by Glenn Diaz
Later that week, Rey arrived in her unit at around midnight, moving in what she thought was the desperately quiet manner of the guilt-wracked. She felt him slink into bed under the duvet, his loud breathing undoing every hushed exertion. Lying on her side, back on the newly arrived, she counted to ten then shifted to face the ceiling. “Did you lock the door?” she asked, just above a whisper. She heard nothing but soon felt the weight of Rey’s body leave the bed. When he returned, she thanked him. “Oh,” she added, “forgot to take out the trash.” Again the bed shifted. “Thanks,” she said when he rejoined the still mattress. When he got up a third time, to double-check if the gas valve had been shut, she stood up to lock the door. After a few moments, she heard Rey knock, three barely audible raps on the wooden door. “Carolina?” Louder, blunter strikes, from a tight fist. “I’m not in the mood for your games tonight.”
She saw Rey’s pistol on the bedside table, gleaming under a lamp. Should she call the police? To tell them what? That her once-docile boyfriend was knocking too forcefully on the door of her bedroom? Next to the gun was Rey’s headphones, in a neat tranquil coil, and she reached for that instead.
She woke up the next day to breakfast in bed. He’d called in sick, he explained, scooping the charred tapa to her plate, then the perfect sunny-side-up, then the mound of fried rice dotted with a generous helping of toasted garlic. She smiled, nose a-twitch at the whisper of burnt oil, before she remembered that she was supposed to be mad. “Where did you sleep?” she asked through a yawn. He placed the serving spoon on a tissue and looked at her.
The woman was his age, Rey said, then a high school teacher in Ormoc who liked him and who seemed lonely. She lived in the same row of apartments where his team had stayed undercover for six months. In a few more years, the neighborhood would earn disrepute for the psychedelic lights that flickered in the faces of the bored-looking girls at each bar’s doorstep, but at that time, there was only one pub, a tiny, nameless beer house cum pool hall announced by a fence of ill-cut bamboo, some red bedraggled curtains, and a Coke sign. The woman was always in the pool hall, beating every shabu dealer and tambay who, up against a girl, played lackadaisical nine-ball until their dirty, crumpled bills were in her pockets, lost in a wager. Rey befriended her because she seemed well-liked. Friendly. She could have information on their target: the dubious organizations that had sprouted all over Ormoc, supposedly engaged in flood mitigation and reforestation projects but which intelligence reports said were just siphoning donor dollars to their comrades in the surrounding boondocks.
“I was lonely, with you so far away,” he said.
She asked for vinegar for the tapa. She now ate like them.
“It’s still me,” he said.
She resumed with a huge spoonful. “I’m famished for some reason.”
When Rey told her minutes later that the woman was pregnant, that she was back here, in Manila, Carolina was done eating and was pouring herself a cup of chamomile tea. “But I’ve ended it,” he said. “I promise.”
He tried to come closer to her but retreated when Carolina’s hands shot up. “No,” she said. “No.”
She looked out to the city outside the window. Rain, she thought, or wished. Please. She no longer had the energy for rage, but it was too bright outside, too self-assured. She looked at the blinds, drawn to the hilt.
Rey had since stood up and planted himself on a kitchen stool, his white singlet taut across his torso. He lifted an arm to wipe a non-existent tear from his cheek, and in a freshly visible spot near his stomach, Carolina espied a single strand of long jet-black hair.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Look at me having a drink and you’re just sitting there.” She stood up and headed to the fridge, from where she fished a bottle of San Miguel. She opened it, the hiss like a celebration, and poured all the contents into a tall glass. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Oops, hold on, call of nature.” Glass in hand, she tiptoed to the bathroom. There, she lifted the seat and flushed the toilet twice. She then opened the medicine cabinet and, from the formation of orange bottles, grabbed a small one in the middle. The blue pill disappeared in the golden liquid with a quick stir of her index finger, which she proceeded to lick.
Rey barely made it to the couch. His expression was beatific, mouth slightly parted as if sleep had arrived mid-yawn. The tall glass of what was once beer sat empty on the counter.
What now? Carolina had thought, just when Rey’s phone rang, the obstinate default ringing tone that had always bugged her. She squeezed the phone out from his pocket and let the ringing end before checking who it was. “Joseph,” it said. She called the number back and hung up when no one picked up. She checked his call history; the three most recent numbers yielded three serious-sounding men. Carolina called “Joseph” again; still no answer. She was supposed to go to the next number when something, an odd old lady hunch, told her to redial one last time.
