The Minorities Read online

  Shanti clicked on a widget on the interface. It detailed a graph shooting steadily upwards. “Melatonin levels increasing.”

  Tights’ eyes were closed, they were mere lines now under his bushy eyebrows. We continued observing the data that the BrainScan presented. Cantona went to make the three of us ginger tea.

  Twenty minutes passed. I snapped my fingers right above Tights’ nose. He did not react. It was time.

  “Isolate theta and delta brain waves and feed them into the musical module,” I instructed Shanti.

  “Isolating…complete.”

  Then a note came from the Pianola—a singular, high chord.

  The chord was followed by another, then another. The overall tune they composed was simple, melodious, a steady song that drifted gently across the room.

  “Fatafati!” cried Cantona.

  A sudden, pleasing wave of accomplishment—one that I have not felt for a very, very long time—washed over me. “It works,” I cried, my body quivering under the rush of adrenaline. Shanti and I hugged. We pulled Cantona in to join us. “We did it! We invented the SoundLoft!”

  “We can start presenting it to investors,” Shanti said into my shoulders.

  Cantona was the first to break from the embrace. “Guys,” he said, tapping his ears, “there’s something wrong.”

  In our self-congratulatory euphoria, we did not immediately catch the sudden shift in music. Now it was jarring, with deep, disjointed notes playing atop each other, fighting to be heard. And as these conflicting chords churned on, an eerie, guttural female voice emanated from the Pianola. None of us moved—we simply stared at it, trying to discern what was causing this to happen. Initially, it was just ragged moaning. The words came out soon after, clearer, in an ominous snarl: “Go home.”

  We did not know what to make of it. Was it some sort of glitch? Poor wiring?

  “Go home.” There was no denying it this time. Feminine. Angry. Uncanny. Dangerous.

  I looked down at Tights, who was twisting violently in bed.

  Then, his eyes snapped open, and he screamed and screamed.

  “I at home with Mama,” Tights said later, his eyes unfocussed, scanning the room, sweat mottled at his temples and forehead. We were sitting at the dining table—Shanti next to Tights, and Cantona and I opposite—my laptop in front of me, with its audio recording software on. It had been barely ten minutes since we heard the voice in the Pianola.

  “I happy with Mama, but suddenly Mama gone. Vanish. Suddenly I at garden downstair and woman from dream appear. Long hair. Long this one”—he was pointing at his fingernails—“and she not walking on ground. Float. She float. I back away from woman, but then behind me was bad from inside.”

  “You mean there was a pile of shit behind you?” Cantona asked, his low voice increasing in pitch and volume as he tried to suppress a laugh.

  “Yes!” cried Tights. “I step on it, then it become more big and more hard until my leg stuck.”

  Cantona chuckled. “So, the pile of shit grew bigger?” Shanti shot invisible daggers at Cantona, and he threw a sheepish look to the floor.

  “Then when she near me, she say to me, ‘Go Home.’ Then I wake up.”

  Shanti and I exchanged looks of complete unease. “We heard it too, Tights,” I said to him. Shanti remained silent, and I knew she was still trying to find other interpretations of the empirical data presented to her. I was afraid. What I thought was the spirit of my father seemed to be something else entirely.

  Cantona, on the other hand, said, “You’re making this up.” He announced it flatly, a shallow shred of accusation in his voice. “Did you make that voice?”

  “Cantona,” Tights pleaded. “I swear I no lie.”

  “The voice came from the Pianola,” I said assuredly. “We all heard it.”

  “Well, then what was it?” Cantona demanded. None of us had an answer.

  The day went by. The ghastly voice echoed hauntingly, and I could not tell if it did so within the walls of my head or the walls of my home. My friends went about their day with frequent looks over their shoulders. We were jittery. Every sound seemed otherworldly and inhuman, every breeze through our halls seemed like the intermediary between the wing-flap of a sinister sprite at one side of the world and the resultant malevolent maelstrom at the other. Things weren’t normal anymore, and I did not know if we were having a shared psychiatric episode, or if we were truly being haunted. Dinner became listless, the night remained suffocating. Sleep came with much difficulty, as I was unwilling to close my eyes to this world.

