Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural

by Lara Saguisag

  Barbie sighed again. “At least you rescued the Professor. Waiting for a warrant could have cost him his life. And you did find him in that house. We can charge Salvacion with kidnapping.”

  “Salvacion could say that he was helping his friend and the Prof says he was abducted by ghosts with three eyes.”

  I walked away from the doctor’s office. Barbie slowly followed. I hadn’t told her about the weird stuff that happened in Bulacan. Salvacion was up to something bigger than that. Ancient immortal or possessed lunatic, we had to do something. God help us.

  I thought of Dr. DeMarco’s question. Prof. Dizon was punished for rejecting his birthright. Perplexing and pathetic it may sometimes be, this was still the land of my blood.

  “We have more work to do,” I told Barbie. “That stupid show is still on the air.”

  Sea Change

  Virginia M. Villanueva

  IN MY DREAM, I am ten years old once again, and we are celebrating my birthday at Mauboh Beach bordering the northern side of the island of Jolo. I have a red, blue, and white plastic beach ball given to me by Amboh, my mother. It is so huge that my thin arms can hardly go halfway round, but so light that I can hold it up by its nozzle and stopper.

  “It is a beach ball,” Amboh says, “not to be brought into the water.”

  But I want to play in the warm shallows and I can’t bear to leave my ball behind for other children to play with. So I watch for the moment when Amboh goes back to the coconut grove where our food is kept and I run to the sea with my ball the instant her back is turned. I frog kick blind, the ball blocking my front view. Before I know it, I am already beyond the shallows. The ball is wet so my left hand cannot hold on to its slick surface. The nozzle slips from my right hand and the ball dances away from me in the blink of an eye. It skims the surface, carried by a powerful southbound current and a light wind blowing in the same direction towards the open sea.

  The undertow sucks me downward and southward, too, but the colorful ball is now far ahead, attracting all eyes away from me. It is already far out when Amboh’s attention is caught by the cries of the onlookers, pointing at the ball skimming towards the horizon. Her eyes search the beach and the sea.

  “Tima! My child, Radjatima! Radjatima!”

  EVEN UNDERWATER, I can hear the panic in my Amboh’s screams, but I cannot answer her for the water is in my mouth and nose and eyes. I am so tired, my arms and legs are leaden and everything is green and growing dark. Before I black out, powerful hands lift me towards the surface. I clutch at streaming green hair and hold on like a vise but I am unconscious by the time I am laid on a flat rock.

  “Remember me, child, remember me.” That is the last thing I hear before I black out. At this point, I always wake up from the dream.

  It was there that they found me, prone over the slight incline of the rock’s surface. They said I was lucky to have been washed up in that position—the water was still draining out of my nose and mouth—but I was luckier still the Mermaid had not gotten to me ahead of the rescuers because that pile of sand and boulders was her exclusive domain: Mermaid’s Rock, a mile south of Mauboh Beach. Tausugs who lived beside the sea, and in Jolo, this was practically everybody, knew about the curse of the Mermaid, though they talked about it only in whispers. If you displeased her, you would die by drowning in the sea, or you would slowly waste away with a mysterious disease which had no cure, your belly bloating with the rise and fall of the tide. This was a fate reserved for the adults. She liked children, though, and once in a while, she would take one to be her playmate in that wonderful playground under the sea.

  I came to in a ward full of sunshine pouring in through wide square windows. A shy student nurse in a stiff, white apron over blue-striped uniform was already preparing me for doctors’ rounds. I was all eyes about the group that was approaching me.

  “Is this the lucky young lady from Mermaid Rock?” A wizened gnome in white, with a bald head and twinkling eyes, asked no one in particular.

  The intern who had “saved” me at the Emergency Room presented me to the gnome, reciting the facts of my case and the steps he took to drain my lungs and pump back the air into them.

  “Prompt and sustained CPR prevented hypoxia of the brain.” My mind recorded what was being said without understanding a word.

  “Lucky girl,” murmured the old doctor as he swiftly shone a penlight into my eyes, peered into my throat and ears, listened to my lungs, and tapped my chest. After saying I was perfectly healthy, he shook my hand, while behind him, the intern winked and the nurses smiled at me.

