The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  Laoag General was surprisingly modern, although the lobby was peopled by the usual assembly of waiting figures who would, every minute or so, lift their faces in attention at every white-clad form that flitted in and out the hall. I asked the guard where admission was. “Is it emergency, Ma’am?” he asked. I gave it a thought. “Hindi,” I said. His face lit up and gave me a queue number, said something on the two-way radio, and pointed down the hall.

  My number was called earlier than expected; there were quite a few people who were already in the area when I arrived and who had not been called. I went over to the nurses’ station to register this curiosity, but the nurse on duty just looked at me. Scribbling on her clipboard, she asked me what was wrong and if I had insurance, in the same breath. “Dengue,” I said, as calmly as I could, “and yes.” “OK, ma’am,” she said. She asked me for my CBC results. I said I hadn’t been tested but I was sure. She said something to another nurse, who looked at me with vivid distrust. I was then asked to fill out some forms, supposedly in triplicate but one of them kindly offered to fill out the other two copies.

  I waited for another half an hour, then the usual flurry: vital signs, blood tests, a quick quizzing by a doctor. I was put in a wheelchair (“I can walk,” I told them, which they ignored) then brought to a large room on the second floor with four beds separated by shutters. Stainless cafeteria plates with remnants of food sat on the row of tables by the beds. After an hour, a different nurse came with an IV bag. “Kumusta?” she asked, holding my arm, “so many veins, good job.” I smiled then turned to the window, exhausted. “OK, deep breath,” she said, “one, two—” I felt the needle. I had a lovely view of the hospital parking lot, where a family now spilled out of a jeepney, bearing pots and pans and paper plates, in time for lunch.

  Time was above all the most searing affliction when one was sick. One agonised over failing muscles and uncooperative bones, the bad heart and the worse liver, the sore spot where the IV tube was introduced, but few knew the geologic agony of time more than the bedridden. On my second day, I fell asleep for most of the afternoon and, come night-time, spent hours staring at the sky outside, at the cars pulling in and out of the parking lot. I kept myself busy by going through all the possible scenarios fashioned by Rey’s letter and, when that got depressing, trying to ascertain my roommates’ general health based on their snoring. At four in the morning, I was halfway asleep when a masked medical technologist came with her muffled greeting.

  “Kumusta?” I asked.

  “OK,” she said, readying the injection. “By the way, a private room now available on the second floor. You want to be transferred?”

  I shook my head.

  “OK, deep breath, one, two—”

  I closed my eyes and breathed normally. She was gone twenty seconds later. At around seven, an orderly came with breakfast, followed by a nurse who checked my bag and gave me a paracetamol. The doctor came after lunch. “How are you feeling?” they would invariably ask. “Not terrible,” I would answer. It was the least alarming answer that I wouldn’t classify as lying.

  I was there for six days, vegetating. Six heinously self-same days of waiting for the body to heal itself. No one came to see me. No one called. A nun who looked Indian or Sri Lankan said hello one morning after visiting the patient next to me. That night, the same patient grunted when I offered him ice cream. In my loneliness, I kept waiting for that sententious conversation with a stranger who was obviously a proxy for God, during which we affirmed man’s inner goodness and the divine signature in all things. There was nothing of the sort. It was the most alone I had felt, which was, all things considered, saying a lot.

  My first day back in Pagudpud, I had the lingering sense that something more than platelets had been taken from me. The heaviness and sluggishness were nothing new—they arrived with age—but dengue, which made me lose at least five pounds, felt like it inserted a bowling ball into my core. It was something that was hard to explain except in literal terms, mainly because the appetite had been back with a vengeance and, save for a new fear of tires and drizzles, I would like to think I was healthy again.

  I was just happy to regain control and strength, that when I willed to clench my fist, it would. I had always been uneasy with feebleness but when I was alone, in a foreign country, and besieged most nights by a warped, unsolicited cacophony of voices, I did feel like I was teetering on the edge of something. Not life per se, but existence, the sentient core beyond the physiology of flowing blood and flashing synapses. It was there when the thought of company, of love felt most welcome, but also revolting. This hunger never existed before Damian, before Rey. In one of my hallucinatory sequences, Rey and I were back at the old homestay and without warning or provocation, I began to scream angry, angry obscenities at him. Vile things. Racist things. That he was rubbish. That his country was rubbish. A catalogue of all things deplorable about the Philippines: the infrastructure, the indecisive weather, the poverty, the unceasing stares, the special treatment that nobody bloody asked for.

  I didn’t remember all this when I woke up. It only came back to me a couple of weeks after I was discharged. I was at the beach memorising a batch of sullenly conjugated Tagalog verbs when a tall, lean figure blocked my sun.

  “Hey,” Rey said, hands clutching the straps of his backpack, which made him look even younger.

  “Ikaw,” I said.

  His eyes dilated in shock, then he laughed. “Wow,” he said. “Oo, ako.”

  I gave him a smug smile. “Kain ka na?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Kumain,” he said, correcting me. “Hindi pa, Carolina. Hindi pa.”

