by Glenn Diaz
At the hotel, he discovered that loneliness and regret, things that otherwise noisily grated, assumed a certain silence when muffed by material comfort. Loneliness didn’t snore or shift if one slept on three hundred thread-count Egyptian cotton. Regret chewed quietly during thousand-peso meals. They were there, nonetheless: saying something desultory about the late night news, wishing him good night before he turned off the bedside lamp (“Good night!” Alvin would sing-song back). Soon he realized that he could further soften the edges of his new companions by doing nice things, like giving big tips and doling out bigger alms, taking long, aimless walks, and this, getting massages. He indulged in this new life until loneliness and regret were so hushed that it was almost possible to ignore them. Being able to snatch such shreds of delight, he realized things weren’t so bad after all.
“So you’re happy now?” Denise wanted to know. “Maybe?”
“Maybe I’m just really bored,” Alvin said.
She laughed. Eyes closed, Alvin could have sworn it was his mother wildly chuckling. It was quiet otherwise in Room 401, with its four-poster narra bed, fake Amorsolo and plaster bulul statues, and glass doors that opened to a balcony with a view of Manila Bay’s famous sunset. Lying on his stomach, he curled his lips into a smile that Denise couldn’t see, only feel, barely, under her grazing palms.
Two weeks into his stay at the hotel, Alvin dialled the AFP trunk line and asked to be connected to the office of Reynaldo Tupaz. During fits of melodrama, he had imagined being accosted and handcuffed amid the lengthening shadows of the palm trees on Roxas Boulevard. It would be sunset (of course), the flâneurs and Rugby-sniffing urchins sauntering in the background. At least he had an officer’s name he could shout, a nepotic lifeline.
Rey came that same night. Alvin showed him the jumble of paper bills in the knapsack. Rey, who looked to have aged rather quickly in the years since he was with Marie, asked who else knew about it. Rey’s expression didn’t change even as Alvin enumerated the stages in his journey—the tearless confession to Eric, the somnambulism in the backseat with Karen and Philip, the therapeutic necessity of telling Denise. “Now are you sure there’s no one else?” he asked. On the TV, an amused reporter went on about droves of beggars making a pilgrimage to Roxas Boulevard, where an unidentified Good Samaritan was reportedly giving away crisp thousand-peso bills.
“You guys really have amazing posture, ’no?” Alvin said, proceeding to do a sort of ungainly robot dance.
“Alvin—”
He bowed his head, again a child. There was a long silence afterward. Rey scratched his head and let out another exasperated lungful, then another; one more and Alvin vowed to grab the shiny .45-caliber pistol dangling from the holster, just to see what would happen.
“Can you get me a gun?” he asked Rey. “Something simple and minimalist.”
“No,” Rey said.
“Witness Protection Program?”
Rey laughed. “How are you doing here?”
Alvin blinked. He wet his chapped lips and realized he had not had any real conversation in a month, nothing beyond the small talk with the people who served his food, handed him his towel, cleaned his room. Something happened when one was alone for too long. A wasting, a peeling off, like the duhat tree outside his window that remained standing even as its leaves had all but wilted. To be sure there was peace, too, a kind of joy, in this inward turn, but weren’t a lot of things—ennui, disinterest, nothingness—like peace. How are you? An unbearable question.
Alvin couldn’t remember how he answered, if he did at all. He only knew that he called Rey “kuya” for the first time. At the hotel lobby, he promised to alert Alvin to any update on the case, a pledge to which he would stay true to the end. The company would like to keep this hush-hush, Rey said, so don’t expect to find it on TV Patrol . They hugged, which started awkwardly (Rey’s forearm hit Alvin’s chin) but which ended up being actually quite nice. Just before Rey left, Alvin brought up that week in Pagudpud six, seven years ago. They both chuckled, shook their heads, the tyranny of the years muting them.
Talking to Rey had eased his mind somehow, but alone in his room once more, his king-size bed, on which he collapsed, was still too big, too cozy, which he didn’t deserve. He still turned on the news to supplant the night’s silence. The amber light from the chandelier still reminded him of his mother’s brief funeral. That night, he started inviting strangers to his room.
