by Glenn Diaz
I let out a polite chuckle that I hoped wouldn’t be mistaken for excitement. I fiddled with my seatbelt, checked if the door lock wasn’t jammed, and turned to the riveting scenery of desolate houses, dark storefronts, and feebly lit gas stations.
“Anyway, he treated me like a prince,” the cabbie said. “Gave me all I needed. He was even at the church when I got married.”
“Did he cry?” I asked.
“I didn’t see,” he said. “I was too busy with my bride.”
Makati’s skyscrapers soon loomed in the horizon. More and more, this part of the ride felt like the too-quick ceremonial walk to the electric chair. My nightly Green Mile.
From the stereo, a weather report. Tomorrow’s going to be “dry, dry, dry,” except in the early evening, when the tail end of a cold front might bring some scattered thunderstorms in Central and Southern Luzon, including Metro Manila. Blame Siberia, the weatherman quipped.
The wide, fenced sidewalks of the business district crawled with people gathered under streetlamps. Many smoked and sipped coffee from spill-proof tumblers. Their jackets and sweaters, a casual counterpart to the morning people’s stern coats and blazers.
My building’s lobby was a sprawling affair with gilded columns and marble floors. There was a panoramic bronze relief of a rural scenery on one wall, with thatched huts, dour carabaos, and farmers hunched to the ground, backdrop to a long reception desk that at this hour was unmanned.
I took the perfumed elevator to the thirty-second, where UTelCo, my account, held office. It was the biggest in Magellan Solutions, Inc., thirty teams of twelve agents arranged in a murmuring beehive of cubicles spread out over the entire stretch of the circular floor. I ran my ID by the scanner to open the heavy glass doors to the operations floor. A gust of cold wind was always the first welcome, then the familiar symphony: the halves of simultaneous conversations, the clattering of keyboards, the polyphony of ringing of phones. Errant shouts, bursts of laughter, a bag of chips being opened, a supervisor’s Mariah Carey playlist.
I arrived at my station somewhere in the middle of the wing five minutes before my one o’clock shift. Philip, on my right side, was already there; Karen, who was supposed to be on my left, was probably putting on her usual black pumps in Brock’s condo unit two blocks away, hair dripping wet, thinking of an excuse just in case she was late, again.
“Queuing?” I asked Philip, whose shift began an hour ago.
He nodded, toggled Mute on the phone and told me he was still on his first call. Going on one fucking hour now. He un-toggled Mute and, looking at me, flashed his biggest smile. “Mrs. Hernandez,” he said to his mic, “I understand your frustration, trust me.” He stood up and gave me a peck on the cheek.
His voice was louder than everyone else’s in the twenty-meter radius. He sat back down. “No, I’m not just saying it.” Smiling, he looked at me sidelong. “We are really doing everything we can to help you. If you can just see me now, typing like crazy—” he stopped and tried again after a few moments. “I’m afraid there’s nothing,” he toggled Mute, “I’m afraid you’re behaving like a Neanderthal, ma’am.” He un-toggled it again. “Mrs. Hernandez, even if I let you talk to my supervisor, he’ll just tell you the same thing. He’s not all that good, to be completely honest. I’m not sure how he got the job. We’ll just be wasting—” He held down Mute again and cursed under his breath.
“Mrs. Hernandez,” Philip said, “believe me, I completely understand if you’d cancel your UTelCo line. I’m sure you can’t afford it. No judgment here. Only love. I’d be more than happy to assist you with closing your service.”
Philip raised his hand. “No, I’m not judging you, nah-uh,” he said. “If you chose to be pregnant at sixteen, who am I to judge? Only God can judge us.” He paused. “Language, Mrs. Hernandez, language.” Another pause. “Very well. Please hold for my supervisor, then. I will try to see if he’s available. Thank you for choosing UTelCo.” Philip hit Mute and called out to Eric, who sat on the far end of our spine. “Eric, sup call.”
“Please take care of it,” Eric said. “I’m busy.”
“Transferring—” Philip said, keying in Eric’s extension.
“Fuck you,” Eric casually called out.
