0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

First Light Of A Crooked Sun

August Linn

August Linn is a Singaporean Australian author, poet, science fiction translator, serial-arts-collective-founder and multimedia artist.

Lacrimosa was playing on Sanjay’s headphones when he had his revelation, as an escalator lifted him from the maw of the train station to the bright afternoon streets; the escalator rose, the choral voices fell; around the end of this brief dialectical motion between song and escalator, the strangeness of the afternoon brightness caught his attention.

The wind was ordinarily mild and the trees were ordinarily green and the lunchtime crowds were ordinarily lethargic. But something felt swampish, like smog caught on his non-existent glasses. He craned his neck up, and as the sun caught his gaze, he trembled in mysterious terror.

What was happening here? To put it simply, it appeared to Sanjay that the very nature of light itself had changed, as if the camera of the heavens had been set to the wrong tone and exposure. The light which compelled the cosmos and fertilized the earth with life, the light which plant spines twined towards with trembling hands, the light whose energy we converted to comprehensible forms, the light which predicated our very existence – it had become crooked and different. In the rippling frisson of his initial revelation, Sanjay knew not whether this fact was benign or apocalyptic. Light is the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: if the visible appearance of light had indeed changed, with no malicious alterations to human biology, the implications for the future of physics seemed troubling.

This light, this primitive excitation of cosmic waves, entered tight apertures, irradiating human minds where it refracted 8 billion more times, and counting. Within this cosmic composite, he cast furtive glances at passing faces, wondering how the changing of the light could have escaped the notice of the 8 billion besides him: crowds were shuffling around him in machinic routines, guileless and betraying nothing inordinary.

To Sanjay, this recent deception of light might have been like a working error in a mathematical calculation: easy to miss, but once perceived, glaringly obvious. He knew not when the light had corrupted – it could not have been on that escalator moment, for the world looked the same yesterday, and the day before. But is it not always in comparison to a hidden, subterranean memory that the utter strangeness of the present becomes evident? The changing of time, the folding of the years, generally remains imperceptible to us all until the moments where we retreat into the black pond of memory that wells in the brackish recesses behind our eyes – the same must have been the case for the changing of the light.

One who does not take photos cannot glimpse the importance of exposure; one untrained in music cannot provide names to the pitches; one that does not introspect simply does not know themselves; it must have been in this sense that all but him neglected to recollect – to find within their black pond of memory an image of a world cast in the rays of a gentler sun.

He took out his phone, scrolled through his camera reel, felt dismayed by the dismal relevance of the photos, kept scrolling, finally found a suitable photograph at the appropriate time of day that could be compared to the present sky; then, pointing a lens at the firmament, he snapped a photo, then put the two photos together in the same album gallery for juxtaposition. Confirming his perception, the photos demonstrated an abrupt shift in the tone of the light spectrum, as if the world had not only been recolored, but rendered in a different style, as if the song of reality had been transposed to a different key. This evidence also eliminated the possibility of physical disease, that he might have been biologically altered to perceive light differently. He then followed the lines of inquiry logically following from his initial premise, such as ‘how did it change?’, ‘will it change back?’, and ‘who changed it?’

In moments of introspection, one’s attention to time is transfigured, and the world melts into sinewless texture: lunch breaks ended; lawyers and legal papers shuffled; Rach reached for salt across the table, then kissed him good night; and Sanjay found himself in his study, blue light glowing from his laptop.

To eliminate the possibility of a personal psychotic break, Sanjay considered his own dreams, the world of half-digested meanings. These were the stomach contents of his sleeping mind, open to interpretation, on the week he had his revelation: a ballet dancer clawed off her clothes, stripping nude to rapturous applause in a Viennese theatre; a crooner stood ignored on the streets, strummed chords evaporating into city noise, squeezing his voice to produce a blue note, a pitch between F# and G, out of key from the guitar which he could not hear; beneath the dome of a cathedral, sun-stained glass windows illuminated a mosaic of Kali who wore an infinite grin on her face, flaunting groaning heads on each of her four arms which were bangled and blue.

While strange and malevolent, a dreamer is never able to perceive as such from within the architecture of their dream, and it is only upon waking recollection that the nature of dreams is revealed to us, a process which to Sanjay mirrored the very method of his own discovery; then, it struck Sanjay that this mode of inquiry was useless, because dreams, being the digestion of meanings and experiences, would have been the first immune response of the psyche to the conspiracy of light. Then, the strangeness of dreams did not evince a pathological deviance of interiority, insofar as they symptomized a disease of the exterior.

If he were to do anything useful with his revelation, he would have to revise his understanding of physics. The books in his study were mostly useless – legal textbooks, historical and political accounts, contemporary fiction, Notes From Underground – so instead he prostrated himself over the laptop and lost himself in a pile of PDFs, his eyes searing in the glare of fatigue. In a spiral of floating words and broken axioms, contemplating the implications of his discovery, Sanjay drifted to sleep, this time with no dreams.

