Cover art for the original print edition of the book.

For Sage, who taught me wonder

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Jan’s Door

Cyan Abad-Jugo

The Doppler Effect

Tyron Caliente

Tendresse

Andrew Drilon

Lovelore

Francezca C. Kwe

EmberWild

Nikki Alfar

Walking Backwards

Joseph Nacino

New Wave Days

Angelo R. Lacuesta

L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)

Dean Francis Alfar

The Coward’s Quest

Jay Steven Uy Anyong

Room Three

Pauline Orendain

Instructions on How to Disappear

Gabriela Lee

The Pepe Report

Ian Rosales Casocot

In the Arms of Beishu

Vincent Michael Simbulan

An Introduction to the Luminescent

J. Pocholo Martin Goitia

The Family that Eats Soil

Khavn

Regiment

Sean Uy

The Catalogue of the Damned

K. Mandigma

The Life and Death of Hermes Uy

Douglas L. Candano

Foreword

Looking Back

WHEN THE OPPORTUNITY to reprint the first volumes of the Philippine Speculative Fiction annuals in digital form presented itself, we jumped at the chance with glee. Way back in 2005 when all this first began, we remember the anxiety and challenges of putting together an anthology of the type of stories that we loved to read, by Filipino authors. At that time, there were no speculative fiction anthologies (the very term itself practically unknown in these islands, save for a handful of readers), and strange and wondrous fiction by young local writers were few and far between.

We were concerned that we wouldn’t get enough good stories, that our call for submissions (posted on my then-living blog) couldn’t possibly reach as many people as we hoped it would, that the project would suffer a quiet death. But the stories came, and with each one, our spirits grew bolder. Here were stories that deserved to be read, that represented the beginnings of the journey of how our fellow Filipino writers moved toward defining speculative fiction, that demonstrated imaginative narrative in English. We had a book of stories that we were confident was a good read.

We resolved to self-publish, and steeled ourselves against the potential controversies that that decision would provoke, and released a small run of this first volume. During the book launch, we began the tradition of eschewing the usual boring formal ceremonies and celebrated all the authors of the anthology instead – it was just as important for us to help seed a community of likeminded authors (though we may disagree in terms of poetics) as it was to publish the stories.

In the following months, we engaged in many conversations concerning the book and the term “speculative fiction” both in the academe and in informal gatherings, online and face-to-face. In the following year, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 was nominated for the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award. Several stories were cited in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant (the biggest inspiration in how our series is formatted).

We sold out our first print run.

And we issued the call for a second volume. Then the third, and the fourth, and so on through the next few years until the 2012 edition.

It was always our goal (and I use “our”, “we” and “us” because while I may have began on the road by myself, the series has vastly benefited from the hard work, clear eyes and different perspectives of the editors who also took the helm of various volumes – Nikki Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Kate Osias and Alexander Osias) to provide a venue for Filipino writing of the fantastic sort, even as we struggle against the labels, deliberately break the barriers of genre, and claim/create space in the realm of Philippine Literature – and beyond all that, to have great reads.

And in your hands, in electronic form, is how we began.

My greatest thanks to all the authors – and to you.

Dean Francis Alfar

Manila, 2012

An Introduction

I AM A fantasist at heart.

I love the literature of the extraordinary, tales of wonder and stories that break the all-too tangible walls of reality. I love myths and legends, travelogues through uncharted territory, explorations into imagination and sorties beyond the known unknown. I love magic in all its forms, the possibility of the interference of gods, the intimation of things beyond stars, and denizens of trees and earth, wind and rain and fire. I enjoy best those stories that take me elsewhere, that speak in the language of dreams, that employ imagery both supernal and supernatural, that play etheric music or hint at cacophonous bazaar mutterings, that show me the possibilities in an empty wooden bowl or a dying mother’s wish.

These are the kinds of stories I love to write most. And to a great extent, these are the stories I do write. But in the past decade or so, I ended up questioning the value of speculative fiction — not their intrinsic value, because the value of the fantastic is beyond question, but rather why a greater audience has yet to be found.

Let us skip the usual argument of taste and concede the fact that certain people will always like certain things (this is spurious and leads nowhere) and just hope that exposure to new forms of literature carries the opportunity for someone new to fall through the magical trapdoor. Realism, of the mode handed down to us by the generations that came before us, is unquestionably dominant.

If you look for speculative fiction in the Philippines, you will be dismayed. Wonder tales and the literature of the fantastic are in very small numbers and are still looked down upon as inferior (as if the strides of the past years in international publishing washed over the Philippines and left it untouched, the country snug under its invisible reflective/self-reflexive force field). The only genre that permits or encourages the fantastic is Children’s Fiction. This is wonderful, of course, but even this published mode enforces very short stories whose first priority seems to be the deliverance of an Aesopian moral (certainly not all, exceptions do exist).

