Note to Reader: This story is 4,100 words and takes about half an hour to read. Although the characters share names with me and my wife, these are fictional characters. That should be apparent from the fact that the fictional David Barker is tall and lean.
David Barker, tall and lean, beige sport jacket draped over the left arm, white casual shirt drenched in sweat, especially where the sweat streamed down his back and pooled above the belt cinched one notch too tight. As for the belt, the sweat had activated something in the tanning dye which ran onto the shirt in a ring around his waist. The shirt was probably ruined. When he saw the discolouration creeping around to the front, he cursed the heat and muttered aloud that they would’ve been better off staying at Raffles. Tamiko ignored him, but he went on anyways. At least at the Long Bar he could sit in the dark with a cool (admittedly overpriced) drink, while the electric punkahs flailed overhead and peanut shells crunched underfoot. If he squinted a little, he could imagine himself drifting back through time to a simpler age of colonial something or other, he couldn’t think what.
When the waiter had discovered Tamiko’s full name, the man became deferential. The couple didn’t understand why until, towards the end of their visit, the bartender explained that when the waiter saw the name on her credit card, and saw, too, that she was mixed race, he thought maybe she was the daughter or granddaughter of the late Edmund Barker, also mixed race, author of the proclamation of Singapore. He didn’t know if she was or if she wasn’t, but he didn’t want to be known as the waiter who snubbed a distinguished descendant. So, pulling the credit card from the machine, and seeing that she had left a decent tip, he set it on the table in front of Tamiko and became nauseatingly unctuous. David liked the idea of nauseating service and wondered why they couldn’t go back for more.
Instead, Tamiko dragged him down North Bridge Road which, mysteriously, becomes South Bridge Road once you cross the bridge, and on from there to Chinatown. She wasn’t about to let David amble from bar to bar and, at the end of it all, claim he’d seen the place. They were going to interrupt his liquid visits with stops at sites of cultural interest. She slapped his chest with a brochure from the hotel and declared that their first stop was the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple.
David had never heard of the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, but he presumed from the name that the Temple housed a bit of the Buddha’s tooth. At the bridge over the Singapore River, David paused to reflect aloud (Tamiko called it pontificating) that seeing as how the Buddha had died 2,500 years ago, and seeing as how there were insurmountable problems of provenance, it was unlikely the Temple held an actual tooth of the Buddha. It was just a silly story. So what if the tooth really came from the Buddha? Did anyone seriously think a moldering bicuspid was going to promote enlightenment? He saw from Tamiko’s expression that he had gone too far. She told him she thought, as a dentist, he might find it interesting. She’d only been thinking of him and there he’d gone, mocking the whole enterprise. He stared down the quay towards Marina Bay and saw a long line of bars forever barred to him by reason of his stupid mouth; now he’d have to make it up to her by visiting more museums and galleries. It was going to be a dry holiday.
David wished he’d gone on a golf holiday the way he usually did. Tamiko went her way with her girlfriends; and he flew south with three of his buddies from dental school. They always went somewhere warm, but not Singapore warm. Not shirts stuck to the skin warm. Some place like Arizona where the air is dry and the sun shines with a cheerfulness that makes you want to get onto the links first thing and whack your way through 18 holes by lunch. Here, when you woke, you pulled back the hotel curtains and stared out across a city illuminated by an orange haze and it made you want to bury yourself again under the covers until three in the afternoon.
It was the marriage counselor, that’s why they’d gone on this holiday together, this forced closeness, this two hearts beating as one as they waited for their expected aneurysm. Do you love her? Of course I love her; what kind of question is that? Yet you never spend any time with her. We, you know, we … I look into her eyes and read so much … compressed … like poetry … You don’t strike me as the poetic type. Efficient, then, like running a dental office; that’s how we communicate.
