“Hello?”
“I have a job for you,” Milo said.
A beat, followed by Alunsina’s soft laughter. “Ah,” she said. “May I know more about the target?”
“He has a strange chandelier you can impale him on.”
“I see,” she said, the laughter lost, all business now. ‘A good work ethic,’ Fonacier had said. “Why don’t we talk about my rate, and agree on a number before we proceed?”
Eliza Victoria is the author of several books, including Project 17, A Bottle of Storm Clouds, and the National Book Award-winning Dwellers. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, and won in the Carlos Palanca and Philippines Free Press literary awards. She has been nominated for the National Children’s Book Award (Jeremy’s Magic Well). She served as guest panelist at the 54th Silliman University National Writers Workshop, and was a Writing Fellow at the 54th UP National Writers Workshop. Visit her at elizavictoria.com.
Raymund P. Reyes
Marvin and the Jinni
MARVIN HAD GROWN to dread getting into bed, because it forced him to face his depression. Sometimes, when the sadness became too much, he would cry until sleep claimed him, and wake up the next morning hating himself, for being weak. He liked it when work exhausted him during the day, because once he slipped under the covers, he would pass out quickly, his mind too numb to think. Even then, in those few minutes before he blacked out, he would be haunted by the memory of his late wife.
Karla died in a plane crash, on her way to attend a conference in Kuala Lumpur. They had only been married for two years, and she was two months pregnant with what would have been their first child. The plane fell over the South China Sea, and her body was not among those that were retrieved, so Marvin had not had the opportunity to grieve properly.
In the first couple of months after the incident, he was in denial, and clung to the belief that Karla was only in Malaysia and would surprise him with her return. After six months of waiting and hoping, he felt that the only way for him to recover would be to leave the country and everything that had been familiar and which reminded him of Karla.
He took a job as area supervisor for a chain of clothing stores in Tabuk, a city in the northwest of Saudi Arabia. During the day, his job provided enough distractions to make him forget about his wife. But at night, he always had to return to his flat, where he lived by himself.
He had Filipino neighbors, but Marvin preferred to keep to himself. He disliked parties and would beg off invitations if he could. After three months in Tabuk, he had so far only accepted five dinner invitations from co-workers, and not one of them had ever been to Marvin’s flat. He didn’t watch TV, but kept it turned on for company. The Internet was his constant companion.
The jinni first showed up in his dreams.
Marvin woke up one night from a dream of a woman whose face he would not remember, try as he might, although he was left with the impression that she was beautiful. He could remember her skin, translucent – almost ghost-like – and her dress, white and blown by an invisible wind. She didn’t do anything, only floated there in a dark void which surrounded her, while Marvin sensed himself being watched, even as he stood watching her.
The same dream recurred for nine consecutive nights. He didn’t know how long the dream lasted, only that he woke up at the same moment each time, just before the nearby mosque called for Fajr, the first Islamic prayer of the day. He would not be able to sleep afterward, thinking of his dream and trying to snatch bits of details he might have missed. Then his thoughts would stray to his wife again, and the gloom that he thought he had slept away the night before would return. He would spend the next hour in bed thinking and getting more melancholy, until the alarm clock went off at six and he had to get up.
Ten nights after the jinni first visited him in his dream, Marvin was getting into bed, when he heard someone calling his name. It was a woman’s voice, soft, almost a whisper, sweet like a tinkling.
“It is me, Marvin,” the voice said.
He looked up toward the large mirror on the wall opposite the bed, where the sound seemed to have come from. The light from the lamp on the bedside table cast a dim reflection of the room, but he could see in the mirror the shadow of a woman’s figure, standing at the foot of his bed. He could see no one in front of him, but in the mirror she was there, a shadow whose outlines flowed, like seaweed under the water.
“Who are you?” Marvin asked the dark being, his voice quivering.
