Flaccid Perpetua

-But are you doing ok…

You backspace on the WhatsApp text as the turning in your stomach tells you that this is why you are sitting on this old sofa in your colleague’s converted garage in the first place.

The money from the house being sold had been transferred into your bank account earlier that day and you are treating yourself to a delicious serving of fish and chips you got delivered by Uber Eats. 

The delivery driver was from Somalia, who got citizenship through asylum as his family was murdered in Mogadishu in 2013. His name was Mo.

You asked him these questions that would eventually lead to an uncomfortable answer, so now with over two hundred thousand dollars in your bank account, you’d much rather percolate over the story of a teenage Mo witnessing his family get gunned down by makeshift revolutionaries.  You do this to yourself all the time.

You grab your iPhone X with your oil saturated hands to distract yourself, avoiding making too much contact with the glass. So you take hold it flat in your palm, like your mortgage broker did with her comically long nails when you and your estranged ex wife bought a house just before the Pandemic.

You curl your thumb excessively as you scroll down your Twitter feed while having your meal. You refuse to call it X as you don’t respect Elon Musk’s political views. Your algorithm is pathetic. The only videos you see are violent, you caused this, this is what you search for when nobody is watching.

You see a video of a man carrying a decapitated child on a Pro-Israel account. 

-Nobody deserves this, nobody should even witness anything like this!

You type this under a comment where someone wrote about October the seventh. The comments make your stomach turn again. You lock your phone.

The fish and chips are fast becoming boring and you think about a sauce that would be fitting. You have no sauce, so you imagine what sauce you would like. Tomato is the staple, but you have almost almost a quarter million in your bank account and your thoughts transcend to something more exotic.

You think about the sauce you had when you took your family on holiday to Singapore the year before. Your ex wife used to love this guy on Youtube that went around the world trying out street food and when he was in Singapore, he went to this vendor who sold a traditional meal called Chili Crab. You had to get one, it was expensive, but the best thing you ever ate. The sauce was amazing. This is the sauce that would fit perfectly with your Kiwi fish and chips.

You pick up your phone again and search for the restaurant and change Google to Images. You read your own positive review, this is the best thing I ever ate, highly recommend.

You view the other images on the screen. The beaches, the hotels, Universal Studios, Sentosa Island.

You remember how it felt when you were sitting outside at midnight having a cigarette outside the hotel while your family was asleep in the air-conditioned room. You don’t usually smoke, but when you smoke in a foreign country it does not feel like real smoking.

The pub across the street from the hotel was a brothel. Men around your age would bring beautiful young girls in red over the quiet road and into your hotel. You would imagine what that would be like. The sheer freedom of not having to worry what the person thought of you or what they thought of themselves. A financial transaction would take away any kind of ambiguity around the proceedings of the encounter. There was a beautiful simplicity to this for you. It made you smoke way too many cigarettes as an excuse to live vicariously through the theater of those white middle aged men. 

You look at the return airfare to Singapore, you see that they have a special. Just $1200, your same hotel, $320 per night.

You are not stupid, so before you do anything, you check the leave roster at work. Nobody on your squad is booked for the next two weeks. Two hundred thousand is not retirement money, you still have to work.

Your job at the prison is something that you did not plan. When the Pandemic hit, there were many people who lost their jobs, including you. You know your hand was pushed.

Deep down you know why you climbed the ranks too quickly, after only three months on the floor you got another stripe on your shoulder. People liked you, you were nice to everybody. The best officers were not nice at all. During an extremely tense time in the prison your excessive concern for everyone was very well timed. Almost refreshing in an environment of extreme negativity. 

The top brass loved you, while your subordinates hated everything about you. They wouldn't say anything though, because they knew that your intentions were always good. These young guns were hungry for violence and your pandering was an excellent de-escalating tool. 

The price you paid for this was that you knew that you had to be consistent, this meant long days and nights of emotional turmoil trying to keep violent criminals from feeling sorry for themselves.

After hour meals and thousands of hours of sympathizing with their situations. When you got home in the evening, you had almost no choice but to neglect the emotional requirements of your family. Especially your then wife. 

You book your leave on your app, starting tomorrow. It gets approved instantly. Your manager knows of your divorce and has been extra accommodating.

You book your ticket and pay in full, the flight is in two days, first thing in the morning. You use Booking.com to copy your accommodation as before. The welcome email comes through as soon as you hit confirm.

For the first time in a long time you feel liberated. This is exactly the kind of spontaneity you need to feel like a man again. 

