Maria

Quiet peaceful nights are abundant in cities, more specifically in the concomitant suburbs. Not in the sense that there is no unrest on most nights, just that on most nights and for most people, routines are rarely interrupted. So, through no fault of their own, the residents and dwellers of such places rarely pay any mind to anything past the boundary of the fences of their front yards and perhaps that is for the best.

One such suburb lied along Thomson Ridge, or more accurately Thomson Ridge was the road that served as access to this collection of houses. Along the row of terrace and semi-detached houses was one going by the address of 55 Thomson Ridge, right at the end of the road. This is an actual address. Whether the following story actually occurred, one realises he has not the evidence to prove otherwise. In the dead of one of many dormant nights, the neighbourhood was asleep, save for the sparse barking of some motley dogs and the occasional rumble of vehicles captained by unfortunate members of the graveyard shift. Until it wasn’t.

The relative normal was broken by the front door of the terrace house on 55 Thomson Ridge being violently swung open by a girl. She seemed to care not for the peaceful rest of other homeowners as she heaved herself noisily across her front yard, panting harder than one might think a girl her size—and she was small—would to brisk her pace across the front yard. At a glance she looked younger than she really was, mostly because she was incredibly and morbidly small, 15 looking 9. The 5-by-5 meter span of her room never granted her the luxury of working her muscles proper and so the atrophy had rendered her barely mobile. One step past her front door and the results manifested, she collapsed under all 28 Kg of her grotesquely skinny frame.

She began crawling like a snake. In some sense comparing her to a snake would be inept, that would imply she could actually crawl. More accurately, her arms scraped desperately at the forward space and she tugged and pulled the rest of her body, muscularly helpless, along the ground causing her pale and already blistery skin to tear. Her body did more flailing than actual productive motion, as if throughout her life she was never given the opportunity to practice basic and natural movement. Despite the inefficacy of her efforts, more than that, despite the self-inflicted damage she was knowingly causing to herself, she fought as hard as she possibly could given the salient malnourishment dulling her every move. It’s clear that her need to reach the gate of her fence, or perhaps the need to get away from that front door, was a mortal one. Rightfully so given that her state left one foot past death’s door. She squirmed for her life.

Her name was Maria, though that name wasn’t given to her the same way everybody has their own name given to them. Have someone question the legitimacy of your claim to your identity and you could pull out your NRIC as adequate rebuttal. Everybody born in a hospital has a birth certificate lawfully and infallibly conferring status on your identity. Maria had no such proof. She was born right there on the first floor living room of 55 Thomson Ridge, aided only by her father as a pseudo (and by all measures gravely incompetent) midwife. Perforce, the government and society never knew of her existence and so she could only assert the right to her name by way of hearsay through her parents. One could argue then that technically she had no name.

As a matter of fact, even if she did have a birth certificate or any document alluding to her existence, she could not read it; Maria was never sent to school, she didn’t even have the faintest inkling of what education was, or that she was an isolated exception amongst the vast majority of her educated demographic. Nor could she speak of it; though this is similarly a product of a lack of curriculum, it seems natural that to function even within a family, one most acquire a medium by which to communicate. Maria had no such need or, more accurately, it was decided for her that she should never speak.

Maria reached the end of her yard. Groping around, her hands land on some sort of fence, bust high. In front of her lay the inimical front gate. Common sense would lead one to try and open the lock, but having never seen one, Maria instinctually decided to heave herself over the gate, landing on the pavement on the other side with a thud. There was blood on the ground. Suddenly, excruciating pain, like lightning shot up her left arm and when she looked down she saw that her left hand was not there. It didn’t break, it didn’t get sliced off by some sharp part of the fence and left itself hanging by some cartilage, it had truly disappeared. It was clearly sliced off; on the rim of the edge of her arm were bite marks of clearly violent origin as if someone had, over a long period of time, gnawed down her wrist to the bone and eventually through that as well. The puzzle was that said slow and unethical chomping never occurred and yet the resulting wounds had suddenly reified themselves. The pain was paralysing, shutting down her ability to focus or move.

