Ian On The Red Dot

I woke up early today to do my meditation which was disrupted by Alfred bringing me breakfast. I’m not complaining. Alfred getting me my food was a welcome change of routine. Back in India, I had to prepare my own breakfast.

India. It was only two days ago that I had said goodbye to my spiritual teacher for the last 4 years.

My mother had allowed me to go to India after the restless nights became unbearable for everyone. While at first it took only a physical toil on my mother and Alfred who would get up in the middle of the night to watch and worry over me as I tossed and turned on the bed, talking, shouting and wailing into the darkness, it weighed on them till it became an emotional burden. It was a burden that my mom couldn’t handle. She retreated further into her work, staying away from the house especially in the nights, away from the pain that was me. We drifted apart until there was a gulf so wide, that even Moses wouldn’t have been able to cross.

From the start, my ’sleep’ took more than a toil on my body. I would wake up in the morning feeling exhausted from a night of constant moving and talking, but the thing that really affected me was that I would start each day with this enormous sense of emptiness within, as if life had no meaning. I would go through the day feeling mentally drained, unable to concentrate on anything, often having to separate the images of my dreams and nightmares from my memories, sometimes even confused what was real from my past and made-belief with the images merging seamlessly.

Alfred tried recording what i spoke each night, but while I was speaking coherently in sentences, the conversations were disjointed and never seemed to make logical sense.

I started keeping a journal by my bed. Each time I drifted back into semi-consciousness, I would shake myself violently into consciousness and try to record down what i was last dreaming about. I tried to recreate the images in my mind before I lost them forever to my subconsciousness - together with Alfred’s faithful nightly recording, I tried to make sense of everything. It was a futile effort.

Somehow I could never remember clearly what I was dreaming about, the images I recreated and the voice recordings never seem to fit into a coherent narrative and there was always details missing from the images, causing them to be extremely fuzzy, as if the lens of my mind were never clean.

It wasn’t just the dreams and images that i was trying to record, i was also to record the events of my days. One thing that I regularly experience are dejavus. I would try to record every time I experienced a moment of dejavu.

My mom never gave up on me although she did try to avoid me. She would get the best doctors from around the world to come down to Singapore to check on me. They performed scans and tests but found nothing wrong with my brain. They couldn’t explain medically what was happening to me. My Mom then started sending me to see psychiatrists. I think with the amount of hours I spent on the sofas of those quacks, I personally kept the industry afloat. They tried to medicate me, tried to analyze me, but none of them every came close to explaining what was happening to me not to mention cure me. Even with the medication, I was still ‘enjoying’ my restless nights.

It came to the point that my mom broke down at the dinner table one night and started swearing, saying that what was happening to me was a curse for her previous good fortune. That the fates were making me pay for the blessing she got from God. She started swearing that it would have been better if I was not born. Although I was already 18 by then, I ran from the table crying.

Alfred found me weeping like a baby in the corner of my room that night. It was only then that I discovered the nature of my birth.

June 6th 2006 had been a day of great tragedy across the world. Typically, it would be the day that the Allied Nations from World War 2 would celebrate D-Day-the day that began the end of the war. On 2006, it became a day that the terrorists forever changed the world.

Sep 11 was a day that shook the world. It had threatened to change the way people live their lives, one constantly under fear. However, as the days after Sep 11 became weeks, and weeks became months, and months became years, even with the London, Madrid and Bali bombings, the grip of terrorism became to loosen, and people got on with their lives, acknowledging terrorism, but no longer fearing it, it becoming the crazy brother that the family never talked about, never cared about and who was never invited for anything.

June 6th was the day the crazy brother got dangerous, crashing the family annual gathering and killing everyone. The terrorists conducted simultaneous attack on almost every major city of the world. Cities like Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, and almost all the capital cities of the world experienced nuclear attacks. Singapore was spared the devastation of a nuclear attack but not the attack of the terrorists.