In the non-Children’s section (I hesitate to use the term “adult” because, well, why?), the pickings are even slimmer. In the past few years, Lucero’s magic realist stories have livened up the dreary Filipino word-community, harkening back to Yuson’s “Philippine Jungle Energy Café” of 80’s. There are few other examples (like the trendy collections of very short horror), but none of them are truly literature of the fantastic as I define the term — unashamedly magical, beyond lyricism and tenor and style.

Fantasy is the kiss of death. Mainstream Filipino publishers prefer almost anything else, something that will definitely sell or has the potential to sell. They say that there is no market for the genre. And if ever there is interest from a publisher or a producer, it must morph to comply with the perceived saccharine taste of the masses, divorced from its original truth and beauty in order to accommodate trite and tired sensibilities.

One of the few places to find the fantastic is graphic literature, but even there, the specter of another nation threatens our four-color patrimony (and besides, grafiction needs to fight its own set of battles). Japanese manga has all but succeeded in eradicating the tradition of homegrown heroes.

To find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic. We must write it ourselves, develop it brick by enchanted brick. We must write literature that unabashedly revels in wonder, infused with the culture of our imagination — which means being Filipino and, at the same time, surrendering that very same limiting notion — being more than Filipino, unleashing the Filipino of our imagination, divorcing and embracing the ideas of identity, nationhood and universality. We need to do magic.

And so this anthology.

I sounded an open call for submissions on my blog and was unprepared for the number of writers who responded. From the almost 70 stories under consideration, I selected 16 that represented the variety of speculative fiction being written by Filipinos here and abroad. Between these covers you will find magic realism next to science fiction, imaginary worlds rubbing shoulders with alternate Philippine history, traditional fantasy and attempts at that elusive descriptor, “slipstream.” For around half of the authors, this anthology marks their first fiction publication. The other half are experienced writers, armed with a busload of previous publications and writing awards — yet for most of them, this is also new.

It is my hope that this is only the beginning.

Enjoy this book.

Dean Francis Alfar

Manila, 2005

CYAN ABAD-JUGO

JAN’S DOOR

Cyan Abad-Jugo took her master’s in Children’s Literature at Simmons College, Boston, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines. Her first book, Father and Daughter: the figures of our speech (Anvil Publishing, 1996), was a joint project with her father, Gemino H. Abad. Her second book, Sweet Summer and Other Stories was published by the UP Press (2004). Her children’s story “Behind The Old Aparador” won second place at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in 2003, and will soon be published by Anvil. Her work has appeared in The Junior Inquirer, Flip Magazine, Pulp, Philippines Free Press, and Mango JAM (a cool comics digest for girls).

In “Jan’s Door,” a dissatisfied young man befriends a mysterious door painter and learns the hard truth behind beginning anew.

I FIND A bus ride most conducive to achieving a state of total dullness. My mind empties in the drones, stops, starts, and screeches of our long major highway, but does not quite go to sleep. And because I am human instead of a desktop, none of those colorful aquariums or matrix-like figures kick in. My own screensaver is a gray hum.

Under this shadow-spell one day, a profile begins to superimpose itself on the gray film before my eyes. Curves of forehead, eyelash, cheek, and ponytail. We pass several more bus stops before I snap out of my reverie and pay more attention to this real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood lady. It’s as if she has eyes at the back of her head. She turns and regards me with brows raised, challenging me to ask a question. Any question.

Hi.

Oops. Not a question. Her lips curve slightly downwards. Try again.

Er... sorry for staring.

She shrugs and faces front once more. I realize just how beautiful her face is, as soon as I’m deprived of most of it. Expressive eyebrows, adorable button-nose, piercing brown gaze, unforgiving pair of lips, heart-stopping tender ear to match the one I see.

Take me home with you?

She snaps around and grins. I’m not sure I asked my question out loud.

Next intersection, she says.

My heart flutters all the way to the next stop. She gets up, and without looking at me or at any one, walks towards the exit. I’m not sure if she really nodded at me to follow – is it possible to nod backwards? – but I decide that she has. I’m not about to chicken out of this once-in-a-lifetime adventure; it would at least be something to remember in bus rides to come.

She has waited for me under a rickety shed, which no self-respecting commuter uses anymore, except I guess if they intend to miss the next ride. She looks at me unflinchingly, as I hop the last step down. I resist the impulse to dance a jig – not that I know how to dance a proper one.

*

SUDDENLY, I HAVE something to break the monotony of my everyday commute home. Now, should I feel so inclined, I can stop the bus midway between work and home, and visit somebody interesting. When I mention this to Gil – someone I hang out with at work and forget during leaves and holidays – he slaps me on the shoulder and gives me the thumbs up.

Oh, Shorty, I knew you were straight, not that I would have minded if you bent some other way.