She bled profusely, she would be dead in an hour, even less considering how deathly frail she already was at that point or really for her entire life. Some concoction of adrenaline and sheer willpower gave her the strength required to stand, all the while her left stump spurted blood all over her tattered dress. The dress was once white, thought she would never know it. By now after years of wearing it, it had gradated to brown at the tip around her knee. The rest of her dress were similarly stained in blotches of grey, yellow and brown with some red. Holes punctured all throughout, some small, caused by the persistent munching of insects, others larger, freshly made by the wooden spikes on the gate she just surmounted or caused by reasons lost to time. The dress was in such a state as to bring to question whether it was now a dress at all. It certainly did no favours for Maria’s warmth or modesty. Maria felt lost. She had never been in a space where she couldn’t feel anything in her immediate surroundings. She was clearly at the end of the street and all too suddenly she was suddenly in complete limbo. She retreated back to the gate, finding it with her touch and decided to follow the fence down the road, her one remaining hand leading herself.

Almost everything about Maria’s life up to that point was decided for her. Equipped with a shoddy mattress, a bowl to piss in and some paper to shit on, the room Maria was shoved into from birth would sustain her life the same way a shot glass full of water would sustain the life of a goldfish which is to say barbarically if at all. She was originally not alone. After giving birth to her, Maria’s mother was locked in with her. Lost from her memory, as all our infantile experiences are, were the few years of wailing and futile banging of the door. The attempts to escape her fate ended eventually when she succumbed to an infection no doubt aided by her weak state post-birth. After that Maria was truly alone. Blissfully ignorant of the injustices brought upon her, the miserably bland means of cereal and plain rice sporadically shoved through the front door constituted the highlights of her day.

The rest of the day she was chained by means of an overly tight cable secured round her left wrist connected to some rope. This shrunk her world further, denying her the small right to even access the entirety of the room which was her universe. Though behaviourally Maria would be unimaginably different than any layman, one thing we do have in common is man’s yearning for agency and freedom which are so innate as to withstand any variance in upbringing. Given no prompt to do so, she spent the first few years of her life trying to cut that rope. Days were spent picking at individual fibres, making excruciatingly slow headway into the rope. She picked so hard and for so long that desperation turned into vapidity. It wasn’t that she realised she was making no progress; it was that she couldn’t know her progress at all. The few windows on one side of the room, the side she could not reach lest her left hand detaches from her arm, were boarded up perfectly along with the small gap beneath the door. This meant that, save for the few seconds the door was opened, she drowned in darkness and, inevitably, her thoughts. Those few moments of blinding light were at once both holy and baptising, cleansing her forsaken self of her pathetic reality, and yet also invasively vindictive, promising her a bigger world out there and yet never truly confirming its existence.

Once, when she was very young, one of the nailed boards meant to cover the window came loose, letting some light in. In the few minutes before father would notice, she managed to steal a glance at the outside. A glance would scarcely be fitting, she could not get used to the blinding brightness and her eyesight had deteriorated enough that all she could see were blurs. What she could understand was that she was looking at something distant, a dark grey blur which was a road. And that road ended somewhere. Father came in and nailed the board back up after that. It would never fail him again.

Up close, she could hear the dripping of blood onto the ground, the patter of her footsteps, each pat accompanied by a pang of agony as her raw skin met the rough concrete and her laboured respiration. In the distance echoed barks of nocturnal dogs much to the disapproval of their owners. The barks were, among many things, off-putting since after awhile Maria realised that the barks weren’t quite right. It felt not so much like a real dog, as someone’s vague rendering of a dog in their mind brought impossibly to reality. Perhaps Maria just wasn’t very used to hearing dogs. Maria had more pressing concerns and so she reordered that thought to the back of her mind. She had to keep moving. As she stumbled from house to house, she felt the textures beneath her palm and fingers change. One house had sharp and rough spines causing much torment to fumble through. Another house had benign, rounded orbs that gave her hands something pleasant and secure to grasp. Though she didn’t have the time to realise it, she was on the cusp of learning to judge others by the manner in which they represented themselves. The design of one’s front yard, the façade which you present to the world, speaks volumes on who one is or at the very least who one wants to be.