In the middle of the conversation with the woman, Carolina’s mind flashed back to, of all things, one of the countless mind-numbing meetings at the corporate office in Sydney. A particularly excruciating wringer this one, presided by a mousy Corporate Communications intern whose final task for the summer was to present the department’s ideas for the annual report theme. As they feared, it became a catalog of bland motherhood statements on wellness, clever-sounding iterations of health is bloody wealth, and puns on “An apple a day—”
“Are you there?” the woman on the phone asked. “Hello? Where is Rey? Who are you again? Hello?”
Carolina closed her eyes, trying to imagine how this one looked based on her voice. She never had a chance to do this with Damian’s paramour, and she guessed now that that failure in part explained the power of the betrayal. It never achieved opacity; it remained shapeless. And how to overcome something you couldn’t even imagine?
“He lied to you,” Carolina said. “To us.” She ignored the woman’s demands to elaborate. Instead, she told her that Rey was in her unit, that he would be out cold for the next eight hours or so, and she could do anything she wanted. “Do you have a pen and paper with you?” Carolina asked, before dictating the address.
“Will you be there?” the woman asked.
Carolina shook her head, forgetting that the woman couldn’t see her. “The door will be unlocked.”
At a café in the boarding area now, another two years hence, Carolina leaned her head to one side, half-expecting a sturdy shoulder. Where did she read it that when we lose people, we lose them gradually, over the years, one aspect at a time? What would be next, she wondered—Rey’s hands, his chest, the shy dimple on his right cheek. Around her, boarding announcements sent people reaching for their carry-on bags, stretching arms and backs and pesky cricks, yawning away a short-lived dream.
The man from the next table asked for the time.
“Half past five,” Carolina said, without looking at him.
When she turned to look, the man was looking at her, too. “Hi, how are you?” she said.
“Good,” said the man, who was probably in his early 20s. “You?”
“Not so bad,” Carolina said. “Thanks.”
While fiddling with their phones, they would, every now and then, look at the other and smile. After a while Carolina turned to him and leaned closer. “I’m sorry, it’s driving me crazy. You look really familiar. Have we met?”
“Pagudpud,” the man said instantly, “a long time ago. We were in the same homestay.”
“There you go,” she said, heaving a sigh of relief.
The man smiled then returned to his phone.
After a while, she tried again. “What are you doing here? Well, obviously, you’re flying somewhere, of course, why else would you be here.” She laughed. “Where are you off to?”
The man said India. “You?”
“Madrid,” Carolina said.
“Going home?” the man asked.
She winced. “An aunt died. What about you? Is it business?”
The man appeared to think it over. “Sort of,” he said. “You alone?”
“Sort of,” Carolina said, and they laughed. She took a tiny sip of her coffee. “Whew, that’s sweet. I told them black.” She told him when she was maybe four or five, her mother used to take her to the market then if she carried her basket she would reward her with sweets. They would then sit in one of the benches facing the river. Quite lovely, looking back, but practically all her front teeth have fallen out by the time she was six. “When I see pictures today, I cringe.”
The man smiled. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “this is my friend Tom.” He tapped a neigbor whom she had taken for a stranger who by careless accident had sat too close.
“Carolina,” Carolina said, extending her hand. “Pleasure.” She returned to the first man. “I’m trying this thing where I don’t struggle so much—it’s the age—so I will just say it. I am so sorry I’ve forgotten your name so I must now ask for it again.”
The man looked surprise. “I don’t think I told you,” he said. “Did I?”
Carolina’s lips thinned; she blinked fast.
“We never got a chance to talk,” the man said. “You were always,” he hummed, “busy.”
“Was I?”
The man nodded. “It’s Paul.”
“Paul,” she cried. “Yes, I remember now, right. Of course. Paul.”
“I can see they’re a lot better now,” the man said after a while.
“What?” she asked.
“Your teeth,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “yes, I had a great orthodontist. And when I turned eighteen, I started to floss. It’s all good now.” She paused. “But when I have something sweet, like that 3-in-1 coffee, I feel my teeth weaken for some reason, like they’re about to fall off.”
The man nodded. “Someone told me, yeah, the body does remember these things.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” she said. Sensing the end of the conversation, she idly took out her boarding pass to double-check her boarding time and gate number. She was making a mental note to pick up something from the souvenir shop and pee and maybe get some real coffee, a robust cup of Robusta, when from the wide foyer came a thunder of heavy footsteps. A dozen or so uniformed cops were running to the boarding area, raucous amid the feeble paces of passengers and the uppity strides of pilots and flight attendants.
