The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  Two weeks into Alvin’s operation at the call center, Eric had one of those nights when EDSA actually behaved like a road, when traffic moved faster than the 10 KPH that frustrated any and all rush during the weeknight rush hour. That time, Eric made it from Katipunan to Makati without the fatigue that every Manila commuter wore like second skin. He sat down at his station, took a sip of coffee (tongue-scalding hot, as he liked it), and thought of his career. Maybe it wasn’t too late to strive for another promotion again, to be that annoying fuck who worked too hard again. He was daydreaming about the turnaround, idly perusing a weekly report, when he noticed a figure in a field that he knew by instinct was bigger than normal. His team’s automatically approved request for credits for the first time approached the $5,000 biweekly limit. He traced it and saw that around 75 percent of it came from one phone line. “Fuck!” he screamed, startling Sharon, who had been dozing at the adjacent station. “It’s-a-wonderful-day-here-at-UTelCo!” she burst out, “This-is-Sharon-Carlson—” before being informed that the lines were down, a magnitude 7.2 tremor southwest of Taiwan that damaged stretches of submarine cables, and by all means she could go back to her nap.

  After the commotion, Alvin caught Eric’s hostile stare. Hostile, yes, but there was also a spellbound quality to it. A perverse admiration. He confessed to Eric later that night, during lunch in a secluded booth in McDonald’s, where Alvin forced himself unsuccessfully to cry. He then reached out to hold Eric’s hand, which Eric quickly pulled away, confused. “What the actual bloody fuck?” Eric asked. “Sorry,” Alvin said, “I thought—” “Shut up,” Eric said, forehead still creased. “I want in.”

  Philip and Karen, with whom Alvin had started to share a cab home from work (or lately to the hospital, in Alvin’s case), found out the following week. Alvin tended to say things when in a semi-sleep state, and I am stealing from the Americans could well have been one of them (he might have been even proud of it). Karen had thought of her childhood, her insatiable father, her relationship with Brock, the operations manager. Philip had long been desperate for a vacation, a break from work, a break, secretly, from Eric. Their taxi had been going east on Buendia when a decision was made in the backseat. “I heard Bangkok is lovely,” Philip said, looking at Karen to his left and Alvin to his right. “I saw this film starring two Thai faggots. Well one is supposedly straight—” The three held hands, an unplanned display of tenderness that they would all recall differently. Karen turned to the two to her right. “Just none of those shows where the girls open beer bottles with their, you know—” “Yuck,” Alvin cried, as the cab accelerated to beat a just-turned-yellow light, throwing them to the backrest. Alvin sat up. “Manong, we want to get there alive, OK. Don’t worry, my friends here are rich, they have you covered.”

  When he got to his gate at the airport now, Alvin identified himself to the ground crew behind the counter. “You said go here,” he said. The man regarded him with narrowed eyes (his plump cheeks again, Alvin thought), before breaking into a smile and asking whether Alvin was willing to transfer seats. Something about balance and centers of gravity and weight distribution, as if Alvin’s 160 pounds—more or less (more)—could tilt the aircraft to one side. Alvin said yes, of course, that was it? At that point he would stand along the aisle, one hand on an overhead rail, the other with an open paperback, as if the plane were a Fairview-bound bus on EDSA.

  The boarding announcement came a few minutes later. Hearing it, Alvin felt innocent again, invincible again. He joined the quiet shuffling of the passengers to the gate, taking refuge in the multitude, the anonymity. At the last moment, he threw a sidelong glance at the far-off escalator landing, bracing himself, and maybe even hoping, for something along the lines of a last-minute throng of scampering policemen that somehow found out that they had gone to the wrong terminal. Outside on the runway, planes taxied like sluggish flâneurs. He fixed his eyes at the one that would joyfully take him away.

  4

  T he hospital called at around midnight, six months after the first influx of converted dollars into Alvin’s peso account. Things were “looking up,” the oncologist had said, at this rate she had at least a year or two more, and so Alvin was at work, trying to salvage a semblance of normalcy back into his life.