Eventually, through disuse, her eyes simply shut down, a consequence of which, and perhaps to her misfortune, was that her other senses were heightened. Unfortunate because of all ways the room offended her, it assaulted her most through her non-visual senses. Over the 15 years of her excruciating existence, all forms of bodily effluvia, namely shit, piss and an alarming amount of blood from menstruation, smeared every surface of the room. There was also vomit from the overly numerous times she was sick with diseases undoubtably caused by the poor hygiene. Eventually, it became so ubiquitous that to place any appendage on the ground and feel dry, even flooring would be a surprise. With uncleaned waste comes a maelstrom of pests; flies, cockroaches, lizards and the chance entering of a beetle or centipede.

There is no such thing as a stagnant mind, if a human being finds that their immediate surrounding contributes nothing in the way of stimulus, then it immediately turns to other avenues for intellectual work. Maria spent many days listening to the outside world. She heard all types of cars go by, motorcycles too. She discerned the patterns and routines of various cars as they get turned on and used to transport their owners to and from work. She was essentially and unknowingly keeping track of the days of the week as, with some variations within a negligible margin, the cars would repeat their cycle weekly. What fascinated her more were the passing assaults of the reckless sports car driver or motorcyclist speeding down a distant road. The deafening roars complete with a subtle Doppler effect, whose sources she would never fathom.

On quiet afternoons, she could hear the rustling of plastic bags as maids made their way on foot back home from the grocery and the different flip-flops they wore, for they all wore slippers of some sort. The sounds echoed a danger and by extension a fear in her which sat in the back-burner of her mind constantly. On all too common occasions, the rustling bags wouldn’t pass from right to left or vice versa, sometimes they just grew louder. They grew to its loudest and then it was interrupted by some sort of tinkling, we would know it as the jangling of keys and then the unlocking of a door, its opening, its closing and then its re-locking. Father was home.

Maria had never travelled this far in her life, she had crossed that threshold before she even got past the front gate. Her universe had just expanded thousandfold, infinite fold. Just moments ago, Maria’s entire world was that small room, and everything outside it, for she of course knew there was an outside, was other, it was not her room, it was un-room. All she ever did really was contemplate what this unbound un-room realm was like. Reality after alternate reality she formed in her head based on what little information she could grasp from the dampened sounds she heard. Of course all of them were wrong, they came in the form of vehicles abstracted into oblivion, people walking in manners the rest of us could never fathom, wearing clothes like hers, barefoot or sometimes with footwear designed with no consideration for sanity and of course with plastic bags in colours and with prints nobody could understand the logic of. By sheer brute force, at some points, she must have gotten really close, far closer than we could expect her to, simply by the power vested in fate and chance.

The daunting distance between her and the end of the road was closing, she knew not how far left she had to go or how far she had gone or really how she would know that she had reached her self-imposed destination. Perhaps really, she was far too frightened at this daunting world to care too much about semantics. As it turned out, she did not need to know where the end of the road was as it found her, it came in the form of her body slamming into the fences as it turned a sharp 90 degrees. She decided to let go of the fence, opting to let the textures beneath her feet guide her. She turned a right angle and walked on, she had reached the end of the road.

Age 15, at some time in the night, there was the unlocking of a door, the door opening, the door closing, the door locking and then footsteps; father had gone out. She had been waiting for this moment for months now. Though she scorned how her father looked at her askance if he ever looked at her at all, it worked out in her favour this time as she could easily hide the fact that the rope tethering her to the wall had been cut. Her father placed too much trust in the security of that rope, leaving the door unlocked, trusting she would never reach it or that if she ever did, she would be too scared to exit. It wasn’t that she took 15 years to cut the rope, she herself did not know what mental blockade stopped her from fully attempting to escape. This blockade, she thought, was primarily propped up by the unknown, the lack of understanding of what lay beyond that door. She knew very little, by any measure, but she did know that she had to leave that room by any means possible. She waited for a few minutes, out of paranoia that her father was somehow miraculously still in the house. She opened the door, and for the first time stepped out of the room. She followed the twisting walls with her hand and by method of trial and error, eventually found the stairs after numerous dead ends in the form of other bedrooms. She clamoured down the stairs the way an animal would struggle down it, on all fours. The rest of the house was not much better than her room. In the few steps she took around the house, her feet and hands were met with the same grime and decay brought about by the same disregard her father had for her. Reaching the bottom and heading straight, she burst out to freedom.

