the same doctor that his cancer might already spread to the liver. The ‘malice’, the name he gave to the blending of maroon and lilac, was indeed a menace, an impertinent one. ‘Malice’, though how innocent it looked, foretold myriad of malignant-like prophecy.

In a nightmare of his, ‘malice’ came to here and commissioned him to stand up. He protested and argued with the ‘malice’ that he was unable to stand up for a time being. ‘Malice’ therefore demanded for a reason. He had lots of rebuttal but on a spur of moment, his tongue was twisted. Astounded and unable to speak, he gasped and he woke up only to find out he couldn’t feel the lower part of his body.

He was rushed to the hospital in no time. ‘Malice’ also followed him to the hospital, like a silent assailant. Frightened and intimidated, he gingerly asked his daughter who accompanied him in the ambulant, “Do you see ‘malice’?” His daughter replied nonchalantly, “ I see ‘malice’ everyday.” Whether she had met ‘malice’ posed a serious question to his own conviction until the doctor revealed the X-ray before him, like a clown who never ran out of trick up his sleeve.

“There’s a tumor at your ****, emm… that means spinal chord,” announced the doctor. He continued, “You may wish to have the operation as soon as possible, before the conditions deteriorate.”

“Does it make any difference now? I lost my mobility, I spoke to with you with my back stickled to the smelly bed, I couldn’t urinate with two feet stamped firmly on the cold ground, I lost everything…”

“But, you still have chance to recover, maybe 15%,” said the doctor sedately.

He hardened grip and shoulders crumbled like World Trade Centre. 15%, the figure unnerved him just as much as ‘malice’ did to him. And before long, he realized ‘malice’ no longer stayed along side. Something nearly colourless had replaced it. Let’s call it ‘Casper’, he smiled weakly, reminiscing the time he spent watching ‘Casper’ with his daughter. This thought drew tears to his eyes but for some odd reasons, he refused to whine in front of the doctor and his daughter.

Maybe he would cry to his heart content next time, but definitely in front of ‘Casper’. “To hell with you,” was the last sentence he muttered before entering the operation room.


6. Tales Of Two Men (Part 1: Crime And Punishment)

“There was a boy whose name I never knew living in a small town, too small to be known by the arrogant tyrant of this country,” said ‘Mr Average’. Obviously, he intended to narrate the story without my consent. Since there’s nothing I could do, I nodded, telling him to continue wordlessly.

“He had no sibling and in fact he didn’t even know where he from was originally. His parents who brought him up, gave him the best education were not his biological parents. In spite of their wealth, they failed to conceive a child after years of futile effort. At first, it was extremely hard to accept, but they still had to bow before the big hand of fate and resorted to the last resolution. Before that, foster parents was a term which was too alien to accept, but slowly, the prejudice thawed, perhaps because of the obedience and the attractiveness of this boy.

They already fell in love with this boy the very first time they had met the boy’s biological parents. He was perfectly normal, in fact, he was nearly flawless with no apparent defect. They were willing to pay higher than what his biological parents had demanded and they happily took over the cash and promised would never see this boy again. This promise pleased the couple.

They fostered this boy just like their own son. With the wealth they accumulated from the logging industry, the amount of gold he had amassed was enough to buy a small country. Although there were rumours circling in the small town that this couple had been linked with several most notorious triads, they appeared unruffled. Perhaps they were guiltless, perhaps they were not, but what undeniable was they gave the boy their best. People could see them walking their boy in the park everyday with envious and avaricious stares fastened to them.

But the boy wasn’t happy at all. Everywhere he went, he would detect hostility and the sense of guilt were stalking him clandestinely. The feeling of ‘guilt’ saddened him just like he was denounced as a liar while he was not and of course this feeling was nothing but a puzzle to him. Although he never had a full grasp on the ‘sense of guilt’ he felt, he knew it existed. It definitely presented, inside him, around him, behind him. Sometime in the night, he would dream of it and he would be woken up by his mother with sweats dipping out from his forehead.

He attempted to describe it to his mother whom he felt more intimate to. Without any effort, he likened the ‘guilt’ to a ‘bogeyman in the wardrobe’. But his mother never showed any emotion. Even when he got very delirious, she was gentle and the most she did was flipping open the wardrobe and declared, “There’s no bogeyman.”

