The Weight of Our Sky(35)

Jay starts singing then, almost howling the words, grinding out some awkward dance moves behind the wheel as Vince puckers his lips and shimmies in his seat in his role as principal backup singer, and all I can do is laugh so hard I think I may throw up again.

Jay is in the middle of growling out the second verse when I realize that Vince’s voice has trailed off. The happy bubble we’ve encased ourselves in shimmers, then bursts altogether, and the air that comes rushing in is thick with tension. “Stop,” Vince says, his voice ringing with authority. Jay pulls the car into a parking space. “Stay here,” Vince tells me, ignoring my outraged expression, then “Come on,” to Jay, and they both head out and down to the riverbank.

Stay here? We’ll see about that, I think. So I get out of the car too.

Floating lazily in the water, swaying with the current, are bodies.

Part of me wants to retch; another part of me notes once again how familiar this scene is to my visions, this tableau of death and gore brought to life; one final other part, the one the Djinn has a firm grasp on, notes with grim satisfaction that there are six bodies, two sets of three, a safe number (although not, obviously, for them). Some are on their backs, their faces turned toward the sky; some are on their fronts, staring into the dark depths of the river. One is a girl who, I presume from the turquoise pinafore just like the one I’m wearing, is around my age. I’m glad she’s facedown; I don’t think I can bear to see her expression.

Instead, I look at Vince, whose mouth is set in a tight, thin line. “We have to get them out,” he tells Jay. “We can’t just leave them there.” The older man just nods. All traces of laughter have been sucked out of him; he looks beaten, deflated.

They begin looking around them, scouring the ground for long sticks they can use to poke and prod and fish the bodies out of the water, and suddenly I can’t bear to watch.

“I’ll be in the car,” I mumble, stumbling over my own feet as I scramble up the riverbank. That could have been me, I think, remembering the girl in the school uniform. That could have been me. And then, almost immediately: That could be Mama.

There it is, that familiar creeping doubt. None of those bodies was Mama. But are you sure? Did you check? Did you see all of their faces? Or did you run away, like the coward you are, like you did on the day you let your best friend die?

I clench my fists, feeling the Djinn start to rise, his dark shadow unfurling like smoke from somewhere deep within my belly and spreading through my entire body. No, no, please, no. I’m so tired that the idea of giving in to the numbers makes me scratchy and irritable. I want to cry. But I can’t keep thinking about this, and I can’t keep seeing those images burned behind my eyelids, and my skin is starting to feel tight, like I’m wearing a buttoned-up coat two sizes too small, and so I count and count and count and count. I try to count the number of leaves on the big angsana tree shading the car from the morning sun, but the outstretched branches quiver in the wind, and I keep worrying that I’ve missed one, which makes me panicky. So instead, I think about the word “angsana”—ang-sa-na, three syllables, so that’s safe, but it’s seven letters, which isn’t. How to neutralize it? I add the letters in “tree,” which brings it up to eleven. Still not safe. The word for “tree” in Malay is “pokok,” and “pokok angsana” is twelve letters, which makes it safe. Good. What else? I count the number of cracks and holes in the leather seats of Jagdev’s car—twenty-eight, not a good number; I use my nail to make two tiny nicks so that I can make it an even, perfect thirty and pray Jay never finds out. I tap that number on the streaky windowpane, then tap it again with my feet, alternating right and left. And all the while, the Djinn holds me almost tenderly in his arms, and laughs and laughs.

? ? ?

When the men finally return, they’re rumpled and ashen and I can’t stomach asking them how they did it, or what they did with the bodies. Instead, we ride on to Kampung Baru without saying a word, the silence punctuated only by the coughs and splutters of Jay’s ancient car.

As we turn the corner onto Batu Road, I can’t help but sit up a little straighter, eager to catch a glimpse of home.

Or what’s left of it.

Thick columns of black, black smoke rise from both sides of Batu Road. Here, even the buildings bear scars of the past week: broken windows, the haphazard patterns of bullet holes, angry smoke stains, smoldering husks of what used to be shops and homes.

“They say this place was hit the hardest,” Jay says, finally breaking the silence.

Vince shrugs. “It makes sense,” he says. “On one side of Batu Road, Chow Kit, full of Chinese people and the triad members that protect them. On the other side, Kampung Baru, the biggest Malay village in town, protected by Alang and his goons. If you want to start an explosion, you light a match in the dynamite factory.”

I can hear them, but their voices sound like they’re coming from very far away, through a thick fog. I can’t stop staring out of the window, at everything at once familiar and incredibly alien. Were these really the streets I’d walked only a few days ago? Everywhere I look, I see ghosts: Mel and Saf, walking arm in arm to the sundry shop with a list of provisions for our mothers; sucking on ais kepal in the heat of a Sunday afternoon, fingers tingling from holding on to the balls of shaved ice doused liberally in rose syrup; giggling about something in particular or nothing at all as we walk to the religious teacher’s house for our weekly Quran-reading lessons. Or here and there, Mama, walking out in her brand-new kebaya with its fine lace-edged top and intricately patterned batik sarong, ready for Eid celebrations; Mama with a basket in hand, gabbing with the neighbor aunties on her way to market; Mama tending to her garden, hose in hand. Mama. It’s all right, I tell myself, trying to tamp down the jarring feeling of foreboding, the sense of impending doom. It’s all right. I’m home. Mama will be here. Everything will be all right Mama will be here.