“I am a jinni. I have lived here long before you, when this whole place was a desert, and my family guarded the wadi which used to be on this very spot, but which has long dried up. We stayed, even when humans claimed our home. We will have this place to ourselves again someday. Your kind have short lives compared to ours, and your civilizations rise and disappear fast. One day the wadi will fill again with water, but in the meantime, we live with you and the other humans here. We have learned to ignore your world, unless necessity forces us to intervene. We are always around, but you cannot see us, unless we choose to reveal ourselves to you.”
“What do you want from me?” Marvin asked.
“It is your sadness. It bothers us. It is enveloping our home with gloom. You harbor too much grief in your heart. It makes us feel restless. The anxiety your grief arouses makes us homesick for the old wadi, where we jinn did not need to share our home with your kind and deal with your existence. My father has allowed me permission to ease your sorrow with my company.”
“Please go away. Could you just leave me alone?” Marvin pleaded. He shut his eyes, hoping that when he opened them, the jinni would have disappeared, but his fear only grew, when he heard the jinni speak inside his head.
“I am here,” the jinni said. “Do not be scared of me.”
Marvin slowly opened his eyes and looked into the mirror. The shadow of the jinni had disappeared from the reflection. He could see only himself, alone in bed and in the room. But he felt someone standing beside him; he felt her warmth, even before he turned his head to look.
“Karla?” Marvin’s eyes widened in shock at what he saw. “What is this? Are you real?”
“I have taken on the form of the person you would most like to see. Hold me. I am who you want me to be. I am here, so you will not be sad anymore.” The jinni held out both hands to him. Marvin reached out and felt his wife’s soft palms, the cold of their wedding ring on one finger, the steady throbbing of a pulse, and warm flesh. She had on the navy-blue skirt suit she had worn on the day she left for Kuala Lumpur, and her hair was held up with her favorite butterfly-shaped barrette.
“Yes, that is good.” The jinni smiled at him. “I can feel your grief waning. It is slowly thinning in the air. My family will be happy.”
Marvin was not listening, however. He had imagined and been expecting this moment for too long. He stood up from bed and kissed his wife’s birthmark, on the inside of her right arm, rubbed his cheek on her shoulder, nuzzled the hollow of her neck, and smelled her familiar perfume, the one that she had been using ever since he sat beside her on the first day of class in graduate school, the first time they met.
He kissed her, and she kissed back. He knew every inch of those lips, and even recognized the manner in which Karla liked to nip at his lower lip, each time they kissed.
“Come with me.” The jinni stepped back and tugged at his hand.
“Where are we going?”
She only smiled at him, and led Marvin to the door leading toward the balcony. He followed wordlessly. She kept him locked in her gaze, and he found himself being pulled, as if by a magnet he could not tear himself away from.
When they were outside, the jinni released his hand, rose from the floor and onto the balcony ledge. Then, she took a step backward, until she was floating on air. Still smiling at Marvin, she beckoned for him to follow.
Marvin continued to stare at her, marveling at how Karla’s brown eyes looked more enticing that night than at any
other during their years together. He nodded at her, and walked toward her. He did not notice how his feet had lost contact with the floor and glided upward, as if he were climbing up an invisible stairway. He paused when he reached the ledge of the balcony, but did not look down, at the cold concrete of the parking lot, ten storeys below. The jinni reached out a hand to him.
Marvin took the final step, to hold Karla’s hand with his own.
Raymund P. Reyes teaches English at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Intramuros. His poems and short stories have been published in various literary journals – such as Anak Sastra, Taj Mahal Review, Stonecoast Review, pacificREVIEW, and Our Impossible Voice – and anthologies, including Off the Beaten Track (Anvil), Verses Typhoon Yolanda (Meritage), and Diaspora Ad Astra (UP Press).
Angelo R. Lacuesta
A Report
DOCTOR ARVINO IS working on an Excel sheet in his room at The Orient, a boutique hotel built and opened at the turn of the 19th century, hastily abandoned when the war broke, which left it in ruins before it could sufficiently shine, until a century and some later, when it was recently restored under a government grant, which is why it now looks nothing like it did before. The only evidence of its past is a small gallery of vintage photos in the lobby: a façade in a kind of art deco, interiors that were celebrated backdrops in society pages, and full-page ads in Time magazines of the day.