When they arrived at the Temple, David had to admit that it exceeded his expectations by being a real temple rather than a tourist trap or a social media contrivance. It wasn’t vast or cavernous, not like a certain Phoenix gospel hall he and his buddies had stumbled into after they’d finished a few too many rounds (of tequila, not of golf), but carried itself with a certain dignity. Yes, there were the narrow streets of Chinatown with their markets and their noises, and scooters easing through the crowds as hawkers haggled over the price of fish, all this pressing in on the Temple, but despite the surrounding chaos, the building held itself aloof, its swooping Chinese lines rising high above the streets and into the calm of the haze-bound sky.
At the front, facing the street, stood three big red doors, but David and Tamiko had to enter around the back as the temple big-wigs reserved the front entrance for VIPs—not VIPs in the worldly sense of the phrase, but VIPs in the spiritual sense, people recognized by the temple big-wigs as having attained a certain—David couldn’t say what they had attained because he himself hadn’t attained it. Obviously. Otherwise they wouldn’t have forced him to join all the riff raff, jostling shoulders with tourists and devotees carrying drooling infants and stooped old men who could barely walk.
Looking on as they entered, there was a monk in a robe the colour of a blood orange after you’ve sliced it open for breakfast. David sensed judgment behind the impassive eyes. Sure, he couldn’t read the man’s mind, but he had his suspicions about what was going on inside that bald head. Probably envy. He’d read somewhere how these monk types live on a strict diet of water and gruel. David knew that if he lived on a strict diet of water and gruel, he’d envy visitors like him who could go out and eat a hamburger any time they felt like it. Or steak. A steak grilled medium rare would be nice right about now.
Stepping into the dim light of the first big hall, the—David consulted his brochure—the Hundred Dragon Hall, Tamiko nudged David and whispered for him to turn off his cellphone. David pulled out his cellphone, but before he turned it off, he checked for messages. There was a text from their daughter wondering if they were enjoying themselves. She had ended the message with an emoji David didn’t recognize. Was his daughter rolling her eyes at him? Is that what it meant? He flipped to his email app and found a note from his broker asking him to call at his earliest convenience, a semi-urgent matter regarding a time-sensitive opportunity. David turned as if to leave, but Tamiko yanked him back into the hall and said in something more than a whisper that he absolutely had to leave his life behind for at least a few hours of every day. Otherwise … and her voice drifted away, like a Chinese lantern, into the wide space overhead. Staring down into his hands, David said right and swiped the power off symbol, and when the screen had turned dark, he pocketed the cellphone and swung around to face an enormous statue of the Buddha. Holy fuck, he said.
Prompted by Tamiko’s dagger eyes, David entertained the balance of his thoughts in the quietude of his own cranium. Most of his thoughts reduced to a simple observation: that’s one big fucking Buddha. David wouldn’t describe himself as a connoisseur and he was certain that, in the world of Buddha statues, this statue probably sat smack in the middle of the Buddha size scale, assuming there was such a thing as a Buddha size scale, but even in its middling status, there was something about it that overwhelmed the senses. The figure sat on a chair, each foot resting on a lotus flower, left hand offering a golden water bottle, right hand raised in the, in the—again he found himself referring to the brochure description—abhaya mudra gesture which symbolizes all kinds of good stuff. Standing to either side, in all their ornate splendour, were two of the Buddha’s buddies. All three gazed down into the room with the same impassive expression that had held the face of the monk they met when they entered the building. Chubby-cheeked and numb, like they’d been dosed up on anaesthetic, waiting for the oral surgeon.
David stared too long into the Buddha’s eyes and when he drew away it was as if he’d been staring into a flame. For minutes afterwards, he could barely make out anything else. At last, a saffron robed acolyte told him it was time to move on, which he did, following Tamiko into The Wisdom Hall. Here, David found a smaller statue of the Buddha but, this time, with six arms. Six arms! That’s ridiculous! Tamiko hist him quiet and demanded to know why he couldn’t grow up.
