by Glenn Diaz
“Where is this?” the caller asked.
“UTelCo offices are located in Naperville—”
“Where,” he screamed, “am I calling?”
“Makati, sir, in the Philippines.”
He let out a petrifying chuckle. “So I won’t be able to use my phone for three fucking days and UTelCo hotlines are now answered from the other side of the fucking planet?”
“Sir—”
“Philippines? Where the hell is that anyway? Beside Jamaica or something?”
“I’m confident that I can resolve this issue, sir.”
That was a misguided thing to say, in hindsight, although it was one of the recommended lines whenever a customer “doubts your capacity” (page 10 under “Assurance”). The line went silent for a few moments, before Mr. Otis let out a thunderous, ceaseless stream of expletives he had never in his life had the good fortune of hearing. There had been, when his father was alive, half-rolled belts and hand-held rubber slippers in his youth, but never this kind of anger, never such pure rage directed at his very existence, at the 5-foot-8, 22-year-old guy seated on the blue swivel chair, headset strapped on his head. When the man started yelling for his motherfucking supervisor, Alvin blanked and forgot all the suggested lines to appease an irate customer. “Yes, sir,” he managed to squeak. He stood up and, teary-eyed, marched to Eric’s seat to tell him that he was quitting.
Eric handled the call well. His fictitious childhood in Stockton, California was known all over the operations floor. “My great grandparents were cotton pickers,” he’d say. “Yessir, on the San Joaquin Valley itself. They built a cabin with their own hands and raised six beautiful boys. They’re a true inspiration to me, you know? In fact during September 11—”
The customer was “just upset,” Eric told him later, because he was mouthing off things without listening to him. “El-vin,” he said, in his voice a trace of that well-oiled accent, “he can’t hurt you, OK? None of them can. Don’t take it personally.”
He nodded.
“Toughen up.”
He nodded.
“Now take a break. It’s freezing and you’re sweatin’ like an Arab in customs.”
Some of these returned to Alvin now, in snippets of hazy dialogue and whiffs of once-familiar smells. The hotel driver, in commiseration with his odd passenger’s just-ended breakdown, had asked what he did for a living, and the recollection had made Alvin blink fast, as if in the middle distance materialized a movie only he could see. All of it somehow led to the memory of his first “phone pal,” a giggly girl from Pasig named Chona, whom he never got to meet. “Six-four-six-three-two-one-five,” he said, chuckling through fresh tears. “Oh my God, I still know Chona’s number.”
The driver shook his head. “Past is past for a reason. I had a passenger maybe twenty years ago, just after the landslide. Said she’s a granddaughter of Juanita Acereda. Remember her? First wife of Imelda’s father? Anyway, my passenger said her lola was a robust woman, bore her lolo five children. All healthy. A fortune teller told her to be careful because she was up against a major force. But she didn’t listen, and, well, you know the rest. But it had to happen somehow, you know? Otherwise Imelda’s mother wouldn’t have met her father, the Rose of Tacloban wouldn’t have been born, and all these wouldn’t have happened. Made me think, too. Since then, I always tried to stay in the present. The only numbers I bother to remember, the lotto combination I’ve been betting—”
The first grumble of the blades arrived like rude company. From the far-off canopy of treetops emerged the speck that quickly grew into a hawk-like silhouette. Alvin squinted to see the advancing figure, although he knew what it was. From afar it hovered squarely against the setting sun. The chopper glided toward them, as if tracing the empty highway. The driver and Alvin watched as it came closer and closer, until the sound of the blades made the driver wince and say something Alvin couldn’t hear. Then it was gone, nothing but a faint tremble in the air, the memory of that fleeting deafness. Closer to Ormoc, Alvin asked the driver if he knew a different hotel.
The man thought about it. The wide world silent again, he cleared his throat and appeared on the verge of saying something.
42
G aunt palm trees tilted on either side of the ramp in front of the new hotel. The new structure was a seven-storey anomaly in the seaside city, its impressive façade jutting out of the patchwork of tin roofs, its burgundy walls brash against the grays and off-whites and rust-browns. It faced the port, the vessels leaden under the retreating clouds, the last cargo for the day freshly hauled.