Dr. Arvino has not seen the photos, though he has crossed the lobby many times on his walks along the seawall and in the city streets. He remained lost in his calculations as he ambled into the hotel, unmindful of the multiple reflections thrown at him from the mirrors in the ceiling and on the walls, perhaps looking only at the pattern of foliage embroidered on the carpet, deceivingly unbroken until it ended at the vintage elevator at the end of the hall.
Once, a strikingly tall and beautiful girl made an entrance, noticed by all – the beggars on the street outside, the chauffeurs and the bodyguards waiting on the worn couches for their masters, the politicians and the businessmen at lobby tables – and brushed his shoulder as she passed him. She looked at her watch, perhaps exaggerating the part of a corporate professional: hotel lobbies aren’t places for women to be alone. Dr. Arvino never noticed.
At noon, the sun punches clean through the tightly-drawn curtains in Dr. Arvino’s eleventh-floor room, a room for two: a king-sized bed, room for a king and his concubine, with two wide closets, two pairs of paper slippers, two white terrycloth robes, a bathtub for two.
One of the robes is left on its hanger, hooked on the closet handle, and the other is royally draped over his naked form, a hard, thin, dark body, protective of its pot-bellied, middle-aged center. Sometimes he speaks a word, a number, or a calculated sum, or a scientific fact by which he must abide, his voice startled by itself, coming off like a chirp or a squawk from some lone, predatory creature.
There is a gun on the table, its muzzle nuzzling the edges of his documents, its stock tethered by a long braid of multicolored cables to his laptop. He picks it up by the handle, his finger clear of the trigger, with the fascination and caution of one who has never held a gun. He tries to overcome his fear by aiming it at his reflection on the desk mirror, point-blank, his finger flanking the gun’s black body pointed squarely at his nose.
There are mirrors everywhere here, on the bathroom door and running across the headboard. When he cocks his eye, he can see himself in side-view, his profile sinister in its terrycloth cowl, hunched over the gun in what he is sure is the wrong position; if he fired, the recoil would crack a rib or break an arm.
He’s been exhausted all week. He’s filled with the ecstasy of someone who’s been awake too long. He swivels in his chair, now aiming at the lampshade, still lit from the night before, now at the door, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign fluttering on its paper hook, from an invisible draft. The chair squeaks, as he spins again, locking on the untouched bed, its duvet an explosion of tropical flora.
It makes him dizzy, as it made him before, as a child. He remembers turning too much in his father’s office chair once – he caught his lip on the edge of the typewriting desk. It required a trip to the emergency room, and some stitches. The wound seemed small enough not to make his father want to get out of bed, so he and his mother took a taxi to the Makati Medical Center.
He’d looked out of the window and saw a robot, ten storeys tall, marked on its forehead with the Yco Steel logo. It is something he faultily remembers, from his youth, as a real robot, a sentient mystery machine walking the streets, alone of all its kind.
Years later, his mother wanted to have a plastic surgeon mend the bridge of his nose, and it is really only now that he sees the damage: a small furrow interrupting the slope. His mother is gone now, though he never saw her dead. He was at a Quantum Field conference in Vienna, when she died. She had given him all her money, because he wasn’t making anything as a teacher, though she never had much herself.
What a loss that was, what a blow, he thinks, as he aims the gun, its cable feed twisted and gnarled around him and his chair, at the terrycloth torso across him, hanging on its hanger, its head a thin wire question mark. He wills his finger to fit into the well. He pulls the trigger.
There is a bang – somehow, somewhere, inside his head, a flashbulb exploding with the faint afterimage of his last thought – his mother, like an image of the bust of the Holy Virgin, her face slightly downcast, her eyes reflecting his contrition: a burst of warm light, a sharp thunderclap.
