It had to be today of all days.
“Again?”
“We managed to save the fish farms. And the met buoy.”
Today. The met buoy, and the fish farms. But –
“– not Oskar’s face?”
“He was fine when we first songed it.”
He sighs. His second husband’s face is a oscillating, whirling mess, and it’s down to him to do something about it. As always.
I don’t think they remember the words, or the day.
Pra kadangua manchua, desah kadangua mansebu sa gadrah.
It was a Krismatran proverb, of course; built and fashioned out of the Dreaming Ocean in 2025, rather than 1511, like everyone else might have once previously believed. Dreamfishing to him, of course, was completely natural; he had grown up completely at ease with the idea that one’s outer sea is as much a representation of their inner ocean, and it felt absolutely legitimate that you would go looking for things unseen inside as well as out. That was the Kristang way.
But it was also the Kristang way to make things up, completely out of thin air – that was Dreamfishing too. And that was essentially the Krismatran side of things that had taken over after the Eksmakamakan, and the loss of 99% of humanity, all at once, to the chaos unleashed by a poorly-regulated, and quite poorly-imagined, artificial intelligence.
You can’t make that stuff up either. It’s what you’re born into. And like the rest of Generation Bravo, born after the Eksmakamakan, it was as much history as the rest of his body, mind, heart and soul, even though he had never lived it. He had never seen it.
He couldn’t imagine what life had been like for someone like him before the Krismatra. And he didn’t care to. He took what they said was Kristang now as Kristang. Because it had also saved them. His ancestors’ willy, devilish ways had ensured that when the Blue Book took over, their language had protected them. Because any language that could be indexed, that could be dictionaired, as some of the older people still called it – that was a language that the Blue Book could control, and take over, and assimilate, and that was a people and culture that the Blue Book could control, and take over, and assimilate as well.
Kristang had always resisted being dictionaired, pra fikah ngua linggu tokah palarediah, and that is what had saved them.
So he went with it. Whatever they said was culture was culture. And this was a proverb, and so he took it as a proverb. Pra kadangua manchua, desah kadangua mansebu sa gadrah.
The translation into English (or so they claimed; it had never quite fully translated for him when he tried to do it in his mind, but again, whatever worked, worked, right?):
Every houseship needs a good househusband.
“’Raq, you’re in the way.”
“Sorry. The guilt thing.”
“I know, sayang. But let me deal with it first. You can feel guilty later.”
“Somehow, I knew you’d say that, you fucker.”
“Can fuck me hard later. When this is over.”
The house-ships were how they had survived, too, them and the other unindexed peoples of the Ilastra Riau, after the Eksmakamakan: around them, escaping from Ujong, they had joined the Selitar, the Mah Meri, the Ubin, the Jahai on the exodus to the Moken Corridor, out on the open waters at first for four long years, and then gradually back to the islands they had once called home, after the chaos overrides of the Blue Book had begun to fail.
But four years is a long time, and when 99% of the world around you is still tokah eksmaka – under the control of the Blue Book – new old habits really begin to die very hard.
So the manchua – the house-ships – were still home to many, including him, and ‘Raq, and Oskar.
They had never decided on a halkuniya, a new family name. Did they need one? Ishraq always said, and it was understandable, since the Selitar had survived the Eksmakamakan with only patronymics. And this was after Oskar pointed out that it would be ‘Raq who would face the most resistance, from the older members of his community, since the jenti Kristang didn’t really care. But it was like other ideas that just had no way to thrive in the new world: religion, image and hierarchy. That was the old way of doing things, and what had it gotten them? A world ravaged by a plague straight out of the science fiction blu-rays Zeph’s parents had hoarded (despite the complete lack of any kind of device to play them on) after the Eksmakamakan. How could god exist, when this had taken over instead?
In the old ways, ‘Raq would have been called many terrible things. But the terrible things had taken over, and there was not much space for whoever was left to create new ones.
