by Glenn Diaz
“You OK?” I asked Scott.
“OK?” he asked, looking around. “This is wonderful.”
When we got to the corner of EDSA and Aurora, we took the footbridge, climbing wide steel-lined cement steps, skipping over puddles on random spots. It hadn’t rained in three days, I thought. “Beware of pickpockets,” the sooty sign said. “Have a nice day.” On the other side of the road was a more organized row, thanks to the metal fences that corralled the throng. “No pedestrian beyond this point,” the sign said. A patchwork of low-lying tarps served as the stalls’ roof. More sunglasses and wrist watches and underage girls. I heard a Caucasian huffing and puffing. “Wait,” he said. I pulled his hand, “What?” “That guy—” he whispered.
Limp on a piece of wood was a boy of maybe nine or ten years, a tangle of flesh and bones in an oversized shirt—no pants, no legs—one arm on the concrete, a literal handbrake.
I pulled harder. “Scott, don’t stare.” He was saying something about a classic Russian film, a scene that unfolded on a famous flight of stairs, the only time he saw something quite like it in real life. “Girls, sir?” someone said. A 7-Eleven, an open manhole, a puddle of something not quite rain.
14
I t was like old times in Providence.
Afterwards, Scott and I would normally take one of the many taxis parked outside the bar to his apartment in Mabini, about ten minutes away. Seeing Scott, the drivers would scramble with their silly smiles and ready English phrases. In the backseat, the driver would smile at our loud, incoherent slurs. Scott would commence with some inappropriate touching, which I’d slap away, as if I owed it to the driver to be the modest Filipino rebuffing the advances of the uncouth American.
Not tonight. Stepping outside the bar, Scott and I looked at each other and began to walk, ignoring the taxi drivers’ pleas. A little girl approached us with an armful of roses in single stems, wrapped in taut plastic. I shook my head at her just as Scott asked how much. “You don’t have money,” I told him.
He fished a hundred-peso bill from his back pocket. “My last money.” He handed me what he said was the longest stalk in the bunch.
“If you fucking go down on one knee—” I told him.
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself.”
The city’s smog had retreated earlier than usual tonight, chased away by the just-ended downpour, the early amihan. The honks and rumble of engine were mostly gone; from time to time, the air would ring with the screech of jeepneys, the blare of a passing ambulance. The row of dim streetlamps hardly lit the road, turning into indistinguishable outlines tree and pole, dog and urchin, parked pedicab and roadside shanty. Down the stretch, the lights of a gas station flickered; beside it, brighter, a pharmacy, a beer house, a pawnshop.
“Hey, William Howard Taft,” Scott said, pointing to a reflectorized street sign. “The chubbiest US president in history,” he said. “See? You can still follow your dreams despite your body issues.”
I pointed to the façade of the Philippine General Hospital. “Mama brought me here when I was in grade school.” There was a mandatory urinalysis at school, and my strip fell to the floor. I was too shy to say anything so they must have thought there were tiny pebbles in my urine. “They were pretty alarmed.”
“That was stupid.” Scott laughed.
I looked at him, before joining in the laughter. “It was, ’no?”
“But my, how you’ve blossomed,” he said.
I smiled, pointing to a closed Jollibee outlet, about to tell another story about that trip to PGH, when a young-looking guy who was way too dressed up for after midnight came up to Scott. “Sir,” he said, “first time in Philippines?” Scott looked at me and I shrugged, inhaling the stranger’s hostile perfume. “I’ll pass, sorry,” he told the guy. I sneezed.
“Bless you,” Scott said.
“Someone’s exercising some admirable self-control tonight,” I said.
The guy appeared to retrieve something from the inside pocket of his jacket, and I pulled Scott away, beginning to sprint. “My number, sir!” the guy called out, brandishing a tiny card.
“Someone needs to calm the fuck down,” Scott said when we stopped moments later.
After about ten minutes, we turned left on Pedro Gil, a somewhat narrower street, to the direction of Manila Bay. The street was deserted, except for a roadside eatery crowded with taxi drivers in identical yellow uniforms. “Remember my imaginary TV show?” he asked. “We can add, ‘gets accosted by a callboy’ to our idea bank.”