He’s ragging me, of course. He knows the whole bloody saga of my love-fought-for, love-won, and love-lost (to the loser I won against). For the past two years, during lunch break and coffee break, we have planned, and plotted, and discussed the probability of winning her back versus the probability of forgetting her and moving on. Gil, meantime, would tell me of his perfect relationships with four women spread out on the archipelago. I – no naïve listener – would calculate the cost of plane rides, text messages, long-distance and cellphone calls, in relation to our wages, including thirteenth month and bonus.

So, he says, what’s the new girlfriend like?

She’s a door artist. I can’t resist mentioning it right away. It’s the ace up my sleeve.

Gil doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Yeah? And her name is Dor-a?

I’m serious, I say, she designs and paints doors.

Okay, he says, so all day she decides what color and what doorknob. How boring. I believe the secret to Gil’s happiness is a lack of imagination. I’m just about to leave him to his happiness when he sniggers and says, And what about her knockers?

Terrible.

*

THE FIRST TIME I walk with her through her front door, I’m floored. Jan lives in a small two-story house, all on her own. The first level, with almost all the inner walls knocked down, has been converted to her studio. There are huge airy windows on all the four main walls, but it’s impossible to ignore the thick, heavy, muggy smells of paint and turpentine. It’s also impossible to miss the doors strung from pulleys and hooks in the ceiling, looking very much like hanged men. I‘ve always hated the thought, and so have thought it each time I entered the place.

Jan is more cheerful. She says it’s like being surrounded by the strangest tribe, almost all of them rectangular, and with all sorts of carvings and adornments upon them. And I’m their priestess, she says proudly, I do all the markings on them.

What she calls her markings range from random splotches of colors or squiggly lines to stencils and weaves and string collages. Sometimes she works with chisel, and other times with glue gun. Whatever strikes her fancy, I suppose.

Come upstairs, she says, after I gape at the strangest collection I have ever seen. She explains to me that it is her art and her business at the same time. My real home is above all this, she says, and at the top of the stairs, I see the missing rooms at a glance – kitchen, living room, bathroom – as well as bedroom. There are barely any walls here, either. Leaning on the kitchen sink is a small, roundish door, its white paint curled and peeling on the surface, the brown of its wood showing in areas underneath.

I pose in front of it and squeak out in an English accent, It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.

Jan grins. That’s my new pet, she says. It’s called a pygmy door. Everyone above five five or thereabouts would have to bend to go through this one.

Not a problem for me. Not for her, either. And I will never tell Gil that below that beautiful, perfectly oval face, she is surprisingly skinny and most unfortunately flat.

*

ONE RAINY AFTERNOON, I stand dripping and shivering on her welcome mat and find myself immediately oppressed by the doors suspended above me, dead men minding their own business, or more pleasantly – for I keep trying to replace the image – unwelcoming towers in the sky. Utter snobs.

In the half-dark, as I shed off my jacket and hopefully my gloomy thoughts with it, a sudden shimmering catches my eye. One of the doors – the one with white, blue, lavender, and yellow splashes, and studded with sequins – opens. Yes, it opens. Three feet in the air, and it opens. And Jan hops down, humming, as I glimpse a blur of mountains and blue sky. A breath of wind that sharpens the senses and smelling like sweet grass blow in with her before the door shuts. She doesn’t see me, but instead runs sprightly up the stairs.

I’m not particularly stupid. I can tell when something weird has happened. It’s just that I do not want to go back into the rain and board another bus. Hallucinations and madness are much more preferable to the monotony of gray sky, gray smoke, gray screensaver, and gasoline. So, I stomp up the steps after her. I find her sitting Indian-style on her lumpy sofa, with the pygmy door on her lap, humming again. She is slowly scraping off the white paint, revealing the dark wooden carvings underneath.

It’s turning out beautifully, she says, and then puts her scraper on the table and flashes me a smile that warms every sodden bone in my body. Help me with this, will you? I help her ease the door into its usual resting place by the kitchen sink, then clear away the newspaper spread on the floor to catch dry bits of white paint.

When I look up from the trash bin, she leans towards me with a towel in her hand. Let’s get you dry, she says.

*

AS I SWITCH on my computer and put on my earpiece, Gil slides into the console next to me and says, Hey Shorty, how’s it going with your door girl? Has she made you completely forget your ex now? Taught you a few new tricks?

If Gil is any indication of what this job can do to me, I better not linger any longer. Of course, Gil could just be naturally lecherous.

And then my next call features a hysterical woman with a ready sob story explaining why she can’t pay her bills. More and more shrilly, she accuses me of not having a heart, and of voluntarily being the devil’s pawn by playing a part in a big corporation. In fact, she says, you are doing their dirty work while they keep their hands and consciences clean.

Beside me, Gil is asking if I have scored. Beyond first base now, aren’t you? Have you tried…knocking her up on one of her doors?