He woke the next day on the couch of the study, finding in his scorching eyes the crooked and changed rays of the morning sun which now violently unsettled him. Like a roach at the sight of light, he jumped and scrambled towards the dark shadows of the room. He dashed across the room, hurriedly tossing miscellanea, rummaging for a pair of sunglasses in his wardrobe. He donned them sloppily, and about as soon as his sunglasses dimmed his vision, a reflexive throb of shame – the sudden self-perception of a madman with sunglasses afraid of the very sun – shuddered Sanjay. Then, as the drowsy stupor of bed-awakening wore off, and as rays of light from the window touched his skin with the false appearance of benevolence, he tiptoed his fingers to his face to remove the shades.

For now, the light remained a theoretical problem, not a practical one. Yet if this trickery of the physical world was allowed to occur, demiurge light in blatant violation of physics which so perfectly deceived the world, then, Sanjay perceived, the sun could also decide not to rise the next day.

He walked to the window, looked up at his new-fangled celestial adversary which now tortured his sclera, and swore vengeance.

Peeking from the window to the streets beneath, Sanjay saw a world unaware of the bizarre scientific revolution unraveling before their unseeing eyes. Cars on the road and pedestrians on the sidewalks moved along the street in intermittent intervals, following paths of random motion governed by the strictures of signs and traffic lights. Everyone was acting as if nothing was really wrong. But if he were to convince others, the photograph that he took yesterday did not suffice: he would need to cross-reference his case against a broader body of evidence. His mind drifted to a photo album he had vaulted somewhere on his hard drive: seven years ago, on his fourth date with Rachel, he took pictures of her and himself and the sunset on the coastline behind them. So he lurched to the laptop on his desk, in pursuit not of his personal past but of the sunset hues he had seen seven years ago, and when he uncovered the album, he examined each picture carefully, alongside the accompanying metadata of camera make and setting. The photos were all taken on his old iPhone and there were 133 shots: 36 of the photos were of her, 23 were of them together, 26 were incomprehensible shots unintentionally taken, and the last 48 depicted in some form a landscape of the sun and the sea – this was his best bet as a control set. The experiment began constructing itself in Sanjay’s head, pairing itself with a portrait of a seafront vista, a short shoreline stretching across East Coast Park where sand descended to the color strips of the sea. A difference in camera model would ruin his experiment; he would need to acquire the same phone model that he had taken the photos on. Meticulously, he downloaded the photos to his phone, and wrote down, on a notebook, the metadata for the photos he had taken of East Coast Park. Before returning to his reading of science papers, he acquired on an online marketplace an identical model of his old iPhone. It was due to ship to his house the next day.

—

At twilight the violet sun drowned itself in the sea.

—

The next morning, Sanjay tendered his resignation letter and began his project of scientific inquiry. By the afternoon, the used iPhone he bought had arrived at the doorstep; he first tested the camera at the window of his study, shifting his attention between the photo he snapped of his window and the window itself: on the iPhone, the sunlight that came in through the window grills appeared as smudged and tainted as the light he saw with his own eyes – the fault was not in the phone, nor was it in him. Satisfied as one who has clandestine knowledge of the nefarious totality of things can be, he hailed a taxi to East Coast; it was 3pm, he was well in time to not just capture the sunset but to also sketch the motion of the sun preceding its nocturnal seclusion, a process whose mechanisms and underlying intentions no longer seemed as straightforward to Sanjay as it used to. It was 4pm when he arrived. 2am when he hailed a cab back home. The solar cycle was no longer as straightforward as it once seemed; he had to ensure the sun would not on a whim rise again at midnight, a notion that would have seemed preposterous were it not for the fact that he had witnessed the color of sunlight change on an equally arbitrary whim. Now, nothing about the sun could be trusted.

On the following days, Sanjay took early breakfast and headed to the East Coast shoreline to compile his volume of evidence, going before the break of dawn and staying till the twilight. Methodically and mechanically, Sanjay snapped pictures every 15 minutes for 12 hours, tracing the trajectory of the sun’s daily routine across the sea. This intellectual inquiry of his sought to demonstrate irrevocable empirical proof of the ‘changing of the light’, and also aimed to longitudinally study for further changes in the observable electromagnetic spectrum.

He no longer stayed late after sunset, on primary account of a pragmatic reason that he had to allay Rachel’s growing apprehension, which was supplemented in justification by his intuition that the sun would not go so far in its misconduct to rise, if only briefly, at the dead of night – if it did, the conspicuous escalation of solar aggression would either: a) immediately spell the end of the existing world, or b) usher in a global research effort, a coalition of every panicked government and scientific institution in the world; anyhow, in either case, his own experiment would become redundant. But as it stood, most were still clueless – the sun chose him as its nemesis, and perhaps a few others. A few others. This thought he bookmarked for later.

A week of research, photo-taking and writing passed, in damp and crooked sunlight that he tried to tolerate. On Sunday, he rested to look through his volume of photos. The cross-examination between the photos taken seven years ago and the photos he took in the past week seemed damning: juxtaposed to the 48 photos taken seven years ago, the colors in the new photos came out smudged and faintly purple-hued, the objects fuzzier and flatter – a data corruption of reality. It was indubitable; the evidence corroborated his intuition and eliminated any margin of doubt on what had seemed, even to him, at various points of his experiment, a profane and implausible proposition: the erratic, fraudulent character of the forces which form the physical, material world. But between the new photos, there was no significant change from one day to another. Conclusion: the light had not changed further from its original moment of conspiracy. All he needed now was peer review, from the ‘few others’.