It would be a game-changer, he’d declared, a reality show called The Foreigner . “Every week, a different gag. Foreigner Visits Divisoria and Haggles to Death. Foreigner Buys Abortifacient in Quiapo and Contemplates Abortion in Front of Enduring Symbol of Judeo-Christian Faith (“I will watch that episode,” I told him). Foreigner Sings ‘My Way’ in Videoke and Gets Knifed in the Gut.”
“All the episodes are life-and-death,” I had said. “We need mellower ones.”
“I know,” he said. “Foreigner Falls in Love with Local Boy.”
I pretended to gag, and I probably should have; I would find out about Ian two weeks later. That Almodovar afternoon when I did, I left them at Scott’s apartment and the walk to the LRT, which used to be a pleasant ten-minute stroll, was like Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. The people were too slow and would not part. Too much humanity. Before then I had always thought that those who cried in public were either undisciplined or needy. After that trip home, I realized that what they were were distraught, too distraught to mind people who gawked and judged, thinking that they were being undisciplined or needy.
When we began talking again months later, Scott had said something about shrinking private spaces in the city to explain the phenomenon of people crying in public. “In New York, like when you take the subway, with the kind of fascist stoicism that that environment creates, that it demands—”
“Was it real?” I asked.
“What?”
“What we had.”
He sighed. Silence.
“What we have , Alvin, what we have is better than real.”
“Better than real?”
“The possible is always better than the real.”
I had begun to tear a piece of chapatti with my hand—we were in an Indian restaurant on UN Avenue—when he grabbed it.
“It’s still me.”
If you had to say that, you no longer were, I wanted to say.
My notions of love and relationships had undergone the severest examinations under Scott. Suddenly there were so many things to consider. Patriarchy, evolution, state apparatuses, Barthes. When I asked him about Ian, he’d ask back if I thought that diminished in any way what we had. Was love finite, like oil reserves? Did I see love as possession? Did I think that when we were together, I owned him? Of course not, I said, but didn’t he consider my feelings? Feelings, he repeated, a sinister smile. Noticed how any harangue about fidelity and desire resound with the assertion of the self? “What about me?” “Didn’t you consider my feelings?” Me, me, me! “Alvin, romantic love was never meant to quench, to appease, to complete. Its essence is its constant exertion. That’s what we have, don’t you think?”
I stopped myself from feeling hurt, and my audacious resolve took over. “There’s a lot that I need to unlearn,” I said, and we hugged and kissed and settled on his futon.
Constant exertion.
Defamiliarization.
It was quiet now on the road to his apartment. Outside any jeepney’s route, stray cats and dogs took over at night, trawling islands of trash on the roadside, away from the pools of light from nearby streetlamps, the itinerary of roving guards.
“Remember my old office?” I asked Scott. “The newspaper?”
“Oh yeah, it’s around here, ’no?”
We crossed the street and took a right, to an even narrower, more secluded street.
“I like this job of yours now, to be honest,” he said. “You’re on a
fixed schedule—”
“I’m always sleepy.”
“You earn good money—”
“Fast food, cabs, beer.”
He smiled. “Welcome to America.”
The men emerged from an alley in between a pawnshop and a money changer, both closed but lit by spotlights. From afar they looked and moved like the usual group who’d had a little too much to drink. Four or five guys. As they came closer, Scott and I averted their eyes, a skill you inevitably learned in Manila, he quipped once. Then there was sudden movement, a firm hand on my side, a whisper in my ear to keep on walking, don’t look, don’t look, or else. Something poked my back, a sharp object. My nose was engulfed by the smell of pungent beer. I dropped the rose.
“Scott?” I called out, keeping my head straight.
“Yep,” he said, sounding firm and angry.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “don’t worry.”
“Yep.”
I was shushed.
The men took us to an empty lot, behind a mid-rise apartment building, the third-floor balcony of which was lined with drying laundry. I remembered the clothes because I saw, or thought I saw, a figure moving amid all the white fabric. I prayed hard that someone had seen us, so hard that throughout the ordeal, I was convinced that help was coming. All I needed to do was wait. I fixed my eyes across the street and saw nothing but an unending, prodigious wall.
