The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  This elevated rail line, the city’s oldest, traversed an old part of Manila. On this route, you could see the nice buildings like the Post Office and the National Museum and City Hall, lined up like museum pieces along the Pasig; my four-century-old alma mater was there somewhere, farther off. Without the wall of bodies, the ride might have been scenic, educational. Instead it was darkness when I looked down and blinding white light when I looked up. The forest of stupid heads constantly turned in search of a bearable view.

  The heavy downpour started as we left Quirino station. The train slowed down, and you could almost hear the overworked engine pleading to take a break (while all of us onboard prayed that it wouldn’t). Soothing wind and the sound of rain would enter the coach whenever the doors opened.

  Moments before the train arrived at my stop, two nuns announced that they were getting off. Like Moses, they parted the sea of people. Megalomaniacs, I thought, following the path cleared by their powder blue habits. A mass of bodies quickly took the space we vacated inside. The nuns were soon lost in the crowd that was making a beeline to the turnstiles.

  The cool breeze came with a price. From the station, I looked at the river that had become of the road below. Pedicabs had congregated by the entrance; punctual extortionists. The dark stairway leading to the entrance was crowded by stranded passengers. Some were bargaining with the pedicab drivers while others had resigned to their fates and waited. A hundred pesos for a ride! someone shouted on the phone, no way. Every now and then, a truck or bus would challenge the knee-deep waters, creating mini-tsunamis that would lap at the stairway, to the delight of the street kids doing summersaults from the center island into the liquid murk.

  When the rain stopped, some of the marooned passengers began to fold the hems of their pants, shoes already in their hands or backpacks. The pedicab drivers booed the heavens, then ran for cover when the sky grumbled and lightning lit up the street. What was apocalypse to some was just Tuesday to Manileños.

  The façade of my building was visible from the station, and the slow stroll was supposed to be the best part of the day. The peace. The surrender. The Vonda Shepard song in my head as the imaginary camera cut to a panoramic shot of the city to suggest a sea of urban loneliness.

  “How much?” I called out to a sturdy-looking teenager on a sturdy-looking pedicab.

  He looked at me and said two hundred.

  “I just live there!” I said.

  One-eighty, he said.

  I tried to remember if there were open manholes along the way before removing my shoes and putting my phone in the deepest corner of my bag.

  “Godzilla!” one of the kids shouted.

  When wading through floodwaters, the first few steps were always the hardest. You often forgot just how heavy water could be. How it clung to denim. Islands of garbage gingerly floated near my track, and I held my breath until it was behind me. I looked around me and saw no other soul. It was just me: wading and risking leptospirosis, evading the eyes of people looking from fortified storefronts. At the halfway mark it started to rain again. Perfect. One more push. Almost there.

  The guard at my condo gave me the familiar salute, as if I wasn’t soaking wet and smelling of sewage. The elevator was thankfully empty.

  By the time I was turning the key to my unit, it was eight o’clock, more than half a day since I stepped out. There was that awful creaking sound as I opened the door. The flick of the light switch. The hum of the refrigerator. I hit Play on the answering machine, like a rom-com heroine at the close of her long day. “You have no messages,” it said. I took off my drenched clothes and shoes and, butt naked, sat on the computer chair. I realized with no great alarm that I left my shopping bags at the pantry.

  I was thankful for this refuge, although sometimes, like tonight, the silence was like concrete. I would sometimes remember, and miss, the atmosphere at my parents’ house in Malabon. Two floors crammed with distant relatives and overfriendly neighbors. Going out of the house was like trying to enter Malacañang, at least three checkpoints to hurdle, each with a nosy question (“Where are you going?” “Dressed like that?” “Pasalubong ha?”).

  When she was still alive, my lola would cry “Who’s that?” as soon as I turned the knob, as if it could be anybody else.

  But there was relief in the isolation, the price of peace. Maybe. My first mornings here, I told myself it was this divine view of the sun rising above the GI roofs that I was paying for. It was probably the second month when I noticed I was waking up turned away from my windows, my body probably rejecting the creeping light as I slept. Must be my love-hate relationship with the sun. Five years doing the graveyard shift could do that.

  I turned on the TV now and headed to the balcony, parting the curtains and sliding the glass doors on the way. It was still drizzling, but the flood that was so ominous up close looked velvety from above. Muted to a faint murmur, Manila seemed innocent enough, kind enough, from above.

  I could faintly hear, from inside the house, a reporter saying something about suicide and cyber-bullying, no doubt in reference to my namesake. What if it really had been an accident? What if the fog indeed made things difficult to see and, when the bus emerged from the haze, it was too late?

  Oh, Philip Manabat. Reluctant celebrity, prey to strange weather phenomenon, dead breadwinner at twenty-one.

  I took a Heineken from the fridge, a crazy idea forming in my mind.

  37

  I t didn’t take a lot to find my dead namesake; I only had to assume a fake identity and lie through my teeth. I called the Makati police station and introduced myself as a news correspondent from Naperville, Illinois. “Yes, Illinois,” I told the cop on the line, “next to Chicago. You know Chicago? ‘Hard to Say I’m Sorry,’ ‘You’re the Inspiration,’ ‘If You Leave Me Now,’ ‘Saturday in the Park’—”

  “No,” the cop said.