As they waited for the lift to the mezzanine level, David smiled that smile Tamiko took as a warning that something stupid was about to issue from his lips and, sure enough, it dropped like a stillborn mess onto their bare toes. When he saw that giant Buddha, it got him to thinking of prehistoric creatures and that movie, Jurassic Park, where they find viable DNA from 65 million years ago. Suppose they found bits of Buddha blood on the tooth, which you’d expect, especially if it was a less than happy extraction, and suppose they sequenced the Buddha’s genome from it and then cloned him. You could have a Buddha Park. Hundreds of giant prehistoric Buddhas clomping around the Buddha paddock spreading happiness and wisdom. Monorails that move at half a kilometer an hour. Games, like Sweep the Sand, or Arrange the Rocks. You could sell Zen in a Can at the gift shop.
Tamiko said Christ.
David corrected with Buddha.
Tamiko wondered why he couldn’t give it up for the duration of a temple tour.
Give what up?
This. This endless goofiness.
I thought you liked it. You used to say it was endearing.
And it was. When we were first married. But now we’ve got kids who are older than we were when we were first married.
Fine. I’ll try to be, um, more adult.
You know—Tamiko got the same look she got in her eyes when she was about to buy something on a TV shopping channel—we oughtta try meditation when we get home. I’ve been reading about it. What really screws people over, especially in the West, is a sense of attachment. Not just to things. But to ideas, too. And habits. Running ourselves through grooves we’ve marked in the ground. We could focus on our breathing. Just 15 minutes a day. We could pencil it into our calendars. What do you think?
David shrugged. Of course he didn’t want to do it, but he had no idea how to counter Tamiko when she got this way. Charged with a mission. Rung like a bell. Bent on changing the course of history. Yes dear, he said. Like any of her resolutions, this one would whiffle away like a kettle off the burner, and after a few weeks he’d be free again. When they first began their life together, David was foolish enough to argue with her. Somehow, with the passage of time, David had discovered that it was less trouble to agree with her and let her predilections run their course. The end was the same, but one path led to a heart attack while the other led to a smiling pleasantness where your children call you “supportive” and, before you know it, you’re up for a community award.
Disgorged onto the mezzanine level, David paused against a hand rail and asked if this was the way to dental enlightenment, but Tamiko didn’t hear him so he gave up on the joke and fell in line behind her. He wondered why they called it the mezzanine instead of the 2nd floor, not like he was an architect or a mathematician or anything, but once you stuck a mezzanine into your design, then your 2nd floor was really your 3rd floor and your 3rd floor was really your 4th floor and so on up to nirvana. It was a misrepresentation. It was a… Again, Tamiko didn’t hear him. David grabbed her right triceps, flabbier than he remembered, and said he was talking to her, to which she answered Oh and nothing more. When he suggested she get her ears tested, she came back with: how do you know I wasn’t ignoring you? He had no better answer than: After this many years, I know.
They did a quick circuit on the mezzanine level, trying their best to be attentive, and David cracked a sotto voce joke about how hard it is to be awake when you’ve missed your naptime. On to the 2nd, 3rd, and finally the 4th floor where, like pilgrims at the end of a journey, they arrived at the Sacred Light Chamber, and inside the Sacred Light Chamber, a stupa, and inside the stupa, a 2,500 year old tooth belonging to the prince, Siddhartha Guatama. They had timed their arrival to coincide with one of the prescribed daily viewings, and hoped, after they were done, and after the sun had set on the Buddha’s blessed tooth, they could meander back to the quay for some dinner.
Sometimes a spontaneous honesty feels that way. Reverence and piety fly out the window and leave you standing in an empty room with nothing to clothe your nakedness. You stand ashamed in your bare words.