I remained hopeful until I heard grunts. From the corner of my eye, I could detect furious movements of hands and bodies, jostling silhouettes. “I told you I don’t have anything,” Scott kept saying, voice breaking and breathy. “It’s gone. Nada.” I wanted to tell them, to shout in a language they understood, that it was true, he was telling the truth, stop. Something held up my throat, another ball of smoke. One of them pulled me to one side. “You, you don’t have anything, either?” Like his voice, his hands were vigorous, brisk, hungry. He quickly found my wallet, which he reported to the rest. My phone, he slipped into his pocket, where it hit something metallic.
All these took place without the loud racket that I had expected, as if the night’s silence commanded everyone to keep it down to a whisper, to subdued groans. Even so, the men were crass and brutal, with a rare in-your-face violence. Civilization was suddenly arduous, a funny idea. When I burped, they chuckled, made fun of my breath, barked how foul it was. They called me panot, a rotten egg. When I pleaded for them to stop, they called me Inglisero, asked if I was a faggot, said my voice was queer, then cackled, all in a volume that didn’t seem scandalous, that seemed heinously casual.
Scott tried to grab on to one of them, which made them furious. A blow to the face. A kick to the gut of the fallen. Their eyes, when I mustered the courage to look, bulged red, and I saw with alarm that they were merely boys.
When they left, I didn’t move for a minute. Or an hour. It was hard to tell. I confirmed the movement on the balcony, where a figure, talking on his phone, appeared from the shadows. I walked to Scott’s side. I said his name. A rush of relief, he was conscious, then I winced when I saw his face, one eye half-shut, the area around it bulging. A diagonal gash on one cheek. A spattering of blood and soil all over. I touched his hair and felt a sticky, wet clump. An errant thought: look, Scott, the city on your face.
A group of barangay patrolmen soon came. I called Scott’s name. A dog barked. One by one, the lights in the apartment building were switched on.
Scott’s place—3H, a studio apartment on the third floor of a beige U-shaped complex—was just as I remembered it, except a lot tidier; Ian’s influence perhaps. The books on the shelves were neatly arranged. I recognized once-borrowed titles: Working , Studs Terkel. City People , Gunther Barth. Illuminations and The Arcades Project , Walter Benjamin. White Noise , Don DeLillo. There was no longer a carpet of paper on the patch of floor near his futon, no more empty boxes of takeout food, unused packets of soy sauce and siopao sauce. Gone was the aroma of laundry that had soured, sunless, replaced by a strange balikbayan box scent, the smell of newness.
The room was still largely bare except for his futon, a shelf, and a blue-green bean bag next to the desk where his Mac was, this room’s nerve center. “So this is where you try to figure us out?” I had asked the first time I came over. I didn’t know if I was making a joke or an accusation. He laughed. “I suppose so,” he said after some thought.
He sat down and tinkered with his laptop until a song started to play.
“Can I borrow White Noise ?” I asked above the opening la la’s of “Dance Me to the End of Love.”
“Again?” With some effort he stood up and plucked the book from the shelf.
“Good ol’ 3H,” I said, to no one in particular.
“Yep.” The sun had begun to infuse the sky with its first burst of brightness, slowly overpowering, through the tiny window, the lone bulb in the room.
Back on his futon, he was watching my face, perhaps in search of a flicker of recognition, maybe even nostalgia, that social disease. Exhausted, I allowed my lips to soften to a smile. The sight, once so familiar and distressing. How many times had I arrived here unannounced to find the sheets ruffled a certain away, the sheets warm with a presence, the scent of a stranger in the air? Then the dragging discussions on monogamy, the palliative beer, the balm of long walks and fucking.
“You still bring a lot of guys over?” I asked, making my way to the new bean bag.
He smirked and tapped the space on the futon to his right. “Come, come,” he said, like in Providence three years ago. I did not move then until he had made it clear that he was talking to me—21-year-old and cowering under a baggy shirt—two tables away. He repeated the order, “Come here.”
Tonight, I shook my head. “You come here.”
He stood up after some thought. The bean bag receded under his weight, the sand-like pellets rearranging and remolding into a new shape. His skin was warm. I turned to him. His face, covered up in gauze in spots, was filled with red lines, a face being uprooted from youth and resisting. He smiled, and I fumbled for things to say. We’d had too many beers, too much of the city, of each other, again.
