By Patrick Sagaram

The second time we took my mother to the hospital was after the police turned up at our flat. She went missing on the first day of the Lunar New Year and my father and brother had to go look for her around our estate, asking people if they had seen a barefoot woman in a housedress. How she ended up at the park next to the expressway, sleeping under the observation post is beyond belief. When she was discharged my mother looked pale and out of place, clutching two bottles of pills in her hands during our awkward meeting at the hospital lobby.

After she returned home, we had to make adjustments. When my brother and I got back from school we put our shoes at the exact spot near the entrance of our flat where our mother told us to put them. Then we'd tiptoe into the bathroom and wash our feet making sure to keep our voices low as possible because she would get easily irritated. We kept out of her way and stayed locked in our rooms. He'd listen to music on his pocket radio, tuning the dial by a notch to get Zoo 101.6 from Batam where DJs Peter Snake and Joe Panther spun seventies rock, soul and R&B. The radio turned low, played all the time. I'd hear it go when I'd come out of my room to get a sip of water and stare at the sky. 

That was around the time my interest began in all things molecular. I picked up an old textbook at the library by chance and before long, I had memorised the periodic table and worked out the way to balance equations on my own. A teacher let me carry out experiments – unsupervised – at the school laboratory after classes ended for the day. A good thing, I suppose because I was learning more on my own through trial and error. I was making discoveries at my own pace instead of aiming towards some end goal.   

I spent hours observing how chemicals reacted with each other as bonds were broken and atoms rearranged to form new ones. I put my ideas down in a pocket notebook, filling pages and pages with diagrams and descriptions. I had a fixation with those symbols and equations scratched out by my teacher on the blackboard. Everything made perfect sense because I could visualise those changes in composition and release of energy.

If you ever had a brainstorm so powerful you'd know what I mean. For some it happens when listening to music and colours appear like arcs on a rainbow. Or when reading a book and the words taste so good. Those rare moments when our senses blend and converge without effort like iron fillings being aligned by a magnet.

Years later it occurred to me that my mother must have experienced a similar thing. But hers was a sensory overload where she may have seen dark shapes along the peripheries of her vision, moving with stealth and speed, like wingtips of a bird taking flight.

Whenever I was in my room working out equations, I'd hear her fussing around the house. I'd keep the door halfway open and listen. My mother would come out of the bedroom and go to the bathroom and she would run water into a pail. Then she'd drag the thing into the living room, her shoulders straining under its weight. Plunging a mop into the pail, she would twist and drain all the water before pushing the mop around the house. I would hear sighs as if she was purging a terrible burden, some unforgivable sin.  

All the windows in our flat remained closed to keep out the moths and spiders. Once by accident, my brother pushed a window open using the palm of his hand, leaving a stain on the glass. This sent our mother flying for cleaning fluid and old newspapers. She tore a piece and crumpled it before spraying a jet of blue fluid on the stain, wiping it off with the paper ball like it was offensive.

Around this time my father began driving a taxi, working night shifts. My brother and I saw less and less of him. He was a supervisor at the shipyard but was given the golden handshake when the recession hit in '85. What followed was years of working odd jobs to make ends meet. My father was a kind, gentle man who never raised his voice at my brother or me. Always giving us little treats even if money was tight because I think he felt guilty for the long hours he left us by ourselves.

It was mid-July, a week after my birthday and I overheard the two of them talking in their bedroom. My father was trying to assure her about something except my mother sounded troubled and confused.

"There's nothing to worry," he said.

"It's there," she said. "It's probably hiding."

"I've checked many times," he said. "There's nothing."

"Did you check the butter?" she hissed. "It's hiding in the butter."

I had to find out for myself and walked past my brother's room and into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and looked into the compartment where my mother put the cheese and butter. I took out the slab of butter and peeled opened the golden foil wrapping. My father was right. It was just butter.

I was about to put it back when I felt someone behind me. I turned and saw my mother looking straight at me. Startled, I dropped the thing. It hit the floor with a plop. In that moment, my mother let out a small cry and I saw her face change. She pushed past me and ran to the bathroom, yelling.

By then my father was already in the kitchen trying to calm her down but she was in the thick of a meltdown. Get out of here, she screamed at us as she began scraping the mess into a small plastic bag. Then I watched as she flung the bag out of the kitchen window. She never used the rubbish chute underneath the kitchen sink having taped it shut with cellophane tape, out of fear those things would come for her.

 "Have you taken your pills?" my father said.

In the bathroom, we heard water hit the side of the pail.

"That's why you need to take your medicine," he said. "You'll feel better."

When the bathroom door opened and my mother stepped out, my father had the bottles in his hands. He placed it on the dining table.

"How can I feel better," she said, "if I'm confused all the time?"

It began with a fight with boys playing football at the void deck. We lived on the second floor and my mother was unable to bear the sound of the ball crashing against the walls. So she decided to take matters into her hands and went downstairs and yelled for them to stop. When they refused she tried to snatch the ball away. Instead of tackling each other, they tapped the ball among themselves forcing my mother to run around in crazy circles trying to disrupt their possession. Of course all this was told to us by our neighbours who happen to pass by and stopped to calm her down and made sure things did not get out of control. It was hard to believe what our neighbours said because if you saw my mother you would think she was plain looking and ordinary, another face at our estate. You wouldn't imagine her chasing those boys. You wouldn't think she was capable of using those kinds of words on them.