Over the PA system, a voice now rattled off the names of faraway places—Tagbilaran, Cebu, Puerto Princesa, Boracay via Caticlan—invoking on the airport crowd images of scratchy hammocks in between palm trees, sand-covered toes, and, to Alvin, a charming homestay in Pagudpud where, in what seemed like a lifetime ago, he had stayed with friends from college (and, come to think of it, met Rey for the first time). Outside, his plane stood still, engines running, cabin doors open.
He recognized the nuclear-inspired logo straddling the black jacket in front of him. Around ten people preceded him in the line, en route to a man in yellow tearing the series of held-up boarding passes. The man wearing the jacket coughed; a fellow smoker, no doubt, maybe a pack a day or more, menthols, terrible for the throat. Onboard the plane, the stranger’s left elbow dangled on the armrest next to Alvin’s seat. This coincidence Alvin welcomed with a smile while he lifted his bag to the overhead bin. The desire to talk to the stranger, whose jacket was standard issue for the call center two floors above Magellan Solutions, overwhelmed him, but the cabin started shaking upon take-off, and so he decided to wait.
Meanwhile: distance, the city losing form. From the intimate chaos of huddled buses to here , the safety of watching their roofs glisten under the sun. It seemed only yesterday when he was in one such bus, in the center of one such gridlock. Now he could note the coffin-like outline of crawling sixty-seaters. Now Manila could fit in the palm of his hand.
The stranger, who faced the window, threw him a split-second glance. A few minutes later Alvin felt a tap on his arm and found a hand clumsily extended, awaiting a shake. “You look familiar,” the stranger said. “Have we met? I’m Martin.” “Alvin,” Alvin said. He then burst out laughing because he realized he had chosen a terrible time to begin telling the truth. “What’s so funny?” Martin asked. I thought I had seen you before, he went on, in line at the 7-Eleven on the third floor or eating alone at the Subway, reading. “Are you an English major? Ha-ha-ha.” “That’s me,” Alvin said, on a roll with the truth-telling. Martin said he was going to Ormoc, it was his despedida before going to India next week for a six-month training. “You, are you going to Tacloban for vacation?” Alvin hummed. “Sort of,” he said. “I’m with Magellan Solutions. Or was.” Martin straightened up in his cramped seat. “So you know about the scam.”
Alvin looked up before he could stop himself, to the overhead bin where the fruit of the operation—or “scam,” as it was now apparently known—now sat between a counterfeit North Face backpack and a box of Davao pomelos. I heard the supervisor was in on the whole thing, Martin continued, plus the ops manager who was engaged with one of the agents. They would have gotten away with it if the bank in the US did not flag the high volume of wire transfers to a bank account in California, which they traced to the aunt of one of the agents. “Heard there’s an ongoing manhunt,” he said. “Exciting!”
“Yeah,” Alvin said. He blinked. Feigning a cough, he blinked again. The plane’s initial ascent done, the cabin was now steady, as if it rested on solid ground. Outside drifted the usual swell of clouds; inside the rows of powder blue seats were flooded with eight o’clock sunlight. The calm felt so complete that he could feel his heart weaken, in tender submission.
But here , sitting next to him in mid-flight, engaging him in small talk, was a connection to the world he was on the verge of leaving. That world: of jackets and sweaters, of half-hearted accents, of dead mothers. The surprising urge to tell Martin everything, to confess, made Alvin shiver. At that point he didn’t mind a little turb
ulence, maybe even a lot of turbulence, all toward a gentle end to this whole affair. He recalled the bus bombings that had rocked Manila, connected to September 11, authorities said. None for planes? No more Islamist militants with a pilot’s license? If they now crashed into the middle of Sibuyan Sea, in a mushroom cloud of smoke and scorched fuselage, the blue bills in his bag would be mistaken for unimportant documents, their fraudulent origin burned to ashes. It was callous to the collateral damage, the fifty-four passengers and crew either dozing off or trapped into reading the in-flight magazine, but wasn’t that how accidents worked, being in the wrong place at a terrible time?