  After the rounds, the intern came back to see me. He handed me a plain white envelope and inside it was a plastic sachet with a clump of green hair coral.

  “I found this tightly clasped in your hand. You resisted every effort to remove it so I guess it must mean something to you.”

  Once again, my senses were filled with the sound of the roaring sea and the vision of long green hair waving in tendrils around me. In the whitewashed hospital ward full of sunshine and antiseptic smells, cheerful nurses and doctors, the sea, with its secrets of dangerous currents, sea weeds, and mermaids, was a world that had fled to the farthest corner of my mind. It surfaced with the disturbing envelope in my hand. When I reached home, I dried the hair coral under the sun and hid it. Later, it turned brown and brittle and broke up into fragments. I stirred the bits and pieces, and found several long strands of wavy green hair. I blew the brown particles away but wound the hair around my finger. The curl I kept hidden in its original envelope among my childhood treasures just as I kept the memory of the near drowning deep in the recesses of my mind.

  It has been many years since my accident at Mauboh Beach. Now, at thirty six, I have a family and a career which are the envy of my friends and relatives. Why then this restlessness which has crept into my life this past year? I cannot put a finger exactly into the nature or cause of my ennui.

  “Why do I feel so dissatisfied with work nowadays?” I ask my colleagues.

  “Our marriage seems so empty,” I say to my husband. “It’s just one big façade.”

  “Talk to me,” I demand. “Say something, anything. You are so distant, now I know how it feels to be marooned by myself on an island.”

  “I’m no better than a robot praying five times a day,” this to an imam friend.

  Most disturbingly, I begin to have the dream once more and with increasing frequency; I wake up nights drenched in my own perspiration.

  I undergo a battery of tests and even go to Manila to go through still more tests. I am given a clean bill of health. My psychiatrist tells me to go home, relax, and have some fun. But she is most insistent that I go home. “You know the maxim, Splint them where they lie. It goes for all kinds of fractures.”

  When I reach home, I attend poetry and painting classes and go swimming at Mauboh Beach early in the morning on weekends. My excursions are all solitary; my husband does not go with me. “Someone has to mind the store,” he quips.

  So I am by myself one Sunday morning on a picnic at Mermaid’s Rock. On a sliver of sandy beach, I build a sand castle on top of a flat boulder. When I have finished, I climb halfway up to get a piece of paper from my backpack to serve as a flag. When I go back to my castle, I find a creditable flag on a stick, waving at the turret’s top. In the open courtyard, small shells are arranged radially like flagstones.

  “What a good idea to use these tiny shells. Now, if only we have plants around the castle,” I say aloud. Soon, sea weeds of several kinds drift to the beach.

  “Marvelous,” I am lavish with praise. The air hums with positive vibrations.

  Again, I am alone that Sunday dawn when I go out to the tip of a promontory of rocky land to paint a skyline of Jolo. I work fast, penciling an outline so I can put the colors in before the light changes. When I turn to reach down for the paints, the box is missing. I look around, scratching my head, when I hear a low laugh that ends in a giggle.

  “A-hah!
I know you’ve taken my paints and hidden them,” I say out loud, thinking that a child is the culprit. Silence for while, then more laughter.

  “I see you! I see you! And I’m coming over to catch you,” I say, mock ferocious, as I run towards an outcrop of rocks. Suddenly, the paints are thrown at my feet and I hear a splash. I look in the direction of the splash for the fallen child but all I see is a huge fish tail cleaving the water. In a flash, it disappears beneath the waves. I am a bit shaken as I gather up my paints and easel.

  During the painting class that Monday, I paint an underwater scene of a mermaid, green hair streaming as she plays with a red, white, and blue beach ball beside a huge black rock undulating in the sea green water. I give her green eyes, dancing with mischief, and a laughing mouth.

  “Hello! Where did that come from? She’s beautiful,” says a voice from behind. Startled, I turn around to see a man who tells me in all seriousness, “Her name is Serenata.”

  After the painting session, Serenata’s friend, who is named Mike, and I get acquainted over coffee and dja, a crispy type of rice cake.

