Old Vernon Lee dangling off the edge of the parapet with the harness and the calipers, measuring the millimetres between the railing and flaking paint of the overhang.
He reads the figures out and I take them down on my notebook: five-point-six-eight mm, two-point-two-two mm. Below us, twelve floors of air. The painted red brick of the quadrangle beckons, geometric outlines of children holding hands.
“I’d do it like my subcontractors used to do, with theodolites and blue chalk and ruby-glass mirrors, but some things we have to see with our own eyes.”
—
The deviations are getting smaller, Vernon says. He had worked three decades as a project manager coordinating proactive façade repairs for the public housing board, who refused to take his warnings seriously. The metal ties holding the false brick cladding to the housing blocks were growing closer together every day. Incipiently it seemed there would be less and less work for him to do. When the time came, they did away with him and his team.
He soon started finding them elsewhere. On a scale of months, metal fixtures receded into themselves, and spalling, sagging overhangs tensed overnight into flat planes. The excess of curvilinear decor that blistered the sides of new, built-to-order blocks slowly took on a stolid, precise symmetry that was discernable to Vernon and his training, but not the naked eye.
Two years after Vernon started, he took me in. I was a fresh dropout from my civil engineering diploma. Architecture had ceased to be sexy among the young. The thought of being plastered across industry paraphernalia for the next decade as a woman in the built environment sector numbed me. So did the thought of spending the next lifetime micromanaging indentured labour. I had much preferred working with my hands, to cake them in splinters and dust. To make sense of where the world was going, I was enamoured with the idea of becoming a documentarian.
I told him that was where I was coming from, and he could only shake his head.
“We’re not just documenting,” he said. “We’re setting the ground for when it rebuilds itself.”
—
We nearly get caught once when measuring the distances between gutter brackets on the barren roof of a carpark.
Building inspectors, draped in black oilcloth, round the corner of the lift mechanical unit, their searchlights white like fish eyes.
I drag Vernon by the collar of his polo shirt down a ledge to the third floor, nestled in the creepers overflowing from the pristine planter box. We hold our breath to the sound of boots overhead. It has been getting harder and harder to trespass, of late; Vernon suspects it's because of the old Cisco stairwell alarms slowly creeping back into function.
Someone takes out a sledgehammer and starts hitting the concrete, sending chips flying overhead. They drift like dandruff into the bougainvilleas. Irregular at first, then methodical, the way large actions settle into a rhythm. The banging slows, dulls, ceases.
When they’re gone, I heave a sigh of relief. We scramble like crabs across the overhangs, calipers at the ready. It’s all too good to be true: the gap between every screw has narrowed to exactly three-point-one-nine mm.
—
A rusty window bracket from an ageing block in the heartlands gives way, killing a boy aged five on his kickscooter. The housing board issues a statement that it is not liable for flat repairs when the anchor point is on the inside of the housing unit, which should be the sole responsibility of the flatowner. The flatowner, a widow at the age of sixty-five, is put to death by hanging.
I gather blurry Tiktoks of building inspectors rappelling down the sides of blocks in the dead of night, loosening brackets with spanners as they go.
As if counteracting them, new building types proliferate on Instagram. Photogenic blocks, their roofs perfectly framing a sliver of clouded sky. A circular porthole cut in a ground floor pillar with the photographer's waifish girlfriend peeking through. Geometrically perfect playground watermelon.
Most nights in my parents' flat, I lie awake in my childhood bed, listening to the sounds of old bones.
—
Vernon’s cagey about theories. Says I wouldn’t understand. One night, poring over spreadsheets of drainage grate measurements, I loosen his lips with some Martell.
“You ever been to a castle, kid?”
I shake my head.
“You know, when I started as a young man, there were already six thousand housing blocks across the whole island, standardised under the auspices of the housing board. Today, there are nearly thirteen thousand, taller and denser in areas we've never built before, subcontracted to a hundred different design consultants and architects. Think of the sheer mass of concrete weighing down into the dirt. Think of the pile caps, the remediation works, the subterranean web of water pipes, power lines, telco cables, and common ducts. The kaleidoscope of forms struggling to hold on to each other. The roads and footpaths that link them like a concrete skein over the soil.”
“It is a monument of many parts, a common form that many have realised, though very rarely in this part of the world. See, you put rocks together and they start to wise up. Weight and symmetry insist upon themselves. Little by little, a structure that started as little more than a dream on plan exerts a formal gravity all by itself and grounds all of history beneath it to a paste.”
“What happens to everyone inside?”
His eyes light up.
“The protagonist always flees the collapsing house because he must view the scene from the outside, which is to say, the future. Stay on the outside of it, girl. One of us has to.”
He assigns me readings. Vitruvius, Leon Batista, Edgar Allan Poe, Tay Kheng Soon. The latter polymath, in his twilight years, compiled a bestiary of architectures complete with a terrifying vision which he claimed appeared to his mother in a dream. In it, infill development packs the central region fifty-to-sixty stories high, ringed by successive tiers of sky gardens, streets in the sky, compacted cuboids of tiered highways, rail lines, shops, and offices. There are no humans in these renderings. The edges of the city spill out into the sea, forming the shape of a seven-pointed star.
