In Jurong
A cage, spacious, the size and shape of a
fútbol
end zone, open to the sky with a roof of thin netting. But at the same time it feels insular, filled with a stifling and oppressive heat. There’s something of the tropics in this place, a location close to the equator, the heat and humidity a way of life. The walls of the cage are crosshatched mesh, the kind you’ve seen at zoos, or animal parks, the mesh providing some illusion of freedom, no bars here, the weave open enough to allow a breeze, like the one that caresses your naked skin, but too small for disease-carrying insects, or anything bigger. The jungle beyond the enclosure is open, limitless, free. And everywhere is the sound of birds.
On the floor of the cage are dozens of empty exoskeletons, the remains of crustaceans larger than the biggest crabs you’ve ever seen, pecked apart by a powerful beak, left shattered on the concrete floor.
There is someone you need to find. It is your purpose in this place, to look for this person. Only, you can’t remember whom you’re meant to locate. You can’t remember much of anything. Your quarry might be female, though there’s no way to be sure. When you plumb the depths of long-term memory, you find experience and identity gone, as if your existence has spontaneously generated itself. The space where those memories should be is now replaced with water, an overwhelming sense of water, flowing around you, within you, through you. It is an unsettling feeling, this profusion of water.
As you continue to lean against a thick and ancient banyan tree (so it’s not just a matter of losing all knowledge, since you can recognize the tree by the feel of its bark against your back, and you do know the names of things, so it’s more of a selective removal of identity, which is even more disturbing), as you sit against this tree, the patch of grass surrounding it coarse under your naked buttocks, you feel not so much like a person as an assemblage of sensations. Faculties of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind, all aggregated into ... what? Not a soul, certainly, nor an identity.
From above, a cringe-inducing shriek: —Son of a bitch!
So lost in reverie you were that you didn’t think to look upward, to the other denizen of this cage. A great fuliginous bird in the banyan tree, its plumage dark as the deepest shadow, tipped on the ends of its wings and the top of its head with a splash of red, the color of dried blood. Its rheumy eyes glare at you. The wings extend twenty feet from tip to tip, and flap twice, sharply, the produced wind cooling the sweat on your dark hairless skin.
—Son of a bitch! it cries again.
You stand on shaky legs, the posture of a newborn colt, or a giraffe. The concrete is cool under your feet, remarkable in such blistering heat. Above, in the tree, the bird seethes with intelligence. Standing before it in your nakedness, you ask:
—Who are you?
—I? it squawks. —
I?
It asks of
I?
There is no I, only
us
.
We
are the Great Tocsin, and it is an
interloper!
It flaps its wings again, a gust that nearly blows you off your feet.
—I apologize, you say. —I didn’t realize I was trespassing.
—Trespassing-trespassing-
trespassing!
it tics, Tourette-like. —It must pay the penalty!
The bird swoops down faster than human discerning, one swift movement that brings it right to you, a tackle, you now on your back, the bird above you, talons extended, its great long beak stabbing down at you. You struggle, but the bird outweighs you by at least fifty pounds, and it opens a gash on your shoulder, stabs deep into your thigh with its beak, scratches furrows into your chest and your face. You roar in pain and anger, and to your complete astonishment, a low green fire sprouts from your skin, licking from fingertips to feathers, igniting the bird like a bonfire. It pushes itself off of you, flaps wildly, trying to extinguish the preternatural flame, hobbling, hopping, lifting into the air several feet before crashing down again. A high unnatural screech fills the air, a cry of knowledge and impotence, against the unfairness of the world, and before you can question any of what is happening, you reach down to grab one of the many giant crab claws on the concrete floor, and plunge it into the heart of the bird. Purple blood spurts over your hands, a final death call from the beak stained with your blood, a rattle, a shudder, and the bird is still.
From behind you, a voice, authoritative and female, says, —You didn’t have to do that, you know.
Stepping into view is a short Chinese teenager, her blue and black hair short-spiked in seventeen different directions. Dark makeup around her eyes and mouth. Clothed in silk brocade: a red jacket, embroidered with the dragon and the phoenix, and black form-fitting silk pants, embellished with the lotus and the crane. In her hands is a hand-carved walking stick, two different types of bamboo, combined, intertwined, one dark, almost obsidian, the other light, greenish. You did not see her enter the cage, and cannot think of how she has gotten inside.