“I wonder what’s up,” Carolina said when she and the man turned to look outside.
“Yeah,” the man said.
She recalled his nice comment about her teeth and thought of something to say, anything, to return the compliment and not seem rude. “By the way,” she began, “can’t help but notice.”
He looked at her.
“Your accent, it’s great. I mean, Filipinos are all OK with English, of course, but you are very good. Really good. Nice and clear.”
“Thank you.” The man blinked. “Well, you’re from Australia, but you don’t seem to have an Australian accent.”
“I don’t, do I?” Carolina smiled. “I can put it on for you, if you want.”
The man’s tentative chuckle she shortly joined, until it didn’t seem tentative anymore, and he looked genuinely, unduly amused.
Acknowledgments
I trace the impetus of this book, which is to say its politics, to a column that I wrote for the Collegian in 2008. That position, nearly a decade later, happily still holds.
For the original anecdote that became the narrative spine of this book, I thank Victor Gregor Limon. For clarifying industry-related plot points, Nathan Espino. Thinking through the politics and aesthetics of the project owes much to J. Neil Garcia.
Some of the stories that I would mangle and coerce into a novel began in the classrooms of Butch Dalisay and Charlson Ong. For the vaguely academic companionship during the MA years, Dino Pineda, Tin Lao, Jov Almero, Pocholo Torres, Eva Beisinger, Katrina del Rosario, Joanna Parungao, Pipay Warren, Kyra Ballesteros, Lars Roxas, Netty Vizcocho.
I’m grateful to Philline Donggay for the abiding patience. Many of the ideas in this book were tested in long, mutually frustrating conversations with her, and the book’s closing dialogue is based on a real conversation that took place at her instigation.
Deep gratitude for reasons intellectual and alcohol-related to Christian Tablazon, Eric Nebran, Jael Mendoza, Vincenz Serrano, Chingbee Cruz, Adam David, Andrea Macalino, Allan Popa, Mabi David, Mixkaela Villalon, Carlos Quijon, Lawrence Bernabe, Jessrel Gilbuena, Joseph Reyes, Sheila Pesayco, Katt Pascual, Jeffrey Yap, Jasmine Cruz. For the many acts of kindness, including a last-minute reading of the manuscript, Mark Anthony Cayanan. For the enduring belief, Maro Torres. For the insatiable conversations, Melane Manalo and Jerrie Abella. For the constancy, Rowell Abobo, Kaka Santos, Lester Cruz, Melody Matibag. For the friendship that shade built, John Bengan, Jombits Quintos, Jeffrey Javier. For the endless generosity, from CCP to Ateneo, Jonathan Chua.
Significant work on the manuscript was completed during the M Literary Residency at Sangam House, outside Bangalore, from 2013 to 2014 and the Jayanti Residency in Ranikhet, in 2015. For the support and friendship, Michelle Garnaut, DW Gibson, Pushpesh Pant, Janice Pariat, Birgit Kempler, Anita Roy, Anupama Chandrasekhar, S. Anand, Venkat Shyam, Ishita Mallik, Aakriti Mandhwani, Govind Singh, and Guru, my favorite four-legged company. For letting my path cross with those of Arshia Sattar’s (and her Sanjay) and Rahul Soni’s, I thank this mad universe.
For shepherding the book into completion and beyond, Karina Bolasco, Kevin Dy, and my other friends at Ateneo Press. For all the help in matters creative and mundane, Julian dela Cerna. For believing in this manuscript, Gina Apostol and Jeremy Tiang.
I thank my family for letting me be (most of the time) and my nieces and nephew for bringing incommunicable joy into our lives: Sophia, Sairah, and Shareen Macatangay, and Jarren Diaz. This book is also for and, in many ways, by Andre Philip Loleng and Karen Beldia, company during the long, amorphous nights at our appointed spot in the corner of Ayala and Buendia. For the other friends I have made at PeopleSupport and VXI, the other quiet ones, thank you.
My other family, my allies, Alaysa Escandor, Alan Montemayor, and Om Narayan Velasco, without whom this book would not exist, I am grateful for the company and peace. Finally, this book is for Chari Lucero, the constant reader in my head, who was unfortunate enough to have encountered many of the stories here at their rawest, and to whom I owe everything, despite her persistent claims to the contrary.
