On a balmy August afternoon, walking down the hall towards your next class, you run into Tin. She greets you warmly and invites you to coffee after class. You accept nervously and wonder if she knows.
When you get there, you wonder if it’s all a big mistake going there: Tin and her band mates are on the couch in a bustling Starbucks, sipping their frappucinos and lattes. They kiss you on the cheek, turning their heads and barely skimming the side of your face. You smile tentatively and settle on a seat. Then you notice that someone’s missing. “Where’s Eva?” you ask.
“Oh,” said Dori, “her boyfriend picked her up. They’re running late.”
“Speaking of boyfriends,” said Bethany, flipping her hair over her shoulder and turning to Tin, “where’s Carlos?”
“Oh, Susan knows him as ‘Ruiz,’ remember?” giggles Tin. “A high school thing, I’m sure. You know how co-ed schools are – even the girls call each other by their last names.” She takes a dainty sip of her frappucino. “Anyway, I’m afraid we’ve broken up. Just last week.” You see tears shimmering in the corner of Tin’s eyes.
You pause. “I’m sorry,” you say carefully. “It must be really hard on you.”
Tin looks at you. “It is, isn’t it? But still, with the band and my studies, I’m sure it won’t be that hard getting over him. And what about you? How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” you say. Your fingers start tingling. It’s too cold here, and you wish you brought your jacket. “Just finishing up some stuff.”
“You’re graduating in March, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Dori looks up, craning her neck towards the door. “Oh, here they are!” She waves, beckoning Eva and her boyfriend over.
You twist around in your seat to look.
Time seems to stop as your carefully constructed world suddenly crashes around your ears.
“Hi, everyone,” says Eva brightly. “I’d like you to meet my boyfriend, David.”
1. Close your eyes
YOU FIND YOURSELF sinking. Days and nights hold no meaning to you. You don’t remember the last time you went to class, the last time you ate or took a bath, the last time you left your room. Your curtains seem permanently drawn over your windows, and the ribbons of light that weave their way through the curtains seem weak and watery.
It started raining last night. You’ve been changing so often that you no longer notice that even your feet have started to transform into glass. You lie in bed, listening to the storm outside your window, watching the shifting gradients of light peek underneath your curtains. Once, you opened the window as a blast of water came in. Your fingers were fragile then, and in your hurry to close the window, you managed to shatter one of them. Now, when you look at your hands, the smallest finger on your right hand is missing. Pieces of it are still on the floor.
You’ve turned off your mobile, and yanked the cord off your landline. Your sheets have already copied your outline, the depressions on your mattress fitting your body perfectly. You wonder how long it will take for you to die.
You can feel it happening already: your hands have permanently transformed into glass, and patches of your stomach and thighs are also transparent now, as if the skin were slowly revealing that it was never flesh and blood underneath, but some fragile material that was ready to shatter. You run a tentative finger across the places where your body was not your body anymore, and wish that your fingertips could still feel. Instead, glass glides against glass, the smooth surfaces clinking when in contact.
One night, you wake up, unable to move. Your legs have already morphed into glass, heavy limbs seemingly carved out of crystal. You try to shift your weight, and realize that you can’t even get up anymore. You want to cry, but lately your tears have started becoming crystalline before they even fall There are thin cuts around your eyes and down your cheeks where the tears have traced their path.
Someone starts pounding on your door. You don’t know what time it is, but you know it’s late enough that most visitors would be home already. You want to say something, but your throat is dry and your voice can barely come out.
Ruiz bursts into the room and staggers to your bed. You can smell alcohol on his breath, on his clothes. He quickly peels off his shirt, his pants, and climbs into bed with you. His fingers and lips quickly do their work, and a burning pleasure runs through your body as he prepares to mount you. He takes you almost by force, and you cry out in pain as you hear a sharp crack.
The sound seems to bring Ruiz back to his senses and he looks at you with a strange, almost horrified, clarity. “What – oh God – oh Sue, Sue! I’m so sorry!” He climbs off your body and you notice, in the pale light, the crack that runs from your toes to your knees. His fingers reverently skim the thin chasm, the break in the glass. He kisses the crystalline wound, and cuts his lip on the sharp edge.
You wish you could pull him down for a last kiss. As if reading your mind, he moves towards you. The metallic taste of his blood is on your tongue. He lies down beside you, curving around you, fitting you inside the circle of his arms, a serpentine embrace. You feel almost warm again.
As the night slowly slithers into dawn, the familiar cold arrives again. You wish you could say goodbye to Ruiz, but he is sleeping peacefully, his mouth open in a small O as he breathes small puffs of steam against your glass cheek. You close your eyes as you sink beneath the surface of your skin, finally disappearing into the darkness just as the sun creeps into your room.
