The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  He shifted in his seat.

  “My name is also Philip Manabat, by the way,” I said. “Not sure if we have relatives in Tarlac, but my father is from Nueva Vizcaya, which is close enough.” I pointed at some random direction. “It’s not out of this world to think that we’re related. There isn’t a lot of Manabats in the Philippines, I think. There’s that general. From Isabela. I also pretend sometimes that it’s Japanese. Sounds more impressive. I tell them I’m from Kyushu or something.”

  “I saw the video,” he said. “I would only see bits and pieces in the news, but in one talk show they played all of it, so I saw it.” He clicked his tongue.

  The clip played in my mind. It seemed so benign compared to all the heinous things I had done behind closed doors, all terrible and unpunished. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He was a very sensitive child,” he said. “And grumpy. Like an adult already. It hurt him, those things. I’m certain—”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “But we believe in the will of God,” he said, “and, well, he was gay.”

  Eric emerged from the house. When he came closer, I looked for the swell in his back pocket. It was no longer there.

  Mr. Mabanat continued, looking at Eric intently. “It was the wrong decision to come here. It was my decision. Life was so hard in Samar. Then a cousin said he had half a hectare. Plant, they said. You won’t go hungry. I sold my boat and took all of them here. Even Philip. He didn’t want to come and leave all his friends—”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that, Mr. Manabat,” I said.

  “What was I thinking?” he asked. “That land is cursed.”

  “I’ll take it,” Eric said.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to retire in the province.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “I’ve been meaning to sell that.” Eric pointed at the SUV. “If you want, I mean—”

  A puzzled look in the grieving man’s face.

  He had always been persuasive, that Eric.

  “Where did you put it?” I asked. “And how many hours again to Manila? God, I need a drink. Can I smoke here?” I grabbed the stray pack of cigarettes.

  He retrieved the envelope from the inside of his jacket.

  I snatched the envelope from him, gave it a kiss, “Thank you, Jesus.”

  He howled in laughter. “I knew it. I just knew it.”

  “He called his son a faggot. He really used that awful word.”

  “Maybe it’s around here somewhere,” he said, looking into the darkness around us, the houses that every now and then interrupted the endless fields.

  I looked inside the envelope, gave it a little squeeze. “What’s here?” I asked.

  “Their farm.”

  Two kilometers away from the house, Mr. Manabat had said, they grew onions, corn, and rice. When the price of onion surged two, three years ago, that was a good time for them. They repaired parts of the house that were damaged by the last typhoon, the roofing and the bathroom. Little by little. Last year, calamansi was good. With the windfall, he added the veranda. Then the drought happened and there was debt to be paid and poor Philip, the eldest, had to stop school and find work in Manila.

  “My parents are farmers, did I tell you that?” I said.

  “What?” he asked. “Weren’t they accountants or something?”

  “Auditors,” I said. “Sorry, just got into a very agricultural mood. Were you serious about the farm?”

  He chuckled. “My first boyfriend, I was in college, he’s from Tarlac—”

  I looked at him. “Mine’s from Marinduque.”

  “He disappeared, and he used to tell me about this beautiful old church that he and his family would go to for Sunday mass.”

  Philip stopped himself from looking at Eric, or around the car, the mess. He understood that if this were a show, it was now Eric’s episode. He asked him to tell him more. The journey was smooth, and it was almost midnight.

  40

  A lvin held out an index finger, phone clipped in the crook of his neck. Wait.

  To his right, Martin’s patient smile had faded into terseness. From behind the counter the receptionist’s grin hardly budged, long inured to the vagaries of human decision-making. Alvin ignored the small crowd that had gathered amoeba-like around him: bureaucrats in blinding orange vests conversing in crisp Ilocano, a sixty-something Chinese man with two teenagers with dubious blonde hair in tow, and a woman around whom orbited five horse-playing kids. From an unseen radio a monotone recited the details of a ferry that had sunk off the coast of Romblon

  Alvin told the mouthpiece to please go ahead.

