Corridor

open, smoked maybe two packets of cigarettes in one night. Once in awhile, he glanced out of his window to see a couple quarrelling in the street, the woman twisting her wrist from the man’s hand, the man sitting on the kerb with his face in his hands. But unlike me, he was involved in some work, maybe he was writing his memoirs, or carrying out a ridiculous vow of not sleeping until he could make a girl fall in love with him. He spent most nights devising various ways to win her heart, and there was the perverse notion that since she was sleeping she was at her most vulnerable. He felt a certain sense of power then at being awake, and having full control over his fantasising faculties. I preferred this version of the terminal romantic a lot more than the others and soon the whole fable became very elaborate. The object of this yearning lived in my block, her bedroom just opposite to his. Each night, he would keep his bedroom light on like a devoted lantern. If at any one time her feelings for him took a turn, then she too would turn on her bedroom lights, and like some harvest ritual, two lanterns would be burning, and two silhouettes would press themselves like moths against window grilles.

As I constructed the story, it turned out that the girl’s interpretation was that the guy had turned on the lights as a form of warning. Like a beacon, it alerted her of the nearby presence of danger. It was a sign for her to steer clear, to hide within the protected darkness of her room from a larger abysmal darkness. She was thankful, and wanted to show her gratitude, but knew it was impossible because he could not see her. For her, being in the dark was an act of obedience which she understood only as love.

Later, it also struck me that the sleepless person on the eighth storey could very well be a girl herself. With an incurable fear of the dark. Whenever it was dusk, panic would set in for the girl and she would walk around the house remembering the colour and shape of every conceivable object before the night turned everything shapeless and grey. Every night, she would sleep with the lights on, like a body in a floodlit mausoleum. It was her grandmother who sleepwalked each night to switch off the lights because she feared that her granddaughter’s skin would turn to wax.

Behind these fantastic stories however, was the faint hope that somehow, I had found someone who shared something in common with me. Someone who stayed awake for the same reasons I did, who feared excursions into reminiscence because he was aware how riddled with holes his body was. Such that when the wind of memory blew, it would tear him with the force of a hurricane. In fact, I had an impulse one afternoon to meet this person. It didn’t take much deliberation, I was going to knock on his door and tell him that I was a neighbour who found inspiration in him. If he wasn’t in, then maybe I should come with a pen and a notepad to leave behind the message that I had paid him a visit. I would bring along a book also, some self-help tome that I had found useful at one point of time, which had since lost any meaning for me. I had one day flipped through the pages to ask myself why I had underlined so many strange and irrelevant phrases.

Anyway, I had actually gone up to his house this afternoon, and knocked on the door, with no idea at all what to say once he opened it. He wasn’t in, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. There was a Christian pamphlet that had been folded in half and stuck between the bars of his gate, with a dove on it, biting a rainbow. I was about to turn away and leave when a thought struck me. I scribbled hastily on the notepad, tore out the piece of paper, and slotted the note under his door. When I was inside the lift I almost couldn’t remember what I had written, all in block letters. I didn’t think of it until much later.

Which explains this special feeling I’m having right now. The feeling that I had done something I would never have dreamt of doing before. I wonder what he might have been thinking, or she, for that matter, lifting up the note and then reading those words, “I know exactly how you feel.”

For the fifteenth night in a row I am on my bed, watching the eighth storey light on the block opposite mine. There are no stars in the sky, or if there are, they are hidden. Gradually I fall asleep and that sense of defeat washes over me yet again, the light I had grown accustomed to beginning to blind me with its stubbornness. My eyelids are powerless against it.

My mother speaks to me in English, something that she had never done in real life. She is wearing a powder blue blouse and coral pink lipstick. I had never been good at describing colours before so I know I am inside a dream. When she sees me, her eyes light up and she mutters something about the doctor having made a mistake. Her ovaries were all right, or else how could she have given birth to her son and be here talking to him right now? It didn’t seem to make any sense, but at the same time was perfectly logical. And then she asks me how I am. I tell her insignificant things, like how I think my counsellor should go for plastic surgery and how I now shave twice a day because I don’t like to look skinny and unshaven like they do in the movies. She nods and seems to