Unsure of how to proceed, Alvin sat back and ploughed his chest for air, pushing away the unhappy thoughts. He eyed the great beyond now contained in the plane’s tiny window, except Martin all of a sudden reached over and pulled down the window shade. The glare, he said, was too much.
6
A lvin’s routine at the hotel in Manila proceeded like so: he’d wake up at 8 AM, when the air-conditioning in the room had just turned off as timed and there lingered the chill of a January morning. He’d find a way to get rid of the guy asleep on the bed, then put on a loose jacket and take the elevator to the second-floor café for breakfast before going to the rooftop pool for a quick dip. During the first few days, he stayed in his room, reading and watching TV, jotting down on hotel stationery dubious backpacking itineraries across Peru and South Asia.
One sunny Tuesday a weatherman’s admonition to “take advantage of this byu -ti-ful weather!” made him realize that he had been behaving like a fugitive, that it was no way to live. There used to be a quiet push in him, a crowded catalog of Something To Look Forward To, and it included goals more realistic than vague plans to travel and keep a journal, like a Jack Kerouac rip-off, a less ponderous Simone de Beauvoir.
The first time he went out, the palm trees that lined the boulevard were swaying to a breeze that intimated the approaching cold months. What could go wrong, was his first thought. Farther along, past the US Embassy and its long lines, past the forest of parked yachts at the bay and the homeless families under tattered umbrellas, just before the Cultural Center and its austere toilet bowl likeness, he found a commercial complex with shops and restaurants where he idled away the afternoon. He often settled in a Japanese hole-in-the-wall that served flavorful miso soup and fat ebi tempuras. A tiny shop next door had a ready brew of mountain tea from Sagada every time he came in.
Nearby was a Booksale outlet with a wide selection of fiction paperbacks, where he found in an ignored corner bin a worn-out copy of Kafka’s The Trial . He had read it in college but only came to appreciate now that his life had begun to resemble it. He thought about poor Josef K, whose ultimate crime, his teacher insisted, was putting up a fight, like Oedipus and Pip, Macbeth and Raskolnikov, Florante and Crisostomo Ibarra. He recalled the brief depression he’d sunk into after reading The Trial and vowed never to resist again. Should be easier now: now that everything, all the comforts and opulence, was within reach, their complexion had taken on a bland shade. So it was about the desire after all? The appetite? The exertion? (Scott was right again.) The cruelty of this wisdom had melded effortlessly with the innate resignation.
The pilot’s stoic announcement of their initial descent now was interrupted by a metallic sound that people despaired to hear, the flight so close to the end and survival almost at hand. Some passengers held their breaths, the vaguely fragrant air cleared for any reassuring word from the cockpit. When none came, Alvin looked out the window and saw the flimsy sheet of metal that lined the wing’s edge flapping in the gray blur that shrouded the windows. He glanced sideways at Martin, whose eyes were closed. “Plane crashes,” Alvin whispered, leaning closer, “so inconvenient,” at which point a series of loud thuds issued underfoot and the plane plunged a hundred feet for a split second. “And when,” Alvin said, steadying his voice, “once in a while some leisurely passer-by stopped, made merry over the old figure on the board, and spoke of swindling, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.”
Martin looked at him.
“Kafka,” Alvin said with a haughty smile.
The aircraft continued to shake and shudder as it began its downward approach. Outside the window, the plains slowly began to clarify into Tacloban’s streets. Alvin leaned closer to Martin. “Imagine if the pilot somehow overshot the runway and we end up landing at the beach in Palo and we hit those statues on the shore.” Martin stifled a laugh and was about to register the blistering stupidity of the thought when they rejoined the earth in a smooth, seamless landing that surprised some passengers into relieved applause.