To be nostalgic in a city like Manila, Scott said once, was to subject yourself to chronic, irredeemable depression. I had told him about a Spanish-era building in Escolta that was recently razed to the ground to make way for a mall.
“Are you OK?” he asked now.
“I should be asking you that,” I said.
“Alvin?” he asked.
“So tell me more about Ian,” I said.
I heard a forceful, pained exhale. “As a fair,” he winced, “unprejudiced social scientist or as his boyfriend?”
I shrugged. “Whatever.”
“He’s the kind of guy who would make silly poses in front of something like,” he paused, “like the Lincoln Memorial.”
We chuckled softly, dear conspiracy. “And?”
“He once mistook Nelson Mandela for Morgan Freeman.”
I closed my eyes. “And?”
“I love him.”
His one good eye blinked.
I stood up to turn off the lights. Outside, what sounded like a rusty ten-wheeler rolled by, and the ground shook, a half-hearted quake. I knew it was the last time we would see each other.
I settled behind him, a different position for a different time. He said something I didn’t hear. I reached to unbuckle his jeans. He flinched. From the bean bag we stumbled to the cold floor. Someone giggled, either Scott or from the room across the hall. On his stomach now, he flailed a bit, but he was weak and in pain so it was easy for me to prevail upon him. He moaned when I tried to slide a finger inside him. He was warm, arid. I whispered to him my intent, and his body gave a final consenting shake.
It was a Gregor Samsa morning. Around me, under the new day’s fault-finding light, clothes strewn on the floor, a pack of condoms ripped by teeth, Scott’s limp naked body a few meters away. By the door was a figure of a man, unmoving.
I quickly gath
ered my clothes, headed to the bathroom to put them on. In the whirlwind of inserting legs and arms into suddenly small holes, skin against cotton and coarse denim, I caught my harried face in the bathroom mirror.
To Ian, who still hadn’t moved from under the doorway, I might have mumbled something as I rushed outside.
When I got home, I found Mama and Sophia supine on the bare floor of Marie’s old room. I watched them from the open door for a few moments. Sophia would raise both legs until they flanked her face, then her whole body would fall to one side.
“She’s playing,” Mama said when she saw me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, proceeding to copy Sophia’s joyous contortions. “Wait, I’ll heat last night’s dinner.”
I told her I was full.
“OK,” she said. “Have a good sleep, Vin.”
My room was a cocoon that I tried to protect from all light, covering all the gaps and slits where the sun’s unwanted rays could announce the time of day.
I had four hours of sleep that day, which was good enough. When I woke up, Mama was in the kitchen, staring at the simmering pot of adobo, Sophia limp in her arm.
“She’s going to smell like vinegar, Ma,” I said. I sat down and returned to Reunion .
She switched on the light from the ceiling fan. “It’s why your eyes are going bad,” she said. “You should really start taking care of yourself, Alvin. I won’t be here forever.”
“OK, Ma.”
She asked if we could send P5,000 to her folks in Zambales, something about someone’s birthday or a hectare of crops destroyed by rain.
I looked at the calendar in the far end of the living room, counted the days until payday.
“Are you sure you have work tonight?” Mama asked. “There’s a curfew. And that hotel is in Ayala. Don’t you work there?”
I looked at her.
“Sometimes I think you live in a different world,” she said, transferring Sophia to my lap. Mama turned on the television.
Onscreen was a man in fatigues, surrounded by other uniformed men, reading off a piece of paper as cameras flashed every two seconds or so. In a voice over, the anchor explained that a bunch of disgruntled Marines had decided to take part in that national sport of trying to depose the sitting president. That morning they had barricaded themselves inside Manila Peninsula on Ayala, triggering a stand-off that culminated with an army APC ramming into the hotel’s façade. They were standing up, the leader of the mutiny said, for the ordinary soldiers who with hole-riddled combat boots and castoff M16s were being slaughtered in Mindanao while AFP top brass connived with CIA-funded Muslim separatists, to whom they sold arms and ammunition, pocketing huge payoffs. The mutineers had since surrendered, grievances unanswered, but the government was being cautious and had imposed a ten o’clock curfew.
