It was a book she borrowed from the library. A collection of short stories revolving around – but without actually taking place during – the Vietnam War. The prose was languid; it almost lulled her to sleep, but for page forty-six: pencilled in the margins in slapdash handwriting – remember to pick up onions, mother now has bunions. She wondered if the writer needed onions or was just rhyming. The book, though lovely, was not for her, but because of the note she read on. Later, on page one hundred and thirty-eight, in the same writing, but warbling out in electric-blue biro – how could she have said that? There was a girl in this story, but she was mute. Further on, in blue biro again, one word underlined – phosphorescent. It was in the story’s first paragraph. Again and again, underlined in the same story – luminous; halogen; brittle brightness. Whoever it was had underlined all the mentions of light.

•

She was a girl who didn’t like people, generally: individually, yes – generally, no. It was not something borne out of a complex; she simply disliked burdens on her solitude. Nevertheless, she was not lonely. At university, where she was an undergraduate, she was sociable; she also often met with the old hangs from secondary school, friendships cemented over the years like loose earth that, when pressed, becomes a country. She was not conscious of hungering, but the book’s intruder made her wonder.

She did not return the book with the others. It was only when she flipped through it again that she saw something peeking out beneath the dust jacket: a slip of yellowing paper that blended almost perfectly into the page. It was an airline ticket from 17 February 2017, seven months previous. Singapore – Kota Kinabalu. Thomas Pios.

Sitting in front of this woman, she must now divine her past. The bandung is terribly sweet. The air from the kitchen is thick with the smell of coconut milk. The revolution of the ceiling fan is slow, languorous – somehow heavy, limping. She is warm but not unpleasantly so. The woman is sitting with her back to the narrow window; in the brightness she is shrouded by shadow. When she moves her arm the snake peers into her eyes. She can see herself reflected in the rheumy windows of age. Glaucoma: an unbearably beautiful word. To take out her computer would be to break the pact with the past that both of them, in this darkening room – this cluttered room full of old photographs and mouldy walls and spools of cloth and bundles of books wrapped in string – have inadvertently created. She takes another sip and removes her notebook from her bag.

•

And behind the boarding pass, a receipt. 13 February 2017 – two books borrowed, from this library, under the name Thomas Pios. This time: non-fiction, something about the agriculture of Filipino rice steppes; a book of poetry by a West Malaysian poet. She puts the short story collection back in her bag and takes the lift to the reference section of the library. When she checks the catalogue online, she sees that the agriculture book is available. Always some sort of sacredness in spaces that are full of stories. In the library, muffled laughter becomes mysterious, the stranger opposite you portentous. It has the effect of turning people into scribes. She passes these strangers with a strange urge to kiss someone on the forehead. She makes her way to the shelf, one finger tracing the spines. There. Just there. She pulls the book out and flips through it slowly, passing through every page. Nothing. She walks quickly to the lift, descends with two squabbling siblings to the basement, where the fiction is stored. Straight to the catalogue: available. Heads for the shelf: a slim volume wrapped in plastic, weighing nothing more than a feather. A heart is heavier. Eighty-nine pages, plus a foreword and a glossary. She flicks through the book. Nothing.

•

Months later, she is no longer an undergraduate. Tasked with writing a research paper on Southeast Asian history, she finds herself in front of her computer. Her proposal’s parameters have become burdensome; she was aware of this failing of self – this bird-like quality she had, some sort of synapse in her brain that flickered long into the night as she lay awake, watching satellites twinkling outside her window, charting the faraway hum of a plane. She brings her mouse to the search bar. For months she has resisted this, but now she keys in Thomas Pios. It was a whim; she had not expected results. Or she had expected a plethora of results, but disparate ones. Thomas Pios (b.1991) was born in Sabah and bred in Singapore. His practice consists of multidisciplinary approaches to Southeast Asian identity. He holds a diploma and B.A. in Fine Arts from ____, and has exhibited in…

No Instagram, no Facebook, just a website. The boy – not much older than her – has a roguish, Caravaggio quality. She has never wished for romance, but his work intrigues her. There is also a blog, in which Thomas Pios describes the work of his favourite Sabahan contemporary artists. Scrolling through the posts, she picks out a narrative. Could it be the same – ? Even if it was, the scribblings in the book could have been written by anyone. Thomas Pios is just another borrower on a presumably long list; the book is a prize-winner from the previous century. She has resisted googling him before this – it would have been too creepy. But if this is Thomas Pios, he is – while not quite famous – a public figure of sorts. He has even given a few interviews. Apart from who he is, there is a narrative emerging on Bornean art and its relationship with the peninsular that she is beginning to sense that, if picked at, might unravel. She wheels the train of thought onto the lined pages of her notebook, to take to her supervisor in the morning.

