take this white gown
wrap you in it
go where the swallows are
go call them mother
Auntie Chiao first met Fortune Teller Man at the temple that burned down. He had a stall there. Fortune tellers from all over flocked to the area in hopes of making a living. They each had their own processes for divination: with a deck of cards, with a bird companion, by looking at the face or at the hands. They arrived in the morning and left the same day. No one knows where they went overnight. Instead of helping my mom sell shoes, I loitered at fortune telling stalls. I was fascinated by this sort of thing. Fortune Teller Man showed up more and more at the temple, and eventually stayed. I saw him often in town. He was known to several of the kopitiams. Over time, his stall became more established.
Auntie Chiao and Fortune Teller Man previously lived at Sixth Road. My mom asked me to go see it, the meaning being to go see if she needed anything. It was an old and dilapidated house, the kind no one wanted to rent. A single mosquito net in the room covered the shabby mattress on the ground. Rain leaked through the ceiling. Everything on and around the mattress was miscellaneous trash. No need to turn on the stove in this kind of house. There was no stove anyway. Nothing suggested newlyweds lived here. It was two scrap collectors eking out a life.
Not a single relative attended their wedding. No one cared where Fortune Teller Man was from. He didn’t exactly garner respect, what with his slipshod profession. There were no flowers, no photographer. Not a single photo was taken. It didn’t feel like these two were getting married as much as embarking on a path of least resistance. Fortune Teller Man read my fortune once. He gave me a palm reading. Free of charge. I don’t remember a single word of what he said, probably because none of it was important.
Barely a year after their wedding, Fortune Teller Man died. He died at the government hospital. People asked Auntie Chiao outright if he had left behind any property or anything of value. The answer was no.
Now they finally asked her: “Why did you get married? At your age.”
Auntie Chiao replied in a dialect phrase I didn’t quite understand. I wasn’t curious anyway. People overvalued marriage and considered it a once-in-a-lifetime event. No way was Auntie Chiao like that. Most likely she considered it a game of house. As to why Fortune Teller Man died, we weren’t close to him and couldn’t be bothered to ask. Here gods have no eyes. And death is far from remarkable. He had made it past the half-century mark when he died.
My mom gave me a hundred ringgit to drive Auntie Chiao and Fortune Teller Man’s ashes to his hometown. To be honest I wasn’t accustomed to driving long distances, and I had never been to that region. The roads were those extremely rural types. The idea of travelling with human remains terrified me. Everyone else was busy. It was just the two of us that had the time. His hometown was located at the foot of the central mountain range. Neither of us had been before. None of our family had ever been there before. I was forced to go. First Sister’s Husband did some research and said it was one of the earliest mountain villages, and that many indigenous people lived there. They lived off the mountain: catching fish in mountain streams, gathering wood on the mountain, and picking mountain berries and fruit. Two hundred fifty-five kilometers: I was about to embark on the longest drive of my life. My usual drive was about thirty kilometers. I was someone who could only drive straight. I didn’t know how to reverse or park.
That night I scrutinized the map. See this mountain? Single Mountain, because it’s all alone. Rain continued and then stopped. I went to bed very early. I let my eyes adjust to the dark before closing them. I saw two opposing shores with the same wilderness. Auntie Chiao was on one side, and I the other. I called out to her, and to my mom too. They didn’t seem to hear me.
I drove into that small town very slowly, taking an hour longer than expected. We parked by the side of the road at a Chinese convenience store. After asking around, we located the home of Fortune Teller Man. It was a house on stilts, with crooked stairs running up. In front of the house was a rambutan tree laden with fruit that no one had bothered to pick. Layers of leaves accumulated undisturbed on the ground. Everything there smelled like cat piss. Laundered cat piss. Fresh cat piss. There were cats watching us at every moment. It was a cat-governed country.
The houses here resembled those in our seaside town. No wonder Fortune Teller Man decided to stay. I was well-acquainted with these unmarked addresses with only numbers on the lampposts. All mail was delivered to the business at the intersection. People would go there to look for their mail. My grandfather’s house was like this. Every piece of mail would be in the hanging basket under the clock in his kopitiam.
Fortune Teller Man’s house had the same wood walls as my grandfather’s kopitiam, and the same cement floor. The same portraits of deceased family hung on the wall. One of them looked like Fortune Teller Man’s father. Maybe it was because they were of similar age when they died, but the father and son greatly resembled each other. They had the same soul. That father’s face had been born again, continuously. That’s why they say every family has to have a son. So that the father’s face could continue.
The house was saturated with a ghostly humidity. As we sat on the sofa, the peeling paint on the walls and the overgrown grass outside seemed to turn their heads. Fortune Teller Man’s transparent figure was at his mother’s side. I saw it. He was saying something to his mom. Humidity saturated his hair. His elongated neck was red and inflamed. His entire figure was awash with condensation. The mountain humidity was suffocating. I couldn’t wait to leave. My legs grew weaker with every moment.
Fortune Teller Man’s mother was wearing a thin flowery material, the same senior’s type of garment my grandmother used to wear. I was unfamiliar with her accent. Her face didn’t look Chinese. She had dark skin and all-white cropped hair. She wanted us to bury Fortune Teller Man’s ashes into the dirt on the mountain. She believed in mountains. Because Single Mountain would look after children for all eternity.
She said: “As it should. Shrouded by expectation in life. Dirt in death.”
No trees grew on the peak of Single Mountain. Go into the mountain, they said.
