He blinked and heard his eyelids click. Doc turned his head and the gears spun with the motion. His arms and legs were gone, but he saw the dials of a clock on his finely constructed body.
Something popped in his neck and he couldn’t move.
His voice echoed inside his metal head as he spoke, “Just perfect.”
He felt something clicking on his metal shoulder, but he could not turn his head to look.
The mouse scurried into view and climbed through a port into Doc’s body. He felt the creature clicking and scratching inside. Something popped with a ring and Doc moved his neck again smoothly. He felt his clockwork heart ticking inside him. The mouse climbed back out of the port and curled up on his shoulder. Doc turned his head and saw the mouse close his glowing red eyes.
“Thank you.”
Doc looked down at the time on his chest and began counting the beds on the floor to see how many tinkerers had moved into the cottage. He stopped counting after a time and closed his own eyes with a click. The former doctor, former shoemaker, former clockmaker felt thankful that he could not run any longer. He listened to his heart tick in time with the mouse on his shoulder.
Finding
By David B. Ramirez
The shadows of the forest lay behind Ren Dela Cruz and a narrow road curved away in front of him.
He was starting to remember why everyone knew not to be at Santa Odetta’s border after sunset.
He had forgotten over the thirty years since his parents took him back from Gramma. High school in the city, college and work across the ocean, the return, marriage, and his parents’ funerals were bricks in a wall from someone else’s childhood.
That dam had cracked with the first phone call from Gram’s friends that she was gone. A crack that had grown in the days since.
The tail-lights of the bus he took to reach here faded into the mist rolling down the mountainside. There was only the last lonely streetlamp to his right.
The air was cold and damp and clinging. No night birds called, no bats or frogs or crickets sang. With each flicker of the yellow light, his thoughts alternated from being forty to being a child at Gram’s knee, hearing tales of the people that vanished into stories when they weren’t paying attention.
Spooking himself. He yanked his mp3 player out of his pocket. The gleaming surfaces calmed him. Post-millennial talisman. He slipped the earbuds on and started it on random, and for a time was back to his rational norm.
He peered at the screen of his phone. The adult thing would be to finally read Marie’s messages. To reply.
They would fight again, and he was tired of fighting.
The phone’s battery warning beeped and the screen darkened.
The mp3 player in his pocket died too. Preoccupied, forgot to charge them. Maybe it just worked out that way, using them on all the buses it had taken to get to where he was, one hour out from Gram’s hometown.
He put his devices away. At least the decision whether to read his wife’s texts was out of his hands.
Only then did he hear the sounds. Out of the forest’s edge, he heard shuffling feet. Heavy, shffff, shffffff, shoes dragging in the dirt, and a wheezing nothing of a breath, then a thud. And again, a three-step cycle.
Probably just an old man. The thud was surely a cane. Ren ought to turn and see if he needed help.
But he was a kid again. Worse than being a kid, he was in a forty-year-old body that was overweight and out of breath. The younger him could have run and screamed for an hour.
It was nothing, he insisted. Yet he could not turn. The ghastly smell of rotting bananas penetrated his nose, pressurized his skull. It was a hot, festering odor, but the sweat dripping down his neck, down his back, down the backs of his knees, was frost.
Reeeeeeennnn.
He saw a shadow cutting into the pool of light he stood in. It reached for him. Slowly.
Reeeeeennn.
An ancient engine roared and gurgled nearby. Headlights flared through the mist, pushing the shadow back. Big tires thumped through the potholes.
Reeeennn. Doooon’t gooooo.
It was close enough to touch when the rumbling shape of salvation stopped in front of him and the door opened.
Ren flew up the bus steps.
#
It was fine at first. A return to normalcy. Bright lights, lots of people sitting on the benches, a solid-looking little man with a hat at the wheel.
The door closed behind him and the bus driver took his ticket and smiled at Ren.
Between ruddy lips, the teeth of an enormous mouth wriggled in the gums. White worms, wiggling.
#
He came to in one of the seats. His ass felt pinched by the wooden slats screwed into the iron frames. There was a girl in a long coat shaking his shoulder. Red-cheeked and lovely, but when he glanced down, he saw that under the jacket, she had no legs. She merely... floated.
“You okay, mister?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Mr. Worm was worried about you. The closest hospital’s the last stop. You don’t look like you need it anymore though.”
“No, I was just. I just fainted, I guess.”
The monster was friendly and seemed awfully young. He would ask if she were twelve or fourteen, but then, he wouldn’t know how old monsters look anyhow.
He locked down his impending freakout. His childhood lived again in his thoughts, though it was incomplete. The wall was broken, and he was not as afraid as a man of the city would have been, cold plastic and steel and LEDs and LCDs and wireless.
This was not the first time, he recalled.
This time, there’s no Gram to rescue me.... He remembered her, fearless, in her frock with a gun in her hands and great big cowboy boots.
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Ren.”
Those long lashes fluttered, and the pouty lips thinned. When she frowned, her eyes changed color, the warm brown turning red.
“You shouldn’t give out your name like that if you’re He, mister.”