So they made do, with authenticity, with vulnerability, with realness, with true selves, as his parents liked to say. Their generation had been called millennial; his generation didn’t use these concepts. Again, what space was there for them? Generation Bravo must be braver than the rest. We take what little we have, and we gently ignore the rest.
So they did. When death or mental capitulation to a hive mind that did not even understand itself were the only two options – you made yourself a third option.
And so they were three. Two beautiful brown Kristang devils, as they would have been called in the old days, and a third spicy, seditious Selitar, as ‘Raq liked to call himself whenever they went over to either Oskar or Zeph’s parents’ houses, thrown in for the mix. Zeph never understood seditious, but spicy – sure. Ishraq’s mouth had gotten them all in trouble on more than one occasion, in many myriad ways that were indeed sometimes too spicy for polite conversation. And all identifying as male – a relative rarity in the Korua Kelong-Kelong, the Kelong Crown affiliated house-ship groupings that they belonged to and lived within. Nobody kept statistics like nation-states and governments once did, of course – most formal institutions had died out with Generation Z – but Zeph had seen some of the old documents they had salvaged from Singapore’s capital district four or five years earlier. Alpha had already been 20% non-binary; here they were, ‘Raq liked to say, bucking and fucking with the trend.
And now, here was the Blue Book, fucking with his second husband. On today of any possible day.
The anger rises and instantly bubbles away inside of him.
It’s not their fault.
But I’m still fucking scared.
But it’s not their fucking fault.
They should have –
He quiets himself, counting to vahang in rapid succession.
Not now.
Then he taps the mic and begins to sing, placing his hands firmly on Oskar’s shuddering shoulders as Ishraq holds down their husband’s hairy, and very well-defined legs.
Siara-siuris di Korua Kelong-Kelong
yo pidih kung Bolotu: dah kung yo Bolotu sa Song.
Someone else narrating this story to themselves would have questioned why Zeph’s mind was fixated on Oskar’s legs, but again, he had grown up with a Krismatran mind. He’d never understood the shame, and fear, around sex, and who you loved, and explaining and justifying why you loved them. But that was the old world for you. In a twisted sort of way, it really did take an AI to change the way people thought about things.
And that was his familia manchua, his house-ship and his world now. Three years since he’d moved out of his parents’ manchua, the Seaside Minstrelsy that anchored off the old Ujong East Coast, and into this much smaller and cosier commune, nestled by Sentu Saku, old Blakang Mati’s eastward, once-beautiful and over-reclaimed shores.
‘Raq and Oz needed the excitement. They’d become bantimeru-bantimeru, the guardians of the manchua, working with the mutable matter the Crown had received from Abya Yala and the Fijian Foundations to slowly reclaim those whose bodies and minds had been consumed by the chaos of the Blue Book. And it was challenging, and absolutely terrifying work: the assimilation worked exactly like psychoemotional projection, jumping from one mind to another in close proximity and/or any kind of strong or shared emotional connection or affinity. As distant as they were from the hordes of Europe and North America, it was less likely that ‘Raq and Oz would succumb to any kind of assimilation working on the people here, but it was always still a fear, especially for Oz, whose entire family except his mother had been lost in the Eksmakamakan.
And that’s why they needed him to stay home, and man the Manchua. Or so he told himself. Or so he chided himself for thinking that he told himself. Someone needs to make sure that things are okay when the boys come home. But he was a boy too. But we discarded all that shit in the Eksmakamakan. Or so everyone wanted to think. But they had. Or so he thought.
It was hard to not think in that paradigm sometimes.
But that’s what they all had to do. Privately, he justified it to himself as manning up more than most men would. It takes a big man to go out and fight monsters. And he would never dream of denying his husbands the right to do that. But even in this world…it takes a bigger man to stay at home, and keep the house-ship afloat for all her beautiful men.
Are you afloat, though, Zephaniah Westarough?
You know, one leaves their parents behind because they don’t quite understand.
He’d had to leave, because they’d still believed in things that could not quite be believed in.
But didn’t he do the same?