But nothing has been altered. There is no force, no recoil. Dr. Arvino drops the gun, leaps out of the ribbon of wires, and checks his Excel sheet. He pulls the sheer curtains apart, as far as he can spread his arms. The sun has not moved in the sky, and the city has not changed, the line of traffic on Roxas Boulevard has not budged. He looks farther down at the hotel’s swimming pool below, a square of blue inside another square.
By the pool, arranged in one of the lounge chairs shaded in rattan, is a woman in a white bathrobe, in sunglasses and a hat, watching the day go by, her legs imparting the glossy sheen of the sun, where the terrycloth parts. Dr. Arvino wants to look away: there are numbers to check and results to validate; he can hear his hard drive whirring, and the laptop fan blowing. But there is that dark, growing spot on her breast – a shadow, or a smudge in his eyesight? Is it – blood? How should the light behave, through glass and thirty meters of height?
Dr. Arvino stumbles out of the room, remembering to hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the handle. He runs down the hall to the elevator. He mashes the button repeatedly, even after it has lit up; he accepts this as normal human behavior. A bell rings instantly, announcing the arrival of the elevator car; he recognizes this as something odd. He descends eleven floors without interruption; again, another otherworldly occurrence.
He runs into the lobby and searches for the entrance to the pool, oblivious to the business happening: an elderly woman who is moving very slowly, a large plaque on the wall bearing a dedication signed by former President Manuel L. Quezon, a bellhop receiving a 500-peso tip from a foreigner. He ignores the beautiful girl who brushed against him a week ago, who is here again at the lobby bar. She is having drinks with a cabinet secretary whose name has been in today’s headlines.
At one corner of the lobby, just past a glass door and a security guard texting on his phone, is the pool area. Dr. Arvino stumbles onto the deck and into the sudden daylight, and there is nothing there, no woman, no commotion, only a row of empty rattan cocoons freely suspended from stainless steel perches, looking nothing like lounge chairs from the turn of the previous century.
Dr. Arvino looks up at the hotel overlooking the pool, and counts with his eyes to the eleventh floor. He counts again from the windows on one end to what should be his window, but he’s still not sure. He’s not sure if it’s the heat, or the city, or worse, his calculations.
He walks up to the glass door, but he can’t see through the layers of reflection and refraction. He places the si
des of his hands on the glass like a fleshy parenthesis and sticks his head in between, as though he were looking through binoculars.
He makes out the white shape of the security guard, and musters enough courage to knock on the glass, a one-two-three-four meant to signal authority and urgency, last heard from his knuckles, bloody from brushing against the broken bridge of his nose, four decades ago; he had merely brushed it with the back of his hand – human behavior again – but it felt like a punch.
The guard flinches, presses ‘send’ before squinting at the glass to give Dr. Arvino a once-over.
Dr. Arvino realizes he is still in his terrycloth robe. He closes it indignantly over his chest, as one might suddenly close curtains on a window, and puts on the air of an entitled hotel guest. He calls through the glass, asking if the guard has seen or heard anything in the past ten minutes?
No, the guard immediately says, shaking his head, as if he knew sound did not carry through the door.
Dr. Arvino pushes hard on the door, and he is met with a blast of cool air from the lobby.
“Sir, who are you?” the guard asks him, one hand on his phone and the other at his belt, where his holster might be. There is a patch labeled ‘Sentinel’ over his left breast pocket, and another labeled ‘Amarillo, J.K.’ over the right one.
“My name is Dr. Evelino Arvino,” Dr. Arvino says. It’s a doctorate in physics, and he never really finished his degree, but he doesn’t believe the guard underwent security training, either. “There was a woman here by the pool, she had blood on her. Did you see her?”
Dr. Arvino holds the door open and stands in the threshold, planting a foot on either side. Amarillo waits a beat before he moves his feet to follow him.
Dr. Arvino points at the windows overlooking the pool. “I’ll go back up to my room,” he says, and points to his chest. “Look for me in one of the windows on the eleventh floor.”
Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10 Page 24