In the always interminable seconds when backpacks and gym bags and donut boxes were being glacially retrieved from the overheard bin, Alvin took out his phone and absently turned it on. He only remembered Reynaldo’s strict instructions forbidding it when the phone rang. He pressed Answer. “Scott,” he said to the mouthpiece, “I can’t talk right now—” The people in the aisle started to move. “Tacloban. (A pause.) Yes, that Imelda. Ha, is there another? Anyway, let me call you later—”
He put away his phone. Martin’s hand, he noticed, was on his back, guiding him in this slow-moving negotiation of the A320’s narrow walkway. He had always liked this gesture, and by the door stood the flight attendants and their perfect Rey-like postures. “Enjoy, Tacloban, sir!” one said.
The airline booking lady—that was just this morning. Was she sleeping now? In Jollibee, having breakfast? In line at the ATM? Alvin had been noting Martin’s prominent cheek bones and deep-set eyes at the front desk of the hotel in Ormoc two hours later when, as he’d grown used to, he reached down to gingerly pluck a bill or two from a knapsack that, this time, wasn’t there. Alvin blinked then looked around him, the area around his feet, the reception counter, the receptionist, then finally at Martin on his side. He then raised the disappointed hand to gesture for both parties to give him a second, hmm, now where could that bag be.
In Manila, a black SUV exited the gate of Scott’s apartment complex. One of the passengers wondered loudly how the threat of deportation from the Philippines could work in this day and age. And to a Kano. A Kano ! Weren’t we just saving this guy on plane fare? They had just started their short drive back to the NBI headquarters on UN Avenue when someone said that their informant was bakla, stupid, he was with the suspect, he might also be liable. This piece of information was silently digested. The driver shared a story he’d heard from a cousin’s neighbor’s suki at the market, whose son was in one such relationship. “The Kano was supposed to take him to Boston,” he went on, “or was it Houston? Anyway, he found a better boy who had bigger and rougher hands—they like those, I think—when he went to Pagsanjan to shoot the rapids. Have you guys tried that? Anyway, too bad, the mother of the first boy was so excited. Roasted an entire pig to welcome the Kano and wouldn’t stop talking in English. No one understood her, but she wouldn’t stop. For practice daw. Too bad.”
7
S cott and I, we had just sat down at our favorite hole-in-the-wall in Chinatown when he began his usual love hymn for the city, as if his cheeks weren’t flushed from the heat, his nose and forehead not a glistening T on his face.
The restaurant, look, he said, valiantly clinging to old seedy Manila while shiny lumbering SUVs usurped its narrow streets, while boutique hotels and fancy restaurants colonized blocks where once stood temples and Chinese drug stores. One such hotel, promised the tarpaulin nailed to a rotting electric pole, was “right in the heart of the old capital!” and, as proof, here’s a photo of a row of Spanish colonial stone houses in Vigan, twelve hours north.
I must have missed it, I told him.
Plates and mini-baskets and stainless pots arrived on our table. Peking duck, chop suey, and beef asado. Hakaw, shark’s fin siomai, and bean cur
d dumpling. San Miguel and the house tea. “Is feng shui involved in this arrangement?” Scott asked the waiter. The fifty-something man looked at him and, without saying a word, plopped a steaming mound of rice at the center, the exclamation point. I gave him a contrite Excuse Him smile.
“Ah,” Scott sighed dreamily, breaking the disposable chopsticks apart, “yes, of course. Rice on Kilometer Zero.” He chuckled then transferred a thin slab of duck to his plate. “You,” he said, “I’m sure you know where your Kilometer Zero is.”
I looked at him. “Mine as a person or the Philippines’?”
“Ha!” he cried. From his nasal cavity issued a strange, watery sound. “Look at you. With your clever one-liners. Clever as a mouse trap.”
I began with the siomai.
“I’ve always liked that Cheshire cat grin of yours,” he said. “Never fails to give me a raging—”
“Scott—”
He raised his hand, feigning surrender.
I looked around the restaurant. It was ventilated like a public school gym, with unsmiling waiters, sticky soy sauce droppers, and tables that were always barely wet with the last customer’s noodle broth. The excellent food, they said, allowed for the sloppiness, the inadequacies excused as “character.” My foot landed on something soft and squishy. The ceiling fan swung with the inimitable screech of industrial age. The air assaulted with a mix of hoisin sauce, coriander, and Clorox.