In his room, Alvin spotted the restaurant menu on top of the desk. Could he afford a meal, he thought, although he still had in his wallet a few suddenly precious bills and three credit cards, one of which he used to book the room. He checked the mini-bar and retrieved a bottle of San Miguel. Just one, he told the silence.
He flipped through the channels: a weather report on BBC (the forecast for Manila in the mid-thirties), the footage of a scorched bus on ANC (seven dead, twenty-three more injured), and grunting Rafael Nadal on ESPN (his opponent, an unseeded Cypriot qualifier, had taken two consecutive dives to reach for the ball, never mind that he was 1-0 set, 4-1 games down).
Alvin had taken the last swig from his bottle when his phone rang—a private number again. After thinking about it, he hit Answer. Bursts of heavy breathing blasted through the speaker. “Rey?” he asked.
“Vin,” the voice said.
He went to the balcony. “You’re choppy,” he said to the phone. “Hello?”
In Alvin’s recollection of that call, Scott apologized. A tearful, preliterate apology, with none of the arrogance, the polysyllabic chutzpah that animated his countless lectures and drunken diatribes, on the wretchedly enchanting city, on distances that sprawled beyond coordinates and longitude, on the fallible, malleable, ultimately inscrutable Filipino race. Alvin struggled to recall the exact words, if they dripped with remorse, if the call ended with a promise to make it up to him, in Chinatown or Seattle, to where Scott said he was returning.
Alvin hung up. In the fresh silence, darkening Ormoc before him, he thought of these plains being covered in water once, in murderous mud. On the bus from the airport earlier that day, Martin had said the landslide wrecked their old ancestral house. It was in an area where a circular restaurant now stood, visible from the hotel’s top floors (Alvin squinted now to look). Their family used to be well-off. His grandmother, he said, was seventeen during the war, and they survived thanks to an old Kempeitai who doted on her by way of rice and potato rations. When she asked him why, he showed her a yellowing photo of his daughter back in Hyogo, a petite girl in a simple kimono who had the same far-apart eyes, the same curtain of jet-black hair, the same jutting chin. Things were peaceful during the war for the family, he said, except for one grand-uncle who ran off to Palompon to join a cult of faith healers and their trading business that was shut down by the mayor, who collaborated with the Japs. This relative peace ended one morning when her grandmother saw two kamikaze planes crash into an American warship in the bay, the thick ribbon of black smoke undulating in the sky. Two months later MacArthur landed in Palo and began the march toward so-called liberation.
Alvin walked back inside, picked up the phone, and dialled the number smudged by sweat on his palm. “I saw the bay and remembered your colorful family story,” he said when Martin picked up. “Sorry about earlier.”
Martin said it was fine. “Party’s almost done, but there’s still some food left if—”
“It was last August,” Alvin said.
“What?”
“When I found a way to,” Alvin hesitated, “well, get UTelCo money.”
“Get?”
“Steal,” Alvin said. “Steal.”
The morning of that August day, he had hobbled to a bank along Ayala after shift. The bank was on the ground floor of one of the first high-rises in the area, its tinted windows cascading down fourteen floors, cinched b
y the busy stock market ticker. Half-asleep, Alvin ignored the sneering looks thrown his way, no doubt along the lines of “Poor call center agents, so overworked, look.” Inside the bank, he picked a number and sat down to wait his turn. How nice, he thought, paying your credit card bill and being made to wait for it, didn’t they know how fucking precious an extra hour of shut-eye was in this line of work, and in this weather, the habagat upon the city, the nights getting colder each day—
An elbow poked his arm; it was his turn, and he had fallen asleep on the shoulder of the middle-aged man sitting next to him. He approached the counter, where he fished five thousand-peso bills from his wallet. After some thought, he changed his mind and returned four of the blue bills inside. “Just the minimum,” he told the teller, smiling. “My mother’s at the hospital, and I need cash.” He could always pay the balance when things got better, he said, and they should soon. “They always do.”