He retrieved himself from the depths of inward inquiry and looked to the beachgoers he had not noticed – a sparse population of ‘innocents’ for whom the setting twilight appeared to conjure no queasy, unpleasant associations. Among the ‘innocents’: an old man leaning on a cane hoisted in the sand; children frolicking with plastic castles and volleyballs; the dog-walkers and evening joggers; and closest to him, a young twenty-something couple sprawled on a white picnic sheet, locked in an embrace. One half of the couple, the girl, sat up from the white picnic sheet, moved a metre towards the sea, then coiled her limbs into the sand. The girl now had her neck craned gracefully against the waves beating blue and purple; her eyes were pointed to the sky; she was posing for a pocket camera the boy held angled towards her. He plodded towards them.

—

“Would you mind comparing these two photos?”

“I suspect that the sun is playing tricks on us.”
“–Uh…”
“Look at these.”

“These 48 photos were taken seven years ago. These were taken today. Same spot. Same phone. Same exposure settings. Same time. Same weather.”

The girl paused the song playing on the phone in her pocket: the 80s kitsch piece, ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’.

“But the weather is not the same,” said the boy.

“There are always minute differences in atmospheric conditions, which means that day by day every moment of our waking life looks subtly different, but don’t you see? The problem we are being presented with is that across the board, in all the photos taken before and after, the spectrum of light appears completely altered. This picture here from the after looks downright melted in comparison to the before. Don’t you see it? Not one bit?”

“Right. Uh–”

—

The boy had no clue what the stranger was talking about. The girl wore a countenance of calculated indifference; she looked on as Sanjay walked away in frustrated haste, proceeding to interrupt other ‘innocents’ in a seeming comic cascade of equivalent failures – he grew smaller and smaller on a falling domino trail of failed conversations, until finally he vanished beyond the visible horizon, after which the girl vanished him from her mind as well.

But that night, after she had showered, and tinkered on the piano, and gone to bed, and then gone on her phone, and then put down her phone in an attempt to go to bed – when she was all alone, when her limbs were paralyzed with the elixir of sleep and she had gone limp on her bed quilts, it was at this moment that the incubus of Sanjay’s conspiracy crept into her mind like the vignette of a haunted television set. On her imaginary television, mists of static parted into a taped replay of her evening scene: as she fixed a gaze at a point beyond the clouds, the camera clicked; she turned her eyes to the lens; it blinked; then, the shadows in the sand shifted to reveal an advancing silhouette. The man who came into focus was barefoot and robed in suit and shades; he brandished photo prints of sunsets in each hand as he paced around the sand; on an implied podium, the man delivered his apocalyptic sermon.

Janelle confessed to the priest in her head. Forgive her, Father. For the longest time, she had the sense that the world the Lord made in seven days was in fact deeply askew; she could never recognize His image in it – let alone her very own. When she closes her eyes, she thinks of a fragile, delicate minor key piece swelling inside her; when she opens them, the symphony of the world, which is only ever played in drab white keys – the key of C Major – suffuses through her. It may have been from this vertiginous dichotomy that she sought refuge in the conservatory. All the priests before him had taken the side of the world over her: only sin corrodes, it first corrodes the heart, then the world. But this television pastor was now telling her that the rust of the world began with the very sun. Forgive her, science was not her domain of expertise, but people change, time changes, space changes, so why would light be any different? The deep wrongness, this chronic disease of reality which had so thoroughly penetrated the marrow of her bones, which had become unbearable in recent days, around the time the light corrupted in the man’s claim, this disease she could finally explain – now what of its cure?

Go in peace. She sat up in bed and reached for her Macbook, attempting to uncover a digital trail of the man she had met earlier, a search which proved fruitless, though in the wake of failure, she felt ridiculous for expecting to find on the internet the footsteps of an eccentric whose routine revolved around daily sungazing and phototaking; then, the obvious occurred to her, and so on the next day, at the same spot, under the same sun, at a different time, she met Sanjay again.

—

Two lives intertwined.

—

On summer break from university, Janelle began spending her days with Sanjay at his apartment. While Sanjay continued tinkering at the theoretical heft behind the solar conspiracy, she worked on strategies to spread awareness, in the hopes of finding fellow travellers for their cause.