  The phantom call from Reynaldo did happen—“Wala, just to tell you I miss you”—although it remained unclear why it was made at midnight. “Basta,” he said when I prodded for details, which reminded me of my grandfather’s thunderous argument-ending “¡Ya basta!” so I desisted.

  They were given a special week-long leave, he explained over lunch later.

  “You watch TV now while eating?” he asked, pointing to the telly.

  “Well, my life could be in danger,” I said. On cue, the news anchor informed us with obvious excitement that the hostage situation had just passed the one-month mark. Cut to the Philippine president trying to affect a steely resolve in another taped statement. “To the Abu Sayyaf,” she told the focusing camera, “you have nowhere else to run.” The rebels, the anchor went on, seized a hospital in some remote town and took two hundred more hostages. “Two bloody hundred,” I mouthed; Rey shook his head. They then ran further south, to yet another string of islands, where a Filipino televangelist and a dozen of his “prayer warriors” tried to intercede and went into the forest. They were taken hostage as well. By the time the anchor was cuing for commercial, the anchor’s smirk was impossible to excuse as ill-timed mannerism.

  Rey turned the TV off. “It’s a bad habit,” he said.

  “I was watching that,” I told him.

  “It’s not good for you, all that bad news.”

  “I think that’s for me to decide, correct?”

  “Aren’t you happy that I’m here?”

  I sighed. A boy. He was a boy.

  He put one hand on mine, and for a moment he looked so tender it scared me. “I wish you’d stop sighing all the time,” he said.

  After sex that night, I went out to the kitchen to have a glass of water and found Birgit in front of the TV. “Walls are thin, you know?” she said. There were dark circles under her eyes.

  I asked if we had really become news people now.

  “We’re old,” she said, and I waited for a smile or a laugh to see if it was a joke or a preamble to a meltdown.

  “I think I will go back,” she said.

  “OK—”

  “The school said they can still have me.”

  “School?” I asked.

  “My school.”

  “You have a school?”

  She gave me a look. “You do not liste
n, no?” she asked. “You’re here, but also not here, you know? Where are you?”

  I switched the channel to BBC, which of course was also reporting on the hostage situation.

  “My friends,” she said, “they say they are scared. And they miss me. My son, too.” Her voice started to crack, and I came to her side, put an arm around her shoulders.

  I rubbed her bare arms. She purred.

  I slept on the couch, next to Birgit. I had a dream, predictably, about following her lead and going back. In it, I was on a tour bus going to Manila. There must have been a build-up somewhere; the vehicles were moving at a snail’s pace. I sat back and, lo and behold, Mindy was next to me. “It’s bloody hot out today, eh?” she said. “Want a bagel?” I asked her what she was doing here. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I’m going home.” I looked outside, and true enough we were traversing the F4 Freeway and just passed by Newington. She nudged me repeatedly, and I woke up.

  I heard Birgit’s voice. “Someone looking for you,” she said, with a bit of irritation. “A man.”

  “A man?” I asked, barely awake.

  Rey, when I checked my bed, was not there.

  The man outside was also tall but a little hunched. As I got closer, I hoped that he would not turn around, so of course he did. By his feet were a couple of suitcases, both of which I recognised because they had been wedding gifts.

  “There she is,” he said with a ready smile. There was the familiar fang.

  And there you are. Oh gosh. There you are. I switch to present tense.

  23

  T he water was cold in my hands but warm on my face.

  In the restaurant loo, the circular mirrors above the sink were lined with capiz shells, faux Mediterranean-style. The soap dish was also a conch, next to a dried up starfish (neighbours up to the afterlife). On the walls, pretentious Klimtesque paintings of the Philippine countryside. Scratchy Bach reverberated from piped-in speakers.

  From one of the cubicles emerged an old man who might be Japanese or Korean or Taiwanese. He stood next to me—my smile unreturned—adjusting his vest, then his knitted arm warmers. He retrieved a tube of ointment from his bag and slowly twisted the lid. The smell of camphor filled the washroom. He was about to dab a pea-sized dot to an unknown body part when from the same bag issued a loud ring. A quick trawl unearthed an old flip-phone, which he clipped between shoulder and cheek. “Hello?” Through the mirror, I saw his wrinkled face light up even as his tone remained flat, impatient. The man spoke a calm stream of Tagalog and English. With a farewell smile, to me or the distant friend, he went out of the washroom, frail voice trailing him.

  No one else came in for the next five, ten minutes.

  I was twenty-eight when I came to Sydney. I met Damian on my third, fourth week, in a bar with a stunning view of the ferry wharf sunset. He’d tell me later that it was the first time he had gathered enough courage to talk to a stranger, in this case a tongue-tied inquiry about the map that sat outspread beside a cob salad. My first words to him were “Yes, I am new to the city.” So honest and inviting, he said. I had told him he looked “harmless” that day, which eventually became a running joke of sort between us.

