Part 4: The Gift

"Mr. Bloagon, why are you outside?" Jason exclaimed.

Jason didn't even get the chance to park his car properly, he stopped the car with the engines still on.

It was almost dusk. The morning was immature, only a slight peek of light. It still growled at the simplest sounds. A twig snapping, old school orange busses might as well be thunder, even birds chirping was a nuisance. Immature.

The Subuh prayer calls. Nobody seems to be greeting it's long passing.

Jason observed the quiet neighborhood around him. He was certain apart from two Chinese lecturers at the end of the street, him and his family were the only Kadazans, or as famously generalized, Non-Muslims, living in the area.

"Harris, wake up. Wake up." Jason shook Harris.

Johan woke up after a transferred shake on his right shoulder. He was known for being a very sensitive sleeper, often switching off his phone at night when he sleeps because often even vibrations on his phone would wake him up.

Soon, Johan’s eyes were off to a half slumber again.

Mr. Blaogon came close to the car and Jason picked him up, dusted off his fluffed up tail.

"Mr. Blaogon, who let you out?" Jason talked as if the cat understood him.

"meowww.." the high pitched response from Mr. Blaogon was as if he understood Jason.

Johan and Harris both eventually woke up because of the heat that accompanied them when Jason turned off the car with the windows closed shut. As the last drop of sweat dripped from Johan’s cheek to the ends of his goatee onto his shirt collar, he opened his eyes and noticed they were in front of Jason’s gate. He shook Harris and both of them got out of the car through opposite doors.

“Guys, just come up. Subuh is almost over!” Jason shouted from his window, one floor above them. They both didn’t even look up; Jason’s house was all too familiar to them.

They closed both doors and the Jason locked the car from upstairs. Harris and Johan soon joined him and Mr. Blaogon on the cold wooden flooring of his air-conditioned room.

They didn’t say much. Harris went into the toilet and Johan waited outside. A few moments later, Johan took Harris’ place and Harris went to the right-most corner of Jason’s room. The corner was apparently cleared up. Stacks of books were there just ten minutes ago.

Johan called for prayer in the cold, cold morning. His voice shivered but it looked like none of it mattered.

Jason was on his bed petting Mr. Blaogon on the back and fiddling around with his mobile phone while listening intently to the words he doesn’t understand beautifully coming out of Johan’s mouth.

He saw Mr. Blaogon was falling asleep, Jason got up and went to the toilet.

Prayers were over for two of the boys. Johan uttered the last salam and he took a seat on the bed while Harris pulled out a wheeled chair that was initially resting under a study table next to the bed. He turned it and rested his chin on the backrest.

“He does have a lot of books, doesn’t he?” Harris said as he ruined one stack of books on the study table by pulling out the middle and thickest book from the pile.

“You didn’t know? He just one day turned his life around, the day his mother passed away. I think it was a year before enrolment” Johan was surprised.

“What? Really? I never would have guessed..” A lower tone was exerted by Harris, fully aware that Jason was still in the toilet.

“Yeah, he was quite troubled back then. The university almost didn’t accept him because of a little..” Johan was cut short.

“It was, a little mishap.” Jason just came out of the bathroom and ended the sentence he didn’t want Johan to continue.

“A little mishap?” Jason was cut even shorter.

“You broke into a Minister’s house! When you were sixteen!” Johan couldn’t contain his urge to expel that information. Loudly.

“Shut up. Mr. Blaogon is asleep. Shhh..” Jason obviously tried to avoid the topic.

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Who is this blue-eyed European lady in this picture?” Harris held a picture frame in front of his face.

In the battle of curiosity, Harris would always win. He’s the type that didn’t care much about anything but his questions. If he wanted to find out something, he would eventually find the answer to it, even when there are more important tasks at hand. Some say that is what makes him brilliant, though a lot more would argue that would be his biggest weakness.

“That’s my late mother..” a little delay from Jason as he took his time answering and slowly resting his back on his bed with his face now facing the ceiling.

“She’s Swedish. You know how much I hate generalisations, Harris.” Jason continued petting Mr. Blaogon.

“The cat? It looks very, very rare with that mane around his head.” Harris asked again.

“The cat is probably one of the last breathing non-human traces of my mother.” Jason can be quite dramatic at times and he’s not very good at it in speech.

Nobody continued to open their mouths. The infant sunlight was shining through the windows teasing a slight blue tint without the curtains blocking its entry.

All this is just too familiar to Jason, silence has a commonplace within him.

Mr. Blaogon was a gift from his mother when she returned from a city near her hometown in Sweden to get a final measure treatment for her condition after countless pleas and hope transmitted online from home. She suffered from a disease Jason did not fully understand, nor did the local doctors. It was gruelling for Jason to see his mother living through an uncertain period of her life in pain. It was never made known to him exactly what it was. All that he knows, though the disease did not take her life it did cause her various multiple cancers due to a disorder in cell behaviour.

She did spend her last days with her family which includes Jason, his two younger brothers, two older sisters, and his father. Mr. Blaogon was a kitten his mother rescued from animal shelter just before she came back home.

Harris is still the same person as he was before his mother passed away. He was ruthless, widely opinionated, and quick to think. Only, now he’s focused on other less deviant things and that has made all the difference to him. He calculated that it’s a waste of time trying to change his character thus he did not change who he was but what he aimed for in life.

“ He’s a domesticated Norwegian forest cat and it’s pronounced blå ögon.” Jason was clearly a bit upset nobody got his cat’s name right.

“It means blue eyes in Swedish” Johan interrupted.

“His tail has a little bit of split at the end of it so he kinda has two tails” Jason continued as he runs his fingers along Mr. Blaogon’s tail to show a little split of the tail Mr. Blaogon was born with.

Harris rolled nearer to the bed. His phone rang.

“Oh it’s a text. This early in the morning? I hope it’s not another ON CINTA crap.” Harris complained.

Harris read it silently. He looked calm but increasingly his eyebrows tell a different story.

“Guys, we have to go. Now.”