IAN ROSALES CASOCOT
THE PEPE REPORT
Ian Rosales Casocot’s short stories and essays have been published in The Sunday Times, Sands and Coral, Dapitan, Tomas, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, Philippine Daily Inquirer, SunStar Bacolod, and MetroPost. He writes a weekly column, “The Spy in the Sandwich,” for StarLife Magazine of the Visayan Daily Star, and maintains A Survey of Philippine Literature, the comprehensive website resource on Filipino writings and literary criticism. Based in Dumaguete City, he has won two Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and an NVM Gonzalez Prize for his fiction, and was chosen as one of the authors for the UBOD New Writers Series 2003 by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
In “The Pepe Report,” Casocot turns the spotlight on the Philippine National Hero, Jose Rizal, with startling results.
MORNINGS, HE KNEW, were given to the receding echoes of nightmares, always with the same creeping dread. He wakes—on the dot, without fail, without explanation, at 07:03:46—with the sounds of phantom rifle fire, as from a firing squad, still thick inside his head. It rings in his ear as his body jerks, torso twisting in a rough instant. When he comes to, he finds himself always facing the sun.
It is the dream again.
When his breathing subsides, he notices the sweat pouring from his forehead and nape mixing with his drool to create wet spots on his compillow, soon quickly absorbed into the sheen of things. Compillows were the byword, these days, for the best of sleep technology: it absorbed everything, except nightmares. Perhaps he could do something about that, he decides sleepily.
In the haze of the slowly recognizable room, Dr. Domingo Lamco still smells the gunpowder springing from his nightmare. He finds it increasingly uncomfortable that in a life that bridges too easily the blur between reality and surreality of CGLives, the definition of things overlaps. The odor, for example, seems to be everywhere—he knew there wasn’t any—and the sulfur has seeped even into his bedclothes and waking moments. It soon disappears as the cobweb of sleepiness eases into the morning light, something which assures him everything is all right.
After a while, he begins to stir. He feels his ulcers turn, and proceeds to fiddle with the SkedMonitor near his headboard. It buzzes, and then his program begins. Somewhere, the room hums, and he hears the kitchen quietly programming what will be his breakfast.
“Good morning, Pepe,” the room drones in a soft, almost velvety tone.
“Mo
rning, Monroy,” Dr. Lamco replies groggily. “What’s for breakfast?”
“The usual,” Monroy says. “Tomorrow is a big day for you, Pepe.”
Pepe. How he hates it when machines become much too familiar. He has not heard that childhood nickname for a long time; how has Monroy tapped into that secret? This is a question he should not even ask anymore. It was his hands, after all, that invented Monroy and the other Room Avatars that cater to the whims and everyday demands of carbonans the world over. There were no personal secrets for these all-seeing monitors—they were machines the equivalent of one’s very soul.
Dr. Lamco does not say anything more, not wanting to spoil the only routine for the day he likes—something that ends with quick masturbation in the shower. He knows, by heart, the details of the next few minutes: perfect eggs sunny side up and runny, perfect bacon, perfect rice. All genetically modified to remove the last form of evil: cholesterol. Then comes morning news and coffee, and finally the brief yogic meditation to ease in what’s to come.
He gets up, and feels the sharp old pain in his back—and not as he has always imagined it. He draws bated breathing, and understands why. He is, after all, to face the Parliament of Elders in less than twenty-four hours to deliver his commissioned report. As the day goes on and the appointed hour draws nearer, Dr. Lamco feels he has no words to say.
Not the kind the Elders will like.
The genetic investigation has been quite successful, there is no denying that. He remembers, by the very skin of his excitement, every waking, careful moment of five years and four months he spent working out the scrupulous investigations of Project Waking—and now….
Now the truth has finally been borne out into the open, or at least for him who has seen the morphing of the being. Given what he knows now, he no longer has any idea what to report, or whether he has the words to say what he must.
WAS THE REVERED 19th century Philippine hero, Jose Protacio Rizal de Mercado, a homosexual?
That had been the question—something that drove the Ministry of Historical Authentication to a fit. In the miasma of faint morning light, all he can tell himself is that nothing matters anymore. Not even the question for which he holds the answer right in his hands: all his research, millions of bytes of genetic code analysis, film registers, and anato-physiographics, in two platidiscs.
Again, and for the longest time, Dr. Lamco feels this is not right—the way the world has come to be.
First, there are no more “women,” whatever that terminology may mean, not even an acceptable mythology of them. He knows that to even think of the finality of their having once existed is treason—Why, the mere suggestion defied logical history! his mind readily corrects.
Now, there are no dead anymore either. No eternal rest for those whom recent years deem too important to cast only within the shadowed records of history—small bytes crunching great lives. Sometimes he wishes such is not the case.
Yet he cannot recall what it was like, as the ancient folk used to say, “in the old days…,” when things had been, as he liked to stretch his misinformed imagination, “okay.” All his life, he has believed in the Gospel of Man—its tenets truthful, as all Men have been trained to understand the world.
He is never one to question anything. His last contact with fairy tales had been with “Uncle” Santi—all 165 years old of him—when he had taken to the old man like young boys take to natural storytellers. Uncle Santi, senile and given to telling tall tales, had regaled him with tales of “women,” humanoid species of another world with different senses of order. Domingo was 12, barely two years after graduation from the Reproduction Center.