But when Sanjay made prints of the East Coast photos and adorned his study with them, Janelle trembled with a wave of doubt; her conviction in their project wavered not out of skepticism but sheer belief. Adjacent to the door, the 48 East Coast photos from seven years ago were plastered above Sanjay’s desk, while a mosaic of 48 newly-taken photos cluttered the wall opposite the door. Her eyes darted between the two walls, the two mosaics. On the wall mural of the new 48, she could see that something had happened, as if the world had suddenly lost texture. She thought of photons hitting her skin, and how these little invisible particles had simply become different, pondered the significance, and shivered. In her immediate nausea, she pondered if it would have been better for the world to have continued in the hinterland of ignorance – as she pictured ice cream tubs left on the veranda, drooping smiles of snowman faces, and melted candle wax, she became quite repulsed. The blinds were drawn in the lamplit study, but she felt the foul light in the 48 photos leering back, taunting her to leave the study to meet its mercy; the study was safely sealed, she thought, except sunlight would seep in every time they opened the door, which was unavoidable, so there was no line of resistance, so she might as well roll up the blinds now. The new 48 morphed into a face on the wall mocking her, tempting her; it was inevitable, the four walls of the study were shrinking and shrinking and they would soon implode; the outside light of the outside world would collide with her and the light of the old and the new photos until all coalesced into a melted, infinite liquid. No, dark places and man-made lights were safe, Sanjay said; but how could he even be sure that the photons emanating from the electric lamp perched on his desk were not in on the ruse? The displays on his laptop and the phone in her jean pocket were LED panels; she pulled out her phone and looked at her face reflected on the black of the glass; her finger trembled over the power button; pressing it would erase her face in a flash of blue; she dared not press it, and her fear made her reconsider old wives’ superstition of electronics and microwave radiation. She looked at the floor but the face on the wall did not stop looking at her; the walls were contorting and constricting and she could not bear it anymore; she lunged to the window and rolled up the blinds in a violent tug.

Her pupils constricted and she winced as the afternoon brightness poured into the room, enveloping her and Sanjay, whose torso combusted into a scream. She stood still for a moment, inspecting her hands and her body and the room before her. Sanjay was yelling at her, but there were no other malevolent figures in the room. The face on the wall had melted; the light in the new 48 was no longer distinguishable from the light in the room. The wall and the world were now a uniform, homogenous mixture. But nothing had happened to her or Sanjay; the light had taken amnesty upon them.

Nothing was really wrong, she could almost believe it, but when she looked left to stare at the old 48 above Sanjay’s desk, she once again saw the immiscible difference between the now and the years ago; the sunlight in the study was smudged while the 48 suns in the old photos were crisp; however, the longer she concentrated, the more she felt the fabric between the two worlds rend; the 48 suns were shimmering, almost flickering now, as if the two worlds were compatible, as if the rays in the room could compel space and time to shrink and crumple, compressing all matter into a miscible gelatinous mass; all would continue compressing and compressing, until nothing remained. A black hole. Nothing could escape.

She shook herself to her senses. The crooked light, having conquered the present, was now trying to seep into the past. She swiftly drew the blinds again.

With great unease did she leave the hermetic seal of the study that night, and with similar unease did she wake in the morning to the seeping rays of daybreak, though when she rose from bed a thought occurred to her that the sun, in spite of its secrets she conspired to expose, had shown her charity and continued to do so. Perhaps there was no reason to fear otherwise – could it not be that the pact between the sun and humankind remained intact, only with certain terms modified? Or at the very least, a pact with her and her alone, if the charity of the sun did not extend to all of humanity? But what were the terms of this pact, and what action of hers would constitute a violation deserving of penance? She could not know what was sin to the sun until she had committed it; though, from the fact that she had not been smited or melted yet, she surmised that neither investigation into the bent light nor her intention to disseminate its truth broke the terms of the invisible treaty the sun had brokered with her.

So the next time she was in Sanjay’s study, when she glanced at the mosaic of truth, the sense she had of her secret treaty safeguarded her like a talisman, and her trembling diminished a little, and the next time, a little, and so on. In this manner, her regular intervals of exposure to the prints on the wall mollified the terror in her heart, and her faith was restored in the notion that the world would come to accept the truth she knew.

The summer days she spent with Sanjay and the nature of their work had the appearance of secrecy, for the simple fact that in such moments of obsession one withdraws one’s attention from everything and everyone else – until one day, Rachel walked in on them after she had left a meeting early.

—

"Most men wait till they are forty before bringing over a woman a decade younger," Rachel quipped sardonically.

Eyes twitched and fingers fiddled.

“Not what it looks like.”

“–what is it?”

Rachel said, with the husk drawn up after a sigh, “is it the light thing you keep bringing up?”

—

A conspiracy unspooled, fraying strings knotted within.

Upon the scheming pair, labyrinths sprawled, writhing.

—

They walked through libraries, their eyes trailing off the spines. They walked through a delirium of websites. They walked through the disorientation of urban developments, heaps of pamphlets in hand. They knocked door after door, hoping to convert the provincial ‘innocents’.

—
Doors opened, timidly.

—

“Excuse me, may I have a moment of your time?”

“Have you noticed anything about the light?”

“Good evening madam - I'm doing a survey on the possible decay of the sun and its consequences for Singaporeans…”
“May I–”

—

Doors shut, swifter than the velocity at which they first swung open.

—

The day Sanjay decided to press charges against reality, Rachel was sitting on the balcony of a different rented condominium. She was not jealous; in fact, it was the utter lack of sexual magnetism between Janelle and Sanjay that perturbed her – her life had become entwined with that of a madman. In her view, the wandering gaze of men was simply an axiom of the universe. Tragic, like death, poverty, war; phenomena lived in the full voice of tenses: happens, happened, happening, will happen, had to happen. How quickly a life falls apart. And how we move on. So it goes.