What had he done the last time this happened to him?
The bus groaned and struggled now, as the climb became steep. They crested the worst of it and the bus almost sighed. He saw through his window that the mists had parted and the Mirror Santa Odetta lay below, a trailing cluster of gaslights by a sea lit in shimmering lavender phosphorescence.
When the wheels began to make the distinct sound indicating the transition of asphalt to cobblestones, they were almost there. The plaza that was at the heart of Santa Odetta. Right stop, wrong reality.
It was the town of his lost youth. Except, the people looked strange. Some were inhumanly tall. Some had animal heads. Circus sideshow and beyond. All wore elegant clothes, some of modern cut and style, many from times long gone: corsets, waistcoats and monocles, tall hats, and of course the stiff Maria Clara types and barongs of fine fabrics.
Was he going mad? Perhaps everything was normal and Ren was hallucinating.
“Deranged,” Ren tasted the word. “Mentally divergent.”
In this land, the flagstones of what was still the unimaginatively named Plaza Sentral shone glittering black, cut from obsidian rather than red clay. The fountain in the center had fat cherubs clambering about, only they had bat’s wings and horns. The squat stone Church was the same in substance and structure, though it was topped with a platinum construct of many crosses superimposed in dizzying geometries.
The only hotel in the town seemed the same as its sun-side counterpart. The Oddette’s Od, a converted Spanish colonial that took up the whole block east of the plaza.
He marched to its double doors with desperate speed.
#
The woman behind the counter, smartly attired in gleaming business black, would have been beautiful. On that porcelain face, her eyelids and mouth were sewn shut. She held her left palm out to him, and the eyes upon it blinked, and the mouth beneath the eyes spoke in the soft, singsong dialect he had once known, but had forgo
tten.
She switched when it was apparent he was only catching one word in ten.
“Mister RDC,” she said, “reservation for two nights. Single room, non-smoking.”
“Yes,” he said, not sure if he should be looking at her hand or her face.
“You seem unwell, Mr. RDC.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“I’m sure.” She passed him a form to fill out, then a heavy bronze key. She did everything with her right hand, while keeping the left up to see things. “You’re in room 202. Up the stairs and it will be on your left. Mister Brod will take your bag, if you please.”
“Don’t you need my card or something? For the deposit?”
The eyes blinked.
“Mister RDC. Ren. You have an unlimited line with us. I daresay none of the shops here will charge you a centavo.”
To the snap of her fingers, a man half Ren’s height but twice as wide took his backpack. The uniform was scarlet, darker by gaslight than it would have been by fluorescents.
Too tired to process anymore, Ren stumbled after that red shape. He saw the bed with its white linens, collapsed and closed his eyes. Mister Brod’s parting words, something about not inviting the wrong sort in, warnings about the hot water, other matters, faded as the lights dimmed.
#
Ren woke with the dawn. When he opened his eyes, was utterly confused.
What were gaslights were now electric. The beautiful hardwood floors were hidden by a somewhat grimy carpet. There was a phone next to the bed. The card next to it indicated the availability of free wifi, and the login and password. A light on the phone was blinking.
He had messages. 5 messages from a Marie Dela Cruz, press # and 9 to hear them now.
He put the phone down. His fingers twitched. Where that antique key with the square teeth had lain, there was a keycard with a magnetic strip.
#
“He isn’t disturbed, Missus Dela Cruz. He’s just imaginative. He’ll grow out of it.”
“Doctor, there are these things—” she had stopped when he had looked their way. They had gone into another room then.
Ren, eleven years old, had just kept on flipping through the comic book in his hands.
#
He could have been more. Experiences that never had been slipped into his hands and fingers and out onto paper and canvass or piano keys or guitar strings. Effortless talents.
Had he really forgotten the pills? Adjusting his brain chemistry up, down, sideways, tilting and rotating it some number of degrees until he was more like everyone else. They had changed his reading materials, his toys and games. No more storybooks or comics, only nonfiction, and his TV time was carefully monitored.
Few friends, in high school, so tightly tied in knots. A hollow version of himself.
As time had gone by, they had weaned him off on steadily lower doses, and the change had taken.
Here he was, seeing things again. If Marie was upset with him before, what would she do if he needed a shrink and personality-altering drugs?
By the scratchmarks of their nails, they were holding onto their life together.
The phone rang, sudden and loud, almost driving Ren off the opposite side of the bed.
“Get a grip, Ren.”
He would tell Marie everything. Even if such heartfelt confessions and releases had done little before.
“Oh. Attorney Bastian. Yes. Yes, I can meet with you today. The lobby in two hours.”
He got through showering and dressing without vomiting. It was close. Perhaps having nothing in his guts kept the heaves from pushing anything up. He felt weak and empty and thirsty, and drank from the tap, drank until he was bursting. The fear chemicals of the previous evening still lingered, refused to unbind from stubborn receptor sites.
He looked in the mirror, and said, “You don’t look like a madman, Mister Ren.” Dark pants, white shirt, dark tie. No barong for him, he did not like any of the usual materials. Texture and translucence. He had one more shirt and one more tie packed.
