Friday, Nov. 25, 2011 - 12:47 a.m.
Memory is the versimilitude of repeating the initial conditions.
Because he wanted to talk to her again, he had the machine built. It looked like a normal handphone, except that it was connected to a black, silent flash-memory disk.
On most nights after work, he went straight home from the law firm. Sure, we'll go for drinks another time, his colleagues said again. They understood he was still broken. The entire firm did, down to the auntie who made him his afternoon Milo, and added extra milk to dilute his grief. He pushed through the glass door of the lobby and the reflections it held, briefly becoming one with the reflections of streetlamps. They watched him walk to the taxi-stand, holding a brown briefcase in his hand, as if it contained his sadness.
He collapses into the cool PVC seat as the taxi pulls out of Raffles Place. Once, the taxi-driver had asked him where he wanted to go, and he had accidentally said, the Oberoi. Right after he said that, he regretted it.
The bank had sent her to Mumbai eight months ago, and she was one of the thirty-two shot dead by terrorists at the Oberoi Hotel. They had been barely married for a year when she died. He recalls the strangeness he felt at the Mumbai morgue. A strange sense of distance. The Indian police inspector had waved his hand upwards, and an Untouchable attendant lifted the blue plastic sheet covering her face. He looked at her face quietly while the inspector waited for him to cry. She did not appear to be his wife. He asked if he could touch her hair. It is against regulations, the inspector said, his mouthstache twitching. But you may proceed.
He stroked her hair twice, tentatively, in the small cold room, watched by the short attendant and the fat police inspector. He could hear the wailing of other relatives outside, muffled by the morgue's steel doors. There was a small hole above her right shoulder where one bullet entered. It was small and black. He felt his life had flowed out through that hole.
When he got back to Singapore from Mumbai, he discovered a voice-mail she had left for him on his handphone. He sat up in the sofa as he listened for the first time, pressing the handphone close to his ear. It was when the terrorists first entered the Oberoi. Oh my god. Someone is shooting in the lobby. There was a pause, during which she recognized her own bullet-shaped mortality. Then she called out his name, once.
As the news broke on tv, he called her non-stop for two hours. He finally reached her, as she hid alone in an unlit stairwell. The reception was bad as they talked desperately over the phone. He could barely hear her, and there were echoes and lags, as their voices were exchanged over Indian satellites floating over the Arabian sea, beaming the anemic signal onto Chowpatty beach. They continued talking up to the moment when the terrorists found her, and pulled her away.
That voice-mail had come one week late, stored in the servers of India Telecom as an electronic signal, a bright green sine-wave trace on a oscilloscope screen. It was then mysteriously sent through sagging wires and perpetually falling satellites, landing in Singapore, reaching his handphone, arriving at his right ear, like an aural letter, like a mistake. He played it again.
The message contained ten words and eighteen seconds of the sound of her breathing. This was all he had left of her. She had been reduced to a binary signal, a concatenated string of '1's and '0's.
Note: The title is 'Memory' spelt in binary