My parents were in San Francisco when the attacks were carried out. They survived the bomb that went off in San Francisco. However the doctors had then told my mom that the radiation from the fallout had damaged her womb and she would never have any children. Like Sarah in the bible who laughed when God told her she would have a child, she laughed when she was told she was pregnant 9 months later. I was her miracle, I was her Isaac.

After Alfred explained all that to me, I realized what she had meant when she said I was the child she should not had, and my condition was the price I was paying for her blessing.

When i was 19, I started deciding to find my own solution to the problem. The restless nights were getting worse, and this was a condition that I was not comfortable with to bring into adulthood. My dreams were getting more vivid and the emotions I was experiencing more intense. Each morning, I would be drained of energy and emotion, too tired to live my life. The only way then to solve the problem was to go for days without sleep, only collapsing out of exhaustion. That was not a tenable solution as after hours without sleep, I could not function properly.

I decided to find a solution and googled for it. His name didn’t come up in any of the first few results, but as I searched through the following pages, I found a name being mentioned in a lot of discussion forums. His name was Raj Kumar, and he was a spiritual teacher living somewhere in Southern India.

Apparently, Raj Kumar had been a top programmer for a major software company before June 6th. After that day, when he lost his whole family to the attacks, he suffered from a mental breakdown and became disillusioned with life. Like many people who survived that day, he retreated to the sanctuary that spirituality offered. Unlike most people, he stayed there and became a spiritual teacher.

The discussion forums were filled with posts by people who had visited him and through his teachings have achieved inner calm and peace. I was intrigued. I decided to travel to India to look for him. I told mother my intentions. As a woman devoted to science, she wasn’t very sure about the whole spirituality aspect of this solution but she was desperate to find a solution and allowed me to travel to India although she wasn’t convinced.

So, at 19, I traveled to India on my own to visit this teacher hoping he could change my life. When I was on the plane, I couldn’t help but daydream about how this Raj Kumar could become my own personal Yoda or Mr. Miyagi like in the old movies that Alfred would show me and help change my life.

And he did. Raj Kumar taught me meditation and many other things. Over the four years, I managed through the art of meditation to get physical and mental rest without actually going to sleep. And when I did sleep, I was able to be in control of my subconscious and view my dreams from the perspective of a third person with great clarity; that ability really helped in the accurate recording of my dreams. I stopped talking in my sleep and my body didn’t react to the dreams anymore; I was able to wake up each day without feeling drained.

I started watching the series Dexter over the last weekend. Lead investigator FBI agent Lundy taught me something - every serial killer has a pattern. Which is interesting considering there has been a spate of murders linked to Facebook.

Recently, there was a spate of murders where the victims were tertiary educated early 20s ladies. Investigators had been able to approximate the time of death for these victims when they realized the killer(s) was updating the Facebook status of the victims just after the murder.

For example, after Melody Chen was murdered, her status was updated to, “Melody is so dead…”. Her friends showed the customary concern by twittering, smsing and posting wall messages like, “hey babe, you ok? hang in there k, things will get better…..

“Funny he should say that, ” Detective A said about the wall message by John Lim, “considering that the killer strung her up from the ceiling fan with a rope around the neck and tried to make it look like she had committed suicide.”

Some other choice Facebook statuses:

“Celine is lying on her desk feeling like a knife has stabbed her in the back.”

“Christina is on her bed. She feels so suffocated.”

“Jamie is in great pain. She is dying inside.”

The two detectives while checking out the laptops found at the scenes realized a pattern. The murder victims were real Facebook junkies.

“Don’t these girls realize that they should set a password for their screen saver?” asked Detective B.

Which is so besides the point, considering they were dead. What the detectives did learn which was noteworthy was that the murdered victims all had two friends in common.

The suspects were narrowed down to a guy and a girl. Or so the detectives thought.

It turns out both suspects had rock solid alibis.

Damn.

Further investigations on the logs contributed by the Facebook admins led to the case breaking clue - there was a particular female user which had been heavily visiting the profile pages of the murdered friends of the female suspect.

