By Sihan Tan

He had just enough room for a digital camera and so he brought his binoculars.

A bird of prey took down a pigeon and tore it open next to a dog park. (A salivating dog is more dog-like than a barking one.)

Drones, more birds and balloons jostled for sky space. (Are birds ever suspicious of balloons?)

Cracks on skyscrapers. (Birds, yes, most likely migratory ones but what about the nomadic drone tribes that are over a thousand-strong?)

Killer litter. (How to go about burying dead pets on rooftop gardens?)

Spotting an object or intrigue in the distance, he'd walked towards it, entertained a passing thought, noticed something else again.

"Speak to the locals," his daughter suggested on voicemail.

"Maybe," he said. "How is John?"

Binoculars were useless in museums, or so everyone thought. His son-in-law had been battling prostate cancer for months and the slightest exchange with his daughter provoked repeated talk about homeopathic treatments and glandular transplants. From the steel-glazed atrium of the former colonial administrative building, he zeroed in on visitors larking about on the floors below: running children weaving through TikTokers pouting for clout, tourists in Birkenstocks, and then, the darkly-dressed types who barely glanced at exhibit labels, hands wrapped dutifully behind their backs. Laughter, grimaces, the most brazen gropes and key chains dangling from ear lobes. Eyes enthralled by those out-of-reach textures behind glass.  The embroidered fruits looked so soft. He recognised the boredom of security guards, the haplessness of men his daughter's age loitering outside toilets, and witnessed a chill shudder through patrons of a gift shop without walls.

He tapped on a small shoulder and handed his binoculars to a boy he thought the most self-conscious from the parade of school children passing by. No, there was nothing more to it, he was just someone else's boy. What little had been said of him, if said at all, over the years: that he was so very quiet, introverted and extraordinarily normal. Were they not politely disguised attacks? How dare they ascertain his worth without looking closely, and from the right angles? But who could blame them for failing to recognise the gigajoules of damage and grief averted, courtesy of his reticence, his refusal to impose? He almost kicked a steel bench, its taped "X" a remnant from a time of social distance. How…how is John? Sounds like hail, he thought, and perhaps hasty morning showers in cheap fibreglass bathtubs. Blinded by spotlights, he listened intently to the music of footsteps on marble. "Ask your parents for a better model on your birthday," he said to the boy. The boy returned the binoculars and caromed back to his free-running crew. The lens surface sported new scratches. At his age he wondered if autistic masculinity – a term bandied by smokers outside a speakeasy – was merely a rehash of the way society perceived men devoid of a roguish breed of sleaze, charm, and breezy sex appeal. He wasn't a dazhangfu, but neither was he obnoxiously, tenebrously conscientious, he averred, watching from afar the dejection on other people's faces. More waves of people, more missed buses and trains. The opinions of others were akin to looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. "We are seriously considering prosthetic sex organs smart enough to predict arousal," his daughter texted. His son-in-law was a self-made cash-poor tech millionaire.

He liked thinking he could have been a better father, that there was always —always—room, and surely, time for improvement. Over the years, the indistinct suspicion that his daughter was altogether different folded neatly into the pointed wish that she would come out as a lesbian who never liked men. A final-boss justification for all the estrangement he endured in this world. He had yet to tell her the greatest gift a man could ever ply a woman was to cry hard and freely in her presence, and that John was, and could yet continue to be, a loud, proud, gloriously insipid bruh.

The tourist without a camera had two more weeks to daydream-gaze.

At the cinema, he calibrated his binoculars as if it were an itch, forcing the lady seated next to him to leave. He stared at the locals who didn't look like him, and wondered if any of them had bionic penises that stayed hard even when half charged. He bought linen clothes for they were hospitable to travellers and medically castrated patients. He spotted a gangland crime and, having caught up with its potent adrenaline – a coalition of cracked voices, broken glass, and whirring ambulances – wandered through the city's red-light district where the gutters twinkled with holographic streaks of oil. "If I could spend the rest of my life spotting the heat of each moment before approaching," he explained to his daughter. "Where are you now?" she asked, from the hospital. After the call, he upgraded to a suite with a balcony. John was in a coma and time was running out to find a compatible donor. He woke up to the curtains lurching, half-drawn, stricken by the thought of his daughter dying from something as unnatural as a broken heart. Old men were seldom compatible with men who, prematurely, declared themselves old.

