The Quiet Ones
Page 26
There must be a profound German or Swahili word for the simultaneous relief and weariness of stepping inside one’s home after a vacation, when familiar things, like the dried up palaspas fronds outside the door or the ancient nebulizer, would take on odd shapes.
After taking a shower, I turned on my laptop and logged into Facebook. “Just got home,” I typed on the status field, “What a weekend in BKK. Whew. ” I sat back and watched the number of likes rise, despairing that it stopped at fourteen. Good for nothing “friends.”
When all the money became available, I was paralyzed by the freedom. But I was never one for grand displays and theatrics so I went about my usual quiet way, my own little corner of the universe. I put the money in a humble shoebox under my bed. Then I sat on the bed and it creaked so I went ahead and ordered a new one right away. The guy on the phone was persuasive about a matching credenza and lamp, and I realized my room was gloomy from the lack of “generous spring light,” so I bought those, too. Only the necessities, yes. Also a lava lamp, because I’d always wondered why there seemed to be one in every pre-teen’s room in America. Then a treadmill because health was wealth, new curtains because the sun was brighter than usual that day—
But I couldn’t sleep for days. The slightest footfalls would make me panic, even if most of the time it was just the pizza I ordered. I didn’t touch the money after that. If the stash was mostly intact, I thought, at least I had the option to surrender it. (In that case, I would agree to do one televised interview, and maybe one more for radio to get my message across even to the remotest boondocks. Tina Monzon Palma would do it—serious but not intimidating—and at the end of the three-hour special, she would ask, “Philip, if you are given one chance to address the nation, what would you say?” I would pan to the correct camera and sigh. “Well, Tina,” I would pause, “I will tell our countrymen this,” another pause, and maybe I’d ask for water if there was time, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” Tina would purse her thin lips and say a variant of “Wow” or “Well said” or “Amen” before going into commercial.)
A month passed and nothing happened. No police raid or breaking news about the stupid operation at the call center. Feeling off the hook, I decided to make a list, then soon went about the happy task of crossing them out one by one. The usual stuff: a Mac, a Blackberry, a basic SLR; a couple of nights at Shangri-La, a shopping spree at Zara, buffet at Spiral, detox at The Farm; French and yoga lessons, a tablet of Ecstasy just out of curiosity. A one-year subscription to the Inquirer for my lola, which she didn’t even see through. I finished all these in two weeks. Then my eldest sister in Maryland successfully petitioned the family, and it was only me and lola who registered concern at the prospect of living in a foreign land (and how to bring all the money, I thought). Lola, they probably thought was on the brink of death, and I was the faggot who didn’t have a future anyway, so after a big Tanging Yaman confrontation, they began sorting things out then booked one-way tickets to Baltimore. Lola and I left the far-flung Malabon house with our long-time help and moved into a small rent-to-own two-bedroom in downtown Manila. I brought my new stuff. I looked for a job. She died less than a month later.
It was “impractical” for the family to return so soon so I took a leave from work to take care of everything. Going over her papers, it was obvious that she had prepared well for death, and it was just a matter of making a call here and there to get the logistics moving. If the first twenty-four hours passed by in a flurry, the next three days, which I spent mostly alone with Nanay Diday (our helper) at the tiny funeral chapel, went by slowly. So slowly. The morning of her cremation, I had to explain to the priest why there were no other people at the wake. I had no way of getting in touch with them, I said, which was true. Mostly. He prayed for me, called me a “heaven-sent grandchild.” It was at that point when I lost it.
I needed to get away. The following day, I passed by a luggage store at the mall. My first trip was to Kyoto, to see the famous temple I read about in college, which was burned down by an ugly Buddhist acolyte with a lisp who couldn’t handle the temple’s beauty. Face to face with the Kinkaku-ji, I understood that deranged acolyte; the temple’s assault was physically painful, and I wanted to make it stop. The next weekend I went to Boracay. Then Saigon, Penang, Singapore, Bangkok.
From the fridge door, I now took the piece of paper and struck off the last item on my wish list: “Sleep with a Thai porn star.” The memory put a stupid smile on my face. I went over the list again, the extravagant catalogue of all the stupid earthly luxuries that money could buy. Momentary comforts, all terribly overpriced and overrated. What a horrible list in hindsight, so silly and superficial. I looked for a pen and added a final item. It instantly made me feel better, so I underlined it, encircled it, appended a smiley next to it: “Give the rest away.”
34
T he following day, for breakfast I dropped by my usual panini stand on Valero before going to the office. While Kuya Rex was preparing my apple cheddar and pork tenderloin panini, he asked if I wanted an update on the spate of Hayden sex video scandals. I shook my head.
“More videos would surface soon,” he said, including a few that featured big-name actresses. “Grabe, ’no?” he asked. I nodded, looking at my food. “Who would have thought,” he said, “a baby-faced doctor, a raving maniac—” At an ocular meeting in Laguna last week, one of our parent-volunteers, a man in his forties and doting father of three, flashed his desktop on a widescreen. Alone in the last column was a folder bravely named “Hayden vids.”
