125: Fragments, Chapter 1

Preface

This project—Fragments—is something I never thought I’d do. I don’t read that much fiction, to be honest. But I’ve always been drawn to stories, especially the kind that explore the human psyche, blur the line between memory and imagination, and ask unsettling questions about what’s real and what’s not. I’ve always loved films that do that—Her, Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive, The Game, Before Sunrise. This novel sits somewhere in that space: psychological, emotional, fragile, and maybe a bit surreal.

Let me be clear: this isn’t a memoir. It’s not a true story. It’s a composite—a narrative stitched together from fragments of past experiences, conversations, thoughts I’ve carried since I was young, and emotions I’ve tried to ignore. I took some real things—like Hemingway going to sea before writing The Old Man and the Sea—and let them mutate, collide, and morph into something else. Writing this has been liberating. Vulnerable. A way of making sense of things that never quite made sense when they happened.

So I won’t say more. I’ll just say: thanks for reading. I hope it gets under your skin the way writing it got under mine. And I’d love to know what you think.

—Non

Fragments: Chapter 1

I was there, in a hospital, lying down feeling the pain creeping from my right foot up to my spine. My brain kept telling me that I would be fine. Pain would subside after the brain had adapted to such pain. But that was far from being the case. I flipped my body around. One minute I was sleeping on left side, the next minute I would be lying down on my back. Then, the process repeated. This wasn’t helping me at all in feeling less pain. It just distracted me, numbed my senses, so that I could battle the pain, alone. My fiancé went back an hour ago as the visiting hours were reached. There I was: Just me, staring at a blank ceiling of a room in an in-patient ward of a small hospital in the suburb of Bangkok. As the pain was getting more excruciating, I was there, with tears pouring down on my cheeks equally from both sides of my eyes. “What did I do to deserve this?”

It must be true that people see things in the moment of pain. Some see themselves in the past. Some see themselves in the future. I saw both. But the problem is that I saw both through the most pessimistic lens possible. I constantly asked the nurses for more pain-killer shot to go into my blood vein through an IV whose needle immersed deeply into the skin of my left hand.

“We could only give it to you every 3 hours, otherwise it would be dangerous,” said a middle-aged nurse whose face was half covered by a surgical mask. To be honest, I never felt comfortable with that. Since I was a child, I read lips while listening. It’s one of those techniques I had developed as a child and it had helped me to fully understand what the other was saying.

The masked nurse walked away. No matter how many times I pushed the intercom because the pain was unbearable, I couldn’t seem to convince her to help me with more painkiller. “How about some morphine?” Of course I just thought to myself. I wouldn’t have the courage to ask for such a strong level of anesthetic.

Last night, when I first walked myself to this hospital’s emergency room—yes, the pain had increased over time—a young female emergency doctor told me that a centipede’s bite like this could be dangerous. The bite wasn’t painful. It was quick. I felt as though I was bitten by something—could be an ant. The moment I looked down and saw a one-foot-long centipede on top of my left foot, I screamed and moved my foot recklessly to get it off. I was fast enough to snap a couple of blurred photos of this monster, which I promptly showed to the doctor when asked by protocol what brought me to the emergency room at midnight. The doctor prescribed some painkiller pills for me, while injecting a shot directly to my left foot. “You’re good to go home; rest a lot and take the pills when needed,” said the young doctor. At one point, she also casually dropped “The pain shouldn’t be a problem to an adult.” Believe it or not, that sentence stuck in my head for a while.

I booked a ride home after that. My lovely mother with whom I lived, too, was optimistic that I would be able to cope with the pain by myself. She even told my fiancé that I had never experienced anything like that since I was born, but “as a man” I should be able to tolerate it. Boy, these words from both the young doctor and my mother were the reason why I didn’t go back to the hospital after the pain got worse. “I am a man,” I told myself while torrents of tears were pouring out like a broken dam.