Although the spiritual riff raff wasn’t allowed inside, it could look on. But first: shoes had to come off. A grave monk enforced the rule, pointing to a multilingual placard printed on Plexiglas and fixed to a wall: removal of shoes is a gesture of humility before the godhead. Maybe. But to David’s thinking, it was a way to fill the room with noxious odours, the excretion of a trillion different fungi drawn into this space on the toenails of Malaysian bankers and on the callouses of Indonesian teachers, festering in the stockings of Australian students and, of course, breeding on the expensive slip-on brogues of Canadian dentists. Despite his private objections, David pulled off his shoes with their distinctive calf-skin tassels, tucked a sock inside each, and set them in the provided cubby. Pick your battles, his hygienist liked to say. She may have been quoting Sun Tzu although, as far as David was aware, there were no temples dedicated to the late warmonger’s teeth.
Tamiko tugged David to the viewing area. From David’s perspective, this wasn’t a particularly satisfactory arrangement; the brochure gave the impression he’d be able to inspect the tooth up close, the way he inspected teeth in his practice, pulling out his pick and mirror—not that he was carrying tools in his pocket—and drawing conclusions about the Buddha’s dental health. Instead, he had to keep well back, catching what he could between shoulders and craning necks. Even then, he wasn’t sure what he’d seen, set as it was in a gold- and jewel-encrusted base, waves of opulence emanating ever outward, while monks and other hangers-on lay prostrate on the floor and got in the way.
They had their look and then they ran, or rather David ran and Tamiko trailed behind. David felt there was something illicit about their visit and the way it culminated in a clot of honest words that came tumbling out of his mouth. Sometimes a spontaneous honesty feels that way. Reverence and piety fly out the window and leave you standing in an empty room with nothing to clothe your nakedness. You stand ashamed in your bare words. He couldn’t help himself and blurted: that’s not a human tooth.
The room fell silent. Tourists stared at David. Malaysian bankers. Indonesian teachers. Australian students. The monk by the placard may have wavered in his focus and, however briefly, stared at him. Even Tamiko stared at him. Recognizing his own rudeness, David decided to make a hasty retreat. Sun Tzu probably had advice for a moment like this. Cut your losses. High tail it out of there. Know when you’ve overstayed your welcome. David offered a thin smile to the room, then turned and loped to the elevator.
Although it was the height of the tourist season, and although for that reason the temple was crowded, and although there was considerable demand for the elevator, no one but Tamiko got on with David. More people would have shared a ride with a leper. On the main floor, they skirted the Hundred Dragon Hall while David tried to explain in an indiscreet whisper that it couldn’t possibly be a human tooth. Too large. Probably the molar of a cow or some other ruminant animal. Maybe a water buffalo. As they passed the stony-faced monk at the entrance, Tamiko stopped and, between breaths, declared that it made no earthly difference.
But of course it does. And David swept an arm that drew in its compass the whole of the Temple glowering overhead. It means this whole thing is built on a lie.
Tamiko pointed to David’s feet and asked what happened to his shoes.
David stared down with all the astonishment of a vaudevillian actor and swore and chastised himself for his own stupidity and told Tamiko to wait by the entrance while he ran back inside for his shoes.
Tamiko felt beads of sweat forming on the neck behind her ears and so she moved into the shade. She loved the warmth but hated the heat. Menopause had given her license to think paradoxical things like that. Sometimes she and David got into such arguments crossing this very ground. She would say: oh, it’s so hot! And he’d come back with: you’re hot! And behind his simple words lay a complicated dissertation on the fact that temperature is an objective measure whereas her observation was, in fact, a declaration of a subjective state; so, put properly, she shouldn’t use an impersonal pronoun which implied an objective point of view and … and … She had taken to placing her hands over her ears and telling David that the day men started experiencing menopause was the day they’d be allowed to comment on it. If David tried to qualify his dissertation, as he usually did, Tamiko would cut him off: one more word and I’ll accuse you of mansplaining. David wanted so desperately to be a woke man that threatening to accuse him of mansplaining was usually enough to silence him.