  Tasked to deliver the news, Eric had taken note of the key words: complications, cardiac arrest, “I’m-so-sorry-to-hear-that-Alvin.” He walked to Alvin’s station, tapped his agent’s shoulder. “Drop the call, Vin,” he whispered, “and follow me, thanks.” Alvin looked at him then returned to his monitor. He shook his head and went back on the line to the sweet-sounding grandma from Idaho. After explaining all the charges in Mrs. McComas’ bill in lavish detail, Alvin’s voice went a few decibels louder as he asked her about the weather in Boise, and what her plans were for the day. “Is there absolutely anything else I could do for you, Mrs. M? May I call you Mrs. M? Yes? Lovely (he was shouting now). You sound like a very pleasant person, but I bet you get that all the time—” Pause for laughter. “I talk to literally dozens of people a night—I mean day, sorry—and I can tell who the nice ones are, you know? Nice day we’re having, don’t you think?” (Page 27 under “Initiating Small Talk.”) Thirty minutes later, the old lady was apologizing for needing to hang up, Ellen was on, but this had been such a nice conversation, if a little odd and overlong. Eric had given up and had since sat on a patch of carpeted floor next to Alvin’s chair, from where he discovered, among others, the “emergency stash” of Lays under Philip’s desk, the neat stack of paperbacks on top of Alvin’s CPU, and the Narcissus frequency with which Karen checked her reflection on a compact mirror (seventeen in a ten-minute call). “May God bless your heart,” Mrs. McComas told him before hanging up. His heart? Alvin blinked. He clicked End Call onscreen and removed his headset. He marched down the walkway to the elevator landing, where he pressed Down, the button lighting up under his fingertip.

  That same morning, a seventh digit had appeared in the tenth bank account that he had created for the operation. Like a mobile phone number, he thought. That the figure stretched to such startling length sent a joy in his chest that settled next to the fresh grief. Strange bedfellows, this bliss and this anguish, and Alvin pendulumed between the two until he eventually found—or returned to—a taut middle ground, where he felt nothing at all, a blessed subterranean place.

  The night after the burial, Alvin, Eric, Philip, and Karen concluded their operation. “I suppose enough is enough,” Eric had sighed gravely. Philip chuckled before humming the chorus to “No More Tears.” The three dropped off their resignation letters a day apart. Many things happened that week: a box with a bunch of wires was found near a trash bin on Rufino, the nice food market at the abandoned skyscraper nearby was raided for selling Ecstasy, and an elevator car in Burgundy Tower across the street had fallen twenty-three storeys down, killing all twelve agents on it. An across-the-board inspection of all elevators was ordered by city hall, and in their building it had to be done during the graveyard shift because ambassadors and admen couldn’t be made to wait. Frustrated by the lone car that serviced all nineteen call centers in the tower, the HR officer assigned to UTelCo approved their resignation letters without reading them.

  In between the spoonfuls of garlic rice and longanisa and corned beef that morning in Jollibee, there was the usual banter, about Karen’s perennially low neckline, that fun episode with Jasmine Trias, how Sharon once tried to build rapport with a customer in Jackson by asking her to spell Mississippi (“just for fun, come on, Ma’am”). But long, arduous silences would punctuate the bursts of laughter, during which they avoided looking at each other’s eyes. There were covenants: to not contact each other, to not speak of it, to take the little secret to their little graves.

  “Or a plus-size grave in your case,” Eric told Philip.

  Philip rolled his eyes. “Still better than kiddie size.”

  “Have you guys ever done this before?” Karen asked after another long silence.
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  “Spice Girls cassette from Odyssey,” Philip said quickly.

  “Really?” Eric asked. “Thought yours would be a corset or something.” He paused for laughter. When none came, he shared that he once sneaked into a screening of Con Air .

  “Cinema already been invented then?” Philip asked.

  Karen smiled. “I was class treasurer, fourth year high school, and there was this really nice bikini.” Her voice trailed off.

  Philip found himself staring at Karen’s breasts, which made him shudder.

  They turned to Alvin, who shrugged and shook his head.

  “Nothing?” Eric asked.

  “Nope,” Alvin said.

  “There must be something,” Karen said.

  Alvin shook his head.

  Philip sighed. “I guess I’ll see you guys in Munti.”

  Prison jokes—was it too soon for those? There was silence again, weak-jawed smiles.

  “Bet you’ll have no problems being surrounded by sex-starved maniacs,” Karen said. Eric and Alvin laughed.