And for some reason, she would not touch the food my father bought from the coffeeshop. A simple meal for the four of us, rice some vegetables and maybe if we're lucky some fried eggs with chopped chili and minced pork. By that time her moods turned inky dark, volatile and we could never predict what she was going to say or do. We could never tell when all hell was going to break loose.

When my father asked her about it, she said she was afraid. Afraid of what, my father asked. My mother was afraid the meat would open its eyes and stick its tongue out before clawing its way out of the white styrofoam box, skittering by on its spindly legs. She told us that the broccoli was turning into tiny rainforests and the strings of long beans were coiling around our flat and wrapping onto the furniture, doors and windows as they clamored for pale yellow sunshine that pooled into a small island of light in our living room.

We were sitting at the dining table and I recall my brother tilting his head sideways, as if searching for some sign of those things around the house. My father did not say a word. He kept looking at his plate. There was no doubt in my mind what my mother told us seemed like a nightmare from which no escape was possible.

That was the first time we took her to the hospital. The doctor put her through some tests, told us not to worry and sent her home to rest. My mother looked as if she was in a holding pattern for the next few weeks. Come to think of it, I'd never seen her smile except in a photo I carried of her in my wallet.

Many years later I lost that photo when a fire swept through the research facility where a colleague and I were working on a new theory. We were collecting and analysing information from tests we'd been running over the last couple of months. Our data kept throwing up readings so extreme it caused interruption to our work. Even so, I wanted to pursue them in the hopes they might unravel a hidden mystery, a causal link I may not have previously detected. Except my colleague kept dismissing those readings. Which was understandable because things can go wrong each day and it can be someone carelessly dropping a test tube or leaving a wrong setting on the oscilloscope.

Still, I knew the value of searching for something unexpected, the intersection between chance and wisdom when a disruption leads to a complete shift in thinking. Cosmic microwave radiation, antisepsis and jumping genes – all these discoveries wouldn't have been possible if we had rejected these things as simple interruptions. To which my colleague, quoting Kuhn said, "Under what conditions do these call into question our current assumptions?" And of course, she was right. By then we grew frustrated and it was time for a break. So we took the lift downstairs to get some coffee from the vending machine. I stood looking up at the moon like a smudge in the skylight, my mind elsewhere as my colleague kept talking in numbers and figures.

Until we heard the alarm go and my colleague let out a gasp as I turned around to see a column of fire curling through the floor above our laboratory. Thick smoke swelled up into the sky and we knew there was no way to salvage our data. Months and months of work were turning into wafting cinders but the thought of the photo in my wallet almost got me running upstairs for it. My colleague pulled me back saying I was crazy and I had completely lost my mind, thinking I was risking my life for our work. We looked on helplessly, still with cups of coffee in our hands as the fire blazed through our floor, warping windows and reacting with chemicals to shoot a hiss of strangely-coloured flames into the night sky.

Except for us the facility was empty until we heard the distant howl of sirens, spinning red lights of the fire engines thrown against the walls of the building. Even now what I think about when I think about the fire is that way the flames burnt away the edges of the photograph of my mother. Taken by my father during their holiday in Penang after they got married, I can still picture the colours in the photo turning from a fiery orange to dull brown and her smile distorting before settling into crumpled ash. My parents were on the ferry leaving Butterworth, and my mother had her arms resting on the metal railing, wind in her hair. Her arms are so slender and the jade ring on her finger was a gift from my father. Years later as I was carrying out my research I would stare at that photo and study it closely as if looking for some kind of clue that would help with my work. It may be my eyes playing tricks on me because I couldn't help seeing beneath her smile, a look that was less recognisable. A gradual fading away, I suppose. But you couldn't see it if the camera did not catch it.

After years of repeated hospital visits we soon begin to lose hope. The doctors tried all kinds of treatments including one experimental drug that seemed to offer some promise at first. But then, the side effects: violent bouts of nausea, dizziness was just too much for my mother. It may have may have over time faded her memory. Sometimes there would be a look of knowing when she saw us but except for that, nothing else. It was only the three of us from then onwards – at my brother's passing-out parade when he got his commission in the army; when I won my government scholarship.

I got the news about my mother when I was presenting my paper at a conference overseas. My brother called up to tell me. Everything else that day was a fog of confusion of making arrangements to get on the first flight home. We do not have exact knowledge about what happened because my father stepped out to run errands at the time. He may have forgotten to lock the front gate and my mother could have left the house. By the time our helper found out it was too late. Divers pulled her body out of the water hours later that evening. Like the time she was found sleeping at the park, we have no idea how she got to the reservoir.

On the night of the fire when we lost all our research, one more thing crossed my mind as firefighters worked to control the flames. It was about something the coroner told me after ruling out foul play and calling the incident a misadventure. "Maybe she had no idea what she was doing at that exact moment," he said. "I've seen it happen all the time. People do all kinds of things for reasons we can't explain." I couldn't agree more. Many things in the natural world as in human nature can never be confirmed or denied because of how rare those things occurred. And if precise conditions producing any effect can never be replicated, certain phenomena will always leave more questions than answers. But on the night the fire destroyed all our data, I thought about my mother at the reservoir, making her way to the water. I had a feeling my mother knew exactly what she was doing and resolved to see it through its final conclusion.

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