Niki Almira

The fourth of November had been a random Tuesday for a significant number of people, myself among them. It was only at 3:00 a.m. Australian Eastern Daylight Time the next day that I received the message.

The fourth of November had not been a random Tuesday for Vee’s mum, for it had not been 3:00 a.m. the next day for her when she had sent the message. 

It had been Tuesday, still, by virtue of the time zone lagging behind in an Indonesian city easier to leave unnamed. 

“Kakak, can you check on your sister?”

Crossing the path of a full moon on its way back to slumber, sirens sounded in my sleepy mind. It had been a Wednesday when I chased through familiar alleys in a suburb of Sydney for a runaway in an unnamed city in Indonesia. 

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Way after this ordeal had ended, Kakak would sit in her therapist’s office relaying her frustration at this role that she didn’t have the choice to reject, maybe toying with the idea of using it as the subject of another personal essay. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎  ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Kakak had failed in the role.

—the starting point would be— 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ as she too could not get a hold of Vee for another three days. 

The therapist, with their elongated smile, would tell Kakak that the experience of being an older sister is a universal struggle. It is not specific to having her mother send her a text at ungodly hours from Indonesia because her sister pulled a stunt. It would not suffice to start an essay with this: my sister disappeared, and I am far away. 

It would only suffice if the sister was driven to the dark corners of her mind because the walls of the house swallowed her whole. It would only suffice if told by an elder sister whose escape for fresh air was tainted by the knowledge that she left the rest of the family to suffocate. 

As the therapist would send Kakak home, they would pat her on the shoulders and tell her that writing down her feelings might help with the stress. 

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As I sit writing this story now, I have more of the puzzle pieces in my possession. 

 

This is how I might reconstruct the scene:

Vee told me herself when she called after resurfacing, and it would become the single line that starts and ends her version of the story. That there was in fact no story at all—that she had come down with a fever and simply slept through the whole three days. 

It is an unreliable truth that is easy to believe. 

The girl was the healthiest in her family; in a way that was why, conflictingly, this bout of sickness was inevitable. 

For her, health had always driven her to maximise the use of her body, like a zoo-born seal excited to show tricks. Her working mum never had time to prepare hearty lunches, so the seal packed herself a schedule like this instead: 

Every day, Vee would only wrap up after 7:00 p.m. And if her mum’s working hours stretched to 8:00 p.m., she too would only wrap up after 8. Because going home earlier would mean having to be home alone with her dad. And though the seal loved to perform, she never wanted this performance to start earlier. 

This zoo-born seal belonged to a family of an animal troupe in a zoo, wooing an arena with rehearsed tricks for half the day. 

The true performance would then, however, start within their enclosure. 

Because the onlooker wants you to appear natural in your habitat. 

Natural equals happy. Natural equals sitting at the dinner table as Dad rattles off about his very important meals for his very important job with very important people that will result in something more important than money—money that he barely has enough of this month to cover your lessons. Natural equals cheering for him despite everything. 

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Kakak started seeing a therapist when she was in Year 5. She had been acting out by scamming small businesses out of three million Indonesian rupiah. In the small city where they lived, it could have amounted to two to three months of work. She did it in two weeks. 

When she turned 19, Kakak hauled herself out of the country. 

She would still search for therapists, calling her mum every now and then when each therapist refused to diagnose her with anything more than stress. Still, she was convinced that the house had driven her crazy, the house that Vee still had to live in. 

When their father used to boast of his influential connections, his large presence now loomed at midnight with the sound of retching—that way, Vee would know that their mother had somehow said the wrong thing to him. 

Her parents had tried going to a marriage therapist until her father cut the therapist off for suggesting that they might have fallen out of love in a way that could never be the same ever again. That was when it started. Their father’s headaches. Nausea. Their mother had caused him to be sick, and so she mustn’t ever leave him. That included his daughters, too. 

“Psychosomatic,” Dad would cry in the evenings as he retched on the toilet when he yet again failed to get through to his younger daughter. 

---

In the same year that Kakak started to swindle her millions, their dad renovated the house. He added a study to the front-facing side of the place, halving what the family previously used as a guest lounge. He had done it because his promotion landed him a reputable enough position to warrant a study. 

Their father’s promotion, it seems, had also landed him a reputable enough position to warrant courting a student on the side. 

Their mum had fallen out of love with their father after the affair, but she still came back to that wretched house. Every night, she would slip away from the master bedroom and squeeze herself into the tiny space on the trundle bed that Kakak didn’t occupy. Vee couldn’t understand what they were talking about, but she must have noticed. I imagine the little girl jealous that she wasn’t involved in the shared whispers of her mother and a sister only three years older. 

I imagine her mirroring my jealousy towards her blessing of not knowing. 

How am I supposed to relay this story to you for it to make sense? Allow me the selfishness of reclaiming this space to unearth my sin: I had helped my father hide his affair. 

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It had been unceremonious, the way I was squished back into the role of ‘Kakak’ within my phone’s small dimensions in the small pocket between night and day, the fifth of November at 3:00 a.m. AEDT. 

The moon was the sole audience to my act of perjury, in a testament I am giving from the witness stand instead of the accused. I was a child back then, and far away from the scene in this one.  

No one I know should see me admit to my crimes, of course, which is precisely why I am writing this story to hopefully extract my own guilt incognito. 

My therapist would smile at me in their all-too-friendly way and say: everyone has family problems. 

As your narrator, I feel it is important to make clear that, due to my being far from these characters, what precisely happened to Vee during her period of disappearance is speculative. By virtue of assuming that the first-hand accounts were reliable, what might have happened on the fourth of November at 11:00 p.m. Western Indonesian Time was this:  

And so, here is the resolution to my personal essay: 

I was making my way back from my biweekly therapy session when my sister rose from the dead. I let her call ring for some beats before picking up. Perhaps in those beats we were both taking a synchronised preparatory breath. 

As I rode the bus and watched the clinic grow smaller in the distance, I imagined her atop a bike—some ocean and a continental border splayed between us—zooming away, away, away from the place we both still call home.  

I brought my phone close to my cheek, and we talked about the weather.