Looking Glass
It seems odd to say that my mother was a genius with a window and a set of whiteboard markers. Maybe it’s my mind, too intent on polishing up old memories for display atop the gleaming shelves of my nostalgia; or maybe it’s the passage of time, that steals away the errant strokes and the careless swipes of the hand, until all that remains painted in your mind is as close as one can get to perfection.
Whatever the case, she was a genius to me. In the vast, airy gallery of my mind I can see her breathing life into horses, islands, stars. She would draw them all on the window in my room with just the six primary colours of whiteboard marker they sold at the bookstore, a whirl of colours never riotous, but always benign, as if some far off landscape of the world had been invited in to enjoy the breezes that ambled lazily through our fourteenth-storey flat.
This was not her job, of course, nor her only passion; my mother was a teacher by trade, and that was her life by day. If not for my father and I, my father used to joke, her world would be filled entirely with immature, prepubescent teenage boys, unwilling to pay attention and adamantly opposed, it would seem, to submitting any sort of homework. I think her work consumed her, for in those first few moments after she stepped through the doorway and into my five year-old embrace she would lean into me as far as my tiny frame would support, a bag full of marking and lesson plans still clutched in either hand.
But there was one day every week, when she returned home early in the evening, when she and I would sit by the big bay window that dipped out into the amber sky, and I would be holding those six colours, red and orange, purple and blue, green and black. My mother would wipe away the previous week’s image, and draw anew.
Maybe the tail of a humpback whale lifted regally across the breakers of an undulating sea. Maybe the immense, golden face of a lion, scarlet mane aglow. Maybe she would work for an hour, maybe for two; always I would sit, mouth agape and eyes alight in wonder.
My father and I loved the images; what I liked most was how as night fell they would slowly disappear, since whiteboard marker is not translucent; but sometimes, on nights when we were lucky enough to have the stars, parts of them would glitter in the dark. Maybe the mischievous, marvellous eye of a snake, twisting through the heavens, or the tip of the horn of a winged hound gambolling through the night sky. I could never accurately predict what would shine through, and the stars themselves, I think, made a great effort to make sure of this; but who knows what may suddenly appear different in the darkest, deepest night?
Like I said, memory is a testy, stubborn thing. I can’t remember which day of the week she would draw, or if I ever began to draw with her; likewise, I cannot remember how old I was when she died, or when we finally moved the machines that sustained her in her final days out of the house.
I must have been seven or eight; maybe it was 2004, or 2005? Dates are numbers we generously give to random, sporadic bits of time that happen to fit pithy human attempts at patterning the universe. I prefer not to think of the thirteenth of May, but of the day when my mother passed away. Even then, I usually prefer not to think about it at all, and I don’t remember what happened. I don’t remember her last words to me. I don’t remember what it was like to watch her body be cremated. I don’t remember what the last image left on the window was, and when we finally wiped it away. In my mind, I ran away from those events, and if at all, they are brief, incomplete sketches in the canvas of my consciousness, barely even pencilled in.
In time, I forgot the smell of her hair, and the way her face would change from a lined, creased map to a vivid patchwork quilt when my father and I would poke our faces round the door of her study. I forgot how she would hold my hand with an extra squeeze on days we went to the doctor, and the way she put on her shoes, the first standing, the second sitting down. I even forgot what it felt like to hug her on those days she would draw.
But I never forgot her images. I don’t remember when I started to try replicating them, but I remember the first time I hopped up on to the ledge and, swaying unsteadily and in constant fear of falling out, attempted to squiggle out an otter or a house on one tiny corner of my huge window.
I also remember it being extremely ugly because all my father did was shake his head and mutter to himself when he saw it from outside my room, a reaction that I would encounter many times over the years.
I kept trying nonetheless. I would draw anything and everything I could think of: buses, flats, the Prime Minister speaking at a rostrum. They were all as good as you can imagine an average nine or ten year-old’s drawings to be, to say nothing of even coming close to matching what my mother had produced.
Gradually, of course, I got better. I began to learn how to draw body contours, and even a bit of shadowing; as I started secondary school I began attempting landscapes, snapshots of the town park or the bus-stop outside my block late at night. It was painfully hard, especially since there were no formal Art classes in my new school, my father never indulged me in books, and the only computer in the house was in my mother’s old study, which had remained locked since her death, and which I dared not ask my father to open. To add to my difficulties, the bookstore in my neighbourhood unexpectedly stopped selling the markers my mother had used, as well as their refillable cartridges. I resorted to using those of another brand that unfortunately never quite matched the vivid, brilliant colours of the first.