It was an epidemic. I myself had only seen one of the videos. In it, the woman, an actress in the loosest sense of the word, was splayed on a mattress with Hayden on top of her. Mariah Carey’s “Breakdown” played in the background, to which she impressively sang along. The sex couldn’t be real, I thought, could it? How could anyone possibly multi-task like that?
“You have a USB?” Kuya Rex asked. “I have the complete set.” He pointed to a tiny laptop beside the cash register.
“Listen,” I said. “What will you do if someone gave you a ton of money?”
“I’ve already thought about this actually,” he said. “First I will quit this fucking job, so I don’t have to deal with—”
“I think the ciabatta’s burning,” I said.
“Shit,” he cried, hurrying to lift the cover of the panini press.
At work, there was less intrigue, no voyeuristic, misbehaving medical professionals. On our plate that day was our annual outreach activity, a talent show featuring kids from our adopted relocation site in Calauan, Laguna.
“Where have you been?” someone asked when I got to my cubicle.
I held up the brown paper bag with the slightly burnt panini. “You want half?”
“How can you—” she drifted off. “It’s almost nine.”
“Louise.” I began to unpack my sandwich.
“The kids will be here any second and MacDowell Hall is not ready and none of the judges are here.”
“Have you had breakfast, Louise?” I asked.
“And look at this.” She held out the event tarpaulin. There was a weird blank square after the official event name.
“What the?”
After a while I realized that my boss had apparently mistaken my niceness for upbeat, juvenile marketing, and the event came to be called “Children Are Our Future Day☺ .” It was the first time we used a smiley, and the software used by our printer didn’t recognize juvenile emoticons, hence the blot.
“We’ll say it’s intentional,” I said. “Or we can color it and turn it into a gift or something. Let me just a make a fresh pot of Monk’s Blend and I’ll deal with it, OK?”
She gave me a look.
“Now can you please put up this tarp in MacDowell? Thank you, Louise.”
“My name’s Libby.”
“Then who’s Louise?”
Libby shrugged.
“Right. Thanks, Libby.”
The building guards refused entry to one of the kids’ props—a life-sized makeshift cardboard slum for a dramatic tableau—and I had to explain what we were doing, that it was for charity and all that. All the scary props safely in, the kids darted in between pin-striped suits and blazers at the lobby of Tower One, where our corporate office was. In the elevator, they went by batches of fifteen or so, pressing all the buttons within their reach and contorting their gaunt faces in front of the globular security cameras. I tried to focus on my mug and the serene Muzak above the unending yelps and giggles.
At the last outreach, I heard, they sent busloads of employees to do a feeding program in Calauan. It was raining when they arrived at the rows of duplexes with identical orange roofs (official company color). Some families did not show up at the designated area, probably still traumatized, they said, from memories of the rivers and esteros that washed away their flimsy houses during Ondoy a few months earlier. The activity was a dud.
So the big idea behind doing a talent show this time was to “engage” our beneficiary community beyond the usual doleouts, although the goal in the end was the same: to give these people a nice treat, to provide relief, no matter how brief, to make our intervention more holistic. “Experience rather than things.”
This was how I ended my pitch for this project. There was no shower of long-stemmed roses upon my feet, but the proposal and budget were approved on the spot. Managing an event for children instead of adults was tricky, but if you had organized a college sportsfest featuring twenty events (or a funeral by your lonesome), a talent show with a dozen acts was like taking candy from a dead baby.
By ten o’clock, an hour past when we should have begun, MacDowell Hall was abuzz with the noise of rowdy children and the chatter of tense parents. My colleagues at HR were running around carrying stuff. An acoustic guitar, a kimono, an easel, a mangy magician’s hat. Minutes before the program started, I saw Carolina, the Australian expat who was Consulting Director for Asia Pacific and interim Country Manager, observe the chaos from behind the judges’ table and crack a tiny, tiny smile. We were off to a good start.
When the show began, the performances did not disappoint. Obscene gyrations to the latest dance craze, tearful skits about overcoming poverty, off-key Air Supply ballads (two kids sang “Faithfully”). To be honest, it became a blur to me after the third act, and every scrawny, overeager girl began to resemble the other scrawny, overeager girls, whether they were jumping rope or doing a Kabuki dance.
The emcee introduced the last group at about half past noon, when the buffet spread at the back of the hall was beginning to be a serious distraction for everyone.
From silence, a series of recorded kulintang beats resounded in the hall, while a very thin girl in colorful Muslim attire walked slowly to the center. Her tiny steps matched the cadence of the gongs. She carried a tasselled umbrella in one hand, while her free hand twisted and turned in quick circular motions. Then the music slowed down, and in came, perched on parallel bamboo poles carried by two pairs of boys, another girl, even skinnier. She was dressed in elaborate golden garments, chin raised and eyes narrowed in a severe America’s Next Top Model glare.
When she got off the makeshift bamboo carriage, the recorded music stopped. She stood unmoving at the very center, looking queenly and fearsome. Then she began to sashay across the stage, her hands curling and twisting, the umbrella-toting girl trotting behind. Then she stopped. From upright, the bamboos were lowered to the ground by the boys, forming an X. The audience clapped. I wanted to scream.