  “I’m not the one who fucked a Kano and betrayed her friends,” Philip said.

  She smiled. “And saved our asses, you’re welcome.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Alvin said, or wished, and that was that.

  To clean up their tracks, Eric resigned last.

  In the window seat of the bus that had taken him away from that parting breakfast, Alvin felt a dull weight tugging on the edges of his Composure. The was a sense of magnification in this new world, where everything was suddenly available. He could’ve taken a cab but even that seemed petty. He could buy a car, he thought. He could buy two.

  His bus had just escaped the gridlock on Ayala and was accelerating, uphill, on the flyover to EDSA when he saw a measure of Manila in one wide glance: derricks in the hazy distance like skeletal fingers; the MRT shiny and whistling through a billboard-laden sky; the nascent clump of skyscrapers in Taguig, and the empty road ahead. It was only a matter of time, he knew this much. Tick tock. He took out his new phone and admired its sleek contours, the unseen mechanisms that obeyed his slightest touch.

  He tapped the bag asleep on his lap. He had always wanted to drive an SUV. He had fantasies of living in a townhouse with a spacious patio, hosting quiet get-togethers, like an introverted Gatsby. He could run an organic café cum secondhand bookshop, like a reformed First World hippie. Maybe he should get a cat. Or people—could he buy people? He had always been curious about the pyramids in Egypt, the Machu Pichu, the Ganges. He could also continue the stalled construction of the second floor of their house, which was halted when his father died (the front wall, built first, hiding the empty hull, the column of hollow blocks, the protrusion of wires, the unfinished foundations). An eighties ballad soon began to play on the bus, one of the many sappy tunes by Rod Stewart or Basil Valdez that he had come to associate with the malodorous backseats of what must have been thousands of taxis he’d taken to work.

  Work: what a strange proposition now. The difficulty of parting with his bed, parting with sleep, his mother’s voice from outside, then her lethargic shuffle back to her room. All of his future thoughts, he knew, would lead to his mother, whose body had started to decompose in a shaded plot in Marikina. He took a certain comfort in this, telling himself that each memory was another moment he would share with her, another vicarious breath she’d take. A lifetime of this is fine, he thought. He put on his earphones and Joni Mitchell’s voice silenced the city’s racket (“If you want me, I’ll be at the bar—”). An ice-cold San Miguel at nine in the morning, yes, how lovely did that sound. He noted with some grief that that had always been within reach, with or without the bag of money.

  Fair enough. In this new world, magnificent and free, everything was fair enough.

  5

  W hen Alvin was two, he contracted an ear infection after a week-long cold. Fluids, said the woman at the barangay health center, had accumulated in his middle ear, where germs had formed. She eyed the long line of mothers with despairing infants on their laps. “It would clear up on its own,” she said, then, when Aurora had stood up, added, “but it could take days, so you have to be patient. Next?”

  The warning was accurate. Alvin wailed through the nights in pain, through most of his waking moments. Even nine-year-old Marie, who first watched in tight-lipped wonder, soon trembled with her own tears, the last time, Aurora would later note, that she showed any discernible human emotion. At the end of the sixth day, she was exhausted. Like God, she thought, making the sign of the cross to shake off the blasphemy. It started to rain at around midnight, and the rhythm of water pummelling the GI sheets over their heads drowned out all of the ruckus in the house, erasing, it seemed, all the terror of the past week. Alvin lay catatonic on the bed, the sheets ruffled by days of flailing arms and legs. Aurora watched him: the pure pain of a two-year-old. How to tell him that it would get better, that it would pass? A child who could only inhabit the present, with no idea of a future, its relief. Her arms surrounded Alvin like a moat, while the rest of her—torso and legs—slumped on the linoleum floor. The next day, she woke up to what seemed like the knowing gaze of her son, peering at his mother’s strange sleeping position.

  More than two decades later, Alvin would sometimes complain about unseen bees hovering an inch away from his ears. The buzz was loudest after particularly gruelling shifts, moments after he had taken off the headset that had always left a shallow but extremely red groove on his bare scalp. The curiosity of the connection between his job, the occupation of disembodied ears and mouths, and the infection that had ravaged his two-year-old ears rarely concerned him, except when the imaginary buzz was so loud that it felt like its source was prehistoric, the memory of a bygone frailty.