In retrospect, it was my way of coping with the loss of my mother, and I was determined never to relive those events, but to keep trying to draw over them again and again in my own crude and haphazard manner, even though they were quite permanently imprinted on the cold, glaring windowpane of my subconscious. One can of course easily paint over a canvas, or pencil out an error; but memory, as it is with windows, never quite forgets the events drawn with a marker nib pressed hard against the surface. A careless flick of the wrist, an unintentional scrape of the elbow; a word or phrase thought long since forgotten, a scent or sight accidentally blown into your face by the feckless wind; these so easily brush away the new work, and reveal the hidden smudges of the old, still tucked away beneath.
I guess I learned from my father, for initially he kept his grief locked shut in the vastness of his heart, the curtains drawn rigid and unflinching over the windows into his soul, endowed with a smile with lines that pinched too tight at every parent-teacher meeting, that could not hide the cracks in the glass: the afternoons he forgot to pick me up from school, the nights he forgot to turn the television off, the mornings he forgot to make us breakfast.
Gradually, the cracks became crevices; crevices turned into gaping, frothing maws.
I don’t remember when it was, but it had been late in the day, because he had forgotten to pick me up from school, and I had had to take a two-hour bus ride as a result. It was seven o’clock in the evening, and the sun had just concealed itself behind our neighbouring block when I opened the front door and was immediately seized by a powerful, nauseating smell that I had encountered before, but in much more minute and manageable doses.
That was the first night he beat me, hard, and with a thirty-centimetre ruler that had once belonged to my mother; the first of many. I could never escape it once it was coming, no matter how late I tried to return home, no matter how quietly I opened the door; always the smell, always the bottles. The ruler was seasonal, of course; sometimes it was just fists, sometimes the chair my mother used to sit in.
I never fought back, for how do you fight something like this? My father was stronger than me and he was my father. I could not report him, for he was all I had left in the world. Him and my window and my markers; and I could not draw.
He never apologized, or I never gave him the chance to. In the dark hours of the morning, I would sneak away to school, scratching furiously at where the red had been splotched, which I would later call attention to as allergies. I would return in the evening to find him in his room, the door closed, the bottles gone, not a sound to be heard. We would eat dinner in silence, and that’s all there was, after a while; silence and then pain, silence and then pain.
I do not remember how my drawings of the time fared; I remember my schoolwork suffered, and I remember a great deal of hate. I hated my father, and I hated myself, for not standing up to him. It’s probably a good thing we were not religious, because I would have hated God, as well, for taking away my mother and leaving us to drown in this slow, burning watercolour of despair, the flames licking their way across its oil slick surface.
Cracks into crevices; crevices into maws; maws into the void.
I can’t remember the first time I considered it, sitting on the ledge of my window, looking out over the uncaring, urban Singaporean sea, a tableau devoid of meaning to me, not even half as real as the vivid reds and scarlets traced down one side of my body. Not even half as real as the Arctic blue that coated my perception of my relationship with my father, or the foggy white that clouded it, as I let cigarette after cigarette fall from my trembling fingers into the fourteen storey-abyss.
There was medication; there was a school counsellor. I didn’t care. There was no escape from the feeling, the knowing that some things were gone, and some other things were beyond repair. No matter how hard you try to pull yourself away from that, you just can’t, because like the ink of a marker tube released too fast it has stained you and your window permanently, like blotches on the skin, like blows to your body and soul that can never be taken back. Your judgement becomes impaired; who can see out of a window so cracked and scratched and stained?
And then, sometimes, there’s so much ink it blots out your window completely.
It was supposed to be a safe day; I had been beaten the day before, and knew enough about his cycle to consider it a safe day, a quiet day, where I could draw in peace.
In my mind’s eye, I saw; with my hand, I drew.
The smell came; the clink of a bottle, the voice, the blows, all at once, sudden, ferocious, unceasing.
He had never come to my room before. Not my room.
For once, I fought back. I thrashed. I howled. I refused. This was my space. My window. My grief.
He threw my head against my window, and there was blood and glass.
And I threw the marker I was still holding in his face, and wept, and climbed.