—Can you understand me? she says.
—Yes.
—Why did you kill the Tocsin? It was the last of its kind in the Park.
—It attacked me.
—So? You can’t die.
—What?
The girl steps over you. She cradles the body of the charred and bloody bird, and sings a low song in a language you’ve never before heard, full of melodious words and tones. The grayish smoke from the bird’s singed feathers thickens, opaques, becoming a solid thing which detaches itself, pulsing in time to the girl’s song, and it lifts into the sky, past the netting at the top of the cage, rising higher and higher, sprouting wings, it’s only a speck now, rising, and then it disappears from sight. The bird’s physical body exhales loudly, then crumbles to ash.
She stands up, dusts herself off, looks you over.
—You’re a mess, she says.
~
The subterranean cave you now inhabit is built into a large hill, not far from the cage in which you awakened. Cooler than outside, but cozy, decorated with generic landscape paintings and overstuffed furniture decades old. You lie on a dusty leather couch, but no leather you’re familiar with, and your wounds throb. The girl dressed the one in your leg, the most serious one, because, according to her, even if you can’t die, you can still lose the ability to walk if the damage is too severe. A tourniquet, a dressing, a pungent salve applied to your other scratches and gashes, stinging and numbing, the ointment made from distilled tiger saliva. At least you are no longer bleeding, and the girl even found some clothes and hiking boots for you, helping you into them without comment. You get the impression that a naked man is no big deal for her.
—My name is Ming Liu, she says. —I am the guardian of this place.
—And what exactly is this place?
—Jurong. It used to be a Singaporean bird park. Now it’s more.
—More?
—Listen, I know you have a lot of questions, but I’m not the right one to answer them. Even if I knew the answers, I would not be allowed to tell you.
—Allowed by whom?
—That’s one of the answers I’m not allowed to give. There’s only one person who can help you: the Undine. I can take you as soon as you’re up for the trip.
Every six hours or so, she brings a jellied fruit paste for you to eat, and a tureen of cool, clear water. In between those times, she’s out, patrolling the Park, doing her rounds. You sleep fitfully, jerking awake after only a few minutes, the irrational and unconscious fear gnawing at your tired brain, the fear that when you wake again, you’ll have lost your memory once more. But eventually, you sink into slumber, dreamless in oblivion.
Ming Liu carried you here on her shoulders, fireman-style, her slight frame surprisingly strong. You passed through the mesh of the cage as if it were vapor, non-existent. A compound illusion. When you asked her why the birds did not just fly away, she exhaled, as if this were a question a five-year-old might ask, and said:
—There’s no reason for them to test their reality, is there? The mesh was actually there at one point, but they can’t tell the difference. As long as they’re fed and kept healthy, they don’t try to escape. Now, be quiet. You’re heavy enough without all this talking.
~
After three days, your scrapes and gashes have healed, and your leg is sturdy enough for you to walk on it. You still experience a dull pain, and occasional twinges of something sharper, but Ming Liu assures you that it’ll go away in time. You are surprised at the rapidity of your recovery, unsure whether you naturally heal this quickly, or whether it is being in this place, in Jurong.
Ming Liu offers her walking stick, and you lean heavily on it as you both exit the cave, from the shadows into the reality of sunshine and humidity. What was once a zoological park, with clear pathways, maintained carefully by gardeners and horticulturalists, is now an overgrown jungle, crowded with hundreds of species of bamboo and palm and banyan and heliconia, a profusion of greens and pinks and yellows, a twenty-foot high canopy saving you from direct sunlight. The intensity of the light is no less diminished, though its harshness is muted from its passage through the leaves. Walking paths have been taken over by indigo mosses and Bird of Paradise and Voodoo Lily, a natural floral labyrinth, impossible to navigate without Ming Liu’s help, an invitation to losing yourself forever.
The going is slow, your reliance on the walking stick a hindrance in the heavy undergrowth. Every so often you pass another cage, more and more colorful birds, mutated, five times bigger than what you think they should be, their size ominous, and they stare at you as you hobble by, the intelligence clear in their eyes, no longer stupid animals, more dangerous for their cognizance. Any noise they normally make is silenced with your passing. Under their intense scrutiny, your skin crawls.
