The second-last oily man of Singapore stumbles out of a storm drain in MacRitchie sometime in the middle of 1996. In his glory days he was black as night, and slick all over with only the finest, thickest, most foul-smelling oil you'd ever smell, but now he is the colour of a streetlit expressway sky at 3am, sort of a dirty brown, and the oil that coats his skin is no thicker than saliva, no more pungent than an ill-maintained drain. He knows not where or when he is, or even when he was born, only that he must feed to sate his hunger. But the only moving things at this hour are the taxis roaring across the highway, and the incessantly vibrating wings of invisible cicadas.

"Virgins!" he screams into the jungle (or what's left of it, anyway, the trees are very thin). Far away, in another age, mothers wrapped in husbands' sarongs clutch their daughters to their chest. "Give me virgins!" His cry ricochets off the streetlamps, careens into the night. The taxis do not stop for him. The cicadas sing on. (The singing cicadas -- the loudest, especially -- are as unsullied as monks; it is the ones that have had their fill of the opposite sex that sink silent and wingless into the night.)

It's 1996, so the streetlights have no cameras, and the oily man roils across oily asphalt, slides across chewing-gum-free pavements, cueballs like a hockey puck into the housing estates that lay sleeping off long Lornie Road. People hear his cry, long and sharp and thin in the wretchedly hot night, and roll back to sleep because their doors are thick and they have the air-con on. They do not fear oil here. Oil is not thick and black in their dreams, it is healthy and clear and good. It comes from fish and olives and nice-smelling plants and keeps their kids smart and their hands fresh. See, the front of Men's Health have oily men too!

The oily man sees all this as he rummages through someone's bin, looking for the virgins that must surely be inside. His breath is slow now, and his skin has taken on a ragged sheen. "Virgins?" he echoes onto bare concrete. The only sound that returns is the hoot of some lost fishing owl, that seems to come from the nearby trees or nowhere at all.

They find the oily corpse of something shaped like a monkey in a ditch on one of those fancy-sounding roads, like Wallace Way or Brellington Boulevard or some shit. They call police, who calls NEA, who calls AVA, who calls the zoo. Nobody can identify the shrivelled corpse and it is cremated at the Mandai pet cremator, where (it is reported) it burns especially well. The ashes are compacted with the usual trash into a corner of Pulau Semakau where (it is again reported) if you are a man and you stand long enough your dick will get hard for no reason at all.

The last oily man in Singapore works in a gastropub on Amoy Street until he is arrested (for tax fraud) in 2001.