The pitcher plants suffocate everything, except the measly high-altitude flies, which they consume leisurely. It is a godly place. No life form can be carried away from there. Those pitcher plants belong to the mountain. Anything taken from the mountain becomes the moon, the moon changing into this and that. Those fish, they belong to the mountain too. People not from the mountain shall not catch them. In the streams of the mountain live a type of breast fish. When it breastfeeds, their breast milk dyes the stream silver. And so the stream is named the Milky Way.
Fortune Teller Man had decided to move away from the place where the moon changes into this and that. Away from a mother who changed like the moon into this and that. He had never mentioned any of his family to us. Auntie Chiao said he mentioned the mountain once. As if he was still playing there. As if he learned his fortune telling craft there. As if he saw through the mortal realm there. Saw those mudslides headed down the mountain. Saw those abandoned mining communities inundated by rain.
“It’s where he used to go often,” the old woman said. “Head into the mountain through the oil palm grove at the back. It’s not far.”
We didn’t know how to go about what she requested, and we didn’t dare try.
Why did Fortune Teller Man appear again? Wind had already pulled his body taut. We had already brought him back home, to his mother, to this house. I caught a whiff of another smell, of another presence.
Auntie Chiao continued to sit there. She seemed blissfully unaware. I started to recite the many names of Buddha. I pretended not to understand the old woman’s words and faked urgency in our departure. Any longer and the humidity of the mountain would penetrate me.
I pulled Auntie Chiao up with me, saying we had to go. We had to rush back immediately. Placing the urn before the ancestral tablets, we bowed our heads and left.
We pray the dirt buries your ill face. We pray the wind alleviates your pain. Put your hand on your rotted-through neck. Put away your washed face.
Auntie Chiao would not fear these paranormal happenings. She had her father’s soul. Auntie Chiao previously said to me that by running hard you can outrun ghosts. So in the car, I clamped down on every one of my pores and sped out of there. My breath collected in pieces as I drove. It was pouring rain the entire way. My focus lapsed for an instant and I almost swerved into a ditch. I slammed on the brakes. A speeding car narrowly missed us. Auntie Chiao said she saw a huge, ancient hat on top of our car, shielding us.
“What hat?” I asked, turning to look at Auntie Chiao.
“The kind of hat people wore in antiquity,” She replied.
I looked left and right, and of course saw nothing.
After we returned, I was sick for five days. Stuck in bed, I felt I had come down with some sort of parasitic infection. My arms and legs pulsed weakly. My mom went to pray for me at the temple and returned rice for me. I lay in the room with sunrises. I let the rays of daybreak pierce my body. I let the sun suck on my dark aura. Eventually I managed to put on the facade of a human being once more. For the first time in many days, I saw the yellow-beaked mynas strutting out front. I sought out Fourth Aunt, so she could bring me to her temple. There I kneeled and bowed my head and prayed and gave money like a fool. I was nothing without prayer.
In the front of our house were citrus trees that my mom had planted several decades before. They never bore fruit. I had heard that their aromatic leaves can ward off the souls of the deceased. So I plucked these leaves and applied them vigorously all over my body. Until it got dark. Until the sounds of Malay evening prayer descended upon me from the skies.
That night I dreamed of a room with dirt. Overgrown with weeds. My lungs transformed into the windowsill. My mom took me down to the fields, within that room of dirt. My mom took me outside to burn weeds. The huge fire. Until we were both sweating.
Long after that trip, Auntie Chiao eventually told me the story of Fortune Teller Man.
Fortune Teller Man spent his time in various kopitiams. Apart from fortune telling, he also picked lucky numbers, you know, those pick four lottery numbers. He was a fortune teller with a conscience, and not a con man, not one of those who convinced you to change your name and your family’s names, with a fee per name change of course. I knew someone like that. It was my mom’s high school friend. Together with her husband they were song and chorus, the complete charade. She used to be the principal of a kindergarten. Her title was principal, but in reality she owned the kindergarten. The kindergarten went bankrupt a long time ago. My mom was bamboozled once, actually a few times. Probably because it was her high school friend. She said our entire family’s names were inauspicious, and charged fifty ringgit per name change. None of us changed our names.
One morning just past six, as the sun was just emerging, Fortune Teller Man was about to carpool with Kopitiam Wang to the next town. Waiting outside Kopitiam Wang’s house, he caught a glimpse of an old woman in flower pajamas going in and out. Her face was fretful. Later when he brought it up in the car, Kopitiam Wang said there were no seniors living in his household. His mom had passed, but from the description that old woman sounded like his mother.
Fortune Teller Man had him go to the temple because the old woman seemed to be concerned about something. It turned out Kopitiam Wang’s wife was having a difficult pregnancy. His mother was worried and thus appeared. Afterwards, they went to make a return offering of rice, and his wife had an uneventful delivery. After this incident, word got out, and his name garnered a bit more repute. Slowly over time more people sought him out.
That day he was scheduled to go to Bukit Bakri to help someone. He didn’t know the house there was extremely cursed. Someone had died by hanging. While inside, he was struck. His head was pulled straight up by something. His whole body went rigid. This sort of thing you wouldn’t believe until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. One look and you’d know he was possessed by the ghost of a hanged man. The bystanders sent him to the hospital. That was a mistake, as they should have sent him to a temple. It was impossible for the hospital to fix him. I heard the news much later since I had no cellphone. By the time I got to the hospital, his body was stiff, and eerily elongated.