—
When it rains, the rooftops flood. We find the blocks where the water’s pooled the most, where black water flows off the gabled roofs in laminar waterfalls. We perch on our elbows with levels and plumbs and confirm that slowly but surely, the tops of buildings are becoming flat. No slope, no fall for the runoff.
The evening news shows a kid with his head stuck in the gap between the decorative elements of the corridor parapet, his hair sticking out like some kind of bulbous cactus fruit. He’s laughing, like it’s some kind of game. It’s a slow news day so they broadcast the live feed of the firemen, the jaws of life, the inflatable rings, the tubs of petroleum. One of them’s trying to dislodge the parapet finishing, the metal cladding holding firm, and everyone’s eyes widen in horror as the jaws of life snap. But then at that moment his colleague gives a tug and the boy’s big jellied head comes free with an audible pop, and everybody cheers so loud that you can hear it on the TV camera on the first floor.
The boy’s parents pass him into the waiting arms of the men in the black oilcloths.
We watch this soaked to our underclothes, drinking hot chocolate in front of Vernon’s old TV. I try to crack a joke but he’s glued to the screen, measuring the gaps with his eyes.
—
We get a visit from the housing board goons. A bespectacled young woman, fresh out of university, introducing herself as Winnie from the façade enhancements programme division. "You already know what all this is about."
I profess that I don’t. “We’re just humble surveyors, ma’am,” I tell her. “I’m not a Qualified Person, but my supervisor is. Is measurement a crime? Is bearing witness?”
“It’s common knowledge that our buildings are getting better all of the time without our control. This is dangerous for people like you and me, trained as we are in reversing the flow of entropy. We don’t like being reminded of the end of our existence. We have to strike a balance. What comes next to tightening screws and compaction of form?”
I balk. “There is no stopping this. You know that, which is why you've approached us.”
“We want to strike a deal. We have been monitoring this long since before you left us. If you hand over your measurements, we can ignore the trespassing and find a way to stop this.”
Vernon exchanges a glance with me. “I don’t think anything we’re aware of is capable of stopping this. According to recently discovered writings by the architects of the Basilica of Maxentius, it's in the nature of a castle to express itself. Even a ruin of one discovers this in its perfect and untarnished way.”
“Then so be it,” says Winnie. “Contempt for a public officer is punishable by immurement. We will give the old man until dawn.”
—
Vernon’s assembled an army of former subcontractors to resist arrest. Rough men of every nation and creed armed with welding torches and scaffolding poles. They block the driveway to his good-class-bungalow in ranks of up to five deep. “Construction is an industry built on favours,” he explains to me over crackly Whatsapp call.
He has tasked me to monitor the tops of buildings near the central region to prove his hypothesis. There is a singular public housing project nearing completion, which I have managed to sneak into from a clandestine gap in the hoardings used by the workers to receive cigarettes. Fifty floors up, I stack an anemometer on a tripod in a half-completed corridor. Something’s shifting in the way the city is holding itself. The way the wind whips between the hollow building shells.
Symmetry arrives between the flapping of blue tarp. Over the call, I hear helicopters and the sound of a fight. Clash of metal on metal and screaming in a multitude of foreign tongues. Vernon tells me to hurry up. Up here, you can see everything. I look over the parapet and note the angle of the skyline change.
It is something I would have once confirmed with spirit level and calipers. Instead I see it with my own eyes. The squat ten-storey units of the west coast lining up with the skyscrapers of the civic district as an obtuse line of symmetry, reflected in form via the taller flats on the northeast. Millions of millimetres of microdetail mirrored across the horizon, false brick finishings, metal fixtures, archways, fittings, portholes, pillars. Optically, discounting the effects of parallax, left and right have aligned.
I close my left eye. In one fell swoop of perspective, the civic district is pancaked between prefab built-to-order units. The offices of the public housing board are no more.
—
Vernon contacts me via landline from a country code I don’t recognise.
“How are you doing, girl?”
“Don’t call me that,” I tell him. “I thought you were dead.”
“I slipped away in my third car. The stragglers are still out here, but they don't know I'm not at the hotel. Are you certified yet?”
“I quit the sector, actually. I think built environment isn’t for me. Actually, I've been really getting into pottery.”
“Really?”
“The city’s been a mess ever since we lost our housing board. Rent is cheap now, and everyone who’s left has been taking turns living where they can. The average three-room flat now comes with battlements and an oubliette. I thought I'd find a niche in interior decoration instead.”
“A future without QPs,” he muses. “Fancy that.”
We sit in silence for a while. I look out the window at the new agglomerations that have sprung up over the last two weeks in the civic district: gardens of spired pagodas, carved with every manner of tropical fruit and snarling beast, gargoyles channelling last night’s rainwater into gutters shaped like lianas or dragons, limestone roots spilling over curvilinear walls, here and there catching the odd skeleton of an ex-housing board employee. Below, the sound of rivers.
“I think we're a lot happier this way,” I say.