Stumbling through the void, her hands touched something familiar, perhaps scarily so. An unexpected and yet welcome change from the harsh wooden fencing, concrete tiling and metallic lampposts, her hands brushed a silken fabric hanging in mid-air. It felt like the curtains in her room, the ones that were never used and yet her father never spared a second thought to remove. But this fabric was lighter than that, it almost floated in her hands and her feet could feel it gently lilting above the road, so out of place and untainted. Maria stretched as high as she could but couldn’t feel where the fabric was hung from. Eluding all rationality, the infinite curtain seemed like it meant for her to find it. It began to have some semblance of its own intentions.

A gentle wind blew, a sensation Maria had only felt in the slightest when she jerked forward or when the closing of the door created the most ephemeral of drafts, and the curtain rode on it and brushed her cheek. It began wrapping itself around her, almost in an embrace, Maria knew innately that this curtain was gentle despite having no frame of reference to compare it to. It lovingly caressed her, shedding Maria of all despondency, lifting her up. It was a scarf to keep her warm, a dress to accentuate herself, a clean blanket tucked over her by a careful father after a tiring day at school, the doting hands of a mother singing to her and the warmth of her suffocated heart she never dared reward herself with and this magic lifted her further. Finally, the curtain hugged her neck, wrapping so softly around her fragile skin. It lifted her beyond this world, into a heaven as she understood it. If she could fathom a world beyond her room, one of such vast improvement, whose dwellers could never fathom a life of her state, then it stood to reason that she could imagine a world even beyond that one; a heaven so far beyond what we could understand, but alas one she deserved and one she could escape to. She rose further into the sky, carried by all the love she’d never known and on a quiet dormant night like many others, Maria was carried with gentle hands into a world she had earned passage to for 15 years.

Nobody would know of Maria’s voyage--firstly tense and tumultuous and then beautiful and fated--nobody was awake to see her stamp bloody footprints along the road and in the first place, nobody knew of her existence. That was the case until 11 days after Maria’s passing. Police officers came down to 55 Thomson Ridge, investigating a report on an offensive malodour origination from the property. They were greeted by a front gate and front door left open, a house in a disheveled mess, some rice being prepared to be cooked and stopped abruptly halfway and some plastic bags from a grocery dropped right in the doorway to Maria’s room, packets of tissue and 6-packs of beer spilling out. They would find one of the rooms ransacked, as if someone had hurriedly packed luggage there. A drawer filled with coins but no notes here and another drawer with some empty partitions originally filled with clothes. They would not find the source of the stench until they peeked into Maria’s room. Assaulting their senses was not only the disgusting breeding ground of insects that was her room but, tied with a curtain around her neck, Maria’s rotting corpse, 11-days old. In the opposite corner of the room, they found Maria’s left hand, still attached to the rope which was attached to the wall. A trail of blood lead from that hand, across the length of the room, to where Maria’s final resting position was and ending at Maria’s mouth, crimson red. Though much of her teeth had fallen out from decay long ago, the remaining frontal incisors were chipped and had bits of flesh and bone stuck between them.

The case would pass over Singapore’s zeitgeist in a matter of days, not that it was ever very present in it at all. The police would fail to find Maria’s father, whom people could only assume had ran away, and thus there were no witnesses to uphold the truth of her life. So it came to be that, with no narrative, people didn’t care. Her life became legend. In passing, people would wonder what she had experienced, how she behaved and what, if very little, she knew of the world. Indeed, they were right to say she knew very little but what she did know, and what was at the forefront of her mind in the final months before her expedition, was that she had to leave that room. And in the dead of one of so many dormant nights in one of many unassuming suburbs of Singapore, she finally did.