  Denise had nodded at the story, unimpressed. “Yes,” she said, hands turning to rest on Alvin’s right calf. “My mother, her hips would always hurt on the first Sunday of June, every year. Her doctor couldn’t explain it. Then she realized she had a miscarriage in June of 1989, supposedly my eldest brother. The body remembers.”

  Alvin grunted. Muscle memory: the body knowing ahead and more. His years at the call center had coalesced into an inert choreography. His index finger would dance over the keypad of his desk phone and, by instinct rather than thought, push the precise buttons of his employee number and password. His tongue, once docile and lazy, had routinely unfurled to produce English sentences even before they registered in his mind. His eyes, after nine hours of squinting in the glare of the computer monitor, had taught themselves to close at every snatched opportunity, flat surface optional: on the bus, at the dinner table, and, once or twice, in the middle of sex with a very offended anthropologist.

  “You’re absolutely right, Denise,” Alvin said, voice muffled by the mattress.

  “What?” Denise barked.

  In the order of body parts, the right leg was second, after the left. This was followed by the left arm, then the right, then back and shoulders. Chest and stomach were optional, and always the head provided the coda. Things were always systematic this way, but there was nothing mechanical about Denise’s fingers. As she massaged Alvin’s calf in circular motions, again and again, scraping the hairless leg, she somehow sent a warm-icy sensation into his lower back. She was vanquishing the knots, the stresses, the years of slouching and stooping and all manners of bodily abuse. Alvin could scarcely contain the moans brimming from his mouth, the godless halleluiahs from his brain.

  He found out that talking to Denise helped when, on their third session, he casually complained about the nonstop quizzing from the receptionist and she laughed. It was infectious, and only later did Alvin realize that the laughter sounded like his mother’s wild cackles. So this was why some Americans would call UTelCo’s hotline for no reason. Why they’d ask for something silly, like their due date, an explanation of the usual charges, then, in the idle time when the line was silent, launch into a 45-minute monologue about their grandkids, the time when so-and
-so was president, the state of the magnolias in their front lawn. (“Gregarious flowers, those, you just need to really go at it, you know?”) Talking was like exorcism; whether someone listened was not important. It was beside the point.

  Denise transitioned to his arms, and Alvin resumed talking.

  After dividing the cash by four, he hurried home to get Sophia from the next-door neighbor to whom they routinely entrusted her. Against his advice, the taxi took the scenic route through the bridge in Pandacan that, five years after it was finished, was still called “bagong tulay.” Stuck in unmoving traffic for fifteen minutes, the driver muttered the usual profanities, cursed the same malicious luck. The quiet was interrupted moments later by the faint chugging of a passing train below, the column of dark smoke rising just beyond the rails, obscuring their view of the oil depots on the other side of the Pasig, the silver domes that could turn old Manila into a raging inferno one wrong flick of a cigarette butt.

  Back at the house, the lights in the kitchen and the living room had refused to turn on all at once. “Mumu,” Sophia said, the word too close to “Mama,” and Alvin looked around and nodded. Marie arrived that night, looking composed, as if she didn’t miss her mother’s funeral by a day. She came as soon as she heard, she said, but some bridge had been impassable due to a storm, a ferry schedule in disarray, the usual archipelagic reasons. Alvin didn’t say anything, not even to Sophia, who was quick to forgive her mother, too quick, clinging on to Marie’s body for dear life. The following day, uncle and niece were separated for the first time since Sophia was born.

  As he watched their cab recede down the road, Alvin was again hit by the cavernous feeling that by then had grown familiar. His firm acceptance of things was something he had always cherished as a virtue, a form of strength, but it was unprecedented, this hunch that his life was now scarcely one, and it confirmed what all of literature had preached, ultimately: things could just fall apart; it was an inherent capacity. His gripes about his job, his mother’s bedridden presence, his fears for Sophia and resentment for Marie, the skirmishes with Scott, his sporadic poverty, these things at least nagged him. They were something to overcome. They gave life tumult, alarm, shape. Now that they were all solved by default, Alvin thought, well that takes care of those. Without a plan, he put the money in a small knapsack that belonged to his mother, hailed a taxi, and told the driver to head to an old four-star in downtown Manila where he had once stayed with Scott after an academic conference.