With the nemesis like ‘guilt’ which never stopped nagging him by his side, he found it hard to concentrate in the school. Every gaze from his classmates chilled him. Was that the fault of his ‘guilt’? The young boy would never know until many years had passed. He didn’t have friends because he was unable to engage in a conversation between his classmates. All he could do was stay at one corner of the classroom, observing every gesture of his classmates. The more he observed, the more he wondered were they his source of ‘guilt’?

One day, he managed to confront one of them after mustering enough courage. He was unmistakably trembling when he asked cautiously, “What’s wrong with me?” The boy he confronted was caught dumbfounded and staring him blankly.

Still blank, he replied crisply as if he had rehearsed it few times before, “I heard you are not your parents’ son.” He just stopped his sentence abruptly and ran away without any explanation given, leaving him standing there stupefied. The feeling of ‘guilt’ didn’t just depart with the answer he got and so he deduced his nemesis would still stay with him. Hence, he concluded it’s time to confront his parents, though he didn’t actually know who or what he wanted to get rid of.

He never had an opportunity to confront his parents when something happened. His father had been admitted in to the hospital with skull cracked and several vital organs injury. But he didn’t care. All he wanted was piece of enlightenment on his nemesis. He never watched The Godfather but somehow he understood what ‘keep your friends close, but your enemy closer.’ Now, it could be his last chance, if not to defeat his woe, at least extinguish its arrogance.

While his father was bedridden, he discovered he didn’t have pity on this old man. ‘This was bad,’ his mind murmured but another voice was much stronger, a voice which was much stronger and more substantial. It’s authentic and it did exist. His mom, on the other hand, was wailing and shaking his father’s hand. She said something to his father but he couldn’t hear. Though how sober she looked, he couldn’t help to think this was all staged and phony. There’s trace of comic in her eyes suggested her infidelity and there’s something extraordinary happened between them, he and his father, he and his mother, his father and his mother.

“Is that a hint?” The ‘guilt’ appeared to be more omnipresent and more ponderous every time his mother wept. He had stayed with the ‘guilt’ long enough to smell the presence of it hundreds meters away. But this time the ‘guilt’ was different, it was somewhat more intense and penetrating. This ‘guilt’ was suffocating and that’s something he had never encountered before.

He explored carefully, inhaled every volume of the antiseptic smell air as if it were toxicant. Just as he was beginning to understand that the aura of ‘guilt’ emitted from his mother’s body was something entirely dissimilar, without any warning, his mother screamed. The scream was so loud that he could hardly hear the noise from the life-support machine anymore and for a moment, he reckoned his mother had suddenly ran into her ‘guilt’ and collided with it. He didn’t know what gave him this idea but he was sure something had just gone wrong, terribly wrong.

Wasting no time, three nurses pulled his mother away from his father’s bed. Her screaming grew even more piercing but no doubt, he could pick up some words she had said.

“It’s all your fault! This is the crime we commit! You deserve this… He was an evil, descended from that woman, he brought jinx, he brought omen…you invited him into our house! How could you leave me to face him alone? We shouldn’t have bought this evil!

The senseless rambling carried on not more than 10 seconds before the nurses pulled her out completely from the ICU. He was also escorted from the ICU and he noticed they had said something to his mother. “Why no one says something to me?” He was wondering with his eyes fixed at the mosaic pattern of the marble tile on the floor.

He pondered on what his mother had said. Could it be related to the ‘guilt’ he felt? No, he heard something else. Yes, it’s ‘crime’. Was it the real name of his curse? He was far too young to cogitate all these.”


7. The Sound And The Fury (Part 2: White Noise)

“You can walk again, we trust the doctor. I think you have a very good chance to stand up again if you are willing to cooperate. You must undergo series of physiology exercise before you can stand up again. Now you are weak, you are…”

He let his mind wandering in the arteries and the veins of this hospital. He felt sorry for his daughter because he had no interest in whatever she said. “It’s all rhetoric,” he convinced himself with a renewed conviction. At least, he still could maneuver his own mind and he believed in his mind more than his body. He neither put his blame on the doctor nor his daughter who never got tired in giving him false hopes because he had become a staunch believer of what he imagined, prophesized and rhapsodized.