Spaced out along the path are several swampy pools, dark brown water infested with algae and clumps of starfish and rotted logs. The smell of decay is strong. You see the outlines of things swimming in the murky water, creatures with an impossible number of eyes and fins. A bevy of dragonflies hovers above one such pool, a silent communion, as if in prayer, and the serenity is destroyed by an amphibious monster, a water-born weasel which hisses as it leaps into the air and snatches three of the dragonflies in its mouth, then drops back beneath the surface with hardly a splash.
Knots of gnats pervade the air, buzzing in your eyes, your ears, your nose. You get the impression they are trying to find a way into your skull. Mosquitoes nip at your skin, and you soon wear patterns of red weals over your arms and neck. Beside the giant birds in the cages, other smaller free-ranging birds populate the countless number of trees and plants. However, you are surprised at the absence of other animals, tigers, monkeys, rodents, and you tell this to Ming Liu.
—I’ve wondered about that myself, she says. —There don’t seem to be any non-avian mammals in the Park, beside the two-legged kind. Just the insects, fish and birds.
An explosion from the greenery in front of you, a burst of feathers and small bodies, of green and red and yellow and black and blue, and you scream and fall to the ground, hands over your face, the sound and fury of countless beating wings streaking by you, a hundred thousand winged projectiles, and then they’re gone, a massive flock lifted up into the sky, an amorphous colorful blot headed where it will. Ming Liu helps you up, a smile wriggling its way onto her lips.
—Australian lories, she says. —Come on, we’ve still a ways to go.
Limping slowly, slowly, trying not to trip over roots or the occasional mallard. Farther down the footpath, late afternoon now, is the biggest tree you’re ever likely to see, as if Yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree, has taken root in Jurong. The apotheosis of banyan trees, its massive trunk the size of a city block, sprouting hundreds of roots as thick as your body, and an infinite number of massive branches stretching up into the clouds, and beyond. Hanging from almost every available surface of the tree is a reddish moss that pulses in the breeze, as if it is breathing. Clinging to the areas of bark not occupied by moss are gnarled shelf mushrooms the size of your head, occupied by dozens of different kinds of insects, all crawling over the surface of the fungus, teeming with life.
Suspended from one of the lower branches, thirty feet from the ground, is a spindly middle-aged man with a blunt rifle, being attacked by dozens of small, laughing, white-bodied birds. Their high-pitched taunts fill the air.
—Groundling!
—Carnivore!
—Piss off, meatbag!
—Slow human!
—Your mother was a cuckoo!
Surrounding the man seems to be a buffer of wind that the swarm of birds is unable to penetrate. At your approach, the man lowers himself to the ground on his harness, and the cyclone of air dissipates. His features are South Asian, possibly Indian, and he wears a tired smile. The birds rise as a group, disappearing into the branches.
—Hey, Kadek, Ming Liu says. —Bali mynahs again?
—Yes, they have infested the lower levels of the tree. I have been battling with them all morning. Silly creatures. If I could just get a clear shot, I could take care of nearly all of them. Can you help?
—I can try, she says.
She turns to you.
—Hang on to something.
You grab the trunk of a nearby bamboo tree as Kadek ascends via the harness again. The mynahs flock down from the branches for another assault, buffeted by the protective cyclone that has again sprung up. Ming Liu takes the walking stick from your hand, drives it deep into the ground, closes her eyes. She opens her mouth and emits a deep
thruuuuuuuummmmmmmm
,
barely perceived by the human ear, a vibration felt in the marrow of your bones, in the air itself. The ground shakes and rumbles, leaves fall from a dozen trees, the mynahs freeze in place, equilibriums unbalanced. Kadek aims his weapon at the cluster of birds, swinging and shaking in his harness, unable to squeeze off a shot, and he’s yelling to Ming Liu, but her eyes are closed and she can’t hear anything for the deep bass rumble, the earthquake of her voice, and the branch Kadek is suspended from cracks, sending him straight down, a collision course with the ground, but before he hits, the weapon misfires, right in your direction, and the next thing you know is abominable pain, the low bass replaced with high-frequency shriek, the sound blinding you, an obliteration of pain, a white noise of pain, and you feel the heat rising within you, activated by the sound, by the pain, a rapid buildup of green fire, and the pressure is abruptly too much to bear, so you release the heat, the fire, and you hear screams, a multitude of screams, and slowly, slowly, the feeling dissipates and the high-frequency shriek fades and your sight returns.