“I need a break,” Philip said, removing his headset. “Old Mexican lady keeps telling me I’m from India. As if.” He fished a cigarette from his newly opened pack. “I mean, I’ve been told I sound like a 14-year-old girl. But never Indian.”
“Your first Indian accusation,” I said.
“I know. Terrible, this day.”
Eric removed his headset and called out for the one o’clock people to start logging in, at which point the antiseptic air suddenly turned citrusy. Someone sneezed. “Bless you,” said Karen, newly arrived and frantic. Those of us in the vicinity heard the manic scrambling for her headset, the rapid clacking on her keyboard to log in. She took a look at the digital clock on her computer. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
12:59.
She was one tardiness away from getting suspended—again.
Some of us in the spine—two metal-lined dividers that corralled twelve people in jackets and sweaters and scarves, heads bowed, tied to the phones on their desks—lauded the effort with laughter, but none louder than Karen’s rapid mwa-ha-ha’s.
“OK, that’s enough!” Eric called out. “Start logging in.”
Karen took her first call with uncommon energy, her voice even more high-pitched, smiling at the monitor as if the customer could see her low, lacy neckline through thousands of miles of undersea cable. “It’s a wonderful day here at UtelCo—”
I took a deep breath and pressed Available onscreen.
Beep.
“It’s a wonderful day here at UTelCo,” I told the static, the faceless silence from the other side of the Pacific. “My name is Paul Kilborn. Can I have your number starting with the area code, please?”
I thought about what Marie said about loneliness and invited Scott for a drink the following day. It was payday, I lied to him. Perfect, he said. As luck would have it, his grant money was coming in a little late. We agreed to meet in Providence.
“Phone monkey,” Scott said when I got there.
“White guy.” I kissed him on the cheek and pulled a chair. We were at a big table for eight in an elevated part of the bar. “You know I hate this spot,” I told him. “There’s a perfectly nice corner table over there, look.”
“But this is nice. You see the entire, well, performance.”
“That’s getting old.”
“Speaking of which,” he said, “you know I was wondering if you’d cancel on me and I was going to be stuck here washing dishes. What a performance that would be. But not the worst way to spend a Saturday night, I say.”
He took a gulp of his San Miguel. I lit a cigarette. Darling ritual.
“Look at us,” he said. “I’m broke. You’re paying for my beer. This is something.”
“The beginning of the end for the white man—”
He laughed. “In my never-ending quest to find new ways to scrimp, know what I did? You know?”
“Said yes to that part-time teaching job?”
“I’m a doer, I told you that. I can do the occasional lecture and I can grant interviews—”
“Especially if it’s a hot grad student—”
“You should really consider moving on, Alvin.”
I took a big inaugural swig.
He continued. “Anyway, what I did was, I had instant coffee—”
“Earth-shaking.”
“I know. It was so sweet, gave me an instant headache. But after a few more times, it didn’t taste so bad anymore. I actually like it now, I think. It’s like coffee and dessert in one. So now I’m wondering if I am being tricked by my physiology to like this new, otherwise appalling taste because I need it. Like when you’re feeling aggressive, you crave meat, like some Cro-Magnon throwback sort of thing.”
“So your body is telling you th
at you might need sugar?”
He shrugged.
“Is it because of the bitterness in your life?”
He smiled. “I saw that a mile away,” he said. “But listen. I suppose there’s a facile lesson here about getting used to things, you know. It’s still a little shaky.” His hands made the so-so gesture. “Let me tell you, though. If you can get used to the limited variety of condoms in this country, you can get used to anything. A- ny- thing.”
“Yeah.”
“For some reason the thought of Manila always gets me horny, you know? That’s a tribute to you, by the way.”
It would still jolt me, his foreignness. In Providence, badly lit and enveloped in marbled smoke, his blonde hair, green eyes, and pale complexion always seemed to jump out, vigorous. When he talked, his vowels were forcefully rounded or short as required. My ears might never get used to that clarity. It felt contrived, a deus ex machina, his presence in a place like this, his bright outline against the dim surroundings, the brown crowd, the brown bottle of beer wrapped in his pink fingers.