  “Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Phil Jackson—”

  “Ah, Chicago. Chicago Bulls.” He scoffed, as if I was the idiot.

  I told him I heard about the case of Philip Men-a-bet and that I was doing research on online bullying. “Do you have the contact details of the victim’s relatives?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Thank you!” I cried, ignoring his distracted tone. “Talking to his relatives will definitely enrich my research. Let me book a flight to Manila right now. How do you spell Manila again?”

  “Ah, the sex video,” he said. “Manabat.”

  “You’re like a fluorescent lamp, no?” I asked. “You turn it on and it takes a few blinks before it turns on for good.”

  “Pardon?”

  I dropped the accent and repeated everything. He asked where the American woman went and said he couldn’t give out any contact details. “It’s against the rules.” He then put down the phone.

  I stared at my laptop. I opened a new tab and googled Manila (one N and one L). And Philippines for that matter. Embarrass, accommodate, fulfil, rhythm. I continued my idle browsing and stumbled upon one of the news reports on the so-called Jollibee scandal. The writer’s email address was appended to the article.

  I wrote the same elaborate lie and was about to hit Send when I changed my mind and bulldozed through the draft with one long press of the backspace key. I typed a new message, hewing as closely to the truth as I could. The number of my namesake’s father was in my inbox fifteen minutes later.

  Before I knew it, I was talking to a farmer from a town called Camiling in Tarlac. I asked him if I could visit his son’s wake. The line was choppy but I heard his “OK” to my request. (On second thought, it might have been “Go away” but that was a problem for later.)

  That same day I prepared to head out of town, as soon as I figured out which direction Tarlac was. From under my pillow, I took the remaining money and put the bundle in a brown envelope. On my phone were days-old messages from HR, the same templates I used to send to malingering employees who had been “No call, no
show” for more than two days. I thought of my desk at work, my morning panini run, the routine that for a while seemed stable, or at least headed to stability. I went to my balcony, and I had a brief urge to just fling all the money to the wind, to close this chapter of my life once and for fucking all.

  From above, the city whirred, humming. Twenty-one floors up, Philip saw the triangular brick roof of the train station, where for the past six months his day had begun. There were now only hints of the roof’s original bright crimson, and overall it had become a pale sort of yellow. His tiny terrace was visible from the station, witness to many nights when the city’s peaceful assembly of flickering lights scared him, as if from among them would emerge some violent payback for a long-ago misdeed.

  He held on more tightly to the envelope, a supple bulge in his palm. Then he unclenched, took a single bill from the bundle, and gently let the wind carry it, which fluttered in a dance, teasing gravity, before dropping and disappearing from view.

  The 7-Eleven smelled like old clothes and burnt oil—like usual—but also, for some reason, beef korma. Nose twitching, I tried to return a map that I had procured by mistake. I told the lady I clearly said “Tarlac” and had no idea why she gave me the map to downtown Shanghai. Serves me right for not looking. No return, no exchange, she said, plus I supposedly ripped the plastic wrap with my teeth while making growling sounds.

  “I was joking, obviously,” I said. I waved my apology to the line behind me. “But seriously, you know, I’m not doing this for the money. No. I can just buy the other map, the correct map. But that’s not the point—”

  The bell rang, someone opening the door to the store. I had to hold on to the dyke behind me when I saw who the newly arrived person was. The llama face. The natural pout. The jutting chest. I waited for him to look at me for five, ten, fifteen seconds; the dyke behind me ever so slightly nudged me out of the way so she could pay for her Red Bull. The llama face finally turned to me, curt eyes softening, then that smile.

  My eyes rolled to the back of my head, just as he began to laugh. I noticed that I had been completely pushed away from the counter. “Eric,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I held up the bedraggled map of Shanghai.

  He squinted to look and gave up after a few moments.

  “Weird to see you here,” I said.

  “I live here,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Nope,” I said. We moved outside for a smoke. He’d quit, he said.

  “I was trying to contact you,” he said. “Did you change numbers?”

  “Didn’t we all?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve had this number for ten years.”

  I touched his arm, which made him laugh. He had become a person who laughed.

  “Are you high?” I asked.

  “Only on life,” he said, not missing a beat.

  “OK, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shrugged, still smiling. “I guess I’m doing OK, Philip.”

  In Eric’s universe, where everything was a euphemism, “OK” was an admission of ecstasy.

  “Anyway, it was good to see you,” he said. “My yoga class starts in ten minutes and I haven’t had my yogurt yet. Ciao!”

  He left, the “ciao” unexplained. Or the yogurt and the yoga. It was starting to become searing hot so I went inside the store. The girl behind the counter called out the next in line. There was no one.

  There was a Persian place beside the 7-Eleven, which explained the exotic smell. The second I got in, the explosion of aroma made me sneeze, and I didn’t notice the waiter who had come with the menu. The flatscreen in one corner was tuned in to a collegiate basketball game. There was only one free table, a tiny one for two positioned strategically between the trash bin and the condiments counter.