Love is visualisable, he insisted, to himself, while Oz and ‘Raq were out doing things for the good of the community, and here he was – sweeping the floor of a house-ship after a mad AI-zombie plague, does anyone really need to do that right now, Zephy? You still do it, ma. Yes, but I’m a lady, Zephie. I know what you identify as –
Love can be seen. Love can be felt.
What if I can’t feel how this is going wrong?
What if –
Up to vahang again.
What if the question you need to ask yourself is –
Why not?
Oskar’s face begins to reassert itself. The mutable matter that had attached itself to his face begins to pull away, one shimmering dust-speck at a time, into the particulate collector strapped to Zeph’s back.
Every single time it gets harder.
Not just because of what day it is. But because: how do you believe in something that not only isn’t there, but shows no signs of helping us, even as the world has literally collapsed into the fucking Dreaming Ocean?
Well, people were really wretched –
But what kind of an explanation was that? People had been wretched for literally tens of thousands of years. The Roda Mundansa made it abundantly clear that they had all been stuck in cycles upon cycles of endless intergenerational trauma – and beyond that, one just needed to be alive to see that that trauma was still –
And so he had left. He couldn’t take it anymore. But he realised it still ached within him. Oskar was family, with the way he drooled softly onto your arm or leg or face whenever he fell quietly asleep on top of you. ‘Raq was family, whenever he wanted to be the one on the inside, even though he was easily the largest of the three of them. He could smell them even when they were not around.
But he also could not forget the smell of his parents, and their home, their house-ship. Of the little cubbyhole he used to peer out of, and where he used to taste the sunshine on his brown skin.
Manchua prumiru, manchu ultimu. That was also a Krismatran proverb.
He would catch himself scrubbing spots on the floor so hard that the blisters on his right hand were reopening without him noticing, and then he would sit and cry for a while. And of course he would tell one of them, or both of them about it. And that was that.
But the anger was always there.
During his individual therapy rotation, he’d try and talk about it too. He’d ramble on, of course, as usual, about just how wonderful it was that they were growing up in a time where seeing your family therapist was as normal as seeing the doctor had been before the Eksmakamakan, and if only his parents would understand that this was a changed world – but he would get there. It’s just that he wouldn’t know what to do once he was there; and so the therapist had asked him to go and get acquainted with Orsang.
It helped. It definitely did. And it had given him new ways of talking to himself, of being with himself, of listening to himself, and smelling himself, rather than hearing the sounds of the way the Katong Manchua-Manchua were too tightly bound together, and smelling the particular salty-jasmine smell of his old dining-room, with the letori to Mother Mary and the Novi Santa Nubu in the corner. ‘Raq had even gone down for a few classes with him; Oskar, with his family history, of course was a little more tense with any kind of Kristang culture, but they both understood Oskar. That was why they were a family.
It was still difficult to explain what the Orsang actually was – a autopoietic therapeutic mechanism? An aesthetic form? A martial art? A mental-physical schema? All of them, lah, fuck, ‘Raq had said, exhausted from just holding poses and counting to sixteen in base-16 in my fucking head for two hours, but it worked.
For Zeph, it had been a dream; it hadn’t just given him a new sense of himself, but a new sense of his husbands too, and how to find them whenever this happened. Which was all too often. Despite every assertion and promise to him to the contrary, ‘Raq and Oskar would go off trying to be big damn heroes, and one of them would get too close to one of the assimilated, and then the Blue Book would bounce into their minds, and they would start losing themselves too; they’d had six or seven close calls before Zeph had started to learn the Orsang, and each time, his anger had grown.
But with the Orsang, with a sense of who he was, the anger now went to the right places.
He hoped.
“Ja kabah, yo lembrah,” says ‘Raq, a little extra loudly over Zeph’s singing, hypnotic, rhythmic and absolutely furious. I think it’s finished.
Something like that used to set him off. Or would have, if ‘Raq and Oskar had met him before he had become…better. He didn’t like the word, and he knew neither of his husbands did either. But that was how he saw himself.