  I awoke the next morning with a start. I had a horrible nightmare but could not remember anything about it, except the dread it left burrowing into my heart. I did not know what day it was. I checked the date and time on my phone. It was six in the morning.

  Shanti was already in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on her toast.

  “Good morning,” I mumbled to her.

  “Good morning,” she mumbled back. “You slept well?”

  “No. You?”

  “No. I had nightmares. Horrible, horrible nightmares.”

  “Same here.”

  Shanti looked up from her toast. “What did you dream about?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I dreamt about a woman. A horrible woman with claws. She said, ‘Go home,’ just like we heard from the piano.”

  “It was just a dream,” I said soothingly.

  “I know that!” she snapped, and suddenly I did not need coffee to wake myself up anymore. “But you can’t deny that something fucking awful is happening here.”

  I sat down next to her. “Shanti, we don’t know what it is, and so far, we are not in any clear mortal danger. Let’s not put our lives on hold.”

  She sighed. “You’re right.” She took two bites of her toast, while I stood still, pondering what to eat. “Do you need me to come with you later today?”

  “No,” I said to her. “Rest up. I think the boys need you here.”

  “All right. Hey, you didn’t tell me what happened with those girls.” A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Was it good?”

  “No, I did not tell you what happened with those girls.”

  I knocked on a blue door with cat stickers later that morning. The ageing, bespectacled, white-haired woman who opened it sported the widest grin as she threw her arms around me. “My munchkin!” she squealed.

  “Good morning, Ma,” was my deadpan reply. She held my face with both hands, and I looked into those familiar eyes, those globules of her soul pooling upon her liver-spotted face.

  As soon as I stepped past the threshold, three black cats strode up to me and began rubbing their smooth coats against my leg.

  “Hello, Goliath,” I greeted the first cat, the largest of the lot.

  “Nehemiah, stop biting on my toes!”

  When the one with the white marking—which looked like Australia—on his rear joined Nehemiah, I yelled, “Goddammit, Chris Hemsworth!”

  Nevertheless, I patted them all, this trinity of cats.

  “How have you been, darling?” my mother asked, making her way to

  the kitchen.

  “I’ve been good.” I followed her but stopped in the living room, which was practically an exhibition of rough-hewn wood antiques. They were varnished, saving them from termites, but they were mostly marked with cat scratches. The upholstery to most of her furniture in the living room was baize. I collapsed onto her sofa and almost slid off.

  “Don’t you lie to me. You’re skin and bones and you look like you haven’t slept in days!”

  “I’ve been working on…a new project.” I decided to sit on the floor, between her sofa and her oak-and-glass coffee table. On it sat a leather-bound English-language Talmud, its pages open to the Ohaloth tractate. It discussed the ritual impurities of corpses. I thought it was a rather morbid read.

  A copy of On the Road was on the armchair next to the sofa, as well as a DVD of Forrest Gump.r />
  “You should work on getting yourself a new job! Strawberry tea?”

  “Yes, Ma!” Chris Hemsworth jumped onto my lap, and I scratched him behind his clipped left ear.

  “What’s this project about?”

  “It’s a machine that converts your brain waves to music,” I said loud enough so she could hear me from the kitchen.

  “Haven’t you been wanting to invent a mind reader since you were eleven?”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice loud and clear. I looked up from Chris Hemsworth’s eyes to see her approaching with a tray, a blue porcelain teapot and matching teacups sat on top. I placed Chris Hemsworth gently on the floor and got up to take the tray from her. “You wanted to build something to help you read your father’s mind.”

  “Huh. I forgot about that.”

  She gave me a deeply wrinkled smile.