  That general tenderness, in the spirit of which he had offered to show me around the greater metropolitan area, I somehow mistook as prelude to love, love’s younger self. The promise that he presented—a crutch in a new place, a new life, really—had come from the same tender spirit. In the wake of his infidelity, I agonised over trying to reconcile that original tenderness with the cruelty of the betrayal. Over the years I realised that they were like the faces of Janus. Tenderness was intuitive, self-affirming, benign. Love was deliberate, self-consuming, dangerous.

  “Carolina?” I heard this person knock at the door now. “You know how terrified I am of flying, right? Thirteen hours, this one. You can’t just flee all the time you know—”

  “Coming!” I called out. I splashed more water on my face.

  It was the downside of having too many imaginary conversations with someone. Now that the person sat in front of you, reading the restaurant menu, cracking a joke about dog meat and his golden retriever, he still seemed unreal, as if you could still will for him to vanish with a forceful blinking of the eyes.

  “There she is,” he said. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I’ve been here for three months, Damian. You’re the one who’s not supposed to be here. What are you doing here?”

  “Can we get some food first? I’m starving.”

  “Marvin?” I called out to the guy standing by the bar.

  He went to our table. “Yes, Ma’am Carolina.”

  “Caro-lee-na, eh?” Damian said, eyes teasing.

  I asked Marvin if we could have a crab meat salad, pork sinigang—extra ginger and chili—fresh lumpia, two cups of brown rice, a pot of chamomile, and some lukewarm water. “Salamat.”

  “You still know how to order for my fastidious digestive system,” Damian said.

  “Start talking.”

  “It’s over. I made a mistake.”

  I closed my eyes. “How did you find me? Is it Mindy?”

  He nodded. “Davey, who found out from Eddie, who found out from Mindy.”

  “Told her it was confidential.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? She left me, Carolina.”

  “What, you want a medal?”

  He chuckled softly.

  “Well, you had a good run, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “From the pointed tone of your voice, I’m assuming you’re making a reference to something hurtful.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” I told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Aside from his lips, the rest of him stayed absolutely still. A gust of wind blew from the sea, and still he did not blink. Same old unflappable Damian.

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me now.”

  “It’s still me.”

  I looked to the sea wondering where that band of terrorist was.

  I straightened up in my seat and pushed my chair back.

  “Don’t leave,” he said. “Here, I’ll give you a moment.” He pointed to the direction of the washroom then stood up to leave. “I need to go to the loo anyway.”

  The restaurant was beginning to fill at the approach of lunch hour. My old group of lovely retirees would soon arrive, the sluggish-jointed Ben-Gay-smelling motley crew of gray hairs and last hurrahs. I suddenly missed them. There was something precious about that collective trudging-along resignation, all inertia and no more additional momentum. No more expectations. Just a final swing.

  From behind me, someone’s hands ran down my arms.

  I turned around in my seat. “Damian, no—”

  “Who?” Rey asked, taking Damian’s seat and watching the food arrive. “Wow, you’re hungry.”

  “Rey,” I said.

  “Went jogging,” Rey said. “Didn’t want to wake you.”

  I stirred the sinigang.

  “Bach in the washroom,” said Damian, just arrived. He smiled, extended a hand to Rey. “This is some prelapsarian paradise in your backyard, mate. I’m jealous.”

  MANNY PACQUIAO AND

  THE PECULIAR HAPPINESS OF FILIPINOS

  by Scott Kilborn, contributor

  Whether it was on ads-splotched, feverishly buffering screens online or front row within high-fiving distance from Liam Neeson and Imelda Marcos, you probably saw how Manny Pacquiao punched the living daylights out of Erik Morales last week. In a conspiracy of anthropological stars, Vulture’s intrepid culture contributor and balut survivor Scott Kilborn found himself surrounded by delirious Filipinos aboard a bus in the Philippine countryside on fight day (Manila’s time zone 16 hours ahead of Nevada’s). By cheering along, taking notes, and keeping absolutely quiet about his love for tacos, he charts his adoptive archipelago’s unlikely love affair with boxing—from the “Thrilla in Manila” in Marcos-controlled PI all the way to P
acman’s inspired multi-million-dollar Vegas show—and tries to uncover a link between the obsession and what some studies say is one of the most stubborn happinesses in the world.

  M ichael Buffer, debonair like a septuagenarian Ken doll, asks the impatient crowd to rise for three successive national anthems. First, the Philippines’. He reads from a cue card but still, I am told, mispronounces the name of the singer. The man in the seat behind me laughs. He points a bony finger at the old Sony set mounted just below the cracked rearview mirror of the tourist coaster. The camera zooms in from a wide shot of the darkened arena to a young lady’s serene face. Her features are somewhat elfin, a delicate mix of Chinese and Malay and a little residual Spanish, so common in this country where chop suey isn’t just a vegetable dish, which Bill Murray once described, quite rightly, as Mendel’s garden, a living, breathing, videoke-singing showcase of genetic sweepstakes. Her voice leisurely negotiates the opening verses. But an improvisation on the martial song would, after the fight, earn her a strongly worded reprimand from the National Historical Institute (“The national anthem is not a contest piece that anyone can just mangle for their own careerist histrionics”).