He had long given up all his senses. “All I felt was nothing, all I saw was indeed nothing, all hear was indeed nothing,” he was more certain of his own little theory now. His daughter was speaking to him and all he could ‘sense’ was her moving mouth without even a slightest hint of moving. He could ‘hear’ but he didn’t know what’s that or perhaps he could ‘sense’ the ripple of air, but not the sound.

His world had slowly degenerated into a very primitive point of view. Everything, in this world, could now be categorized into one category only. For him, all things were white, all sounds were inaudible noise now. Perhaps the prolonged treatment of cancer had inflicted irreplaceable damage to his mind, nonetheless, he possessed no desire to seek for vengeance because he already felt nothing. Numbed legs, numbed ability to distinguish colours and too numbed to feel the numbness.

“You must stand up again, you know, without you, we…” his daughter sobbed again.

Watching the tears streaming down her face, a sudden disgust rose up inside his body. That’s hate, an unemotionally one. This feeling transcended any sense of emotion and this was something totally beyond comprehension. No matter how bizarre it might be, he wished he could tell his daughter that he could ‘hear’ emotion and he was able to decipher emotion.

The emotion he ‘witnessed’ was transparent and beyond the thin veil of deception, he saw something else which was altogether foreign. It’s the core of the story narrated by a mute story-teller. Beyond the emotion displayed, the narration proceeded without a hitch. There’s no doubt a story or two or more than two stories were being orated simultaneously.

A story of a boy, a disgruntled mother, a dying father. He was quick to dismiss that as miscellaneous and randomly-assorted combination of story line. But it was so surreal as if it just happened yesterday. He couldn’t help to spare more watchful stares at it and the next thing he realized was he was deep inside the story, becoming the boy, the mother and the father at the same time.

It’s all very confusing but he was completely immersed in the story. Whenever a potential danger poised to upset the delicate equilibrium of the story, he would shout in alarming manner, only to discover he was bedridden, looking at the green curtain and brown window frame.

The story proceeded slowly, too slow. With this pace of narration, it seemed this story would never end. But out of his surprise, the story suddenly vanished. It just vanished into the thin air, leaving no trace. And more surprisingly, the emotion also evaporated to nowhere. He no longer felt any presence of it and all objects had become white in colour once again.

That’s when he decided to go home and gave up his remaining hope on the next operation. He told his daughter bluntly there was no second operation because he was not going to have one. “I want to go home,” was the first sentence he said to his daughter since he regained his consciousness.

8. Tales Of Two Men (Part 2: Gulliver’s Travel)

“I have finished my story,” Mr Average claimed, “What’s your story?” he demanded subsequently in a extremely courteous manner.

To my dismay, his story ended in such amateur way, just like a story by a futureless novelist. I must say at first I was listening to his story without any expectation because the denouement of today’s events was causing serious indigestion in my crude mind. But as I listened more, I grew more closely to the story, as if I were bound to become one of them. I could even feel the molecules disintegrating inside my bodies, vowing to join the characters. This was the prowess of this story but suddenly, ‘pop’ the story ended, like a bursting bubble.

“What’s your story?” Mr Average pursued.

I wasn’t so sure about what story I wish to share. Maybe I was just reluctant to reveal my story or I felt inferior to share my filthy past, which elegance and brilliance could never outcompete Mr Average’s story. But at the same time, a story came to me out of nowhere. I ran through that story in my mind and realized I, in fact, never heard that story before.

I cleared my throat, trying to buy more time. “Should I share a non-existent story?” When I was toying with the idea of telling a story I myself had never heard before, Mr Average lifted his hands, hinting me to start my narration.

I cleared my throat one more time before telling the strangest story in the world.

“There’s a man coming from a rich family. He once had loving parents but something had changed and he was sucked into the vortex of misfortunate. Love had left him, affectionate had deserted him, leaving him in a state of solitary. In order to survive, he had to sacrifice and work masochistically.

However, he was never able to recoup his loss. Plethora of attempts after attempts, he never succeeded. The thing he lost was priceless. With the wealth he inherited, he could easily buy everything off, politicians, business or even love.

