by Gina Apostol
“Home.”
“You’re locked out,” he said, looking at his blind watch. “The dorm’s closed.”
“You look strange,” I said. “Are you drunk?”
“I don’t drink. I don’t even eat,” he grinned.
“You also don’t sleep,” I said. “You have a red gash there. What’s on your cheek?”
I touched the gore on his face. It was paint. But even when he brushed it off, his face remained ghoulish against the light—his cheeks an impertinent rash.
“You should have gone with us,” he said. “It was fun.”
No one was around. Even the astronomer was gone: his light was out. It was late. There were only stars, a new moon, and this weak phosphorescence on the grass, which seemed to illuminate Jed.
“Strange,” I pointed out, “the grass is lit up.”
“Glowworms,” Jed said, settling on the grass. “They appear all over the jungles, you know. In my father’s forests, they give off a greenish light.”
“It’s eerie.”
I thought I heard a few birds, maybe an owl. Insects. The stealthy movements of a cat, a rat. I got up and walked around, pushed at leaves, a deserted snack bag.
“Sit down,” he said. “What are you nervous about?”
I sat beside Jed.
“What fascinates about the sky’s constellations?” I asked. “Why is it that people always look to the sky for signs, acting like people who are lost?”
“Is that what you do?”
“No.”
“So what is it? Why are you still here?”
“I’m figuring that out.”
OF COURSE, IT didn’t happen like that: all of the above has an indulgent recall. Phosphorescent worms? That’s a detail I gathered from this book, The Ordeal of Samar. Amid the narrative of a massacre of American soldiers by masked rebels in Samar in 1901, I found in me only a misplaced nostalgia, a sense of loss, in the American enemy’s descriptions of the country’s landscape, the wildlife I did not know—glassy fire ants, grassland moths, glowing phosphorescent worms. I imagine the illumination of the university’s rural light in this lurid setting, a kind of tropical grandeur: when in fact, if I saw Jed’s face, it was most probably by ordinary streetlight, if at all—a wan stippled glare. Maybe a few faint fireflies bustling about—and even that, though true, has the specious aura of art.
Memory is deception. There’s a pall under which intentions lie, gross as an astrologer’s ball. In fact, I don’t remember that first time clearly, or even calmly. If I dig through it more deliberately, I come up with surprising blanks in my memory. I can’t re-create the wetness of ground or measures of space, awkward movements or bend of light—specific facts elude my recall. Instead, fantastical, borrowed details recur—green, phosphorescent lies. Those offhand matters that should round off a significant moment with convincing clarity—these are jumbled, a general blur. Sharp grass, a cold nipple, clumsy pain, a stupid, blundering tongue. Pale generic claims, bones in my memory. I do remember strongly what I used to feel about Jed when he was impossible to get. For a time, the only woman he spoke to was Soli, and he barely remembered who I was. I have that distinct, sunlit memory of passing Jed with Soli one sharp, milk-eyed noon by the covered walk at the college. I remember that lost, malignant emptiness as I watched them, that wasteful coveting madness as I held up a lunch tray (or was it a book?) in my hand. A holograph: vacuum stasis of desire. But when I did eventually have him, memory falters. As if happiness, possession, were a blank, and only longing counts.
I HAVE HAD NIGHTMARES of interrogation, inflating my importance. In four-by-five, roach-scuttled rooms drenched with the smell of piss, soldiers’ cigarette and dry sweat. The smell of the low end of human achievement: the ability to shit, spit, kill. The smell of vomit, diuretic heat.
In one dream I confessed my actions, and I reported two things.
“Yes, yes. I painted signs on bridges!” I confessed.
“And number two?”
“I fucked the boyfriend of Saint Catherine of Siena!”
The prosecuting soldier, a well-shaved child, turned out to be, of all things, a stucco Della Robbia angel, a naked Florentine figure who laughed at me like nuts. Then I woke up. A stupid dream, patched from the vague dregs of a vacation home.
But at the time I began going about with Jed, mucking around near the astronomer’s tower, where one can see Sirius the Dog-Star in fitful spurts on clear evenings, in between the rustle of tall grass and the anxious repositionings of one’s weight, I thought nothing of the affair. I do not believe I even had dreams. I stalked him by the tower without guilt or illusion.