  Mike is an American Lebanese in his late twenties, slight and pale, with fine, languid hands and weird, intense dark eyes. He is a parasitologist in the WHO, assigned to Jolo to research on the resistant strain of malaria that attacks the brain, sometimes causing the afflicted to run amok, or go streaking naked around the town, or just be plain delusional. As Mike goes on talking, I begin to think he is touched in the head: he claims to be a poet who spends nights on a banca, composing odes to a mermaid who told him her name was Serenata.

  “She looks exactly like your painting, only I have not seen her in daylight,” he tells me.

  For the next few weeks, Mike drops by our house on his way to Mauboh Beach, ostensibly to work, but really to keep a lookout for the mermaid. His assistant, a young man named Jamalul, a rogue, but a likable one, eggs him on. Jamalul and I live in Barangay Lambayong, a section of Jolo just beside Mauboh.

  Finally, Mike tells me he wants to go through the ceremony of turol taymah where the prospective bridegroom brings the dowry to the bride.

  “You must come with me as my sponsor,” he begs. “There is no one among our colleagues who can vouch for me to my Serenata.”

  Marriage to a mermaid? My mind struggles to make sense of it.

  “All I ask from you is to keep an open mind,” Mike pleads. “You are, after all, living in this bit of South Sea paradise where the weird and the wonderful happen and are accepted as ordinary.” At my nod, he spins a tale which, somehow, resonates deep inside me.

  “You know that it is part of my job to spend nights in Mauboh, catching live specimens of the Anopheles mosquito. The WHO is into research on a mutant strain which has the ability to breed over salt water.

  “One night when the moon was full, and I was alone, half asleep over my nets and flashlight, I heard a woman singing. Her voice did not come from the houses on stilts in the shallows, but was carried to me, over the sea, by a light wind from the south. Using my binoculars to make a sweep, I saw something which made me hold my breath in wonder.

  “It was a mermaid, sitting on a boulder at Mermaid’s Rock, singing a popular native tune, and lifting up her arms and hands in the graceful movements of the pangalay.”

  Mike’s voice is hushed and his eyes are shining.

  “I was in a quandary; I wanted to go nearer but I didn’t want to lose sight of the mermaid by putting my binoculars down to man the oars. But I had no choice; I tried to paddle as fast as I could to Mermaid’s Rock.” He heaves as he recalls his effort.

  “Even before I was near enough to see with my bare eyes, the singing had stopped and I knew the mermaid was gone.”

  “What did you see through the glasses?” I ask urgently. “Did she have green hair?”

  “I could tell that she was tall and graceful and her hair cascaded around her body to reach well below her hips, perhaps to her knees. But I could see no colors in the moonlight, only light and dark. Her arms gleamed white in the moonlight.

  “I knew she had hidden herself nearby. I was so enchanted; I recited to her love poems straight from my heart. I had never been so inspired in all my life.”

  “Perhaps what you saw was a ghost. Ghosts are commonplace to us and they float over land and sea, alike.” I try to be down-to-earth.

  “May I, then, be always haunted,” Mike smiles.

  He admits that it was the first and only time for him to have seen the mermaid though he has heard her singing during several of their meetings.

  “Most of the time, I read the poems I write for her alone. Sometimes, I read Kahlil Gibran to her in the original Arabic.” He flushes as he catches me trying to keep a straight face.

  “And, yes, once she spoke to me. When I asked her name. But she hid behind a boulder as she told me her name was Serenata.”

  Mike is new to the place and, although a Muslim, he is a foreigner. Could he be suffering from culture shock? I bring him to Maas Alam, the oldest man in our community, who has firsthand accounts of love affairs between mermaids and mortal men. I do not know who, between Mike and me, is the more curious. We amble on a sandy trail beneath the coconut trees and cross, single file, a spidery bridge which seems to go on forever on slender mangrove trunks thrust into the sea bed. Finally, we reach the house which is a bamboo and thatch affair, made larger by verandahs around the hut: three are roofed, one is just a stretch of bamboo floor with railings to keep the children from falling off. We are welcomed by our hosts with fragrant black coffee and sizzling banana fritters.