Santiago was his Father’s Godfather, one of the original old relics—they, it is said, who still have wisps of recollection of the world before the Great Eruption.
“Of course, there was chaos everywhere,” Uncle Santi would begin, for example. “Not like now.” With this his eyes would drop in nostalgia, but quickly slipping into barely disguised sarcasm “… Now, we have real progress.” He would spit into the small plasticon that sprang from his mobile ergo. The ergo hovered, its upholstery already brown with age.
Dr. Lamco remembers his boyish questions. “Uncle, what’s a woman?” is an example.
“A woman! Pepe, the questions you ask!”
He liked the way Santi would call him by that obscure nickname.
“A woman is a creature of such wile and violation,” the old man said, and he remembered Uncle Santi smiling—but with a turn in his eyes that shaded fast into a brown tang. “We did away with them, my boy. By Science! By God! The world is ultimately a better place without them.” Santi laughed, sounding sad.
“You don’t believe in what you’re saying.”
Uncle Santi snorted. “I’m too old even for my own fairy tales.”
“It was only a question.”
“And the answer will do nobody any good,” Uncle Santi cut back. This time his eyes flared a bit. Suddenly he looked tired. “You’re young, Pepe. Only twelve? I don’t even remember that age anymore. I shall die soon. It is best, I think, that my stupid answers die with me.”
He laughed, weakly, again.
“Stop planting fairy tales into the boy’s head, Godfather,” Domingo’s Father said. To Domingo, he said: ‘Women,’ my boy, never existed, although their myths survive, as they must. It is an unconscious reach for primordial archetypes. Jungian, one might say, and that says everything you need to know about the lies of 20th century psychology. Remember what your Alpha Mentor told you in the Center? Truth Number One?”
“Truth One…All good reproduction is the result of Clonaid Science.”
“And?”
“There are only male species in this world.”
“Right.”
But there was too much boyish rebellion to let matters rest; there was the very need to push. “But, Father, isn’t that tantamount to declaring, by virtue of oppositional logic, that if we have the categorical male, we also maintain, even just a concept, of the categorical…‘female’? Like…We call out ‘light.’ For that to exist, there must also be ‘dark.’ Isn’t that so?”
“The boy’s mad,” Uncle Santi said, smiling.
“All of 12, and already ready for Grand Philosophy,” his Father smiled back. He looked at Domingo. “There is an answer, in time, boy. Soon you will begin to understand that our lives depend on the precarious balance of truths. Belief is the only thing we have. Without that, and the Maintaining Infrastructures to sustain it, we are nothing. Maybe it is best to leave such questions, at least for a while?”
“Yes, Father. I’m sorry, Father.”
“You are the spawn of my cells. The product of my DNA. I am both your Father and—if we have to be sacrilegious about it, your mother.”
“Yes, Father. I’m sorry.”
“Good. Now say goodbye to Santi.”
“Goodbye, Uncle Santi.”
“Goodbye, my Pepe.”
Santi died soon after. And now here was Domingo: the venerable historical scientist Dr. Lamco.
In the growing brightness of his quarters, he wishes he had known more of Santi’s answers. Recognizing futility, he prepares for the Parliament of Elders. “Gentlemen,” he rehearses his speech, as he breakfasts on his sunny-side up. “You asked me a few years ago to provide you an answer to a question. I’ve arrived at a most definite conclusion…”
He suddenly feels all the world fading away from certainties, runny as the yolk yellowing his plate.
THE NEXT DAY, the routine becomes more pronounced. He has already woken up, at the same hour, still with dreams of sulfur and twisting torsos. Dr. Lamco recalls another nightmare where an odd, young creature named Gertie bashes his head with a bat, and shouts, “That will teach you about stealing my cards!” He remembers the quick blow right below the temple, and how he had startled to his feet, bedclothes tangled around him. It took him a while to realize there were no bat, and no violator of his space.
H
e did not know what the creature was talking about. Before he could protest, it had huffed out of the room, its hair in a strange pair of braiding tuffing out its head, its purple chrome dress disappearing outside with the pneumatic sigh of the door. The creature looked like a carbonan. But strangely different. And named Gertie? How does one come up with such strange names and dreams? Probably a remnant of Santi’s tall tales.
There is always the new surgery he can opt for: a delicate slicing of certain memories and predilections for strange dreams. A soft procedure, but not one to easily resort to. People are still like that: sentimental for memory, a weakness really. So unmanly. Impractical, like emotions. The brain, after all, is a controllable tissue, mapped out completely for all its functions, brainwaves harnessed, graphed, interpreted.
Yet somehow Dr. Lamco has an idea of what the creature might mean by “cards”—perhaps old postcards of a tender past, so long ago, detailing a disappeared life: mechanical contraptions called jeepneys moving about with colorful banners, long extinct carabaos tilling fields. Tilling fields! A joke. They now all live by biological modifications—no field-tilling anymore, only science to make things bearable: like the blue sky and the white, fluffy clouds—electronic mirage that covers what is truth: an earth scarred and potholed in the stratosphere. There is only darkness and cancer beyond the mirage.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 14