The detectives and the Facebook admins decided to monitor her activities online. They noticed a sudden spike in this user’s viewing of the profile page of another friend.

“I think I smell a murder, ” says Detective A.

They laid a trap for the murder suspect using the potential victim as bait. They were right and apprehended the suspect just as she was about to slit the throat of the bait.

The trust of these ladies was so easy to gain. Everything about them is online on their Facebook page. I know their birthdays, their hobbies, their likes, their dislikes, the relationship statuses, their friends…

I’ve seen their photos. I know where they have been, who they hang out with. Gaining entry into their room, their homes was so easy. All I had to do was use Jane (the original female suspect) as a conversational starter.

Damn that Jane. I killed all these people cos of her. Friends she calls them. FRIENDS!

You know what are friends. Friends are people who have been there when your dad died. Someone who accompanied you for every single hospital visit. Someone who has bled with you, cried with you, laughed with you, experienced every fucking roller-coaster emotion with you and more. Friends are those who will be there with you.

Friends aren’t the people who cam-whore with you. Not the ones who just follow you because you’re showing your fucking cleavage in every single photo. Not the ones who post wall messages just to keep some fucking trivial tenuous connection with you.

Friends are the people your parents know. The ones you trust enough to open up your family to.

Friends…. I killed those girls because damn it, they are the kind of people that debase the meaning of friendship.

Everyone is a fucking friend now. What happened to the word ‘acquaintance’.

“She has a point, ” said Detective A to Detective B, “we’ve worked together for like 3 years and you haven’t even met my family. I don’t know a thing about you.”

“So what are you saying? We aren’t friends?”

“I’m saying you and your family is invited to dinner this Saturday, ” said Detective A.

I’ve been making notes for a story for some time. Even wrote a few chapters, if you can consider what little that has been written below a chapter. I thought I’ll start sharing them.

I remember standing at the edge of the sliding doors, making them go crazy with my apprehension.

Open, close, open, close.

I stood there with my head and shoulder lowered, as if carrying the burdens of the world. The sky was a gloomy palette, the rain lashing down on a subdued city; I wondered if this welcome was a portent of things to come.

I was standing at the entrance, like a man at the edge of an abyss, paralysed by fear. I would have stood there for an eternity if Alfred hadn’t been there to meet me. I remember hearing him call out my name, snapping me out of my own thoughts. His warm familiar smile was something I had missed.

That was an hour ago.

I had insisted on driving back despite Alfred’s protests. I wonder if it was out of fear of my driving abilities or out of a sense of obligation to his duties, but whatever the reason, my will prevailed.

I drove along the ECP. Nothing has changed. The trees and vegetation along the sides have continued to be left unattended, the buildings run-down and deserted. I heard from Alfred that the park along the coast was now called “Immorality Mile” - a place for whore-banging, where anyone with money and a deviant pleasure to enjoy can do so for the right price.

“What a waste”, Alfred had commented, “this road was once a beautiful boulevard, a healthy unclogged artery straight to the heart of what was once a dynamic and vibrant city.”

Once. The world Alfred talks about no longer exist. A world before I was born. A world before June 6th. I have often wish that I could have some contact with that world beyond Alfred’s nostalgic reminiscences, beyond books and websites with their words and pictures.

Mother was not at the house to greet me when we reached. Alfred told me that she had wanted to be there when I reached home. Yeah right. As usual, her work came first.

I am here blogging in the living room while Alfred gets my room ready. Alfred was surprised when I told him I wanted to move my study out to the living room. I believe he was more afraid of my mom’s protests when she returned from work; my mom had spent a considerable amount of money on interior designers and furniture, and i know her magazine-perfect sensibilities would cause her to be livid at me for mixing things around.

But I have my reasons. And for now, my computer cannot be in my study or my bedroom or any private area. The living room was the best choice. Somehow, I could not bring myself to violate the sanctity of the kitchen and dining area.

Once Alfred has finished removing the door of my room, and brought in some fans, I will go and sleep. I am going to stop blogging now and go for my dinner.