He slid the glass doors open and watched a space station fall. He saw wildfires in the Arctic; flightless dinosaurs with feathers; and everywhere – like pink teetering teardrops – the jiggling uvulae of peoples yawning and munching on breakfasts. Thirty years ago, he climbed Mount Merapi in Central Java. He rediscovered the strange, unknowable inscription etched on a megalith. The rockface his porter had fallen from.

What could his daughter's mother be looking at right now?

Her newly painted nails, or her step grandson wobbling from one end of a carpeted room to the other. Yet again, she appeared too well-preserved in his thoughts, artlessly languishing, agelessly plotting her escape from the ex-home she designed. No, he was projecting. That young-old, undead woman must be complaining about mosquitoes, minor smells, Restaurant Week set meals at Michelin-starred kitchens, and the price of pregnancy to people she considered strangers. Gosh, you're right! I did have an ex-husband!

Microfibre cloth was preferable to canned air when cleaning the lenses of his world-watching binoculars.

"Pray for John," his daughter texted. "We got the green light for an artificial implant. The next twenty-four hours will be very, very crucial." Having splurged for an expensive tour in a passenger submarine, he thought hard about his reply: Men expect women to expect them to be invulnerable and sensitive at the same time. I'm sure your husband feels the same?

Does your Mum know?

He thumbed the "X" on the virtual keyboard.

Does Mum?

Does—

 "One less person to care about is one more aspect of myself I'd get to work on," said a young man to another in the packed vessel. Like everyone else, they were taking pictures and he could see, moments before submerging, flaming debris in the wake of a commercial plane falling.

"Marine snow is the continuous shower of biological debris," the audio guide informed, "it buffets an ocean floor scattered with ruins and the slow-to-decay carcasses of whales."

Wouldn't the submarine's sonar system detect anomalies as obvious as shattered parts from a plane, he questioned, and could he continue to expect a grandchild from his son-in-law with his made-to-order manhood?

The submarine's lights illuminated sectors as vast as valleys, and there were fish like light reflected from the screens of phones. He revisited the range of excitement that radiated from his daughter's face on her happier birthdays. She loved the ocean, but so did John, newly improved with his submarine-shaped million-dollar penis. What ever escapes an old traveller? he wondered, glancing at the binoculars on the empty seat next to him full of a feeling that this could well be the beginning of a most unusual journey. "The pressure of water eliminates most life", the audio guide continued, "shatters unfortified glass". Talk and laughter faded, exposing the submarine's calm mechanical humming. At 120 metres below, all fish were silver darts. Someone looked like they heard a thunk on the roof. Several more thunks poignantly followed. There were complaints of headaches in other passengers' murmurs. "We are now entering the realm of the giant sq-quidd," announced the audio guide. He thought of names for baby boys and girls but could not settle on the right English, Pinyin or Transhuman-sounding ones. The soft trill of fracturing glass elicited more screams. "Hey, it's okay. It's just my binoculars cracking under pressure," he shouted at his fellow submariners for something was hurting him from the inside. Something was hurting everyone. The submersible seemed to have stalled in the midst of successive tremors. He pressed his face onto the frenzied floor, discomposed by his abrupt acceptance of the quiet, shy and fittingly inconsequential person he was – an old ghost wary of his son-in-law's motion-predictive cybertronic sex organs; a dull shadow passing through hotel rooms and his family's memory of a nostalgia-free home. And the inert bubble of space between opposing lenses of a binoculars, not unlike the emptied hull of a novelty submersible, or the sudden absence of flesh, infected and extracted from the pelvis…

After a flameless combustion, passengers of the mangled submarine comingled with ones from the downed plane and it was impossible to differentiate rising bodies from the sinking ones.

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