The rhythm of the clapping bamboo poles soon filled the air. The two girls began to hop about the flurry of closing bamboo poles, chins up, never once looking down. The clapping of the bamboos quickened as the music resumed, matched by the furious movement of feet and umbrella and twisting paper fans, all oh so beautiful in a required-cultural-presentation-for-the-benefit-of-foreigners kind of way.
No one expected this level of polish from the kids. Libby pinched my arm in delight, and I pinched hers in return, but she winced and hit me on the arm, that joker. I took a look at the judges’ table, where Carolina sat between the head of the Christian relief group that provided us with volunteer-teachers and a lifestyle columnist for a national daily. They all looked at me and smiled. Onstage a boy carrying a makeshift sword and shield joined the two girls in what turned out to be the routine’s fast-paced climax. When the intensity began to slowly subside, the entire place began to cheer. Loud and long. The applause must have lasted for about half a minute.
Then it happened. One of the bamboo poles being hoisted for the group’s exit hit the ceiling-mounted projector on the right side of the stage. Glass sprayed to the floor. There was an audible gasp—I closed my eyes—and the hall was silent for a few moments. The next sound we heard was feedback from a microphone. Someone whispered something to me, but I was too stunned to move.
Carolina, I saw, gave the other two judges a reassuring smile and whispered something to their ears, which made them laugh. In her stilettos, she did a little jog to the stage and called out to Mang Johnny to clean the mess please, thank you. She mouthed “It’s OK, it’s OK” to the emcee, which we took to mean she’d take care of it. Tiptoeing around the man vacuuming the broken shards from the carpet, she asked everyone to settle down (the noise had gotten pretty bad). “Philip?” she called out, eyes narrowed at the crowd. “Where are you, lovey?” I raised my hand. “There you are. Can you start computing the scores please?” I went to the judges’ table to get the score sheets. While waiting, she invited the kids to do a little recap of their performances. A prize awaited those who would cooperate, she added, how exciting, right?
I emerged with the score sheet minutes later. The singkil group had handily won. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the bamboo incident. After the announcement of the winners, everyone went onstage and gamely posed for pictures with the giant inflatable globe with a smiley in lieu of North and South America, the symbol for this worldwide Corporate Social Responsibility effort (with tie-up events in Pakistan and Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka). Looking at the grainy photo that appeared on the columnist’s lifestyle spot the next day, one would never guess, from the wide smiles of kids and adults and giant globe, of Filipinos and foreigners alike, that anything had been amiss, that they stood on leftover shards of broken glass.
35
W hile waiting for my panini the next day, I took a newspaper that someone must have left on the counter. I thought it was yesterday’s paper, crumpled and stained in parts. I whizzed past news of kidnapped humanitarian workers and killings of activists and found something curious under “Fast food crew gets run over by bus” on page six:
A 21-year-old crew member of a popular fast food chain died when he was hit by a bus early Sunday morning at the intersection of Ayala and Buendia Avenues in Makati City.
Philip Manabat of Project 6, Quezon City, was declared dead on arrival at the Ospital ng Makati after sustaining head injuries from the accident involving a Newman Goldliner bus (TXJ-710) bound for Leveriza.
Police said Manabat was seen walking from the Makati Post Office to the direction of EDSA. There was unusual fog at the intersection, they added.
I folded the broadsheet in half. “Look,” I called out to Kuya Rex. “That’s my name!”
“Wow,” he said, “you’re famous now! Dead, but famous.” He laughed, and for the first time I noticed that he didn’t look too bad. Like a poor man’s Aga Muhlach.
A fog? In Makati? I looked to my right, to the direction of that intersection, then up, not sure what I was expecting to find. A sign of doom perha
ps. But I only saw clouds in their usual annoying splendor, some stupid birds, the top of a rotating crane. They were all declaring this day open. Business as usual. Look for your Armageddon somewhere else.
I gave Kuya Rexy a five-hundred peso bill, my hand not letting go of his for a moment, and told him to keep the change.
“Did they say anything else?” I asked Jen, Carolina’s secretary. “I mean, she just wants to meet me and no agenda or anything? Is it about the recruitment of the treasury group head? Fuck. We have three shortlisted candidates, but they’re being a bitch about our stock option offer. One of them might be coming later. But I didn’t bring any documents with me, although I suppose I can quickly go to my desk—”
She stopped typing on her desktop and glared at me with her racoon eyes. “No,” she said. A woman of few words and extreme eye makeup, that’s Jen.
A Post-It with “BOARDROOM NOW” taped to one’s computer monitor was hardly the peaceful beginning one hoped for in the morning. My long-sleeved shirt still smelled ever so faintly of vehicle exhaust. My ears still rang with the blare of jeepney horns. I was so upset that I almost didn’t enjoy my jalapeño and prosciutto basil panini.
The waiting area where I spent a lovely quiet time with Jen was bare, with little décor save for the company’s former CEOs looking sheepishly from gilded frames. Behind the big wooden door, I imagined, grave-looking men and women in Armani suits converged around a table, discussing things like the pricing strategy for our banner paracetamol or the unveiling of a revolutionary dengue vaccine.