He fled.
And I sat there, looking down.
I could see my memory already being wiped away, my window remade as if by magic, clean, and new, and untouched by the shameful past, of years and years of failure, and of loss.
Maybe I did remember which day of the week she would draw, with me, on a Tuesday. Maybe I did remember when I began to draw with her, the day after I first went to kindergarten. Maybe I did remember how old I was when she died, or when we finally moved the machines that sustained her in her final days out of the house.
Maybe I never forgot the smell of her hair, and the way her face would change from a lined, creased map to a vivid patchwork quilt when my father and I would poke our faces round the door of her study. Maybe I never forgot how she would hold my hand with an extra squeeze on days we went to the doctor, and the way she put on her shoes, the first standing, the second sitting down. Maybe I never forgot what it felt like to hug her on those days she would draw.
Maybe I did remember that the last image she drew on my window was her own face, that beautiful patchwork quilt, still smiling down at me until my father wiped it away a week after she died.
I lost her, and despite all my efforts, I could not bring her back.
I considered death, then, weighing it in the palm of my shuddering hand, letting the idea of it flow, smooth as black silk, down my tired cheeks, mingling with my tears.
What makes those of us who survive despair step back from the edge? What sacred rain washes our stains away and makes our vision clear?
It is hard to forget the people we truly love. You open the window, and you expect to see them waving at you from down below; you close it, and they are reflected in your eyes, in a universe tantalizingly close, yet forever separated by the glassy grey curtain of memory. You turn away from the window, and the edge of their shadow leaps across your vision momentarily, fleetingly, and is gone.
Except this time.
I touched my vision to the window for an instant, and saw her. Her eyes, reflected in my own, dark and sorrowful, tainted and worn.
She gently took death from my hand and put it away somewhere safe, and led me down, first from the ledge, then from my room.
I stumbled through the house, still full of the smell, but my father didn’t seem to be there.
Then I noticed that his room door was ajar.
Go, she said.
I had never been in my father’s room. I had never even seen the inside of it.
Go, she said.
I pushed it open, and beheld my mother’s last image.
Maybe the tail of a humpback whale lifted regally across the breakers of an undulating sea. Maybe the immense, golden face of a lion, scarlet mane aglow. Maybe a husband and wife, and a beaming baby boy.
No.
He was in a chair by the window, his window, looking at the image he had never wiped away, still untouched through all these years. The rage was gone, and the fury, and the anger; in its place was broken, desolate despair.
I stood in the doorway for a long time, staring at this man, this man who had beaten me, and reduced me to dust and broken glass, who had been my persecutor, and a monster.
But I saw through him.
I chose to.
Nobody asked me to. Nobody wanted me to.
Except her. The last image she wanted me to see.
I moved over and sat next to him, on the ground, next to his chair. He knew I was there; we didn’t have to say anything. In all those years, had we ever?
But his hand touched my hair, hesitatingly, at first, then gracefully, and then with feeling that I thought had long since been wiped away.
Later, long after the therapy had begun, long after the boundaries were enacted and respected, he and I would weep anew, in our own quiet ways. Much later, after this, that we would finally draw together, hesitantly at first, then gracefully, and then with feeling that I thought had long since been wiped away. Much later, we would be as father and son should have been, as close as father and son can be without the mother that should have been there with them.
But she was; in my mind’s eye, she is still there.
Maybe it’s a careless flick of the wrist, an accidental scrape of the elbow; maybe a stray ray of fading light, or the mischievous twinkle of a star taking its place. Sometimes, I can just glimpse her, when my father and I sit by my big bay window that dips out into the amber sky and draw; I’ll see her, momentarily, fleetingly, in the memory no longer hidden, but living, breathing, brought into clear, powerful view. I’ll know he sees her too, for we’ll pause in our labour, and simply let go; two lost souls drifting in the advent of evening, still trying to reach the woman we both loved. I remember, too, that even in memory does our legacy slowly fade away; one day, when we are all gone, no one will remember her, or the beautiful things she made. But does that make them, or her, any less beautiful, any less visible?
This is the form of what I saw. So do we begin to wipe away the past, and so do we begin to draw anew.
Kevin Martens Wong is the founder and director of the internationally-recognised volunteer non-profit Kodrah Kristang language revitalisation initiative for the critically endangered Kristang language in Singapore.