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current limited ability to perambulate through the rest of my days, so ashamed am I.
    Five years and a live-in marriage, and she still refuses to reveal what is hidden in the locked wooden cabinet.
    Tun Perak, named after an ancient Malayan warrior, who gently replaced me in my hammock all those years ago, and who, I learned recently, was the fisherman scooped me out of the waters after that fateful battle with the Bugis, acts as Dzurina’s client liaison for those souls too trepidatious to venture ashore and deal with her in the flesh. He is increasingly adept at avoiding the royal patrols as he delivers payment to us and goods to her clients. Although our small island lies only slightly south of Singapura, many of the transactions take place far from the prying eyes of the harbormasters. For Perak’s trouble, he receives a twenty-five percent commission on all successful dealings, which, with the increased business due to her trade in illegal goods, is no small amount.
    I imagine my parents proud of my current merchant status, even if my contribution is small—keeping the books and suggesting new commodities to trade—but I know not how to explain all the events proceeding from my “death at sea,” and so I do not write to them. However it pains me, I cannot imagine how they might react to my crippled status, native wife (though our union is not legally or religiously recognized by the Empire, as we have chosen to remain beneath the notice of the Crown), dangerous and illegal dealings in addition to her witch doctor cures, association with pirates (although we refuse to do business with the Bugis), and an everyday co-existence with thaumaturgy. Pious God-fearing people both, Mother and Father simply would not understand.
    I have also reacquainted myself personally with the ecstasy of contact with senapang kenangan bottles, sneaked from our bountiful stores. How I missed savoring the bliss upon the ingestion of another’s memories, more potent than the most passionate night with my lover. I also have come to experience the lives of dozens of men and women, from the nearby southern island archipelago, from the vast mainlands of China and India, and from as far away as my English homeland. I also note an alarming recent trend of terrifying memories, of villages being sacked by pirates and privateers, of rapine, of pressganging to tiny cramped dwellings with memories being extracted forcefully, of the frightened sobs of the persecuted. The hue of memories in these bottles has also changed from red to a sickly yellow, and I fear we may need to halt trafficking in the technology, lest it continue to be supplied by such ruthless means.
    Rumors have also spread round our little island of an evil spirit, a puaka , who has been spied late in the nights prowling the shores and thoroughfares. Although I have taken to patrolling our section of the island due to an impossibly chronic insomnia, I have not yet been witness to such a spirit. Even tonight, as the moon shines down a muted pale light, and as the breeze from off the sea has quit, leaving the air in a sultry stillness, the very climate lends itself to supernatural speculation, and yet the only soul awake at this hour is me.
    The insomnia has driven me from Dzurina’s side, true, but I lately notice an increasing tendency in my prostheses to build up a thaumaturgic charge in my person, to levels recently where the very top of my skull felt as if it might launch itself away at any moment. I know not whether this is the result of technological aging, or whether it is a mingling of magics, a result of my senapang kenangan habit. The only solution I have devised to bleed away this accretion of energies is to run. And to jump. During the day, I lurch and stomp and shuffle through the hours, but at night, at night I am a tiger, a great cat speeding through the villages of Pulau Blakang Mati, gamboling and cavorting and reveling in the unbridled joy of such freedom.
    Far from my