  Maas Alam is a vigorous and regal sixty-year-old with an air of great dignity. He wears a turban with a hound’s tooth pattern in black and white. His brown seamed face is still handsome, with a straight narrow nose and a wide mouth clamped around a pipe. The most arresting feature is his eyes which glint with a shrewd light between lids narrowed from squinting at the sea.

  Deliberately, he removes the pipe and places it on a shallow copper bowl beside his knee as he sits cross legged over a beautifully woven mat. Mike and I face him, sitting on the other end of the mat. The mat is wide enough so we are free of the tobacco fumes from the pipe. But the roofed veranda is so large that we can see the sea through the bamboo floor at the periphery of the mat. The waves roll gently in a hypnotic way and the house on stilts sways lightly. I feel a rush of vertigo which I try to shake off as I listen to Maas Alam. Not so with Mike: he listens raptly to the old man.

  “I had a cousin who was brought by a mermaid to her cave under the sea. He said it was like being in Paradise but eventually, he grew weary of the water and he missed the land. Before she set him free, she blinded him so that all his life, he would never see anything except her image.” Maas Alam says gravely.

  “And there was this case of a young and handsome datu. From the time he was a toddler until he grew up, he had always been bathed naked by maiden slaves. He liked to bathe under the stars on the open porch of their astanah built over the sea. One night, when his bathing attendant went inside to get more hot water, he felt soft, cool hands reaching from behind to soap and rinse him with warm, perfumed water. The datu’s skin was white, smooth, and hairless from rubbing bat’s blood on it during his adolescence. But the hands and arms that reached around to caress his chest and belly were fairer than his, with skin so translucent, he could almost see the blood coursing through the fine capillaries on the wrists and the fingers. He dared not turn to face his strange attendant though she crooned to him as she bathed him. She wooed him in a soft mellifluous voice, telling him of unheard of delights under the sea. Though he enjoyed her ministrations, not once did he look at her or talk to her during her many visits. Eventually, she grew tired of courting him and left him alone. But his longing for her remained till the end of his days.”

  Apo Sofiya, the local shaman, cackles from her corner. She is the witch in every childhood fairytale, with white and gray hair in a loose topknot so that long strands fall about her thin f
ace. She is clad in a long-sleeved sablay which is closed in front by three round pins of real pearls set in gold of intricate design. Below the blouse, she wears loose, cotton pajamas called sawwal. She has been quiet so far though she listens intently, her sly, beady eyes focusing on the men. Now, as she speaks, we can see a perfect set of shining black teeth from chewing betel nut.

  “It’s the men who are afraid of the weird and the mysterious. That’s why they’re afraid of mermaids. But just because a mermaid is half human, half fish does not make her less of a woman than a mortal. Time was, when my husband and I had the whole Mauboh to ourselves, one could take a walk at midnight under a full moon and see many mermaids on the beach, gossiping and playing like ordinary women. They love sugarcane, you know. Some could be seen washing clothes, and yes, even diapers and menstrual cloths, whether theirs or some mortal friends’, I never knew.”

  At the mention of these female functions, the men look uncomfortable and Mike stands up abruptly to make his departure.

  Mike is deep in thought as we leave the old man’s house-on-stilts over the sea. I have to take his elbow and propel him over the spidery bamboo bridge swaying with the waves lest he fall into the sea. When we reach my house, we discuss his plans for the turol taymah. I have the feeling that he is having second thoughts about the whole thing; he is struggling to come to a decision. As we sit down over some more banana fritters and hot, black coffee, Mike rambles on.

  “My heart tells me that this is real, and beautiful and true while my mind questions if I didn’t imagine it all?” He bows his head and covers his face with his fine, elegant hands. Then he stands up suddenly, nearly spilling the hot coffee, and waves those hands in the air. I do not take his dramatics so seriously; Mike, after all, claims to be a poet.

  “If only Serenata were content to be a gentle muse! But she’s a force that drives me in my waking hours and haunts me in my dreams. I am afraid to surrender to her but I cannot bear to lose her. She terrifies and fascinates me at the same time.”