Red Dot Irreal: Equatorial Fantastika

By Jason Erik Lundberg

Travel to Southeast Asia on wings of the fantastic for Jason Erik Lundberg’s debut short-story collection Red Dot Irreal. There you’ll meet pirates and shamans, wise fish and mystical storytellers, living monuments and paper animals, time travelers and civet cats, stone taxi drivers, floating dental patients, and a sentient bird park. Once you enter the surreal worlds of Lundberg’s equatorial fantastika, a part of you will never leave.

Bonus: extra stories “Big Chief”, “Occupy: An Exhibition” and “Bachy Soletanche” have been added for this electronic edition.

“Stories exotic, spicy, and redolent as a four-star curry. A fine meal for the mind awaits you in Lundberg’s collection.”
—Jonathan Carroll, author of Outside the Dog Museum

“Lundberg’s writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order: these stories are memories encountered for the first time, but never to be forgotten once they’ve been experienced.”
—James A. Owen, author and illustrator of Here, There Be Dragons

“Red Dot Irreal is a box made of the finest equatorial wood, containing a collection of genu-ine gems of the early 21st century noble art of fantastika.”
—Zoran Zivkovic, author of The Last Book

“Red Dot Irreal teems with imagination, location, originality, and fine writing.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Empire of Ice Cream

• Language: English
• Publisher: infinity plus
• Release date: Dec 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301992423

Jason Erik Lundberg

Jason Erik Lundberg was born in New York, grew up in North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. He is the author and anthologist of over twenty books, including Red Dot Irreal (2011), The Alchemy of Happiness (2012), Fish Eats Lion (2012), Strange Mammals (2013), Embracing the Strange (2013), the six-book Bo Bo and Cha Cha children's picture book series (2012–2015), Carol the Coral (2016), and the biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series (2013–2017). He is also the fiction editor at Epigram Books (where the books he's edited have been shortlisted for and won the Singapore Literature Prize and Singapore Book Awards, and made multiple year's best lists since 2012), as well as the founding editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (est. 2012), and a recipient of the Creation Grant from Singapore's National Arts Council. His writing has been anthologized widely, shortlisted for multiple awards, and honourably mentioned twice in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Bogeymen

Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)

Hero Worship, or How I Met the Dream King

Lion City Daikaiju

Dragging the Frame

Big Chief

Occupy: An Exhibition

Bachy Soletanche

Kopi Luwak

Paper Cow

Taxi Ride

Coast

In Jurong

Notes

Red Dot Irreal

Equatorial Fantastika

Jason Erik Lundberg

Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

© Jason Erik Lundberg 2011, 2012

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© Jason Erik Lundberg 2011, 2012

First published in print by Math Paper Press in October 2011. Extra stories Big Chief, Occupy: An Exhibition and Bachy Soletanche have been added for this electronic edition.

Cover © Keith Brooke

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of Jason Erik Lundberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

What others are saying about Red Dot Irreal

Stories exotic, spicy, and redolent as a four-star curry. A fine meal for the mind awaits you in Lundberg’s collection.

—Jonathan Carroll, author of Outside the Dog Museum

"Lundberg’s writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order: these stories are memories encountered for the first time, but never to be forgotten once they’ve been experienced."

—James A. Owen, author and illustrator of Here, There Be Dragons

"Red Dot Irreal is a box made of the finest equatorial wood, containing a collection of genuine gems of the early 21st century noble art of fantastika."

—Zoran Zivkovic, author of The Last Book

"Red Dot Irreal teems with imagination, location, originality, and fine writing."

—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Empire of Ice Cream

Preface

Irrealism and fantastika are just two faces on the multi-sided die of Non-Realist Literature. This type of literature combines the tropes of fiction that imitates reality (mimetic) with that which explores the magical and unexplainable (fantastic); other labels that have been used at one point or another to describe this kind of cross-genre writing include, among others, magic realism, fabulism, interstitial fiction, and (my personal favorite) slipstream. Teasing out the nuances between these labels, including geospecific applications (magic realism hails from South America, while fantastika originated in Eastern Europe), goes beyond the scope of an author’s preface, and can be accomplished with a cursory Wikipedia search. All of which is to say that however you label it, this is fiction in which the strange is made normal and the normal is made strange.

Which is, perhaps not coincidentally, how I feel about living and working in Singapore.

As of this writing, I have now lived in the equatorial island republic for just over four years, and I am still occasionally taken aback by cultural assumptions that do not match my own. Corporate workers or civil servants are expected to devote their entire lives to their jobs, staying sometimes past seven o’clock in the evening (or later), to the point that the government had to declare Eat With Your Family Day so that parents could see their children during dinner time at least once during the year. This mindset (of workaholism, not eating with one’s family) rankles against anyone who values their personal and family time. What good is working 60 hours a week to scrabble after promotions if you can’t take the time to enjoy the fruits of your labors?

I live in Geylang East, a neighborhood only about 20 minutes’ walk from the legal red-light district, an area that hosts as many temples, mosques, and churches as it does brothels, and which gathers some of the best food in the entire country; my Western friends who know of Geylang only connect it with the sex trade, but my Singaporean colleagues and the taxi drivers who may ferry me home don’t bat an eye. That such an area is left to flourish under governmental regulation still feels odd in a place that prides itself on moralistic conservatism.

Artistic endeavors are highly touted for their cultural importance and prestige, but whenever an art exhibit or theatrical run or dance event is covered in the newspapers, they are primarily assessed for their supposed monetary worth and/or the attention garnered for the country’s tourism (which further translates into dollar value). For a nation that yearns to be a centre of arts and culture in Southeast Asia, like Renaissance Venice, it is dispiriting to see so much focus on these more vulgar concerns rather than on aesthetic appreciation.