“Oh, Ren. You’re not planning to wear a black shirt, black tie, black pants, black shoes to your grandmother’s funeral,” Marie had said.
He was. He would.
The walls were still adobe. If he had gotten mixed up with a different Santa Odetta the night before, he was in the correct one now.
Down in the lobby, a good-looking lady stood behind the counter. Her eyes were brown, her lips were full, eye-catchingly sexy, and most normal. They could have been twins, this woman and the Other.
Even the voice. “Mister RDC? You have a free daily breakfast. The café is down the hall if you want it.”
The scent of eggs and sausage and garlic fried rice and tapa and fish wafted from down the hall. Beneath the food perfume, the sulfur–sweet, pants-pissing fear of oblivion and decay. Unnoticed until he could not help noticing.
His stomach clenched.
“I don’t think so, today. But if someone could bring me coffee while I wait here, that would be great.”
“Of course, Mr. RDC.”
He drank it too fast, ignored how it scalded his tongue.
Though Ren had never met him, never seen a picture, the attorney was instantly recognizable when he arrived. His leather briefcase was bulged out the sides. His too-tight barong was damp under the armpits. His crystalline-glossy shoes reminded Ren of the obsidian flagstones of the Other town’s plaza. For a moment, the rotting-fruit odor intensified.
Then they shook hands and Ren was overwhelmed by the cologne. Axe, a lot of it.
“Mister Dela Cruz.”
“Attorney.”
The man was tall but his hand was tiny.
“My car’s air-conditioning died on the way up, and since I got here it’s been hotter each day. Shall we? The food in this hotel’s restaurant is famous.”
Ren tried not to cringe.
“That’s fine, I’ve eaten. It’s down the hall. Where are you staying? I thought this was the only hotel in town.”
“I’m a guest of the Mayores’ family. You know how it is. They paid my way through law school, and now when I visit, I have to stay at the compound or the Old Man takes offense.”
The tables in the restaurant had wrought-iron frames topped in gleaming Italian marble. Huge windows that went almost from floor to ceiling looked out onto a garden. Orchids of lurid shades were wired onto driftwood pillars standing in a field of white sand, raked in decorative patterns.
They sat next to the air-conditioner, and the attorney sighed loudly as the climate-controlled breeze blasted them.
Bastian rapped the white surface. “Lovely tables. They’re a hundred years old and each one is worth more than my car. During the War, everything precious in town was hidden by the Mayores family in the tunnels of the mine. The Japanese loved the Mayores’ mansion and the Od.”
He laid out folders and documents across half of his side of the table with one hand, while sometimes glancing at the menu open under the other.
Ren thought of the Other Od’s concierge. It had to be inconvenient to be blind any time one needed both hands.
Bastian went on, “there is a lot of hidden history in these small towns. You know, your grandmother was a fireball when she was young. Just a teenager back then. She hoarded supplies, hid some American GIs who’d gotten away in the forests. They say she killed some of the Japanese herself! Even crossed swords with an officer!”
Ren murmured, “She was a crack shot.” Disjointed images, heart pounding, jumping over tree roots, while black shapes darted around and Gram in her big boots shoved him onward up the trail with one hand and every once in a while stopped to fire into the darkness. She only needed to line up a shot once.
“Yes, she was! Killer left hook too. Even the Mayores boys didn’t mess with her, and she was said to be the prettiest girl in the province. Oh, and when she was older, she started a fencing and arnis school. She gave it up when you were born.”
Gram: wartime lady of blad
e and bullet. Ren could see her in his head, middle-aged when he had been a kid but still ramrod-straight and square-shouldered, quick and strong, light of eye and brightly laughing.
Was it the drugs that had kept him from growing to love his parents as much as Gram? Or their fear of the things he could do, that which he could have become?
What was it that he had done that made them drug the hell out of him?
Flash. Two places. They had seen him in two places at once. Him telling them about things that hadn’t happened yet. More. Cripes, had all that really happened? What was going on with him? How could he have forgotten so much? Was his mind making these things up?
Bastian ordered sausage, poached eggs, fried rice, a basket of bread, jam, butter, and a pot of coffee.
“She was organized, your grandmother. The taxes are taken care of, the paperwork. Your, uh. Parents—I mean.”
“You can say it. My parents are dead, I have no siblings, so there are no other heirs.”
“Well,” he cleared his throat. “That’s the thing, Mister Dela Cruz. Another heir has surfaced.”
#
Space-time-tripping. It got away from Ren for who could say how many minutes. When he came back to himself, Bastian’s order had not yet arrived.
Gram, straight and proper, who shot even straighter, having some affair and a hidden child?
Unimaginable.
“That child grew up, and had one child herself.”
“I have a cousin.”
The attorney slid a letter across the table to Ren.
Eyes skimming the legalese. “He, or she. Is buying my share from me?”
“The whole thing. The house, the antiques, the guns and swords, everything. The offer is quite generous.”
Bastian’s pen flicked out, serpent-quick, encircled a number that had not registered in Ren’s mind.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 28