  “In accordance with civil aviation policy, sir,” said the woman on the phone, “all bags and packages left unattended on the plane are to be unloaded immediately and then taken to the airport for inspection by authorities, (pause for air) who will either keep the item for a certain amount of time or dispose of it, depending on—”

  “What’s ‘a certain amount of time’?” asked Alvin. Another group arrived: an extended family of six or seven adults, an old lady in a wheelchair, and a couple of children who rushed to inspect the hotel’s makeshift Christmas tree, made entirely of recycled PET bottles.

  “Ay wait for a while please, sir,” the woman said. There was a loud thud on the line, then a low machine hum. It was the third time in ten minutes that the woman had put down the phone to consult with an invisible authority. She returned after a while. “So sorry for that again, sir,” she said. “In accordance with civil aviation policy, the airline is not automatically liable for the losses the passenger incurs when a bag is lost unless forced to do so by a court of law.”

  “What?” Alvin asked. “That wasn’t my question.”

  There was a muted gasp, followed by panicked rustling of paper, a faint voice asking “What? What? What?” The hotel lobby echoed with the dawdling assurances of a tired-sounding lawyer, who swore that the shipping line would take care of the victims’ hospital and funeral expenses.

  “Well, sir,” the woman on the phone tried again, “as I told to you, you must please report that your luggage was lost, delayed, or damaged to relevant airport authorities and keep a copy of the documentation. Then you need to contact the airline and/or airport in writing and clearly narrate, in a timeline format if possible, all the circumstances—”

  What abiding confidence in the script, Alvin thought. He himself had fond memories of delivering long memorized spiels (appropriate ones, he hoped). He liked the surefooted flow from one word to the next. The learned pacing of breath. The haughty air of ritual, of verbatim ceremony. He could in fact still recite, six months after resigning, the federally mandated disclosure on the hush-hush fifteen-dollar check-by-phone fee, mostly due to the countless times that he’d said it, as rapidly and inarticulately as he could, lest the customer realize that he was being charged the steep amount (that would happen next month when they saw their bill; a problem for later).

  “Sir?” the woman asked. “If you don’t respond in ten seconds, I will be forced to terminate this call—”

  Page 17 under “Terminating a Call.”

  “Please don’t respond anymore, sir,” she added, primal defeat in her voice but also, it sounded to Alvin, the anticipation of wild, wild mirth once this fucking call was over. Perhaps during the conversation it had finally dawned on her: the absurdity of the script, of this job, of the very enterprise called human communication. Amused, Alvin turned around to see stern looks from the other would-be guests.

  “Not my fault there’s only one receptionist,” Alvin loudly told Martin, who gave him a frigid smile. Alvin held up the same index finger. “Just one more minute,” he said.

  A second group of kids had joined the first, the lobby now a makeshift playground.

  “Ay wait, sir,” cried the woman on the phone. “The bag is already here in the counter na pala, sir—”

  “Great,” sighed A
lvin, whose relieved smile cued subdued celebration from Martin, the receptionist, and the small crowd. “Now if you can just hold on to it for like an hour—”

  “—but there’s a problem,” the woman cut him off. More consultative whispers in the background. “Because the other FAs and ground crew saw it,” she paused, “we have to prepare an accident report. No, an incident report, sorry.” The woman’s mic, Alvin heard, was covered, muffling the rest of the instructions. The radio anchor had brought in the mother of one of the fatalities from the ferry accident.

  Alvin breathed in and slowly exhaled. Eyes shut, he asked the woman if flying so frequently with a cheap airline had deprived her brain of oxygen, you know, budget flight attendants with budget brains working for budget carriers, that sort of thing.

  “No, sir,” the woman said, unsure. “Those are the rules, sir.”

  Alvin tried to discern any extortive note in the woman’s voice. Was it all a ruse? The fumbled script, the theatrical inefficiency? Did they want him to come over so they could proceed with the extortion? Should he call Rey? “Wait,” he told the woman. He handed Martin the receiver and rushed outside the hotel, to the front ramp where he stood in between waiting cars. He looked up and searched the sky for the chopper that was surely transporting the cops assigned to arrest him. A different voice—male, less frazzled—welcomed him when he picked up. “Who’s this?” Alvin asked.

  “Oh, you were gone the whole time?” the man asked. “Anyway, I’m afraid Steph will have to get on the return flight to Manila, but someone else will assist you when you get here. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, Mr. Estrada.”