•

She had gone up to the mountains during three of the days she spent in Sabah. She had not travelled anywhere above Kelantan until then. She had been to Australia for a spell, as a child, but it had been December, sweltering. Two hours up the mountain and she was cold. Fog pillowed everything, consumed everything. She had a sudden desire to walk into the mist, to become a part of it, to feel every cell dissipate – into a nimbus of light – into nothingness. She had wanted to retrace his steps, around the mountain as it were. Everything at once crisp with cold and heaving with fog. The mountain of the ancestors.

•

Her supervisor has approved of her change in direction. At seven that evening she bites her lip and taps out an email to Thomas Pios, whose address is on his website. Her finger hovers over the button for a while, but finally, swearing, she hits Send. Just as she is getting to bed, a ping from her phone alerts her. Thomas Pios has agreed to her request for an interview. They will meet on Saturday, at a Japanese bakery. It is not romance; she is not looking for romance. She is just alight with the idea of somebody holding a blue pen, brow furrowed, pinning down sparks of brightness on a page.

•

He is waiting in a grove of trees. One could fall asleep here, close to the earth. One wanted to become the earth – the trees – the rocks – the sky. It’s all memory. All memory. One could become the very air if one wanted to. One could wander for days through the rainforest and not think about anything other than the endless green, the foliage shuddering with something older than the known world, wiser; except this was the world – the whole world – the wide world. And he wanted to fall asleep in it.

•

She wears lipstick to meet Thomas Pios but regrets it the minute she reaches the bright, airy bakery. She is hating herself for the red lipstick, for the inevitable mark it will leave on her teacup, for the romance of it, when Thomas Pios walks through the door. In a country with four stark racial divisions and recognisable foreigners, she can’t put a finger on his face. It’s the tribal blood – sons of the earth. His Bornean half. She raises three fingers in a feeble wave and feels a new wave of self-loathing. Be bolder than that, she chides herself. Don’t – for heaven’s sake – don’t be simpering. He comes towards her and says hi. She repeats it, smiling.

‘Have you been here before?’

‘My school’s nearby,’ he says.

‘What’s good?’

‘Um … they’ve got a set …’

When they’ve ordered and returned to their seat, she decides to get down to it and pulls out her notebook.

‘I’ll be taking notes, if that’s all right with you.’

‘I mean, like … it’s an interview, right?’

‘It’s just something that I have to say.’

Throughout their conversation she tries to picture him pen in hand, hunched over, scribbling notes in a library book. Thomas Pios is not rude, but there is something about him that is jarring.

‘We’re actually having an exhibition, in Kota Kinabalu. In December.’

She looks up.

‘We?’

‘I’ve just become part of a collective – we’re having our first show in December.’

‘In Sabah?’

‘Yup. You could come, I mean, if you’re on holiday. I mean – you don’t like, have to – I’ll probably blog about it. But … it’s happening. Just so you know. You could come with me.’

She has to laugh. ‘That’s bold.’

He shrugs. ‘I mean, if you’re going, and I’m going, we might as well fly together, right?’

‘I don’t know if I’m going. I mean, you just told me.’

They part soon after. Neither of them says anything about meeting again.

•

Something’s not right, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. Of course, first impressions are often wrong – and it is entirely possible that Thomas Pios did not write the notes – but she can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong, that something’s breathing right behind her or curled around her wrist, that someone, somewhere, is saying a prayer. She closes the page and goes to sleep – or tries to go to sleep. Part of her senses something thrumming away, something she’s missing.

It’s not that popular a location with people her age, Sabah. Bali is popular, as is Thailand: beaches and dance music and cheap beer. Enclaves. But she has heard that it is beautiful, that it is wild and sleepy at once. She picks at the string. The night after she books her flight, she heads to the library and consults the catalogue. The book is on the shelf. She borrows it.

•

Was this the place? A single hollow, sanctified by light. She had once been with a boy, a Eurasian. She was nineteen, and he had a lineage that was clearly documented: Cantonese on one side, Australian on the other. His house had tapestries made by his ancestors: settlers in Perth, from the nineteenth century. He had a crockery set that followed his great-great grandparents from Hong Kong. Her own parents had half-cobbled histories from their parents; beyond that the past was murky. She had envied him, looking at that crockery set – a feeling of jealousy so powerful she felt it in her throat. But now – now with nothing but the earth, she feels so close to some trembling, wondrous thing. The rainforest consumes all knowledge and because of that, becomes all knowledge.

