Misty piano

As I sit on the picnic bench, I finally feel some serenity. The stuffy air, the soothing warmth, the tree frog chirps. They calm my body and my soul, reminding me of the quiet evening walks that I used to take in Bukit Batok Nature Park, surrounded by nothing but trees, ghosts, and the occasional colugo glaring at me through the darkness.

Perched on that picnic bench in one of the greenhouses of the Botanic Gardens, comforted by the humid heat, my mind can finally focus on finishing The Lost Bookshop, by Evie Woods. I chose it as some light fiction to quiet the voices in my head, but did not find it to be particularly effective at that.

“Hi, do you speak Dutch?” A skinny, young, bald man approaches me on my bench. I nod. “Sure.”

“Can you translate something for me?” he asks, and hands me a book.

It is a poetry collection by Toon Hermans. It looks old and tattered. The back cover is missing, along with I-don’t-know-how-many pages.

The book immediately evokes a memory from my primary school days. Because I would always have finished my school work for the week by Wednesday lunch, I would spend the rest of the week in the hallway, entertaining myself. Shy as I was, I never asked for any assistance, and just entertained myself with whatever I found in that hallway. For weeks and weeks, the only thing in that hallway was a book called The Blue Moon . It, too, was missing the back cover, and at least 20 or so pages. I read and reread it over and over again, and never found out how the story ended. Here I was, so many years later, on another Wednesday afternoon, alone again, reading about an unfinished story, only to be interrupted by a stranger handing me yet another incomplete book.

Pondering the meaning of this, I leaf through the mysterious book the stranger has just handed me, unsuccessfully looking of a publication date. The book is full of marginalia. Lines of the poems are followed by little “x”es, in different colours. Some poems have been augmented with slightly sinister illustrations, drawn in black biro. Others are footnoted in blue ink and a neat handwriting.

“Think of something in your life, then open the book randomly, translate the poem for me, and I will draw it.” says the young man.

I look at his face, then at the tattoo of Death in a doorway on his arm, then back at the book.

I close my eyes, and think of the interview I had earlier today. I devoted a year of my life to preparing for that interview. It required so much soul searching. Who am I? Who do I want to be? In what ways can I and do I lead others? Why is this important for me? How do I not make this so personal? What even is identity, anyway? Do I really need to cosplay as a man to be taken seriously? Am I too honest for this job? Would I want to be any other person? What will I lose? What might I gain? Does it matter?

I open the book, open my eyes and scan the pages.

“Oh…”

“What?” he asks.

“I… this is really sad.”

The pages on which I opened the book. I blurred the lines of the handwritten text to protect the writer’s privacy, since they revealed some personal data.

I translate for him, as well as I can.

Do you see that haze

I stroll around, dazed
along the misty roads
but repeatedly and regrettably
I keep encountering concrete matters
says someone, very confidently
‘this is Mr. Van Loo’
then I do not know what to do, and,
flabbergasted, just say “Oh…”

“The second one is about crying,” I tell him. Somebody wrote about remembering only two instances where another person cried about them. I translate the story, first. Then the poem:

Tears

in the middle of the night
the light is born
the middle of the night
is when the light starts
that’s what I think about
now that I look at you
and see the tears on your face”

“Which one did you see first?” he asks. I tell him that I saw the left one first. I tell him about my friend Mattia, who died almost a decade ago. I tell him that her parents commissioned a piano piece in her memory, and that a Dutch comedian made a poem for that music. I tell him that the first four lines of the poem on page 20 remind me of that poem.

“I will draw a misty piano, then.”