He laughs like the maniac that he is and makes me feel like the basest man in the universe. I stand up and wave my cellphone at our Team Leader. Family emergency, sorry. I throw everything into my knapsack, ignoring her scowls and follow-up questions.

Gil jeers. A sudden uncontrollable itch in your pants, hmmm?

And then I’m off, making a mental list of all my excuses as I board the very first bus I see. 1) I do not want to end up like Gil, with a musty, rusty mind, and an equally dirty, moldy tongue. 2) I want to prove I have a heart that still beats and ponders the greater mysteries of life. 3) I do not want to lose all spontaneity even if it means losing my job. 4) And actually, I just want to see Jan.

It’s not just about some itch in the pants either.

*

THE LATE-MORNING BUS ride quenches my zeal somewhat. It gives my memory banks too much time to recall my boss’ fiery glare and Gil’s dirty mind. Smoke and dust are all I see. It could just also be air pollution.

I have never confronted Jan with the fact that I saw her do something quite unnatural. I know I said I wanted adventure, but I meant something of the more manly kind, the kind that would at least keep me satisfiably laid, and at most, have me basking in a love-induced marriage. And I would really just like a little break. But now, the day I saw her hop out of a door suspended three feet in the air keeps sitting between us like a pesky little sister. I’m too frightened of pointing her out to Jan, for fear of being called delusional – There’s nobody sitting there, kiddo – or for fear of turning out the villain – What have you got against my little sister?

Besides, the event seems too much in the past now. I could have said something then. It was a little bit awkward though, sitting there shirtless, and making a puddle on the floor, while she hovered above with a towel, softly dabbing at my arms and chest, and smelling like sunshine. She also reminded me of my mother, except without the shrewishness and the scolding. The resemblance nevertheless kept me quiet and still, which is the zen art I practice if I dare hope for even a second of peaceful co-existence with my mother and her tongue. Then, as she leaned over to kiss me, or as I looked up and stole a kiss from her lips, I worried that words would only ruin the moment. And finally, you see, I thought it would have been completely unethical to mention it later on, after we had removed our clothes and given in to the romance of dark skies and rain outside, and the warmth of clean, spectacularly dry sheets inside. It would have been too much like criticizing something about her body after being allowed to see her naked.

And now, standing here on her doorstep, I admit my ultimate excuse for ditching work today: 5) to arrive earlier than expected and see what happens next.

*

THERE’S NOBODY HOME. No one upstairs and no one downstairs. I am alone with her high and mighty doors. And she could be anywhere, behind any of them. She could also be on a bus somewhere, idiot. She could be hiding, watching what I do next. Why don’t I just try opening one and getting it over with?

I study each door closely, and try to single out one with a different aura or special glow, which to my mind would reveal where she is. Too easy. And then I think, What if she’s calling for help and no one can hear her? I try to listen for the sound of pounding fists.

But if doors were so dangerous, why would she put them in her house? Just listen to that. There are all sorts of doors in all sorts of houses. I will never ignore another door like a normal human being ever again.

If I live through this.

Oh shut up.

The fact is, there are no telltale signs. Which door? Just choose any, you moron. The truth is, I don’t like touching any of them, especially not her prized antiques – the Medieval Eastern, the Balinese, and the sturdy wooden gate that ought to have a moat.

The nearest one looks harmless enough, simply a flat board with orange, purple, and brown runny lines from top to bottom. You’d think there’d be a lake of paint underneath by now, except that the paint drops have dried here and there on the surface, permanently frozen in time. I suppose I’d rather open this one than the head-to-foot locker door with a magazine and sticker collage smoothed by a thin film of gloss. There could be nothing worse than opening it and discovering smelly socks. I shall also make sure to keep away from the black door studded with all sorts of screws, bolts, and nails. Too Frankenstein-Hellraiser. And the faux pink fur lining the frosted glass of its upper half, and all sorts of seashells studding its lower squares, look too girly for my taste. I’d probably see a mermaid singing Broadway tunes in that one. Although why I’d refuse something topless in a beach-setting... well, this door’s my next choice, then.

So I start with this simple paint-and-wood ensemble. Just a peek. I try not to think of Pandora. Well, Pandora had a box, you shit.

*

IN THE END, I knew I was a fool. None of these other doors opened, slid, or accordioned to anything but empty air. They simply framed and showed the other side. I could even walk through them. Without harm, without anything happening, no trapdoors, mirrors, mists, shadows, sunshine, nothing. I just became dizzy and nauseated by the smell of paint and glue and varnish. In the end, I decided to collapse on Jan’s bed, smell her much more comforting smells, and wait for her there with my more manly hopes.

