Red Dot Irreal Read Online Free PDF Page A

devilry, intensifying until the noise shakes the items on the shelves and rumbles the ground beneath me, a quake of preternatural intensity. The sound building and building, filling the air and the dirt and the entire world, and then abruptly stopping, the silence become unbearable, assuaged only by my nervous breathing.
    Several minutes pass before Dzurina shuffles through the door with a candle, the flickering light playing across her excited features, turning her wide grin demonic. She places the candle on a low table, walks outside, and then enters again, her arms laden with two metal monstrosities, vaguely cylinder-shaped, with a thick disc on one end and a ball socket on the other, bulging with cables and pulleys and springs and toothed gearwheels, a bricolage of machinery. She stands each cylinder vertically on the ground in front of my hammock, two metallic columns, and the realization of their significance strikes me with the force of a timber to the forehead.
    Legs. She has created prosthetic legs.
    “So?” she says. “You like, ah?”
    “What ... how ...”
    She pulls me up to a sitting position and maneuvers me perpendicular to the hammock, facing the mechanical legs. My stumps fit perfectly into the cool ball sockets constructed to act as knees, and the pain immediately vanishes. Its absence is strange after having endured it so miserably these past months. Leather straps from the exterior of the metal are harnessed around my waist and thighs so as to secure me to the devices. After tightening them to her satisfaction, she steps back and admires her handiwork.
    “Do you believe this will work?” I say.
    “Up to you. You believe, it work.”
    Could it be possible? Might I walk again? Such an invention should not be possible, but then neither should be ingesting another man’s memories. This exotic region of the globe seems suffused with improbabilities, as if the laws of the natural world hold no sway. It is as if sheer belief can construct reality.
    I nod.
    Dzurina bends down and whispers, “ Hidup ,” and the metal cylinders hum with life. Pendulums swing and gears turn, clicking and whirring loudly in the confines of the small shop. A vibration starts in my stumps and travels throughout my body. Hairs stand on end and my skin pebbles, a truly odd sensation in the tropical heat. She reaches out both hands, veined with age but strong as iron, and grips me by the armpits, assists me in leaning forward. Using her strength for support, I rise, slowly, until I am vertical.
    I am standing. For the first time in months I am standing upright. On clockwork legs.
    “I don’t know what to say.”
    She steps forward and kisses me full on the lips, her mouth tasting of betel juice and spices. I am abruptly aware of my precarious balance, but she holds me tight, erect.
    “Say you no leave,” she says.
    ~
    A whirlpool, a hurricane worse than any at sea, a recession back, back, backward to the start, the days, weeks, months, years. The stone against my back, just a sensation, no longer real, nothing, nothing is real, the vastness of the universe is mere illusion, shadows on a cave wall, we hold the world in our memories and when mine are gone the world will disappear, void, oblivion.
    ~
    Five years. Five years of suffering under the indignity of being unable to walk under my own power, but that I must rely on these monstrous appendages, always ticking and dripping lubrication fluids, as if I were a clanking beast from legend. Five years of legal impropriety, acquiring pirated silks, spices, and senapang kenangan devices, and then selling them, discreetly, to the foreigners who visit our home, all while staying beneath the notice of Captain Henry Keppel, who is determined to rid all of Singapura of those who would flout the authority of the Crown. Five years of rarely venturing outside to expose my lurching gait, relying on Dzurina for support, for sustenance, for a reason to continue. Never did I thank her for my