  Ma looked older since I last saw her. After she and Father had gone their separate ways, she had adopted three cats and dedicated her time to studying the Torah and the Talmud. She had not been born into the religion—my maternal grandparents, whom I have never met, had been staunch Taoists. She had converted to Judaism during a trip to Israel when she was 22. There, she met a Jewish man named Avram, and they married the year after. For a period of time that felt like a lifetime ago, Ma was Shiri Yahalom-Cheong. Her parents never approved, and for the next three years, Ma was estranged from them. Avram moved to Singapore, where he worked as a clerk in the Israeli Embassy, and for three years they were happy. Avram was later stricken with prostate cancer, and on his deathbed, my grandparents finally made their peace with him. They passed the year after.

  Nehemiah, the one with the white-tipped ears, jumped onto the table and rested her sleek, feline form on the Talmud as I placed the tray down. I poured out two cups and offered one to Ma, who sat beside me on the couch.

  “Uncle Jun sends his regards.”

  “Ah, sweet Jun Wei. How is that man?”

  I took a sip of strawberry tea. “He’s good. Getting on Cik Salmah’s nerves.”

  “That’s marriage for you,” Ma said flatly. There was no jadedness in her voice, and it made what she said sound much sadder. After Avram and her parents had died, it had taken eight years for Ma to date again. She had been a desirable woman (in my teenage years, my male friends would not let me forget it)—but she eventually fell in love with a gruff Muslim man five years her junior. Of course, a Judeo-Muslim union was not looked upon too kindly by members of both faiths. But Ma was never fazed by the discrimination. Father, on the other hand…

  Well, Father was Father.

  “How are you holding up, Ma?”

  “Oh, you know, I’m good. You should come join me for a yoga class someday. There’s a classmate I want you to meet. She’s twenty-six, a teacher, Eurasian, as Catholic as the sky is blue.”

  “And I’m as known for my Catholicism as Rome is known for its ketupats.”

  “Don’t get sassy with me, young man,” Ma admonished with a small laugh. “I just thought you could do with any kind of spirituality in your life.”

  I thought of the thing that had floated above Tights, of the ghastly voice from the Pianola. I shuddered involuntarily, and Ma saw it.

  “It’s just a strong recommendation. You don’t have to react like that.”

  I welcomed the redirection of my thoughts. “You should think of what you’re putting the poor Catholic girl through, introducing her to me.”

  “Oh, don’t be dramatic. Just one yoga session.”

  “I don’t have time for yoga, Ma!”

  “I’ll pay for the session.”

  This made me hesitate. Finances had been difficult lately. I had put so much of my savings into the SoundLoft, as well as providing for Shanti, Cantona and Tights, that all I had left in my account was barely enough to last the next two months.

  “How are Tights, Cantona and Shanti?”

  I did not reply. Perhaps it was in the way I stared at my cup of strawberry tea as though considering the possibility of somehow drowning myself in it, for Ma filled the silence with, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I need to borrow your car, and I cannot tell you why.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. She walked to her room and, when she returned to the living room, threw me a silver key chained to a black car beeper, a black cat key chain and a small dreamcatcher. “If you scratch the car, you owe me more than just an explanation.”

  The laptop came to life, then took its time to display the Windows start screen. A spinning hourglass mocked me from within that luciferous panel. I could hear impatient murmurs behind me.

  I turned to face the board members of Redhill Holdings. As I stood before them, I felt a sense of unease. There was a clear gulf of power between us, a silent maw stretched open by age, by our ways of life, our wealth, how we communicated with the people around us. The differences were telling in the clothes we wore—their power suits against my hardly-worn white shirt and tie. “I apologise for the, um, technical delay,” I said.

  The tall, balding man at the head of the table spoke, but he addressed only the pretty lady in the white power suit next to him. “Rebecca, what time is my next meeting?” he asked with thinly veiled impatience.

  I knew him, from our earlier introductions, as Mr Jonathan Wang, a former banking executive turned venture capitalist. He was the CEO of Redhill Holdings, a man famed for astute investments into private sector projects that centred around new, disruptive technology.