There’s only a thing he couldn’t afford was a thing named ‘atonement’. When he was an impulsive and compulsive youth, he had committed a crime, a crime he never meant to commit. From that day onwards, he was sinned. Everywhere he went, there was smell of sins lurking around him. Sometime, a cat would mock him sarcastically. Even a lamppost opposite of his house was against him. Everything, everyone detested him as much as they loathed the notorious triads. He guessed this was what everyone called ‘retribution’ or ‘punishment’, which he personally favoured more.

There’s a time when the punishment became too unbearable, he decided to kill himself. He jumped off from the fifth floor and by the twist of fate, he survived. The survival didn’t come without price, he lost his mobility. To translate it into a simpler language, he lost both of his legs due to the injury of his spinal cord.

‘I’m sinned,’ this was what he told every person since he was admitted into the hospital. Diagnosed as a mild depression patient, he was spared from legal action. But he slumped further into his own depression, murmuring to himself like a hopeless lunatic. Not only refused to get up from the bed, he initiated a hunger strike which forced the doctor to sedate him forcefully.

Under the strong influence of sedation, he felt his body was fleetly moved away from the hospital. The sensation of moving was very subtle and he couldn’t detect any vibration of movement at all. What made him think he was moving? Must be the stretching feeling of his body. Every inch of his skin was stretched and pulled and yet he felt no pain. A little pressure was what he could feel.

Soon, the sensation ceased. A eerie déjà vu of emptiness struck him. “Where was I?” This was an odd question because at the first place, how sure was he that he had moved? He might still lay on the bed, waiting for the dawn to fall. Tardily, he instructed his hands to move but to his horror, he was like old Gulliver, nailed to the ground, unable to move even a single nerve. Every attempt to move would result in immense pain that he had never experienced before. Or, the pain could well be described as something intrinsic. Whenever he conceived of a certain movement, he could feel that his limbs were indeed prepared to move, but his mind was as if crucified by millions of nails.

Yet, he refused to stay still, waiting for an onslaught of an unknown enigma until he was suddenly blinded by a brightly-lit object right in front of his eyes. Although the illumination was so dazzling, he estimated the object was only 3 meters on top of his body. Patiently, he waited for his eyes to get used to the light.

While he was waiting, before he ever realized, an epiphany descended upon him. “This was heaven!” He didn’t know where he got this idea from but the object, which he could see clearly now, was a perfectly square flat (curvature?) screen (a box?). Instinct told him it’s an oversize television or a water-down movie theater. Television in heaven? This was an absurd idea but this place, beyond his belief, felt exactly like a heaven. But had he been to heaven?

A sudden change of the intensity of light grabbed his attention. Nervously, he forgot he was ‘nailed’. He lifted his arms, trying to rub the sweat which plastered his hairs to his forehead away only to be electrocuted by the inscrutable pain. He cursed silently.

And then he resumed watching the ‘television’. For a while, nothing was shown. The nothingness was so profound that the aura of its was equally fearful. He was relieved when the nothingness was replaced by series of colourful pictures. At first, the pictures were very fuzzy. After a while, he could see every picture with the clarity that surmounted any picture taken by the best camera in the world. This deepened his unshakable conviction of he was actually ‘nailed’ in ‘heaven’.

Soon, the same pictures appeared again. He was baffled. And after another 9 pictures was displayed one by one, same picture came out again. No doubt, there’s no discrepancy in the same pictures came out again and again. But the more he buried his mind into the pictures, the more he was convinced there were differences. Were the branches of trees orientated at the right direction? Was the colour of the umbrella of the ice-cream vendors same?

And were the people same in each picture? At first glance, all of them looked same but not after some careful observation. No, every detail was not consistent each time the seemingly same picture came out. His mind raced frantically. Why changes? Why differences? He sank into deep thought. Few possibilities circled in his mind but none of them could explain everything. His reasoning was no longer sensible; instead, they had become rather mystical and singular.

Before he managed to decipher the riddles, before his reasoning could convince himself, of a sudden, he discovered he was on the same hospitals’ bed again, looking straight into the eyes of the doctor.”


To be continued