Or maybe, not the end. After some moments on her bed, I could not help but stare at the things around me, and finally, come to understand something. There was going to be only one door for me. Above the lumpy sofa, the pygmy door hung from the ceiling with the help of pulleys, bearings, and sturdy, semi-transparent string. All its white paint had already been stripped off, and all the carvings underneath revealed an elaborate border of curves, mazes, and lines. It was as if Jan had left me a note; it just wasn’t on a post-it. Enter here.

So I am faced with three choices, as I see it. 1) Go home, and admit I am not manly enough. 2) Wait for Jan, and pretend I did not understand the instructions. 3) Just open the door, have a look, and if I like what I see, stroll in.

But there’s no mistaking this door is mine.

*

NOW I CURSE the drenching rain and walk down the long dirty highway enveloped by the sights, smells, and sounds of trash, grit, smoke, diesel, crowds, jeepneys, and taxis. I find I cannot bear to wait my turn and board a bus; neither do I want to push my way among the throng and get into close contact with the drops on their raincoats and umbrellas, the mud in their pants and shoes, the mix of their sweat, their perfumes, and their chatter. With my current mood, I just want to trudge on and forget I had ever hoped for anything better than my lot. And no one better block my way.

Why not the sea, sun, and sky for me? Or shady trees and grassy mountains? Did she think I was not good enough for those? I had not even wished for a Willie Wonka sort of surprise, no lollipop trees or cotton candy clouds. And though I might have expected something along the lines of a Linkin Park video, and have strange, hairy, emaciated, and headless behemoths loom in the horizon for a moment, I had not expected This. Ordinary. Rainy. Bus-infested. Highway. I would have even preferred the behemoths stomping on me, though seeing that video had put me off tapa for a week.

*

I FEEL CHEATED. Ridiculed. Trapped. Left out indeed by all those other doors that might have opened to something so much grander. I had no choice at all in the matter, the moment I put my foot on the sofa like I was going up a doorstep and pulled open the wooden pygmy door. Then there was no door, just this endless highway to my left and to my right. I waited so long near where I thought the door stood or hung, thinking to make my exit supposing it appeared again. And then I started walking – to hell with where and why and what now. There are just days and days of this highway, where it is always rush hour, and the rain just keeps pouring, and the pedestrians and the sirens and the horns and the motorcycles just keep multiplying. I would have liked a car, at least.

And then some day or another, I am pulled under a sidewalk vendor’s awning, and, knocking down a tray of beads, watches, lighters, purses, and pens, I find myself face to face with Jan and her towel. I fend her off and manage to swipe away three cotton t-shirts with garish designs from their plastic hangers. I dive back into the rain, ignoring the screams and curses of the vendor, only to discover that suddenly, there is no rain, only sweltering heat.

*

YOU’LL STILL NEED THIS, says Jan, attempting to hand me the towel, while trying to catch up with me. I feel the steam rising off my shoulders, the steam of rage and hate, I think proudly. I see she is hampered by something on her back, which turns out to be my knapsack, left so many nightmares ago at the foot of her bed. I take it from her, since that is at least something that truly belongs to me, and push the towel away.

I know you’re angry, she says, still following behind me, and I wish I had just kept on letting her carry my knapsack, since it is slowing me down, heavy with all my stupid paraphernalia, from my wallet, keys, cellphone, and MP3 to my extra change of shirt, my ratty schedule sheet, and the toy VW I filched from Gil’s desk to borrow for a day or two. I know I also have my shades in there, but I don’t want to stop walking.

I can’t blame you for being angry, she continues, able to keep step with me now.

No kidding. Angry. Disgusted. Enraged. Furious. Absolutely Livid. Just go away, Jan.

You’ve been wanting so badly to run away, she continues, to escape.

Well who wouldn’t have wanted to escape all this? When it’s not rain, it’s sweat dripping off me, and lahar from my armpits. Just shut up.

You’ve been wishing for a fresh start. A new beginning.

And what right had she to tell me what I have wanted and wished? What did she know? She surprisingly sounded right, though. Still...

You tricked me, Jan. I don’t know what you did, but you can undo it all and leave me the way I was.

And then?

And then you can fuck off.

Why are you angry WITH ME?

Are you kidding?

I gave you what you wanted.

You call this a new beginning?

You can’t have a real beginning unless you know what it is you are ending.

Oh cut the crap.

To move forward, you’ve got to be able to look behind you and make peace with that.

Give me a break!

*

IN THE END – and I mean this as the real end – I simply just board the bus and go back to work. Yes, as simple as that. I just turn my back on her, there on the highway, and board a bus. And it escorts me back to work.

So, I face the foul-mouth Gil and my sour-faced boss during the weekdays, and spend a lot more time arguing with my mother during the weekends. No blue skies, no stars shining, no fireworks or big bangs. No winds to whirl me back to the first time I met Jan, or to the first time I opened the pygmy door. No magic wand or happy endings either.