That night at home was worse than the night at the hospital. Don’t get me wrong: They’re both abysmally bad, but the first night by myself was something else. In my room alone, I made noise all night. Any sounds that you might have heard people made when they’re in pain—I made all of them. I cried. I screamed. I told myself that perhaps I should die. I paced in my room, which didn’t lessen the pain but at least it made me feel different. Little did I know that doing so would make my foot swollen to almost one-third larger than my other foot. I would try to lay down whenever the pain allowed. I believed that at least as I was already lying down, somehow I might be able to fall asleep. I was wrong. For nine hours since I came back from the hospital, I didn’t sleep even a second.

Let’s rewind a bit here.

The night before I found myself staring blankly at an old cracking ceiling of a hospital listening to the humming of an overly loud noise from an old air-conditioning unit in my single patient room, as you could probably guess by now, I was bitten by a one-foot-long centipede. I was craving food after smoking a joint at the balcony of my room earlier. So, I came down to the first floor with the hope of finding something sweet or savory to satisfy my artificial cannabis-induced hunger. I had lived in this house for more than 4 decades, so I didn’t even bother flipping the light switch when walking to the airfryer at the far corner of my kitchen. That was, as you and I later learned, a fatal mistake.

The only consolation is that there were many news reports of many people being bitten also by centipedes. This might be due to the rain and humidity that got these crawling creatures to find places to hide. I didn’t think it was necessary to go to the hospital since there were just small bites on my right foot. I cleaned the foot and poured some medical-grade alcohol directly onto the bite marks. My mother, who heard my scream, came down to the kitchen and asked me to go to the hospital. I did so with a bit of skepticism as the bite marks were quite small. “This is almost midnight and I would rather go to sleep. The pain would go away tomorrow naturally,” I told myself. Nevertheless, I went to the emergency room anyway as I knew that would be the only way for my mother to go back to bed.

The emergency room was quiet that night. Hence, I got all the attention from both the doctor and the nurses. They were all scared when I showed the photos of the centipede that bit me. It took about half an hour for them to clean the wounds and eventually send me home. At home, I started to feel the pain. My mother couldn’t sleep as she was waiting for me with my two dogs in the bedroom. She asked me what the doctor said. After I told her, she smiled and told me that I was old enough to deal with it. I believed her, yet the pain didn’t subside as we moved into the quieter part of the night. Yet, there’s nothing quiet about it, at least to my mom’s and my two dogs’ ears.

I screamed and cried. It’s like your foot was trapped between a car and its door—and there’s someone who kept slamming the door against your foot. You told them to stop, but no one listened. The night was both painful and psychedelic. This was the first time ever that I didn’t have to hide from my mother that I would need to smoke some more joints to get through the night. “Smoke as much as you want this one time,” she said. So, I smoked three more. Since I didn’t have joints left, I dug up my glass bong from my storage. As I was stuffing the weed into the bong, my hands were shaking because of the pain. Spoiler alert: Weed didn’t make the pain more bearable. It just distracted me from the present moment of pain—taking me places as my imagination allowed. I was traveling to the past. I was peeking into the immediate future. All of these were helpful in giving me slices of moments of distraction from the task at hand: Stay calm. How could I?

I endured the pain until the morning came. My mother who came to check on me told me I both looked frail and weak. She saw the remnants of the tears on my cheek and, this time, forced me to go to the hospital again. “Admit yourself to the hospital this time,” she said. Not gonna lie; I still held a bit of grudge against my beloved mother. “Wasn’t it you who told me to man up and suck it up?” The emergency room’s doctor in the morning was an older male. He seemed surprised that I was sent home last night. “These types of venom can be dangerous; they should have admitted you last night.” Duh. I ended up spending the entire day and one extra night there. The doctor came to check on me every few hours with nurses who would prepare a shot of painkiller. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was hope that the pain would go away.

My fiancé rushed to the hospital after I sent her a quick text before being moved to the in-patient ward. I would not be looking at my phone again until much later as I couldn’t think about doing anything else. “Why me?” I constantly asked myself as if the answer would help. It didn’t. She brought me some snacks and spent the whole day with me until the time she had to go home. A good friend also dropped by with a pack of cannabis gummies. “This would help you, bro.” I looked at him with the greatest possible feeling of appreciation. “Thanks, man. I know for a fact that it wouldn’t help with the pain but maybe with something else,” I told him. Distractions. Yes, I needed them.