  I planned my trip. According to online sources, I could take either a Solid North or a Five Star bus bound for Pangasinan then get off in Tarlac City, where I could take either a jeep or a long-haul tricycle to Camiling (the tricycle, noted one user, should only be a last resort, only after eight in the evening, when the last jeepney would have left the terminal). There was one bus that went straight to Camiling but the schedule was erratic. Victory Liner buses bound for Baguio also passed by Tarlac, and there was one of those every half an hour.

  I was mentally computing the taxi fare from Katipunan to Tarlac when Eric walked in, the hum outside briefly leaking into the restaurant. He returned the salute of two waiters, then fist-bumped a couple of guys at the table nearest the door.

  He had become a person who fist-bumped.

  He didn’t seem surprised when he saw me, as if we were in McDonald’s in Buendia and it was 2005.

  “It’s not 2005,” I told him when he took the chair across me.

  “I knew I’d find you here. Yoga class was cancelled. Teacher has diarrhea. Or dyspepsia. Euphoria? Might have misheard. You know my hearing ironically deteriorated after we resigned. Anyway, how are you?”

  It was our cue to run them down, the common people in our lives. For call center veterans, this meant accounting for who worked for which company now, like a game of musical chairs. I told him I had absolutely no news about anyone, except Alvin who I knew flew off with a guy somewhere because I saw him at the airport one early morning.

  “Alvin, huh,” he said.

  “And Hassan closed down last year,” I said.

  He closed his eyes and exhaled. “OK, that breath,” he pointed to the imaginary particles in front of him, “that carried all the memories I have of that nice restaurant. It will be missed.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  “I wish you didn’t tell me, though,” he said. “I’m trying this thing called Conscious Unknowing. It’s very popular in the US. It’s a reaction to the regime of information that the modern world is bent on inflicting on us. With Conscious Unknowing, you basically respect the universe’s decision on the kind and level of information that you are entitled to receive. Don’t seek, don’t probe. Bask in innocence. Celebrate it. Choose not to know.”

  “That’s called denial, Eric.”

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

  I was not sure now how he said yes to the idea: traveling with an ex-lover to Tarlac to give away ill-gotten cash to the father of said ex-lover’s dead namesake. He said he knew the way but wouldn’t say why. I told him our quest resembled the plot of an indie movie, which screened in near-empty theaters and featured characters who always inexplicably waxed philosophic about despair, poverty, destiny. “Something idiotic like that.”

  He laughed. “Please stop sharing things like that.”

  38

  Y ou’re in your weepy mode,” Eric said. “There’s tissue—” He gestured toward the glove compartment.

  I opened it and dug through heaps of government forms, a wedding invitation, lotto tickets, an empty mineral water bottle, a granola bar, and a beat-up paperback entitled Going Full Circle with a meditating Buddha on the cover. Underneath everything was a sticky packet of Kleenex. “Thanks,” I said. “Last week it was on a taxi from the airport.”

  “What was the song that time?” he asked.

  I thought about it. Something by Janis Joplin, I told him.

  “‘Piece of My Heart’?”

  “Older,” I said.

  “Older than ‘Piece of My Heart’? Like ‘Summertime’? But that’s from the same album.”

  “‘Jolene.’”

  “That’s Dolly Parton, Philip,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Details—”

  His fingers drummed the wheel. “One of your videoke favorites,” he said after a while.

  “11340.” I keyed the number in an imaginary machine.

  “At least it’s not Bread,” he said. The old smirk returned.

  “Don’t hate Aubrey,” I said. “It’s not a very ordinary girl or name.”

  “But who’s to blame?”

  I looked outside. The trees on
the side of the road swaying in the breeze, the fields sun-kissed and dotted with cute farmers. The vehicles calm, obedient to speed limits. It was the beginning of a horror movie, and I wondered if I was the clueless bimbo who was destined to die first.

  “So this is really the only thing you bought, huh?” I made a show of looking around the car and looking impressed. The edge of a hanger hit my face when I turned to the backseat, which was crowded with more paper, a crumpled shirt, a rolled-up yoga mat.

  “Yeah.”

  I ran my hand down the dashboard and then discreetly wiped the dust off my fingers. “You never struck me as a car person.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “The only car I knew was our family’s Gemini, and we sold it when I was in college.”

  “Well, you are richer than most of us,” I told him.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it?” I asked.

  “None of us would have done it if we were rich,” he said.

  “You mean work at a call center or do what we did.”

  He smiled. A wry smile. Self-assured, coy. “Both, I guess.”

  I saw a pack of Marlboros on the dashboard. “Thought you’d quit?” I asked.

  “A friend left it.”

  “Then again, it was never my business what that tiny mouth of yours could do, because, well, you know.”

  He looked at me, shook his head.

  “Sharon is rich,” I said. “Let me see. So is that IT guy with a limp. Jopet is rich. Mitch, Oli, Dulce, even Karen, she went to a Catholic school—”

  “Wait, who’s Mitch again?” he asked.

  “Her station was next to yours for years, Eric.”

  “I’m not good with names, Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “Mestiza. High-pitched voice. Petite. Always wearing an Ateneo jacket.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “She quit after the Jasmine Trias thing.”