A night op was a kid’s job. A rebellion without profit. Cadres would not be caught dead painting slogans. A person like me, a mere sympa, as they say, a sympathizer with dim potential, had no business doing it either. Jed first drove me toward Kamias. It was past midnight; the place was almost empty. Jed parked his car across from a dull eatery; we moved into the shadows created by a nearby building. Emptiness had transformed the street, and the city looked disarmed. Traffic was its ugly armor, and without it, the city had all the terror of a trashed cigarette pack. We saw people entering a coffee shop across the street. At the next stoplight, a cigarette vendor lit up one of his goods. Near us, the cud of spit-upon stone, ragged edges of cheap road construction.
Jed walked before me, light brown hair obscuring his sight. He wore his leather Franciscan sandals and a white poet’s shirt, with the string collar. In profile, his silence acquired an almost sweet tapered beauty. For his part, I believe Jed was pained by it, by the predictable reception his looks claimed. The cigarette vendor, wrapped in smoke, stared.
Jed had this gaze of ardor, a light-flecked cherub’s brow, topped by golden curls and furrowed by his earnestness—he had a look of innocence, if you didn’t think too much about it—and for this he got away with many things.
I walked behind, alert to dangerous sounds, surprises.
He chose a wall near the overpass.
We weren’t organized—we didn’t even divide by syllables. We acted on impulse and took each letter as it came. We aimed too high—when I stepped back to look at our work, the letters slanted unnecessarily, like mortal heart lines in a cardiograph. We were messy, uneven. The M in the word was Jed’s height, the R in it was mine. I made a large, wet blob at a spot right before my temple. I was silent, jumpy. Sometimes Jed would paint with his body directly over mine: his arm outstretched against my chest, his breathing humid, disturbing. We began to paint in rhythm, fast, my hand with its paintbrush crossing over his sweaty sleeve. We finished a word. We had only begun the rising letters of the next when a car passed us with headlights full-blast.
The car stopped—and we abandoned our greasy cans. We ran. But it was just a motorist, coming home from workday stupor or carousing, blinding the world with his high beams. The man sped on. Jed cursed. Halfway to the car, we looked back. Our sign was ridiculous, an ad for the wrong thing, the opposite of our intentions—Imperyalismo! With the I in ibagsak acting as an exclamation point.
I’m embarrassed. It’s true—our juvenilia were cast in communist red. I suppose it reveals what was most ridiculous about me. A neurotic adventure, an erotic ploy. We found spray paint and sometimes used that, but we liked best the gory texture of dripping red. Not only that. We’d plan ahead. Once, we did it at the wall by my house’s Village, behind his mother’s place—by the gas-station corner, near Ah Me! Kitchenette, where William McKinley trickled into a rut, a dirt road. Jed’s elbow hit mine, and a bloody ghoulishness dripped on my breasts. He laughed. Later that night, he could not lick the bloody mess off, no matter how he tried, and for days my nipples ached, tender, from the comic stupor of his insistence, the pathetic rhythms of his obedient, ministering tongue.
We did it at Jed’s dad’s place, on James Buchanan Drive. The parking lot of the defunct American School at Roxas Boulevard. Our neighborhood playgrounds in Makati. The blind firewalls behind dead-
end malls. We slathered our signs on the cemetery where I used to take walks as a kid, the beautified grounds of American dead. We made our marks, like peeing dogs, near the conquistador church where, two years apart, Jed and I were baptized. An emerging autobiography, our very own talambuhay, motives still uncast. We were exhibitionists, we were artists. We made infantile moves on elementary haunts. We could predict where our work would be slashed over, whitewashed and revised: the town of Makati was vengeful, self-policing, the city of Pasig not so much. We’d take a drive in the night to survey our bloody narration: proper red marks all over the city, preludes to other acts.
At first, we never had encounters. You had to find the trick to it—deserted leafy places, usually after midnight. You had to be ready to run. We had near-brushes. Silly, delirious moments, with my heart thumping so hard that I heard it in my hand, my brow, a loud, regular drill, my body like a drum. A rush in my cunt, a delicate throbbing. We were never caught.