You get that familiar pleasant anxiety as you land at Changi International as you check in through customs. You wonder if you remember how to get back to the hotel in Fort Cannon and if the Chili Crab guy was still in business. Why would he not be? It has only been a year.

You show the cab driver the picture of the hotel on your phone. He says nothing and you fight the urge to ask him any questions, just in case he decides to burden you with his problems then you feel bad again. You think about how you deleted your text to your ex when you were having your fish and chips. She was probably fine, she has the same amount of money as you. You know that she will entertain the kids with it, you will do the same when you go back home.

You check into the hotel with your itinerant bag, you packed light, knowing it’s only five days. You are not used to having the responsibility over so little. It feels good to you. You often personify luggage with burden. The thought result of a twenty year marriage.

The girl at the counter recognizes you, and tells you that her dad in China has been feeling better since you last spoke. You nod and pretend you don’t care, but you are happy for her. She looks disappointed that you don’t engage, and you ignore her when she asks about your family. 

You worry that she will judge you when you bring home a lady in red later on, but you keep telling yourself that you do not care about how other people feel anymore. This new you is only about you.

You deliberately booked a different room to the room you had before with your family, you know that having sex in a room your kids were in was going to be awkward. You go to room 333, but you gently touch 331 as you walk by, knowing that your youngest would have loved to have come back to this place. 

But you need this, this is your rebirth. You will no longer consider the feelings and worries of others as much as you had before, just yourself.

You bring up the selfie of you and the chef at the Chili Crab place as you order your meal, the girl calls him from the back. He remembers you and shakes your hand. You don’t ask him how things are, he might give bad news and you know you will not engage. At least this way he will not be offended and all awkwardness will be avoided.

You have the Chili Crab. It is not the same as before, not as good. Sometimes the best memories need to remain just that, memories. 

Like your childhood. Some of the things you tried to emulate in your life, never had the same buzz. You remember that time you tried to play football again, it looked the way it was supposed to look, but never felt the way it should have felt. Just like the sad looking dead crustation you are begrudgingly stuffing into your gob.

You get a Tiger, it is the only beer they have, it comes in a tall skinny pint glass. You watch the bubbles rise like a piss yellow lava lamp as you sit back in your chair, enjoying the warm humidity that you hated the last time you were here. Your concern was that your family would get uncomfortable, and even though they said they were not, you know that they were lying. So every time an opportunity came up to ask if they were ok, you would annoy your wife by asking anyway. This is the reason you deleted your WhatsApp text to her. Your concern was the death of the relationship.

Apart from the hotel girl and the Chili Crab guy, nobody knows you in this place. You walk the streets with a confidence you have not had in a very long time. When you see a child that looked lost, you just turned a blind eye and kept walking. This was so much easier than you imagined. You realize that you have overcomplicated your own life. Nobody cares about you, so why should you care about anybody?

The guy in the bottle shop near the MRT asks where you are from, you tell him and you ask no questions. He is fine with this and so are you. You have found your swagger, this is your life now. Finally,

At the brothel you get another Tiger, you don’t usually enjoy Tiger, but the one you had earlier today had primed you. You tell yourself that this new you has a more sophisticated pallet and Tiger beer is something you enjoy now.

The ladies in red are all over the bar, just milling around. It doesn’t take you long to realize that the protocol is just to call one over if you need company. They don’t sell themselves like you thought they did. You must have got this notion from all the gangster movies and porn you’d watched over the years. You were hoping that this was the case as you had no intention of having to choose one.

The other patrons don’t talk to each other, you wonder if everyone is on the same journey as yourself. Nobody talks to you either, you enjoy this, it means you don’t have to listen to their soppy divorce stories.

One of the girls catches your eye, she looks a bit older than the other girls. She looks like she could be Greek or Italian or Moroccan. The Asian girls look like they could be younger than your daughter. This bothers you.

With a tip of your glass, you call her over. She gets Vodka and pineapple, you pay for it.

You point to your hotel.

The girl at the desk looks at you in a look of bemused anguish, trying to figure out what is happening. You pretend you have something in your eye and look towards the pool. 

The lady is red sits precariously on the edge of the queen sized bed with its Egyptian cotton sheets. You find it hard to get familiar with her and you struggle to find words. You cannot connect, and then it happens.

That sensation that travels down your weak chest and into the pit of your stomach, The perpetual vomit of an over empathetic man. And you say it “Why do you do this job? We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to”.