I leave Jan standing on the sidewalk, leap into a bus, and then never look out the window again and never go back to where she lives. I doubt I shall ever find her again anyway. It seems easier to believe, too, that she has never existed except as a sudden attack of the imagination on a bus ride one day.

So what the hell changed, you might ask. Well, you won’t catch me singing Broadway songs in a feather boa, but my bus rides have improved, for a start. All of a sudden, I‘ve got all these thoughts brewing in my head. Perhaps one day I shall quit work and go to graduate school. One day I shall tell my mother I love her. One day I shall dive in the ocean or climb a mountain. One day I shall even paint a door, though I will keep it firmly shut. Well, at least until I’m ready. And today – after I wipe my face with this sweet-smelling towel – I shall end this, because after an end comes a new beginning.

TYRON CALIENTE

THE DOPPLER EFFECT

Tyron Caliente is the pseudonym of a research and development engineer who seems to have too much time in his hands when he should be analyzing statistical data and design issues. Proof of this is his conception of a series of e-books compiling the best of the Philippine blogosphere, released (almost) regularly starting April 2005. His publications include emotionally-charged technical paper thrillers such as “Understanding the Mechanism of Wirebond-Related Blown-up Test Failures in Flash Packages” and “Delamination in Very Thin, Fine-Pitched Ball Grid Array Packages.” He was previously the Editor-in-Chief of a factory newsletter and is currently a contributor to a company magazine. He will be relinquishing his position as grammar police of the engineering department after clipping the last stray apostrophe inside a process development report.

“The Doppler Effect,” Caliente’s first fiction publication, looks at how the laws of physics sometimes reflect human relationships.

1. Afloat, adrift, a flight, a wing

29 March

HEY. I REALLY have no talent in hiding my excitement.

Did I sound so eager yesterday? Postponing the event was a disappointment. I prepared for the occasion, but I am not used to Manila’s climate anymore. By afternoon I was a soggy mess, I felt harassed, earlier walking the whole of Cubao to run some errands and on to Libis for more. Knowing that the barber was on day-off was my last straw. I won’t blame you for sleeping; you need it. There’s still Saturday.

Maybe having just one percent of my own life makes me eager to see somebody new, not that I’m having an affair out of marriage. I don’t feel caged at all, but I am not willing to be stifled, so I make these little escapes to my bachelor haunts. Books, music, photography. You know, when you said that I‘ve been around, maybe I‘ve been, or maybe not. I still remember that when I was a college freshman, I vowed to taste every sin that I could take, to shift my soul a few degrees from my body.

My wife had been my girlfriend since college. Other than that, I had a series of less serious relationships. We were conservative during those days, unlike your generation.

My first freshie was devastating; she hurt me on and off and destroyed me three years later. She was my Love Spit Love, a bedlam that came in a balmy season. Sometimes I hear myself singing “Am I Wrong” on a March day. Bad things really happen during the Ides of March: Caesar was killed during March. She was gone at the cusp of March and April. After two months of exile I was a new man and I met my future wife. Should I say, got to know her for the second time? Our love story was interesting. She vowed never to marry me even if I was the only guy left on the planet and I said the feeling was mutual.

Enough of that, maybe we can talk about it later or never at all.

Men want a battle to fight for. Women want a battle to share with.

{You can always make things happen except make your ex fall in love with you again. I find it harder than any dreams I have.

You have 50, 60 years or so ahead of you if you die of a natural cause. You can do a lot of things in that short span of time. Don’t waste it, or you might regret waking up when you’re old and can’t do things you should have done while you could. It’s like saving up for a vacation upon retirement, but I want my vacation now. I’ve always believed in making things happen, and being in control.

Evil is ultimately good. You’ll see. You’ve been around.

I’m a floater. Bono said, “There’s nothing you can throw at me that I haven’t already heard. I’m just trying to find a decent melody, a song that I can sing in my own company.”

I’m drifting in this lifetime fearing nothing because I own nothing except my soul. I’m getting melodramatic like the search for a taxicab on a Maundy Thursday.

Been working in the night shift for two years now. And I am beginning to think that I am a movie vampire burned to death by a team of paid extras. Do you believe in past lives?}

2. The naked truth arouses the soul

23 March

LET ME INTRODUCE myself first. I work at a Japanese electronics company up north. Senior package development engineer—research and development stuff. If I have to explain to you what is all the fuss with packages and why the Japanese go to the Philippines just for it, I might bore you. You can call me Castro. I have as many names as God.

I have read that “Moon River” is your favorite song. I hummed it way back in university, and I’m whistling it now because you brought back those days when I didn’t have to worry about the future. Moon River. As Time Goes By. Take My Breath Away. Tuck and Patti. This is Flirting First-Class. I am a sucker for Everything But The Girl and when you talked to me like the sea, I knew that I wanted myself to be heard.