A tribute to me.
Worse, it was a foreignness that was solicitous to the point of being silly. “Like a blonde and baby-faced Al Pacino,” Mama described him once. “What gayuma did you use?”
“So, talking about coffee,” Scott said now, “I’ve been thinking, when we do shed off something and we just don’t shed that thing off, you know, we also shed that which anchored us onto it. Our favorite components, you know? Bitterness in coffee. Cheap pubs in a city. Brilliance in a beloved.”
“So we’re talking about me now?”
“Ha!” he cried. “But seriously, it’s all about that now, no? Anchors. In a world where distance is a function not so much of miles but sheer willingness, that’s what we need, that’s what we aspire for. Well, most of us, at least. It’s the antithesis to placelessness.”
“Still sounds like First World polemics to me.”
He cut short a swig. “Sure. Political economy, all part of the equation, I suppose. But it doesn’t make my point any less valid. Anecdotally, just talking about myself, when you leave a place and find something like this, like Manila, the exaltation becomes about the overall experience. Is economics involved? Sure. A doctor here can make more money as a nurse in Texas. A dollar is, what, forty pesos, and forty pesos will buy me what, a nice meal at an eatery? A 15-minute head massage from the blind guy under the overpass? But we’re already invoking global financial systems here. That’s no longer my doing, kid.”
“I feel like Hemingway is about to narrate what happens next,” I told him.
He smiled, cleared his throat. “‘After hearing Scott so eloquently and so sexily talk about the vagaries of desire in the Global South, Alvin looked at the American with undisguised lust and realized that he bore an almost supernatural resemblance with Al Pacino—’”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just dying to rip that shirt off of your body.”
He stretched out his arms. “No, but seriously, you know I always appreciate having someone to bounce ideas off of, right?”
I raised my bottle for a toast.
Clink.
“How about that visit from your sister?” he asked after a while. “Anybody lost a penis again?”
I smiled. “She has a new job. In Pagudpud.”
“Nice. Nice.”
“She thinks we’re still together.”
He looked at me. “Really now.”
“She’s barely home.”
“Hey, wait a minute. Did you say Pa-gud-pad? That’s the resort town in the north, right?” Scott said that his forthcoming grant money had strict provisions for travel; the sponsors liked to brag that they were “liberated” and “noninterventionist.” Which was ironic, he went on, because he’d frankly rather stay in one place and they were intervening with that. So as much as he enjoyed staying in his 24-square-meter citadel here in the city, he was going to have to steal away to somewhere. “Want to come?”
“What about Ian?”
Oh, Alvin.
“What about him?” He took a swig of beer. “Won’t be back until next month, I think. And anyway, he doesn’t like lazing away. He feels,” he hummed, “reactionary. So what do you say?”
Scott’s scalp, I remembered, smelled like newly cut grass with a hint of sunburn. A sun you could inhale.
10
I woke up in the middle of the thirteen-hour-long bus ride to Laoag, from where we would take another bus to Pagudpud. Scott, on the window seat, was snoring lightly, eyes closed and head dipping and quickly recovering, as if saying yes to a phantom request. Mabait ’pag tulog, as Mama would say. Every now and then, his face would turn a bright gold, hit by light from a fleeting streetlamp. He was wearing his usual shirt, khaki shorts, espadrilles. Without the earnest facial expressions, his features were delicate, child-like. Even his hair was well-behaved, faint wisps over his forehead. I had always wondered why most of the precolonial Visayan chieftains just capitulated to the Spanish who, arriving ashore exhausted and hungry, must have cautiously demanded, “Bow to the King of Spain!” Were they intimidated by the ships? The mortars and armors? I could almost imagine the datus, tattooed and copper-skinned and swathed in copious gold, looking at each other askance and shrugging, “Sure.” Was it this brightness in the white men’s skin? Was it an intuitive awe—part curiosity, part admiration—over the Other? I felt a deep urge to run my hand down Scott’s cheeks, the prickly five o’clock stubble on his chin. Was it their size, their heft? The warm promise of their shoulders and arms. Was it the lips that could utter something foreign yet familiar at once?