Infidelity and heartbreak were solvable problems, but the sheer irrationality of the situation that had befallen on Rachel was not. There were assessment books for spouses of unloyal husbands, but there was no precedent to solve the novel problem of a husband who had been inexplicably struck by a stroke of insanity or prophecy. Both his discovery of the light and the dissolution of her own life, it seemed, were equally novel problems of physics.

On page 46 of Daisy Jones And The Six it got too dark to read, in the disappearance of the evening violet, so Rachel snapped the spine of the book shut and lit a cigarette with a Bic. The end of the cigarette burned. When Sanjay quit his job, he said he was taking a mental health sabbatical. But in unemployment, his beard grew longer and his hair greasier and he shut himself in his study – he was not recovering, he was wilting with disease.

Of the Sanjay she knew, she had known to possess within him a certain intensity, a singularity of the will, but she had so loved this drive of his because it used to be uncontaminated by the car-crash caprices the heart often tempted. Now, his sudden paranoid desires appeared to revolve around replicas of the photos they took on a date during university; she tried to pull him out, but his trajectory was predetermined.

Her lungs winced as she sucked in the smoldering cigarette; she exhaled and sighed. When Rachel was in secondary school, there was a girl that typically topped the class, her shoes were dirty and she never wore a bra, and when she was 14, Rachel became very cruel to her; the other girls hated her for the superficial reasons children detested the filthy and ugly, but unlike the others Rachel hated her because she had it so easy; Rachel took two extracurricular tutors on most school-days, suffered sleepless nights and pulled-out hair, and this lazy girl who doodled and read magazines in class would still do better than her; she had to work for everything while this girl never did, and this girl could never appreciate how lucky she was or how easy she had it. The year before they took their International Baccalaureate, the girl left school and no one saw her again, but everyone thought she would make something of herself, go to Ivy League, whatever.

Last year, when Rachel bumped into her at a supermarket, her shoes were dirtier, her hair was in a clump, and her teeth were rotten; when they made eye contact there was a hollowness in her eyes. Madness, genius, and talent were all equally irrelevant – without discipline, without firm roots in the physical, material world, you were bound to drown. Now, Sanjay had become this filthy girl from her past.

And she thought of herself and the salt breeze of the sea and the mangroves by the coastline, roots entwined, breathing against the tide, resisting.

She sighed. In her final moment of quiet nicotinic introspection against the fading light of the evening, it came to Rachel that the detritus of her domestic circumstance did in fact contain microscopic particles of jealousy: love was a bond of mutual madness, and the streaks of madness shared between Janelle and Sanjay far outstripped the force of hers.

—

In Rachel’s old Bedok apartment, the pair were scheming in the dim lamplight of Sanjay’s study, though Janelle’s faith in her prophet was already faltering. They had scored a small cult of ‘faithfuls’ mostly through her efforts: the anonymous campaigns she ran on social media. Still, the consensus remained as indifference or derision.

“Singaporeans over 45 are more likely to have chronic illnesses,” the disembodied voice declared. Janelle switched off the radio and slumped against the window blinders, standing still with her arms crossed.

Black sunglasses were now permanent furniture on the face of the man who had been silent on his armchair for nearly an hour; she imagined his eyes must be closed beneath the glasses; his breathing was slow and his clasped palms were resting on his thighs, as if in a meditative trance.

While her conviction remained in the transmutation of the sun, her mute prophet could neither predict future changes nor could he convince the world of what they had witnessed. He was going nowhere. And what did it matter? Something had changed, the light around her was different now, that much was obvious, but the sun had not yet abandoned its fundamental duties to mankind, and in reciprocation, mankind has gone on as if nothing had happened anyways. So why should she live as an invalid, retreating from the world as if she was diseased, and why should Sanjay shoulder his burden of Messianic self-crucifixion? What difference would it make? After all, has the sun not judged that the world should continue? Tomorrow, the sun will still rise in the east. Perhaps one day it will judge that it should not rise after all, but on that day, nothing she does would matter anymore; in the dark, she would close her eyes and prick her ears to hear the phrase of the angels: be not afraid.

In the early days, after the photos were put up on the wall, Sanjay was the one who showed more composure than her, but as he buried himself in further study, his anxieties grew together with his allergy to daytime; pinned on the wall behind him, shaded by lamplight dim as the glow of a lone votive candle, the 48 photos from 7 years ago now hung around his head like a bent crown of stars.

She looked at the star-crown, its constellation of ships and stars, and she reminisced of sunset strolls at East Coast with her partner; a single palm clasped against another, interlocked arms softly stroking against the muslin quilt of sea breeze, then in the night, the white and yellow sodium eyes of tankers and freighter ships blinking in the horizon whose leering presence would suffocate her; the ships in proximity littered the waters and squeezed oxygen out of the air, cordoning the thin string line between sky and sea; they made the world feel so small. Yet now, the ships in the night seemed to her a profound solace, these massive cargo-homes like beacons of hope in a softly comforting blanket of dark, offering safe harbor from a delinquent sun. It was the thought of these giant ships, painted red and blue, that eased her initial fright over the East Coast prints – she wondered if the disheveled, sunglassed man in front of her had any ships of his own to cling to.