We became quick, minimalists. We stuck to one phrase, monotonous but efficient.
Afterward, there were cheap motels, ruined places with awful smells. We barely noticed where we were. We noticed our bodies, like well-known parts of an alphabet. As for me, I keep remembering him in pieces. This fractured vision. To dwell on it, his body—I feel something in me unravel, like a loose string in the mind. Kneecap, square and a bit nubby, whitened by soccer scars. His funny widow’s peak. Eyelashes, brown and whimsically long. Flat thumb and womanish calf. None of him comes together—a lewd, abstract recall. And then sometimes I remember some innocuous moment, like once when his stubbled hair chafed my chin and afterward the thin skin around my mouth was bruised, as if I had kissed gravel.
BY DAY, JED was with Soli. Nights, we’d meet by the astronomer’s tower, when the seers were asleep and the prophets had gone home. The group had a term for it, I forget, one of those abbreviations that truncated a radical’s brains. S.O., D.A., F.U., C.K. Like the terms “adultery” or “bigamy” among canonical Catholics, our acts had terse definitions and legal consequences in the group’s breviary, if anyone ever found out; the worst of it was, I would have nothing but my mind’s dishevelment with which to refute its gloss. We stuck to the charade of our silly syllabus, Imperyalismo, Ibagsak, a tired rant we overplayed. These night-op duties, a sodden responsorial psalm, were mere preemptive strikes, I knew, a dilatory prequel. I only thought about the end, that dull apartment in New Manila, for instance, for which Jed somehow had found keys. He was a Morga, after all—he could have owned the whole street.
The thing was, Jed loved the cloak and dagger, but he always planned ahead.
As the final couplet in our repertoire, Room 1616 was an appropriate disaster, fully furnished in trite nationalist tropes. There were lampshades made of woven buri and a creaky rocking chair in abacá. Puka shell figures gathered dust on rattan side tables: and fat tropical ants scuttled upon the tawdry room’s Manila hemp, oblivious of our devices. It occurs to me now as a twist of fate that the twined room’s metaphor, a mirrored number, foretold some awful symmetry. Lying in the single bed, listening to the whistling susurrus of Jed’s dreams while his broad wet arms lay warm upon me, I sometimes had this out-of-body feeling, as if I were not there, but someone was happy.
12
THAT LAST NIGHT, we had already done the job. We were about to throw away our paint cans. On a wall a few meters ahead, the man must have seen our mark, gleaming, still wet. I was horrified: I froze.
Jed barely looked at the policeman. It was as if he had long expected the scene, and he did the first take with cool self-control. He took the paint can and simply threw it in the bushes. Right in front of the policeman’s car. Then Jed took the brushes from me and threw them away, too.
I did not move.
The man came out of his car, and long-lost fears arose, of blue-sleeved policemen on a street, clashing with a crowd, a long time ago when I was a child. Manong Babe kept driving through the crowd shouting silent taunts at the police, and I watched as a man battered a woman with his club, while I clutched my stuffed animal. Ali Babar. A purple elephant with a cloth crown.
The man in uniform spoke in Tagalog.
Jed mumbled a word I did not catch. Then Jed took something from his pocket.
He showed it to the man.
He took Jed’s ID and peered at it with a flashlight. Even the cop’s fingers, piggy and beringed, looked somehow consequential. His flashlight shifted, from Jed’s ID to Jed’s face, looking up at Jed’s foreigner’s mask, bloodless in the searchlight except for the scarlet darkness of his mouth. I was surprised by the man’s gesture.
The policeman saluted Jed.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Mr. Morga, sir. May I escort you home?”
“No,” said Jed. “I have a car. Come.”
Jed turned to me: “Let’s go, Victoria Eremita. I’ll take you home.”
SHE CAME INTO the room, without knocking. Victoria Eremita had cooked a storm in the kitchen downstairs, from the looks of her traveling tray. As usual, the dwarfish boy, something of a good luck charm in the house, followed Eremita around, carrying extra cutlery and tablecloths. None of the servants who had stayed behind in New York walked about the house alone. Manang Lita and Manang Maring—the chief cook and the old caretaker—had not even bothered to come; they were home in Manila. Everyone wandered about the mansion in pairs or groups, as if solitude might curse them.