From her spot in the shade, Tamiko watched a flower seller arrange sunflowers in a metal bucket. The woman had just sold an arrangement and was filling a gap in her display. She reached from behind and drew a length of twine around the fresh stalks the way she might reach around a young child when helping to do up a coat. Tamiko wondered what it would be like to live that woman’s life. That was part of the pleasure of travel, wasn’t it? To entertain fantasies? To imagine yourself in someone else’s skin? What would it be like to be this woman selling flowers in Chinatown? To wake up early each morning in an apartment block out by the airport—a husband, maybe a tradesman, and two children, teenagers—and know that you had to rush across town to your stall by the Temple, hawking your little discs of sunshine within sight of a relic. Would it wear on you to feel the gap between your mean life and the Gautama’s perfection?
When they had gotten back from their holiday, Tamiko would have to find a way to explain to their marriage counsellor that while she loved David and couldn’t imagine life with anyone else, it was also true that she couldn’t stand him. This was another of those paradoxical thoughts she couldn’t account for but felt all the same. She had broached the subject of retirement with her employer and David, she knew, had consulted his accountant about getting a proper business valuation, signalling that he, too, was thinking about retirement. If they retired simultaneously without any plan for their future together, then they might as well open with pistols at dawn and get it over with. Apart from the children, they had no life beyond work. And the children were grown now. Tamiko could envision nothing in the land beyond work. It was a dark and inchoate place, like the cavernous spaces where the monks chant their oms. A vast stretch of no mind.
David burst from the Temple and Tamiko could tell by the way he hopped on the sun-stoked pavement that he hadn’t found his shoes. Immediately, he retreated to the shaded side of the Temple where the woman sold her sunflowers. He said he’d gone back up to the 4th floor and searched through all the cubbies and all the other heaps of shoes besides, and he’d questioned the monk who stood by the entrance to the Sacred Light Chamber, explaining that they were expensive brogues of Italian leather with custom inserts because of his high arches, how he needed his shoes if he was going to walk properly and not have back problems for the rest of his holiday, but the monk never made eye contact (the anti-social pig) and never spoke a word, worse than one of those beaver-hatted twits standing guard outside Buckingham Palace. David glared at the monk and thought he could detect a hint of derision at the corner of the lips. He’d bet anything the monk was privately laughing at him. Probably it was him who stole the shoes. They’d come back tomorrow morning and find him standing in his saffron robe and Italian brogues.
David raged, and as he raged, a feeling came over him, a feeling he’d never felt before. The clouds turned black as if a giant forger’s fingers had smudged charcoal from top to bottom across the sky. Way in the back of his head, electric currents crackled and the shocks rumbled through his whole body and out his toes onto the street, and the shocks tumbled wares out of the stalls and rattled cinder blocks onto the asphalt. Then, as quickly as it arrived, the raging passed and David crumpled onto the curb, wrapping his arms around his legs and rocking in place. Tamiko sat on the curb beside him, draping an arm over his shoulders and drawing him close. The flower seller went on arranging her sunflowers in bunches and tying them with twine.
When David had grown calm, Tamiko eased him to his feet and led him ooching further into the narrow streets of Chinatown. Several blocks away, with the Temple out of view, Tamiko found a vendor who sold cheap flip-flops in cellophane wrappers. She bought matching pairs and, finding space on a bench, sat the two of them down and pulled off her shoes and stowed them in her hand bag. She cracked open the packaging and dropped the pairs of flip-flops onto the pavement in front of them. We’re in this together, she announced.
It’s just … David choked on a wad of phlegm and said nothing more.
Yes, it’s just … but I’m hungry. I want fish and the quay is that way.
Tamiko urged David to his feet again and nudged him in the direction of South Bridge Road. It was an easy walk from here, even in cheap flip-flops. As they walked together through the stalls of vendors, Tamiko noticed for the first time that David seemed smaller. Nothing to do with lost shoes or arch supports. Diminished somehow. Like so much of their life together, she couldn’t account for it.