  The lights that shone on me seemed to melt my skin.

  “In twenty minutes, sir,” Rebecca replied with military promptness and in what seemed to be an Australian accent. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, but very obviously did not hold the least power among those seated today.

  I pulled from my luggage bag the wHelm and placed it on the table, with all the other untouched things—bottles of mineral water, notepads, pens. My hosts regarded it, as interested in it as God had been for Gomorrah’s architecture.

  The gentleman closest to me said, “Sir, I think your computer’s ready.”

  I turned and sure enough, my desktop was showing my start screen. I opened my presentation for the SoundLoft. The first slide showed a sketch by Cantona of a human brain whose lobes were inked in with musical notes.

  “Ladies and gents, thank you so much for your time.” A couple of them nodded encouragingly. Most took my words as a cue to check their gilded watches. “When I was eleven, I wanted to invent a machine that could read my father’s mind. We had a strained relationship, and more than anything, I wanted to know why nothing I did seemed good enough for him. I wanted to know the rationale behind some of the particularly cruel things he said to me.”

  Rebecca perked up at this, whispering excitedly into her boss’ ear a jarring change from the corporate corporal earlier. I realised that she had gotten to where she was at such a young age by being whatever Redhill Holdings needed her to be. Mr Wang whispered back seriously. The woman asked, “You invented an actual mind reader?”

  I frowned at her. I continued from my previous speech without breaking a note, “It did not take me long to realise that it is impossible to actually read a person’s mind, in clear black and white, in definitive language, for a person’s mind is a symphony of past experiences, of future ambition, of seemingly trivial factors such as the side of the bed on which they woke up, what they ate, the temperature, the intimate thoughts that come to mind when they’re alone. Ultimately, a person’s mind is their own.”

  Rebecca said, “Oh,” in time with visibly slumping shoulders.

  I pressed a button on my laptop, and the next slide was another sketch by Cantona, of Tights using the SoundLoft. “What I invented is even better,” I said, confidently. “What I invented turns your thoughts…into music.” I paused, admittedly rather dramatically, to let my words sink in.

  Mr Jonathan Wang laughed, a hearty, condescending laugh. “It does what?�
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  “It converts your thoughts into music,” I repeated.

  “That’s pretty—” said a skinny, middle-aged lady two seats from Rachel.

  “I’m sorry, it converts your what into what?” cried Mr Wang, cutting off his colleague.

  “You heard me,” I said, barely politely. I patted the wHelm on the table. “This reads your brain waves, consolidates them against a set of musical chords and plays it through an autopiano.”

  “How is that better than a mind reader?”

  “Al…Allow me to play a video to show you exactly how it works,” I said, regaining confidence midway through my sentence. I clicked on Tights’ recording of our first experiment on Cantona.

  They watched. Well, some of them did. Mr Jonathan Wang began swiping his phone, as did Rebecca. At one point, they both chuckled at the same time.

  “You can stop the video now,” Rebecca said, looking up finally from

  her phone.

  Mr Jonathan Wang put his phone into the inner pocket of his suit. “You say you’re an independent civilian, that you’re not attached to any corporation?”

  “That is correct,” I replied.

  “But my reports say you were with Qyburn Labs.”

  “Yes, and then I left. And what do you mean your reports?”

  “Do you think I would attend this meeting without knowing what you can and cannot bring to this table?” he asked, his words machine-gunning out of his mouth. I grasped for words to say but nothing came out. And then, more slowly, he said, “But, I’m afraid I do not see a practical use for this SoundLoft.”

  “But sir,” I said my heart beating in time with my desperation, “if you would just let me finish my presentation, you will see that there’s more to it than—”

  “Come back to me when you have a time machine so I can go back and not attend this, I hesitate to call it, presentation. And boy, when you do have a time machine, pitch it to me as a time machine, not a Memory Reliver or some such.”

  “May I know how you came up with the name?” asked a member of the board, a middle-aged woman with dark skin and white hair.