Something like this would have made him fuck it all up in an instant. Who the fuck are you to tell me when it’s finished? Who the fuck told you that it was okay to go out on today of all days, on this particular fucking single day in the entire single fucking year? Who said –
Usually when one of the bantimeru got too close to the assimilated, the usual procedure was to rush them to the medical house-ships, anchored out by Pedra Branca; but that was too far, and too many had been lost along the way. And it was, curiously, something exactly like that that had allowed Zeph to figure out he could do what the medical house-ship could do at all –
– that eighth time, when almost all of ‘Raq’s entire body was already gone, and Oskar had only come home to Zeph, soaking wet and shuddering in fear, because he thought ‘Raq was already gone, and Zeph had taken his dad’s old stash of baby mutable matter, the sterile, child’s-play one that he had taken with him when he left his parents’ manchua that last, final night, because it reminded him of home, and he hated that it did, but he had still taken it –
“Zee. It’s done.”
Zeph realises his eyes are almost squinting shut from the exhaustion, and that ‘Raq is holding his arm.
The words that have been biting against his tongue slip back into his unconscious, and vanish.
‘Raq doesn’t remember.
He doesn’t remember that –
He exhales, and relaxes, slumping a little over Oskar’s still-unconscious form, and kisses ‘Raq’s hand.
Fuck it.
“I’m sorry,” ‘Raq whispers.
His ears prick up. Internally, he wants to smile, but even that is too tiring. Oskar smells like wet paint, and sweat, and sea-salt, and he doesn’t mind. He tugs on ‘Raq’s hand with all of his remaining strength, even as he feels the consciousness drain from his mind.
Maybe ‘Raq is apologising because he actually does –
Nah. You know what?
Bai pra diabu. Go to hell, he tells the thought.
He never wanted to think-talk to himself in Kristang, or learn some bloody, dead art form that nobody cares about, least of all because it reminds him so much of his life before he met the two most beautiful people he has ever known, and the two people who motivate him, every single day, to be the person that he is. To suck in his masculinity, or whatever the hell it is, really, and throw it back out every day. To walk himself gently away from every memory that leaps into his mind, every time one of them, or both of them come back like this, because every time the boys come home, he remembers. Not just the eighth time, but his mother’s words, long ago, and not so very long ago –
You know, if you decide to be in this…in this relationship – and it’s the way she says the word that still makes every part of him want to shriek and rip the world apart –
– the way she said goodbye, with no shrieking, no ripping of anything but his heart, the way every word froze inside of him forever –
– there will be no way to ever come home.
Wirung-kombros-telis-kedra –
‘Raq’s fingers lacing through his hair interrupt the count, and he exhales. There are tears on Oskar’s prone body.
Pra kadangua manchua, desah kadangua mansebu sa gadrah.
Someone has to do it. He feels ‘Raq try to lift him up, and desists.
“Don’t apologise,” he murmurs, far too belatedly and with all the fire and strength in the world. He hasn’t finished his sentence, but ‘Raq rests his weight on his back, and he relaxes fully, in between the two men that he will do anything for –
– even fight everything he knows, and hates about his own past, and who he is, to make his present into a future that is even more worth trying for.
He knows what ‘Raq wants to say, now; and he doesn’t. It could be what he wants to hear: I just remembered that today was the first time you saved my life, that eighth time we got quasi-assimilated, and I’m sorry it had to be today of all days that we asked you to do it again. It could be something else: I’m sorry we fucked up again; I’m sorry I still haven’t learned how to make my bantim go faster, or I’m sorry I let Oskar take a stupid risk, or –
In his mind, he uses ‘Raq’s voice to say what he himself knows he needs to hear.
It doesn’t matter, Zephaniah Westarough.
And then, as he finally loses full consciousness, and falls into the dream-embrace of the two men who have helped him find a new place in the world, he says the words that he knows the world needs to hear instead.
“As long as you both came home.”