By Toh Hsien Min

I have seen a vision of my death and it is alone.

I do not mean this in the sense of Blaise Pascal ("On mourra seul"), although that is so self-evidently true as to be almost not worth the observation.  One Sunday in June, after church, I pop into the kitchen to prepare lunch, and since it involves applying much heat to a kurobuta pork collar I close the door to the kitchen and slide the windows open.  I finish flaming the pork, set it on the plate and am about to take it out to the dining table when I discover that the kitchen door has jammed shut.  It isn't locked, yet the doorknob is as unyielding as the lid on a jam jar.  Through the glass panels in the door I see my phone on the dining table.  Another few twists.  No luck.  Would inserting the key (kept in a kitchen drawer as a safety) help?  Nope.  Since lunch is ready, I turn back to the worktop and start chewing as if for ideas on how to escape this unlikeliest of prison cells.  Shall I break the bottommost glass panel to be able to crawl through?  It is tempered glass and I know how difficult those things are to break.  Moreover, I don't have anything in the kitchen heavy and tough enough for the job.  The toaster oven?  The Ikea folding chairs??  I pour myself a glass of gently oxidising Semillon.  I try the doorknob so hard the skin on my palm gashes open.  I peer down from the window to the alley below, and briefly contemplate trying to fashion some kind of a rope by which I could lower myself to the ground floor from my third-floor window before realising that no material in the kitchen fit the bill, plus in any case my apartment keys are on the wrong side of two different doors.  Can I clamber onto the air conditioning compressor and slide left from there to the window of the study?  Which I am pretty sure is clasped shut from the inside.  The back lane is only used by occasional residents of the street I'm on or the staff of the businesses on the main street, which means that on a Sunday it is more deserted than usual.  It is fifteen minutes before a construction worker on his day off passes by.  I shout to him.  He ignores me.

Lunch is done, so I'm left with time on my fingers.  I don't even have a pen in the kitchen, so cannot write while waiting for inspiration.  Instead, my mind casts back to my last time in such a predicament.  It's Thursday, New Caledonia.  I've just finished a pastry in Houailou, on the east coast, and am in a red Nissan Micra heading southeast, but having turned off the GPS in anticipation of an easy coastal road I miss the turnoff.  When I decide that the surroundings look distinctly surprising, I turn on Google Maps, which confirms my wrong turn and suggests a new route instead.  Which I take.  It funnels me down a succession of ever smaller roads.  Perhaps having to ford a river should have given me pause, but I keep going.  Almost sliding off the road into the ravine should have been a better indicator (oddly, not by a long fall my most severe near-death experience in New Caledonia, which was almost stepping on a banded sea krait).  I plunge into the second river, emboldened by the first.  And then start charging up the slope, at first in second gear, and then halfway up I clutch down and switch to first.  At which point the car grinds to a halt.  Having already done this once before, I rev the engine in neutral and then engage the gear while swinging the steering wheel to one side.  It doesn't work.  I try again.  And again.  In a precursor of my situation with the door.  I get out of the car.  The rear tires are caked in mud.  The whole road is mud.  I look for rocks, twigs, any form of foliage, to place under the tires.  Still no grip.  Every attempt slides me back downhill by four or five yards.  I don't even have enough grip to turn the car around.  At one o'clock, I call the gendarmerie.  They first tell me to call for a towing service, but I say, truthfully, that my French is not good enough for an emergency situation.  Can they call on my behalf?  At last they relent and take my GPS co-ordinates.  Unusually, the gendarmerie say that they cannot call an overseas number, so I have to call again in fifteen minutes.  I do, and am told that help is on the way.  So I sit in the car and wait, reading, and trying to write.  By half past three, I am sufficiently alarmed to call again.  Dusk is just after five.  "You know those GPS co-ordinates you gave us?" the officer on the other end says.  "There isn't a road there on our maps."  The officer asks me for landmarks.  I try my best.  Two rivers, then a steep uphill.  Nothing all around.  No other vehicle for hours.  "Look, we recommend that you abandon your car and walk," the officer says.  So I do.  I sling everything into the backpack and start trudging uphill, figuring that going forward is closer to the main road than turning back, along the way discovering other tricky spots that would have ensnared a Nissan Micra.  After a good half-hour of walking, I hear a siren behind me.  I turn and see a massive 4WD in police colours.  My rescuers invite me on board, give me water.  Going back downslope is like a sitting in a motorboat, so much do we slip and slide all over.  Back at the car, it turns out all that is needed to get some traction is for one other person to push while the driver kicks the engine into first.

My rescuers are angels.  

Back in the present, I wait at the window for more passers by.  A few more ignore me.  Finally, one person looks up and doesn't look away again.  I explain my situation, and shout my dad's number.  Tell him I'm stuck, I say.  He does so and I thank him profusely.  I end up cleaning the kitchen while waiting.  My dad arrives, is unable to open the kitchen door, and calls for a locksmith.  When the locksmith arrives, he susses out the situation and ends up dismantling the doorknob and using a wrench to break through the deadbolt.  These things do fail, he says.  Maybe after five years, maybe after ten.  He replaces the doorknob.  I ask for one that cannot lock.  

I now barely close any other door inside my apartment unless I have my phone with me.

I am glad to have had a team around me to push this issue into being.  July has been another trying month, with the confluence of work and some travel, albeit only to the relative safety of Hong Kong.  Kai Chai has picked another strong batch of stories (including one by Wyatt Hong on a patient close to death), Shu Hoong continues to work his magic with the reviews, and Stephanie has selected a strong essay from Theophilus Kwek, coincidentally on travelling to a location not too far away from danger.  This issue's Proust comes from the much more desperate chains of Elmina Castle.  And in Poetry, I had enough material to have real options around publishing more or letting fewer things through the door for a better formed selection, and chose to be a little more restrictive.  Collectively, this issue is a reminder that every time we communicate in writing we reach out to someone else, and that may be the strongest resistance we put up against death.

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