At work that night, Alvin was visited by a melancholic mood that he later realized was fatigue. Taped on the upper-right corner of his computer was a photo of smirking Sophia, showing off the icing beard from her birthday cake from when she turned two. On the opposite corner was his name in colorful felt paper cut-outs, from the time when his batch, new on the operations floor, wanted to stake its claim on the territory. Around were it more artifacts: a tattered US map, a souvenir Philip bobble-head from Philip’s thirtieth birthday bash, an old printout of a Yearly Agents’ Ranking in which “Estrada, Alvin P.” in the number two spot was encircled.
“Start logging in, people,” someone called out. Alvin saw Eric at the far end of the spine, hunched in his swivel chair and gesturing “Go away!” to Philip. With two minutes to go before his shift, Alvin logged in to his bank account to check the credit card payment he made earlier. Amid the pre-shift noise, he hummed a tune he had heard on the taxi, fingers drumming on his desk, waiting for the page to load. A QA analyst passed by on her way to Eric; Alvin waved hello to her. When the page loaded, Alvin blinked. He looked around. Finding the same listless operations floor, he returned to his monitor. There were four zeros next to “1” where they should have been three. The overpayment, an asterisked note said, could either be refunded or applied to his succeeding billing statements. He chose the former option.
He struggled to remember the careless teller’s face from that morning. Instead what returned to him were random sights: the bank building’s Art Deco façade; the window-cleaners on a scaffolding twenty floors up; the Caucasian man in a baggy suit who, in jest, tried to turn the tables on a street urchin by thrusting his hand imploringly toward the kid’s emaciated frame.
It was a system that could fail after all.
Alvin blinked and returned to the call center floor, engulfed anew by the cacophony of hushed voices and other vaguely human sounds.
“What’s wrong?” Philip, on his left side, asked, pointing to his face.
“My mother,” Alvin said.
“What about her?” Philip asked.
“Log in now, Vin,” Eric said from behind them. “Don’t let Philip distract you. We need your stats, come on.”
Philip smiled and took his first call with what could be considered, for all intents and purposes, as screaming.
Later that shift, Alvin found himself on the receiving end of a dreary soliloquy by one Mr. Connelly of Elkhart, Indiana. While the American droned on, Alvin created a dummy account using a random name, an address from White Pages, and the social security number of Mr. Connelly’s wife, which UTelCo also kept on file. Once that was done, he clicked Process Credit. On “Amount” he entered 15 and on “Reason” he put “Appeasement re CBP fee,” for the always-contested check-by-phone fee. The outstanding balance being zero, the system, as Alvin hoped, automatically generated a request for an electronic check.
It worked.
“Are you still there?” Mr Connelly asked.
For a while, Alvin felt his tongue loosen, as if ready to chant the archipelago’s most ancient, intricate epic. “Yes,” he cried, hearing a sing-song in his voice. He was so relieved that he briefly veered off the script, the focus-group-tested sentences packaged neatly in the UTelCo Manual , the recommended platitudes and niceties that should work in theory but which repetition had numbed into meaninglessness. Beyond the imperious document’s reach, Alvin’s words regained the joy and impulse of language, the jump and swell of conversation, its urgency and tedious hesitations. He laughed when Mr. Connelly cracked a joke, sighed when a complaint was rehearsed. Even the closing spiel—“Thank you for choosing UTelCo!”—sounded fresh.
Alvin deposited the electronic check to the Wells Fargo account of an aunt in Vallejo. It was around 4:15 AM in Manila—1:15 PM in California—when he sneaked in a call to tell her about the deposit, and could she wire it right back to his local account? His mother’s eldest sister, after the requisite barrage of questions about life in the old country, did what she was asked. Three business days later—the news of his mother’s cancer freshly implanted in this mad world—Alvin saw the alien figure blinking on the roadside ATM where he checked. He liked the amount’s strange lack of zeroes, its delightful inconsonance.