But, as readers of speculative fiction are probably already aware, the world can always be made stranger, and that’s what I’ve attempted to do with this humble collection of stories. Bookended by longer fictions, with various shorter pieces inbetween, Red Dot Irreal is a palindrome in terms of story lengths, and an outsider’s exploration of what it means to live in this part of the world. Four years is still too few to get a handle on one’s destination of migration, but it is enough to reveal how I have been changed by the experience.

Thanks go to Karen Wai and Kenny Leck for having faith in my writing and agreeing to originally publish this volume in dead tree format, and for running the best independent literary bookshop in Singapore; to Toh Hsien Min and Yeow Kai Chai for publishing several of these pieces in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and for making me feel like a legitimate member of Singapore’s literary community; to Bill Schafer and Daren Shiau & Lee Wei Fen for separately buying two of these stories and allowing them to be published here first; to Rudi Dornemann for establishing the long-running website The Daily Cabal and inviting me to submit my flash fiction as a contribution. But most importantly, I must thank my wife, Janet Jia-Ee Chui, for introducing me to her homeland eight years ago, and our daughter Anya, for showing it to me through new eyes every single day; I am ever-inspired by their love and their ways of looking at the world.

Jason Erik Lundberg

June 2011, Singapore

Bogeymen

Pain, sharp. A pull, a tugging sensation, as if my soul has been spun thin, to be siphoned through the chamber of the barrel. I am being drained. I am drowning.

~

My eighteenth birthday. Father sits in his favorite high-backed chair by the fireplace, stolid, unmoving, hostage to his back injuries, quietly sipping sherry. Mother weeps into her handkerchief; a blue M.D. is embroidered in its corner. The white linen soon grows grey from her tears. I guide her to the other chair before she falls down from grief; her body is so frail these days.

I’ll return soon, I say, and her sobs grow louder. I feel racked with guilt; I’ve only just returned from my schooling in London the week before, and now I must leave again. The East Indies are not so far away.

My baby boy, my baby boy, is all that she can gasp between breaths.

I must do this, Mother, to prove to myself that I am now a man.

Father grunts and says, What’s the name of this ship of yours?

"The Swift," I say. I want to correct him—it is not my ship, I’ll only be working as captain’s scrivener—but I dare not. Father’s temper is short these days.

Good name, he says.

Mister Brooke chose me himself, I tell Mother. It is a point of pride, that out of seven applicants, I was picked by the ship’s patron for such a noteworthy position. It is clear that the headmaster’s recommendation was a boon, but I am confident that it was my skills and experience that won over my new employer. I’ll be recording Captain Kennedy’s log entries. It is a very important post.

Mother looks up at me, eyes shining. You were always good at your letters.

Father lumbers out of his chair with help from his cane, and shuffles across the Oriental rug, his steps slow and deliberate; the pain must be particularly bad today. Were it not for my mother, his wishes would not even be made known to the servants, as they fear his wrath in the midst of such agony, and hide from his threats and insults in the far corners of the house. His hand is heavy on my shoulder.

I’ve just one piece of advice for you, my boy, he says. Be wary of the Bugis.

I cannot help but smile. Father, the Bogeyman is a story told to make children behave. I am no longer a child.

Where you’re going, boy, the Bugis are no children’s story. A very real danger, Henry, and you’d best not forget it.

Yes, sir, I say and Father pulls me into a quick unexpected embrace. He pats me on the back, then returns to his chair. Mother stands and grips me tightly. I kiss her on the cheek and whisper reassurances, but she can say no more.

Have Charles drive you down to the wharf, Father says. Experience a last indulgence before plunging into honest work.

Thank you, sir, but no. It’s too much trouble to prepare the horses at this hour, and I prefer to walk. Two miles is not too far.

He grunts, says, Suit yourself, and lifts his hand in a small wave. I heft my rucksack before Mother can detain me further, and depart, closing the front door behind me. I hear her sobs outside, down the path to the main road, over the cobbled streets, echoing throughout the Brighton docks, all the way to my destination.

~

I cannot stop heaving. It is incomprehensible to me that the crew can keep their feet in such turbulent waters. They laugh at me behind my back, then assure me I’ll soon gain my sea legs. I do not know whether to believe them.

The smell is at times overpowering. Wet hemp, pitch, sea salt, fish oil, and the increased odor of unwashed bodies. I myself have not yet become accustomed to the nigh-constant sweating, the oily dirty sensation of life at sea. Several of the men display the signs of scurvy, irregular spots that decorate the skin; I hoard the several clementines that Mother packed in my rucksack, rationing them by wedges until I can find more.

I ponder the possibility that I have made a horrible mistake in accepting this post.

Still, Captain Kennedy is an extraordinary man. He commands the crew with confidence and foresight, although quick to temper. Insubordination results in time spent in the brig and wages docked; a second offense sends one overboard to the depths and Devil Jonah. As such, he keeps a tight ship and an obedient crew.

My scrivening duties are not yet begun, as I am still incapable of concentrating on pen and paper in my current nauseated state.

The captain’s cabin, being in the exact center of the ship, is the most stable spot, and Captain Kennedy has set up a corner of the room with hammock and shelves as my living quarters, so that I will be easily accessible to log entries at a moment’s notice. Other crew members have given me the evil eye, and make remarks behind my back loud enough that there can be no doubt were meant to be heard, accusing me of becoming the captain’s new pet, his toady, or his whore. However these words may impugn my good name, I dare not retaliate; I am still the newest member of the crew, and the youngest, and it would be no bother for these work-hardened men to see me disappeared over the side. As of now, having not yet made visible contribution, I would not be missed.

I must soon conquer this queasy stomach and prove myself to the captain. It is the only way to begin earning my keep and gain the respect of the crew.