•

The airport at Kota Kinabalu is small, empty. It’s different from what she knows, quieter. It’s like the older parts of her country, the parts where you can still see a clear and unencumbered sky. A city caught between the mountains and the sea.

•

The exhibition is in a shophouse gallery tucked between a tattoo parlour and a record score. She wonders if Thomas Pios will be different in the land of his birth – yet she knows the fault is hers. She had always expected something from him, something he had never promised. But still. She looks through the glass door. A few people are milling around, and he’s giving a tour. When she slips into the hall he catches her eye. She gives him a little wave – five fingers this time. He continues, and she drifts away to the exhibits. He’s done some sort of 3D interactive thing, mixing digital with a physical model of rice steppes. A stray memory floats by: a peninsular poet, Filipino agriculture. She was right. She was right.

Finally, he comes over. The book is already in her hands. His eyes become bright.

•

‘Where did you get that?’

‘The National Library.’ She points at the sticker. There is a stain on the book’s cover; Thomas Pios’s eyes are fixed on it.

For a moment he looks confused, then –

‘That’s what happened. You,’ he touches her elbow, ‘you’re a lifesaver. My grandmother was so pissed off at me. I was passed some books, from another artist here, to give to the library, to donate to the library – stuff they didn’t want but which they thought – Hafidz – Hafidz thought he could sell at some second-hand bookstore. But I thought he could donate it, and I brought them back, from my last visit here … and this.’ He pointed at the book in her hands, ‘This was not supposed to be in the stack. That’s what must have happened. And I thought I’d left it lying around some café, or on the plane –’

‘It has your boarding pass inside it.’

‘What?’

‘Your boarding pass is inside.’ She closes her eyes. ‘That’s how I found out about you’ She opens the book. ‘Look, all these scribblings. I thought they were interesting, so I paid attention: I saw your boarding pass. Look at what you underlined – ‘

‘I’d never do that, I hate people who dog-ear books. This,’ he takes the book from her, ‘this belonged to my grandfather.’

•

And so he gave her his grandmother’s address, a humble bungalow in an old neighbourhood that is quiet, faded, comfortable. All the sounds she hears are distant – a child’s laugh, a bicycle bell, the rattle of the fizzy-drink man’s cart. The trees are huge and gnarled. They are away from the city and the roads are narrow, the houses haphazard, old-fashioned, lumbering. Roofs hang wide over the houses, gracing each one with a thick perimeter of shade. Rainfall is faint, invisible when you look towards the sky, but obvious in the puddles upon the earth. She rings the bell and Thomas Pios’s grandmother, waddling and sarong-clad, emerges.

•

‘All these books,’ the old woman says, ‘they’re his – I was never one for reading. While he was here, I never bothered to touch them. It isn’t that I don’t read – it’s just that I never – well … fancied fiction. My father disapproved. You know what old habits are like. I was never rebellious. But after – my husband, not my father – I looked through them, all of them. Looking for clues. And I found myself …’ Her voice catches and the old woman looks away. Briefly, silence. When the old woman speaks again, her voice is chirpy.

‘I found myself realising. He wasn’t very forthcoming, bah, my husband. But I realised what he had been doing. This – the book you have. It was given to him by a friend who’d been captured by the Japanese too, back in the war, held in the same prison as he was. There’s a story in that book. Page one hundred and eighty-four, that’s where it begins. It’s about a man – an American, ex-military, who has been imprisoned for what – I can’t remember. But he’s been imprisoned. And he’s underlined every word that has to do with light. Do you understand? I know the abstractions: that he was a Resistance member during the war, that his missions took him between the mountain and the valley, that for a while, in the middle, he was captured, tortured, that he escaped and hid out in the mountains until the end of the war. But all these small things – these things he never mentioned. These things I discovered afterwards, looking for clues. He left them in storybooks. He inserted them into the lives of people who didn’t exist.’

The old woman stops talking and looks at her.

She puts down her pen and shuts her notebook; she hasn’t written anything in it.