Eremita’s pink-shirted page had a huge head, with a brow broader, I swear, than my limp thigh. But his face was very kind (though distorted, kind of funhouse-frozen): and I always felt, when it stared at me, that something tragic had occurred, but I did not know what.
How is it possible to be called Soledad and be granted absolutely no privacy at all? People followed me to bed and picked up my pajamas, they ran my bath and picked at my shirts, looking for missing buttons, if not missing persons. What were they guarding with such clueless care? At times, I imagine that if they could they would invade my damaged brain, with their soups and their ladles and their rice cakes, and somehow serve up my mysteries with clotted cream.
I smiled at Eremita and that stunted creature, who was not shy at all. For the life of me, I could not remember its name, right there on the tip of my tongue. It was in fact no infant. He, the juvenile dwarf, was coming into an awkward age: the kind of obese you could not put your finger on, only vaguely fat, a tween with incipient man-stink, and completely oblivious of his imploding glands. He clattered into the room with his utensils and smashed them onto a table, as if still practicing his gross motor skills. Someone had manicured his bitten fingernails.
“It’s so dark, Ma’am Sol!” he exclaimed, in a surprisingly low voice. He always had this tone, addressed to me with his fingers in a formal pose, as if ready to chastise or pray—a tone of deep pity, but a look of awful respect.
Eremita, silent as always, flipped the switches.
“It’s so dusty, Ma’am Sol!” he reproached. “You are not afraid of asthma?”
Eremita started vigorously on a table I had not even noticed, wiping in circles at its clean surface.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, to both of them.
“The merienda is good,” he pronounced, now staring straight at my arms.
And under his glare, I felt instinctively again for my wrists, their soft curdle and tumid scars.
“Does it still hurt,” he said, as he always did, with that barefaced look of compassion, quite misplaced, I thought, for it was he who was a dwarf, and I who could silence him if I wished.
I smiled at him, trying to remember his name.
“No,” I said. “I am healed.”
“That is good!”
And he held up a thumb, for victory, before lumbering away with Eremita, trundling the wheeled tray back toward the hall, the trail of sweat and musk in their wake underlining the persistence of their humanity. I heard the elevator as they descended, an antique rumble, like a moan.
Inocentes
.
That was his name. Born a week after my birthday, the winter solstice—Holy Innocents’ Day—an orphan salvaged from a pile of castaways.
EDWIN USED TO taunt me with my name. Sol, he said: short for solipsism.
“So you had a revelation,” Edwin said. “Tell me about it.”
He was sitting beside me, metal bit in his caged mouth, his fat glasses flattening his face. The effect of his late bloomer’s braces was an awkward shower of spit, sometimes right smack on his lenses.
We were leafing through different issues of the same literary review. A dark wall of books framed the neat brick before us.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure something out.”
“You know that God spits out the lukewarm,” he said, spewing out ungodly spit.
I felt alternately like cleaning up his glasses or waiting in fascination until his eyeballs drowned.
“But you’ve never even been. Not even close to ingestion.”
Edwin turned the page, passing over a blind article on myopia.
“There’s more to spit than meets the eye,” he said.
“Beg your pardon,” I said. “More to spit than what?”
“More to it, I said. Than meets the eye. Are you deaf?”
“I think I should quit,” I said.
It seemed to me we spoke in code, maybe because it betrayed the absurdity of what we were doing if we actually divulged what it was.
“About time,” he said, nodding. “You have discovered why you are with them, of course?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I have not.”
“Solipsism,” he said. “Sol for solipsism.”
Edwin opened up to a full-page ad for a bestselling book, about dreams or dentistry.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You’re the worst kind of recruit.”
“Thanks.”
“You joined the group as a form of soul-searching, bogged down in existential depression over some Oedipal mess.”
“Ha-ha.”
“You want to find peace with your childhood, and once you do, when you return to the lap of luxury, radical action will look like a sport, an absurd, old-fashioned toy: when in fact, joining a Maoist study group, or whatever you prefer to call it, no matter how dumb your intentions, is the only thing you’ve ever done that grants you relevance.”