The ships above his head were shimmering as she thought of her prophet’s past; this was an ordinary man once, a former lawyer. Shards of desperation, pity and inspiration struck her all at once.

“What if we sue?”

Behind his glasses, she could not make out his expressions – she never could – but she imagined fits of connections; neurons sparkling in his mind.

“Who are we suing?”

Sanjay replied tersely, though she wondered if this was paradoxical to the flight of ideas his mind must now be taking on at the probe of suggestion.

“Well, we can’t keep going like this; throw away years of our lives for nothing in return. I’m just saying we have to do something. Nobody is listening to us. But you were once a lawyer. Try something. Let people hear you out, in court.”

“You want to sue the sun, because our way of life is contingent on the sun being reliable, therefore it should not be allowed for it to play tricks on us, is that what you are saying? We are entitled to a stable metaphysics. A right for reality to stay fixed. ”

“No – I mean well, I don't know. But it’ll bring attention to our case. Sanjay, you know I believe in what you have uncovered, and you know you believe in it far more than I do – but nobody is listening to us, and so maybe I think what everyone needs is just a little nudge, a little push, you know? Get your photos on the news, let people see it for themselves, let them discuss it, then who knows...”

—

Papers called it the trial against the sun.

—

…

The plaintiff, representing himself, claims that light, as defined to be the electromagnetic fields of radiation observable in the universe (hereby abbreviated E.M.R), has conspired against him, and thereby the rest of us.

The plaintiff claims that the abrupt alteration of E.M.R is an unlawful action as the rule of law is contingent on cosmic stability.

The plaintiff claims that wilful harm was done by E.M.R and seeks compensation.

…

—

The fluorescent light in the bathroom was not kind to the body he had seen in the shower, which was hollow and scrawny, and the black suit he put on in the morning was crumpled at the waist and the shoulder seams were tailored for a figure much broader; his pants were three sizes too big now, sagging to his thighs in spite of the belt. He adjusted his tie in the bathroom mirror, looking at himself for the first time in a while.

The lower half of his face and his upper neck had been annexed by the wild growth of unkempt hair. But the weight loss did accentuate his high-cut cheekbones -- perhaps he still cut a dignified, handsome figure. He tilted his head down. Behind his black shades, the eyes were sunken, bloodshot. It would not matter. Today was the day of judgement.

Janelle left a month ago, Rachel maybe nine months. He was all alone in his holy war now. He plodded from the bathroom to the study, and looked at the weapons he would wield on the battlefield. A brown leather briefcase was sprawled open on his desk.

The photos on his wall had all been taken down; the two sets of 48 photos were now filed into two PVC ring folders that sat neatly packed in his briefcase, beneath mounds of case files and documents. He slipped a few pens and markers into his briefcase, and put two more pens into his suit jacket. He clicked the briefcase shut and slung it across his shoulder.

Slumping by the window, he winced as he rolled up the blinds. He opened his eyes and heaved a sigh; damp morning air rinsed his breath. The morning was tinted a tolerable shade of lagoon blue – he could almost mistake this blue for the mornings of years ago. It was the afternoons that got scary for him: the sky morphed into a muddy brown, as if the thick yellow paste of a decomposed star was mixed with an iridescent, alien purple.

He adjusted his glasses so they sat snug on his nose. Be brave; today, he was going to wage war on the sun.

As he rode the escalator up the City Hall train station, he imagined the weeping choir of Lacrimosa rising in his head, and one side of his lip twisted into a smirk. It had all begun like this.

As he walked across aisles of trees and street lamps, crowds parted around him to make way for his entrance to the battlefield. 12p.m. – his celestial adversary was at the peak of its powers. Yet it hid behind the ramparts of office towers, while their window reflections aimed arrows of light at him, like archers in a garrison. Unfazed, he clasped his fist on the handle of his briefcase.

The facade of the courthouse was a white marble, untarnished by solar corrosion. But blood would soon be spilled in its hallowed grounds. A small crowd of a dozen had gathered outside – reporters, skeptics, and two or three ‘faithfuls’. A jowly Chinese man chanted, ‘Sir, Sir, we believe you, Sir’, to the scorn of the jeering cynics, who had come to be entertained by a spectacular, divine comedy. A lanky, bespectacled reporter (lanyard suggested a tabloid origin) clicked a picture of him. Lacrimosa surged in his head a final time, then the choir fell silent and the crowd scurried away and he felt the sun roaring behind him as the gates of the courthouse opened, welcoming plaintiff and defendant.

The air was cold and sterile as he walked across the glossy floor of the hallway and into the courtroom, where the seats were occupied by two journalists, a very small handful of “faithfuls”, and about thirty morbidly curious members of the public. Across the room, an old hunchbacked judge squinted at papers on his desk. The gavel tapped once against the desk. Now, make your case.

He cleared his throat on the podium and prepared his arguments: the culmination of his scholarship. “Where should we begin, with Copernicus, Galileo, or maybe Descartes?”