•

Thomas Pios’s grandfather chose the name Paul for himself after the Catholic missionaries visited his village. He kept his tribal name close to him; it became a secret thing – to know it was to know him intimately. The first time his wife had heard it was two days before their wedding, in 1956. During the war it had been his code name. During the war he had been far from his village. No one he knew came from it, and when the Japanese arrived and the Chinese commenced the Resistance, he had whispered that name and cloaked himself with the disguise of his past. When he was betrayed, that name was said without shadow or sanctity, spat out even, and picked up by Japanese tongues that sliced it apart, butchered it, tongues that belonged to the men who picked him up, hiding beneath burlap sacks in a small lorry, and killed his friend in front of him, as well as the first woman he had ever loved – though for her, the killing had not been deliberate. She had struggled, it was an accident. And every day for the rest of his life he hated himself for the brief moment after her death when he had offered a prayer of thanks that she had died quickly, that she would escape the torture that he would face in the immediate hours after his capture, and for weeks after that, torture that made of men maps, and women, nations.

•

‘It was always him,’ Mrs Pios was saying, ‘who changed the batteries of the clocks. I knew how to, of course, but I didn’t want to – I had a feeling that when they stopped he finally found some peace. In whichever world that he went to. He should have told us. That is the one thing I can’t forgive him for. Your family – they should never have to wonder. They should always know.’

In one story, he had been reminded of his mother, who needed onions; it was that simple. In another, a woman’s tongue is torn out, and she refuses to acknowledge her lover afterwards; he remembered an argument he and his wartime lover had had. A language in the absence of language. Doctor Zhivago, the first sentence underlined: eternal memory. On and on they went, singing. A book of creative essays from an anthropologist from the Pacific Northwest who was excavating some European hollow: I close my eyes, and I see everything. The book she had borrowed from the library, that was the last book he ever collected. His last insertion, the last page of a ten-page story – less an insertion, more an intrusion: a phrase, underlined. And once I am away from everything, I will fall asleep.

•

He came from a coastal village. The memory that thrummed inside of him all day was of flashes in the water that signalled fish. Brown ankles gleaming in salt and silt and sun. Every day he was inside he thought of this. His method was to think of something good each time something bad happened. Her voice, above the screams. His mother’s eyes whenever hunger invaded him. In the end, he could no longer distinguish pain from peace. Those last few months in the mountain were the first time since his imprisonment that he was contented, and the last time he would ever be. He thought of nothing. So far inside, the Japanese would not come. They didn’t know – winding through the rainforest, up here where rice still grew fat and tall – of these people. He didn’t know of these people, his own countrymen. His time there was so feverish – blessedly feverish, blessedly blank. Just fog and rainforest and food placed in his mouth so he never had to think, never had to imagine, in the tropical malady of his head –

•

He stopped speaking, in his last week. He had always been quiet, but now he was totally silent. When he wanted to communicate with his wife he left books on the table with passages underlined. He could communicate most clearly through words that already existed. Only on paper were words to be trusted; in mouths, on tongues, they were made cheap. But he could have sworn he had told her that he was leaving. In his memory he was perched on the edge of the bed. Outside it was raining feverishly, and the sea beyond them was swollen. The fan above them creaked endlessly, and he said to her: I must go. There is more life without me. And in his memory there is nothing but the sweet, wet haze of his time in the mountain, after the imprisonment. But his wife, thinking again and again – she can’t remember this. She can’t. She would never have allowed it.

Life shattered, like a house of matchsticks in the summer rain.

•

And afterwards –

His last life was there. Back to the village where he had lain with his first love, in some ramshackle hut, hastily built so that when it stormed, lightning flashed through the slats between the woods and turned everything as bright as day. Up the path he had taken, swollen with hope, feverish with courage, young and hardened, ready to die – but never to watch another die. A splinter of bright, blazing fight. The village in the rainforest where he slept, in a bed of ferns, sunlight speckling his skin, after everything he had known had been torn away from him.

He never wanted to die, but perhaps he did. Or perhaps he found the villagers he had left decades agowhen he was still a young man, and in the silent understanding of the last of the great wars, he lived to the end of his days. After all, it was years after his disappearance that the clocks had stopped. Or perhaps, beyond all understanding, beyond all knowledge, he simply walked to the very end, where the earth’s edge blurs into light, and everything that has ever happened – all sorrow and joy and grief and triumph – happens again and again. Where all of life meets with a crash most resounding.

•

This isn’t the grove; it isn’t near a village, it’s still fairly low on the mountain. After all, she doesn’t know what happened to him. The ink on the book was not months old – it was decades. She pictures a man, bent over with history: phosphorescent, luminescent, halogen, brittle brightness. She pictures a man inside that man. Pressed earth. When she opens her eyes, she is aware of her body: the mountain air settling on her skin, in her lungs. Her vision cloudy with fog. Glaucoma. She stands up from where she has been lying on the earth, collects herself, dusts off the dirt, and walks down to the path, where all the people are.