  Page 9 under “Apology.”

  “Did you fuckers open it?” Alvin asked.

  A surprised pause. “We might have,” the man whispered. Alvin told him he was on his way.

  When the line went dead, he asked the still-smiling receptionist for the hotel’s fastest vehicle and most lawless driver. He told Martin they had to go back to the airport. “I’ll explain on the way—” he said. Martin looked amused. “What?” he asked. “I can’t. It’s my despedida, I have to be home.”

  Alvin blinked, mainly to contain the swell of anger so profound it could only come from a place of deep, baseless affection. Moments like this, he had long chalked to some strange synaptic activity, some misbehaving neuron that would grow up to become an adult tumor. In his construction of this narrative, Martin the beloved would at this point give him, the protagonist, his hand, ready to be whisked off to partake in the unfolding Third World picaresque cum heist thriller. There were no extenuating factors like despedidas or free will, nope.

  “I’m free tomorrow,” Martin said.

  Alvin was hit by the banal reminder that it was a story not quite finished. “Sure!” he called out, shuffling, already halfway through the crowded lobby.

  Alone in the backseat of the hotel car, Alvin asked the driver if he could do Tacloban in less than two hours. The man, with graying hair and deep-set eyes, looked at him on the rear view mirror and grunted, which Alvin chose to see as a timid, if unconventional, way of saying yes. He felt reassured; he had always preferred the quiet ones.

  Alvin had been a meek, manageable boy. He was in the third grade, when, finishing a test early and feeling faint from the onset of the flu, he made a pillow out of his bent arm and rested his head on his wooden desk. “Everyone, look! “his teacher called out. “See? Alvin is so well-behaved.” His classmates, hunched over their papers, turned their heads to gaze at the freshly christened poster boy for subservience. For eight-year-old Alvin, “well-behaved” became a treasured epithet, right next to “neat” and “good in reading.” The eternal desire to please others, often waylaying his own wellbeing, he chose to see as humility, kindness even. It birthed a sad, timorous air about him, sometimes manifesting as broad awkwardness. Was it really a docile childhood? But many times he refused to follow the regulation haircut. Often he took the longer route to school to miss the flag ceremony on purpose. Once or twice he smoked a cigarette behind the gym after PE. It was only in hindsight when he understood the indiscretions for what they were: little, uncharacteristic acts of rebellion by an unhappy child.

  It changed years later when, on a regular shift at the call center, he found himself fifteen minutes into a call that had transpired entirely in shouts. Mr. Moody of Sewanee, Tennessee, had been trying to establish Alvin’s IQ based on his fucking dead-end job that a one-arm baboon could do when Alvin discovered that he could, if he tried, divert all the spewed vileness away from his chest, to where they had been accumulating, to somewhere in his gut, where the words pained less. After the call, Alvin took a break and went to the pantry. Surrounded by happy, chattering agents (it was payday), he forced himself to say goodbye to the passive composure that had gotten him mediocre grades in school, the tentative steps that had prolonged the crossing of every turbulent street in the city, the lack of expectations that lovers mistook for resignation, for cold-blooded sangfroid.

  In his next call, he lowered his voice, kept it firm and steady, and tried hard not to buckle when the caller, a middle-aged housewife from Toledo, Texas, said that she was charged a wrong long distance rate last month, and, honestly, would it fucking kill you to do your fucking job right? “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Garcia,” Alvin said, holding off the “Ma’am” and the usual surfeit of civilities. To his surprise, the mother of two gushed in gratitude. In that, his first triumph, Alvin understood that there was joy in being bold, an exhilaration in asserting yourself.

  The driver of the hotel car slowed down now and, signalling, turned to a small nameless gas station somewhere in the lush, winding outskirts of Ormoc. Alvin checked his phone for the time and wondered out loud why anyone in his right mind would think that this was a wonderful time to fuel up. Ah, I know, he went on, legions of taxi drivers in Manila made this same detour for a few extra pesos on the meter. Shutting the engine, the driver grunted, which this time Alvin took as insolence. “You think,” Alvin said, “I’d offer to pay for gas, then you can keep the real gas money for yourself no?” The driver looked at him in the rear view mirror again and rolled down his window. “Full tank, unleaded,” he told the gasoline attendant.