I laid my head on his shoulder. He stirred, and for a moment I feared that he was going to disengage, but he only shifted to welcome my arrival.
11
W rong,” Scott said.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re awfully quiet. Whatever theory you are hatching in that bald little head of yours, it’s wrong. I didn’t misplace the bag. I didn’t forget it somewhere. I didn’t leave it by the beach after a midnight fuck with some stranger. That bag was stolen from me. Deliberately. Maliciously. With all the nefarious commitment the act carries.”
It was a few days later, on a rickety bus from Pagudpud back to Laoag. I was taking a nice stroll by the beach that morning when I heard a flurry of fucks in crisp English, which was standard for any touristy place so it didn’t bother me. Closer to the commotion, however, the flailing and the enunciation began to seem familiar, and I got there just in time to hear Scott curse the bystanders for stealing his fucking bag, which had his fucking notebook, which had years’ worth of precious fucking notes, which was good for four books at fucking least.
“You still shouldn’t have left your stuff somewhere and then expect to find it there,” I told him now.
“See where a little faith gets you?”
“You really want to talk about faith?”
He chuckled. “You see, that would hurt if I still had feelings for you.”
The bus chugged along.
“Not my fault there’s no police station in Pagudpud, you know.”
“Ah basta.”
“Ah bes-ta,” he said, in a near-falsetto that supposedly resembled my voice. On his sunburnt face was the familiar mischievous grin, signalling in me something both sinister and sweet.
“Asshole,” I turned away from him.
Mabait ’pag tulog.
“Oh, Alvin,” he said. The logic of what we were doing—going to the provincial capital, venturing afield from “the scene of the crime”—escaped him, he explained, as strongly as the wind inside the bus was ruffling all things light enough to fly, like his strawberry blonde hair. It was so noisy, too—listen—the vehicle abuzz with talks of Me-ni Pe-ki-yaw, who apparently had a heavily anticipated twelve-rounder with some Mexican later this afternoon (Saturday night in Vegas). “All I’m saying is,” he said, “why can’t you accept the possibility that a local could have possibly stolen my knapsa
ck? I told you it’s not a comment on you or the Filipino race or Filipino civilization, if there is such a thing. It’s a stupid thing some stupid person did. And that stupid person happens to be Filipino. Is that OK? Can you accept that? You know, this might surprise you, but everything’s an attack on you, Alvin.”
“Well, feel free to leave,” I told him. “What’s stopping you? I’ll help you pack.”
He closed his eyes, as if in deep pain. “Jesus Christ.”
I sighed. “Sorry.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry, too.”
He put an arm around my shoulders. I gave him a withering look, shook my body loose. But he held me in place, so I acceded. He smiled. The position was uncomfortable and would leave his arm, in a matter of minutes, besieged by the pricks of a thousand invisible needles. He gave me a peck on the cheek. “Thank you,” he whispered. Behind us, a minor ruckus. Even the driver took a brief look via his rear view mirror.
“Just doing my job, sir,” I said.
He squeezed my shoulder.
The bus ran over a rough spot, and we lurched in one singular motion, the wooden seats creaking in unison. You’d think, with all the tourist dollars, that they could at least pave the road, he said. The skinny arm behind me, deprived of oxygen, began to twitch. He took it back and we returned to a more comfortable position.
The policeman behind the elevated counter stood up and gave Scott an energetic salute, as if Douglas MacArthur just walked into the Laoag City Police Station.
Playing the part, Scott removed his Ray-Bans and waved to him, before turning to the rest of the cops. They were idling by monobloc chairs arranged in a semi-circle around a 21-inch set on one side of the lobby. “Pacquiao later,” explained one of the idlers. “You know Pacquiao?” He started throwing sharp jabs into the air to the delight of the other idlers, while I came up to the counter to tell the first cop our story. Not once looking at me, he nodded his head—“OK, OK”—and motioned for us to follow him. “Pineda,” he called out to the shadow-boxing cop, “that’s enough.” The sniggering cop stopped and went up to the vacated spot behind the counter.