Quiet nights on the beach, skinny-dipping in the moonlight, nightswimming. I definitely want these simple things, far from what urbanity and its (in)-conveniences have to offer. I have definitely outgrown the debauchery and hedonism of my wasted youth and simply want to disappear into the gorges for days on end. But this definitely won’t happen in my lifetime.

You’re young. You can have as many relationships as you want. There is no legalese to bind you. Take advantage of it. I’m speaking like this because I miss being single and if I had the chance I would trade my soul with yours for a day. Finding somebody to complete you is a fruitless search. Start from the other end—think how you can complete somebody who you feel is worth completing it with. What is it that we are completing in a relationship anyway? The ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything is 42, but we don’t know what the ultimate question is. I think it’s the search for completion that matters most.

It’s an end unto to itself.

{I agree, Stud is a beautiful name fit for a dog. Castro is okay, but let me call you River. Our conversations are getting deeper, building up on every available space before going to the next level, like an Aufbau principle. Like Griffin and Sabine.

Who knows, in an array of alternate universes, in a sea of ifs, we could be one person writing to himself from the past. Or a father (me), writing to his future son (you). All is possible. I could actually trade my love life for this.

But then again, I have none.

P. S. I am a quality assurance analyst in a call center, in case you want to know.}

3. A life less lived

29 March

I BELIEVE IN past lives because if, say, we die and we all go to heaven and every generation thereafter follows suit, heaven (or whatever place we go to) would be overpopulated. From an industrial engineering point of view, purgatory’s capacity would be overloaded. Its planners have forecasted special allocations for wars, holocausts and food poisoning. So somebody has to go back.

Hi there, Mina.

Mina Harker.

Do you like that name? Seduced the vampire until you became one yourself. Had you been a man I would’ve called you Vlad the Impaler. Got to this conclusion since you love blood. You are a night person, and you love black on white.

River

{I like it. Corrections though, gray on white.

I drafted a very long e-mail last time, and I thought it was sent. We still experience network problems, but I hope you’ll receive it because I can’t remember the things I wrote anymore. I‘ll try my best to remember them. Here goes:

Can we meet on Sunday afternoon? Say 2 pm?

I wrote a lot, and all I can remember now is that. [Rummages through the cosmic trashbin] How pathetic!

Mina}

4. Tell me your secrets. Let me be your tree.

12 April

JUST GOT BACK to work today.

Yesterday was dull torpor, I was surprised by water splashing on sleeping me at 4AM. Yet Sunday was hot in every sense of the word. Thank you very much for the conversation. I sometimes hate myself for speaking most of the time, as I still want to know you better, and I enjoyed our talk so.much. Those little things that I can’t say to my bestest best friends, like family, design and sex. Things that I‘ve wanted to share. I’m into my own Kris Aquino Complex.

Next time, I‘ll make sure you do the talking. I so damn wish that your unsent mail would eventually find its way into my mailbox, but I got snippets of it during the conversation anyhow. I‘ll wait for the zephyrs today to whisper to me the things you would have said.

As promised, I FedExed you the jacket I mentioned. I have to fill up the nights of empty while the wife is asleep. I dabbled a bit on the Doppler. I‘ll tell you when and where to wear it to send the embrace signals. Don’t be surprised when you feel it enclose your body. That’s me giving you a virtual squeeze. You’ll notice that, as the distance between us gets shorter, the sensation feels like the real thing.

I don’t know how to say this, but you always run parallel to my lines of thinking, and stay there even when every thought has expired.

You’ve entered me, you Impaler you.

R

{Last Sunday was fun, indeed. I appreciate you coming over all the way like the North Star. The effort was deeply appreciated. Not to worry, whatever we talked about stays on that coffee table. And no, unlike your other online friends, I will not talk about you to other people, in a manner that will promote your paranoia.

I received the jacket and am too excited to size it up to the bells and whistles.

M}

The jacket looks like what it really is. A jacket.

Within the fabric there is a mesh of miniature mechanical systems, which correspond to electronic signals received from an internal antenna. I’m wearing a similar jacket and from far away I hug the air in front of me; my jacket absorbs the signals and transmits them like ordinary e-mail to you. You receive the embrace signals while wearing a similar jacket at the same time.

I’ve managed to place a temperature sensor to send my body temperature too, and a heater in yours for the experience to be complete.

Then there is the Doppler effect. The embrace signals become more palpable as I get near you, but not if we’re several cities away. Satellite transmission should take care of that.

I’ll be working on the pheromones next.

R

5. Alternate universes, a sea of ifs

15 April

I AM NOT really worried about what we talked about last Sunday spilling out to friends.

Knowing how you kept my design files during the first days was proof enough that I trust you. Deciding to send you that confidential information in the first place meant I knew that you could be trusted.