For the past few years, I had been feeling empty. Not because I didn’t have anything. Quite the opposite, it’s because I had everything: a house, a car, a respected and stable job, a lovely fiancé, and two lovely dogs. All of these were in addition to the fact that I got to live with my mother taking care of her after my father left us more than a decade ago. “What a perfect life,” my good friend once told me. This friend didn’t know shit about stability.

The gummies took me back to the time when I was just a graduate student abroad trying to learn a new language, making new friends, and trying to survive in a completely different academic environment. “At least, despite all the hardships, my life was so exciting,” I screamed at one point so loud that a nurse would come check on me. “Sorry about that. It’s just pain,” I brushed off the scream as something to be expected. The nurse looked at a clock in my room and gently told me that she could give me more painkillers—but in an hour, not then. I nodded and went back to my weed-infused imagination.

I enjoyed weed because it helped me to feel distracted from the stability of my life. At that time, I thought to myself that it would be nice if things became stable. But now that I had all the stability I ever needed, I felt as though I was living in a void. I drank and socialized. I read books. I traveled. I did all these because I was under the false hope that they would spice up my life.

It didn’t. The emptiness continued to creep in. I often wondered to myself what’s the purpose of life after all. Since I was young, I always had vivid dreams. Maybe it’s not as great as a lucid one, but I could never tell that I was dreaming. I guess that was common, yet I always asked “What’s the difference between our dream and our reality?” I was never shy about sharing with good friends my “simulation theory” that I had believed in ever since I was a boy. Perhaps, just perhaps, we were here because the real us wanted some distractions from their “stable lives.”

So, my theory went: In the future, people will live in such an abundant world that they could get whatever they want at their fingertips. Want food? An automated drone would deliver in a nick of time. Jobs? No one has to do it anymore because humans would have mastered the utilities of robots and artificial intelligence. Governments around the world would send checks to everyone because it’s cheaper and the most effective way to maintain a “stable society.” No jobs? Don’t worry. Here’s the check—just use it and don’t cause any trouble. Some call it a universal basic income. In that future, people would get so bored that they would ask to be put in a simulation just to feel “distracted” from the monotony of life.

These could just be all weed talking.

I was in pain and the gummies contained 50 mg of the substance that made you high. Usually, 5 mg could already kill those who didn’t use it regularly. I was taking ten times of that. The same pattern of pain as the night before emerged but this time I couldn’t pace anymore. I could only lie down on the bed and scream, sometimes inside and sometimes, needless to say, out loud. The night went by slowly. I lost a few kilos of weight just by the lack of appetite, and the pain. But, but, there’s one surprising thing that came out of this stoned cold long night: I actually enjoyed some aspects of pain. I could have come to the hospital again after the venom made me want to jump off my balcony last night, but I didn’t. Why? Well, because in the pain, there were parts of it that I enjoyed. Although I prayed that this was all just a bad dream and then when I woke up everything would be fine, a part of me wanted to feel it deeply. My mind split: A version of me kept saying “This is all just a simulation” while the other part was preaching to me “Pain made you feel alive, isn’t it?”

My fiancé came to visit me in the morning. The pain did subside. I felt frail and weak. We had a light hospital lunch together on my bed before driving me home. I spent the entire afternoon in bed at home feeling weak and tired. “I wish the pain would last a bit longer—it did make me feel alive.”

While still high from the gummy and all the weed I had smoked the night before, my mind wandered. It traveled as far as 2 millennia BC and around the same number of years forward. But there was one particular moment that kept replaying again and again in my head because it gave me a similar feeling though without the physical pain. That moment got me thinking about everything from whether or not I could and should trust my intuition, to whether or not any of the things we were seeing even real. No, it’s not like another version of a simulation theory, but it’s more as though whether or not we were slaves to something else darker, more sinister, and more insidious. Thinking about that moment made me feel as though there were, not one, but a dozen of centipedes crawling all over me: wrapping around my torso, hiking up and down my spine, and crisscrossing with its many claws on my face. It’s the moment that made me question everything: Am I real? Am I human? Am I seeing things from a parallel universe?

That moment began a couple of weeks earlier.

When I was in Kuala Lumpur.