  The two mutely watched the numbers in the neon counter climb up. With another grunt, the driver turned on the engine. He gave the attendant a familiar salute before rejoining the road with a couple of honks.

  41

  A lvin could see his bag, snug under the airline counter at the airport, inconspicuous enough but to him still too dear to be abandoned so nonchalantly this way.

  Almost there.

  He thought about Martin, imagined him sitting at the foot of his bed at the hotel, laughing at a hilarious joke he had cracked. The string of island resorts nearby would naturally come up in conversation. The possibility of one or two weeks in a beachfront hut. Air-conditioned just in case it became too humid. A nice hammock outside for lounging. Opulent seafood and San Miguel. Then maybe a week in Singapore or Hong Kong or Taipei, pockets of First World, all less than two hours away. Who needs India?

  Alvin called the attention of the person manning the counter and asked for the person to whom he had spoken on the phone. “You just missed her,” the man said, pointing to the A320 taxing on the runway. “Well, that’s my bag over there,” Alvin said, pointing to it, “I’m not sure if she had told you.” “Oh, yes,” the man said, “Alvin Estrada, right? We spoke on the phone.” Alvin winced at the sound of his name. The man smiled. “One second,” he said. “Actually I can just get it myself,” Alvin said, gesturing to enter the counter. “No, sir,” the man said, blocking the makeshift barrier. The other employees looked at him, then at Alvin. “Please wait and I’ll be right with you,” the man said. The smile widened.

  When an airport policeman came sauntering by, Alvin tried his best to meet the cop’s eyes. He ordered his tongue to produce a pleasantry, maybe a nervous quip about the threatening swell of clouds
overhead, a casual greeting in piecemeal Waray, but every attempt only reminded him of how parched his mouth was, and each time he ended up swallowing hard, then a wince, as if the symptoms of guilt weren’t enough. His hands, before he could stop them, found his pockets. Just then his phone began to vibrate, which he quickly—too quickly—retrieved and hit Answer. “Yes—” he shouted, a tremble on the edge of the tiny syllable.

  “Don’t ask me why,” Reynaldo said, “but they know you’re in Tacloban. Chopper just left Villamor. They’ll be there in three hours.”

  The muffled notes to “Paminsan-minsan”—until then dourly drifting in the terminal—suddenly stopped. In the pre-departure area, a tourist had kicked askew the mic stand of the blind singer. A ground personnel came to adjust the stand and reposition the mic a couple of inches away from the blind man’s mouth. Told of his crime, the errant tourist shuffled back to his victim and, with a pat on the arm, tossed a ten-dollar bill unto the blind man’s metal box.

  Alvin returned his phone to his pocket. He waited for the Supreme Exhaustion but felt no weakening of the limbs, no distress in the stomach. He paced to the counter and, with a rare, vigorous voice, asked the airline employee to hurry, please, it was an emergency. “I won’t ask if it’s not,” he said, voice cracking nicely. The cop, Alvin saw, had returned to his post by the metal detectors.

  The airline employee appeared to think about it. The rest of the people in line seemed to shrug their assent to the troubled stranger’s request. After handing a group of Koreans their boarding passes, the man took Alvin’s bag and asked him to follow him. Checking their watches, the people in line looked at the abandoned counter, regretting their kindness right away.

  It was Alvin’s first time in a holding room of any sort. At that airport, it was a converted storage area inside one of the administration offices, not, as he feared, a dank, foul-smelling chamber where a swinging bulb bathed the room in harsh yellow light. The employee told Alvin to take a seat in one of the three monobloc chairs around a table on which he placed the bag. From his shirt pocket, he retrieved a folded piece of paper that Alvin assumed was the incident report. The man unfurled the sheet with excruciating care before narrowing his eyes to read. Alvin cleared his throat, testing the volume of his voice vis-à-vis the room’s acoustics. “There’s a book on the side pocket,” he said, feeling the American accent coming on. “White Noise by Don DeLillo. You ever read him? Hit or miss, but this one’s a hit. There’s also a Blackberry in the sleeve inside.”