“It was not like some evil operation, you know,” Alvin told Martin now, besieged, as he was saying it, by the certainty that he had heard the line before. “No,” he said. “It was very small, like a few hundred dollars or so a day. But my supervisor got on-board, then two of my teammates got on-board and the operations manager, well, you get the picture.” He heard Martin clear his throat. “It might have gotten a little out of hand,” Alvin conceded after a while. “But that’s all moot now because I don’t have the money anymore. All of it is gone.”
“Wow,” Martin said. “I don’t know what to say.”
Alvin went back inside his room and turned on the TV. Noise from an onscreen explosion suddenly drowned out what Martin was saying. “Wait,” Alvin said. It took a while for him to find the remote. When he was finally able to lower the volume, he caught just the tail-end of what Martin was saying. “What’s your room number?” Martin asked.
“It’s a different hotel,” Alvin said, because all day long he had been telling the truth, and what was the harm in one more?
In the bathroom, the showerhead gurgled, the water summoned. When it broke free, Alvin stepped back with a grunt. Slowly, he stepped into the circular curtain, head bowed, drenching his nape first, the water flowing down his neck, easing straight to his back. He blinked and was four again, his mother telling him to look up, it’s not that cold, let the water flow down your body, look up, otherwise, see, the water will go straight from your head to the ground, what a waste. He counted to three now and, with a preemptive shiver, faced the downward rush.
After drying himself, he fished another San Miguel from the mini-bar—“One more!” he cried—and he had scarcely finished half when he lay down on the bed, eyelids heavy. It had been, he realized, less than twenty-four hours since the first phone call from Rey, which commenced his escape. And he thought he knew about long days, or nights, or days that bled bewilderingly into nights.
A knock on the door startled the dark room. It must have been a couple of hours later. Or a couple of days. For the briefest of moments, Alvin didn’t know where, or who, he was (or why). He squinted at the rectangular pool of the television, the only source of light in the room. On the screen gleamed the petite outline of the president marching apace with a tall gray-haired man in a suit, in front of a row of soldiers in formation. Underneath, in the ticker where the minor news crawled, he saw the word “Magellan.” Or was it “Marcos,” “Magic,” “Megamall.” He had been reaching for the remote on the bedside table to turn up the volume, thinking he must have imagined it, when the knock resumed—faster, the staccato of gunfire—stopping his outstretched hand. By instinct, his arms surveyed the layout of the bed for a bag that he slowly realized was no longer there.
He closed his eyes in fresh relief. When he opened the door, his eyes were slow to a
djust in the light; for a couple of seconds, Martin’s face didn’t register at all. What he recognized was the familiar half-shy, half-animal smirk of casual sex. “Come in, come in,” he said. He had long conquered the pointless, annoying preamble to these encounters, and he would have pounced on Martin if there was no web of dried up saliva on his lips. “Sit down,” he told him as he made his way to the bathroom.
“Did you know,” Martin began when Alvin re-emerged into the room, hands cupped to smell his breath, “that a couple of years ago the call centers in Bangalore had to close for a couple of days because there was rioting on the streets over an actor’s death?” Alvin sat beside him. “Wow,” Alvin said. “Yes,” Martin continued. “Shops were, like, stoned and ransacked. They burned cars and buses. It was chaos. Even Infosys and Microsoft had to close. You know how absolutely disastrous even just one hour of disruption is, and we’re talking here of one entire shift for dozens of companies.”
Alvin put one hand on Martin’s lap. “But they were not thinking, these big companies,” Martin said, standing up and dislodging Alvin’s lame attempt. “You know what the shuttle service of my company did? They put up posters of the actor, Rajiv or Kumar or something, on car windows and windshields and drove around slowly, honking non-stop. They made several successful trips this way—in India agents had to be fetched to and from the office because they’re Hindu or something—and got people to the office without anyone dying.
“Always a good thing,” Alvin said.
“Yes,” Martin said. It can be crazy, he went on, all the conservative stuff. I heard there were, like, acid attacks on women agents because they were in jeans and were out so late at night. Imagine that. He shivered then reclined on the bed and looked for something. He grabbed the remote and turned on the television. “Exciting, right?” he asked. “We don’t have that accent, so I’m sure we’ll lord it over there. We’ll kill the competition.”