“Let’s begin with your case. You are suing the sun.”

“Your Honor, the political, social, scientific foundations of our world, that of rational modernity – they are by no means a product of common sense nor a natural development of animal intuition. No, our world is a cathedral built by skeptics over thousands of years – the most brilliant among us who applied to the social (human) world and the natural (inhuman) world a method of absolute skepticism. The Scientific Method. The Age of Enlightenment. Skeptics who had been called mad, heretic, or stupid. Skeptics like me. Sometimes, sections of our epistemic cathedral, the load-bearing beams of general knowledge so to speak, fail to withstand our rigorous benchmarks of structural integrity; they must be torn down, so they may be rebuilt. Today, the load-bearing beam for our whole social order and intellectual order is the proposition that the universe has fixed, coherent laws which govern the natural world, and thereby the human world too. There is no question that metaphysics and ontology are still loaded topics today – these are domains claimed and contested by every religion and every philosophical school all over the world. But the one assumption all these claims share is that the nature of the universe is A) fundamentally knowable and B) self-consistent. My findings suggest this very assumption is faulty, with nefarious implications to all that we know, and –”

The gavel tapped twice against the desk.

“Enough. Mr Sanjay, you are claiming that the sun changed on an arbitrary day, and only you and a handful of your disciples noticed? It is, a priori , a ridiculous claim.”

“A priori? Your Honor, have you heard of a Cartesian demon? Descartes suggested we could know the world as it is by raw reason, unless an evil demon manipulated our faculties of sense and cognition. But the Cartesian demon is not simply a reductio ad absurdum on the limits of human reason. In my view, the sun is a Cartesian demon. It has deceived our senses, it has concealed its very nature, with nefarious intentions, and as Descartes believed logic could not surpass his malevolent demon, we can not utilize a priori arguments to rule out what is true and false about the sun. But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will now pass out my photographs, my a posteriori justification for the claims I have made. They will show without a doubt that the sun outside the courthouse looks very, very different from how it did years ago.”

“Mr Sanjay, there is no jury in the court of Singapore, there is only me.”

“Your Honor, it was a figure of speech. All these people in the room here, they have to see the photos for themselves. Let them bear witness to the true nature of the sun, of reality.”

He spun around as he waved the ring folders in each hand, desperately gesturing to the witnesses in the room, who threw back quizzical glances. Then he began to yell, addressing literal judge and symbolic jury.

“Your Honor, as you know, the forensic investigation done in preliminary hearings show that none of these photos were fabricated or modified in post-process. The experts had no scientific explanation for what was going on.”

“Mr Sanjay, are you talking about the same experts who concluded that while the photos had no signs of forgery, they could not rule out the influence of wind and weather?”

“The climate of the earth cannot melt a star, Your Honor. The experts could not offer a scientific explanation, because there is none. None that we know of. What is happening here defies science, and that is why I am in this court today.”

“Are you saying you cannot explain this change in the sun either, Mr Sanjay?”

“Yes, Your Honor. I cannot. Nobody can. Not me. Not the experts. I have thrown myself at the issue for months, and there is no explanation that fits with our current paradigms of science. But that is why I am here today, with the photos I am now holding in my hands. They show that the assumptions behind the foundation of our world are all false. The scientific truths, the legal truths, all which we took for granted until today are all invalid when the sun itself is lying to us.”

“Mr Sanjay, this is a court of law, not a court of science, not a court of philosophy. Even if I could be convinced your photos demonstrated an unusual difference, which I will not be, what sort of compensation do you expect to extract from the sky above? Why is this a problem of the court, not the university?”

“What is the difference? Your Honor, you were a teacher yourself. Insofar as we have a court at all, where matters can be judged true or false, right or wrong, is it not by a prior body of work established in the university? And insofar as legal practitioners are able to practice judgement, is it not by their faculties of reason, which as I have said have been compromised by the sun? Order in the court requires a precedent of natural order – all the rights we take for granted – the rights of the individual, the rights of the state, the rights of humankind – all these rights depend on a more fundamental right, that of ontological stability: the right for reality to stay fixed. But when the demon in the sky changes the hue of sunlight and messes with our minds, then, this fundamental right is inarguably violated and compromised. The world cannot continue as it once was.”

He shook the folders in his hands, as if begging. “Your Honor, please just look at the photos I am holding up. Believe me, Your Honor.”

Whispers and murmurs buzzed in the courtroom, only to fade as the gavel rose and hung fixed in the air. Sanjay’s trembling hands were extended above his head. The ring folders were beginning to slip from his palms. A camera shutter clicked – the reporter by the stand. The gavel slammed down again and again.

A clerk walked to the podium and took Sanjay’s two ring folders, passing them over to the judge. One folder contained the 48 photos from 7 years ago; the other folder contained the 48 photos taken in the present year. He walked away from the podium and planted himself on a seat at the first row, examining the hunchback across the room who was now deliberating on the evidence. The aisles around him were silent with anticipation and curious amusement.

As the judge fiddled with his ring folders of evidence and flipped through the East Coast photos, Sanjay adjusted his shades, observing the reactions of the judge. He observed brows suspending in the air then furrowing, which he interpreted as shock, awe, bewilderment, and denial. This presiding judge who deigned to evaluate his photo proof may be a ‘faithful’ after all.

Now, the moment of judgement. The hunchback was ready to deliver his verdict. He ruled that the lawsuit was out of legal jurisdiction.

The gavel swung down. Sanjay looked around. It was too late now. The ‘innocents’ in the room were barely stifling their laughter, while the criminal he accused was leaving the courtroom through ruts, windowshafts, and doorslits.

As chairs creaked and the aisles began to empty, he looked to his left: the reporter by the stand had turned his back and was heading towards the door. Tomorrow, the public will engorge themselves on the image taken earlier: the hysterical man in a sloppy suit and tie, wearing indoor shades, trembling hands extended to the sky, shouting on the stand against the profane sun. Tomorrow, newspaper coverage of the trial will demonstrate mathematical proof of the arc of the universe which thus far only bent to wry irony: his folders of photos may have held conclusive evidence of the solar conspiracy, but now the court photos of the sunglassed madman will become conclusively damning of him. Tomorrow, the internet will burst in an uproar of ridicule, and at his own expense, Sanjay imagined the comments which would be in equal proportions unsympathetic and humorous: what is in the water supply in Punggol; this is your brain after nus law school. But he knew the internet would move on to new hysterics; he did not have to fear being a social pariah for very long. Nor was his career in permanent jeopardy – fits of eccentrism in lawyers were not so uncommon, and what was common was easily forgiven. The sun, however, would never forgive him.

Today, he was all alone. The seats of the court were all empty now, and columns of lights above began blinking off – the handiwork of a prudent, invisible clerk – leaving him alone in the dark, empty courtroom. For the final time, he flipped through the ring folder containing the 48 photos he took at East Coast 7 years ago: all 48 suns had set in the night of the courtroom; they were inert, empty holes; the landscape and the sky in all the photos had been swallowed by the tide of a black sea that had no horizon line, a sea that stretched beyond the margins of each photo, flowing into the corners of the courtroom and the estuaries of memory. As he waded against its waves, he reached for the sunlight submerged in his black pool of memory; streams of light and shadow flowed across the pitch-black around him, coalescing into projections on his canvas of self-imposed night: a bedroom baptized blue by the first shafts of dawn; the shadows his coffee mug cast against the windowsill; office cubicles in the white heat of the afternoon; on Sundays, halos that hung above apartment towers. They were images of the world as he had known it, before the crooking of the light; a mirage forming over a black sea.

The sea was almost this dark on the night he last met Janelle, as she had agreed to his request to only meet after sunset; the dark outline of her figure was rim-lit by the sodium lights of distant ships and she stood by the shoreline against black, beating waves, looking at a point beyond the clouds. As she turned her face to speak to him, the two black seas merged, superimposing a silhouette of Janelle over his mirage of old memories. Her words, floating above the waves, were phrases full of platitudes and sentimentality.

“Look, I’ve always believed you. But in the end, what does the shape of the sun matter?” If the sun can choose to trick us, it can choose to not rise tomorrow.

“Then we live in the dark.” How?

“Life goes on, Sanjay. We have to believe it, even if the heavens are against us.” A platitude.

“You know, maybe we orbit one another, not the sun.” Another platitude.

And the waves beat on, and silences and intentions and the meeting of the eyes ebbed and flowed. Then, in the professional tone designed to impress, the same one he had put on in court earlier, he declared to her that night that “when one hears perfect pitch, one cannot tolerate an off-key reality.” But she scoffed, though sadness appeared to rinse through her when she emptied her gaze from him, retreating inwards in search of something, until finally she said, “But pitch is learnt, Sanjay. God knows I didn’t for so long. Maybe you can also learn to forget.”

When the silhouette of her face left the edges of his vision, he was left alone with a vista of a mirage above a silent, black sea. But he began to see jagged seams where the two black seas had earlier merged; at the points of confluence, one sea was visibly brighter and muddier than the other, a different shade of black, and as soon as he discovered this, he tightly shut his eyes in a jerk of reflex, dispelling the mirage in front of him. His last memory of Janelle by the sea only happened after the crooking of the light; now, he had contaminated his images of the old world with the profane, new one. Even here, he was not safe – the thing, the unrelenting thing outside, had conjured a phantom of his first believer in order to deceive him.

Black waves swelled in the darkness.

Daylight awaited outside. Sanjay rose from his seat, ready to meet fate.

—

When the gates of court opened, he ripped the black shades from his face.

In this final condition, he knelt his eyes in contrition, submitting to the mockery of the thing in the afternoon sky.

—

The next morning, Sanjay dug out his eyes. It was under a damp bathroom light, not quite as cruel as the sun, with a wooden ice cream spoon. He veiled his wound in cloth, disposing of the eyes in a brown paper bag.

—

He floundered in the dark from the bathroom to the study, his face crooking to neither frown nor smile.

He sat over a book already open before the table, and traced his fingers over black ink on worn paper, on the first page of the Bhagavad Gita.

—

O Sanjay, after gathering on the holy field of Kurukshetra, and desiring to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?