I’m looking at myself as a dysfunctional person now, paranoid on one end, attention-deprived on the other. Maybe it’s just a phase; maybe it’s the weather or the moon. Like the common cold, I have to let it take its course.

You are always present in your own universe. The universe perceived by your five senses and everything else. You are at the center and you are the center. Anyone beyond your universe is beyond your perception but it doesn’t matter.

I’m waxing poetic, and I sound like an astrologer, but I’m happy for you, free spirit. You can move on without the hurt. You have the luxury of going back to happy moments, even to the time before your birth.

Coffee again.

R

{I’m flattered that I gained your trust that early. Really. Trust is very hard to earn these days.

You’re not dysfunctional, that’s overrating. Let’s call it the blue disease. Everyone gets it, almost as often as each phase of the moon. And it’s perfectly understandable in your case; the wife is acting so womanly, so womanly impossible and aloof as it appears to me.

I am always present in my universe? Honestly, what do you mean? I need to understand.

What’s holding you? Break free, River. You are infinite, and you know that.

Coffee would be nice. Soon.

Mina}

I’ve got a period, but I don’t bleed. Still not talking to the wife like she is the anti-Christ from the kitchen. The jacket I gave her went by unappreciated. Sending a virtual snuggle from a different timezone would not take root on her plate.

Cold wars on a hot summer’s day. I have a melancholy to nurse.

I’m guilty of bromide in my previous post, but being present in your universe is an exercise in existentialism. If you are not present in your universe, then surely you are somewhere. And that somewhere is your own universe and nothing else. I am always present in my own universe. You too. I’m happy that you’re happy.

We still have so many things to do.

R

{The last four days have been very busy, it seems like they want me to die.

I hope things are better between you and the wife. She should have done her part as a woman and as a wife to you. And you should learn how to swallow.

I can’t be happy just yet. I delay pleasure and happiness for better gratification.

Watch closer.

M}

6. The color of the sky as far as I can see is greyburnt.

16 April

WE’RE ALL BUSY, we’re moving in our own directions, parallel arrows of time. There really is a slim probability that we intersect. And that is when we see above the x-y plane, from the z-direction, and disobey Euclid. We have Gauss and Leibniz on our side.

Wasn’t able to go to Galera on my own last weekend. The wife and I have started to talk things over, and if you happened to be in Glorietta last Friday night, we were the couple shouting with our voices down. We choose where we shout at each other. We shout at each other. It’s good therapy. I’m sure you know what happened next. It’s good to snuggle up after a fight.

I had a Doppler moment. Will let you know next week what it is about.

The next two weekends will be superbusy, as there is a semblance of pressure in the office which I can’t put into words to sound like a weather report. Might see you in May, but if I bump into you anywhere in this lifetime, carpe diem. I‘ll be seeing you in all Irving Berlin ways possible.

Because the deserts miss the rain.

River

7. The cosmic trashbin

4 May

IT’S MAY. ALTHOUGH my worst fears are over, looks like pressure and paranoia are becoming permanent desk fixtures here in the office. But I digress; maybe it was just me and my Andy Grove. Here we go.

I remember the last two items I owe you: an Almodovar movie and free coffee, but e-mail? Honestly I was waiting day in and out for a reply even in the thick of my things. I knew I was about to tell you something about the Doppler moment but I held back. I’m not at all comfortable discussing it here—so might as well use it as the meat of our next meetup.

The question of which, is when and how.

I’ve so wanted to write to you again without being a disruptive element in your solar system. You had your silver boyfriend perched on a fire hydrant; I never knew that it was a goodbyeless end to the affair. I don’t know how to feel for you, but I‘ll let you bleed first then see what I can do. It’s not really proactive but for now, that’s the best and lamest I can think of.

Sunday won’t be an issue if it will be for you. I know that fire hydrant is irreplaceable.

I need a bicycle.

R

8. What planet are you from?

6 May

I HOPE IT’S the same as mine.

We are typical. My life is typical—what is there to expect anyway? Couples argue and have sex all the time, straight or otherwise. The strange thing about us is, with petty fights about the news and the weather; we organize shouting matches. When very serious issues come to the fore, like a third party, there are long, painful silences. It’s one uneventful day passing by to pave another uneventful day. It’s searching for thoughts that have absorbed into dinner plate scraps the minute she walks by without a word.

A sliver of silence can cut the stratosphere deeper than words can.

R

9. Out of reach

19 May

{FINALLY, I GOT them, your mails.

It’s been long since I wrote you. We somehow lost each other in the transit of time. Events, as they were, became so off- tangent; my face fell into pieces over things and places. I indulged too much in loneliness for a time, then in pleasures of the flesh, and now in independence. I like living alone, it gives me the pleasure of liberation, and it’s overwhelming.

I’m not really living alone, though. Scout stays with me, and keeps me from loneliness, and gives me too much pleasure. I know, it’s selfish, but I’m selfish, and I learned to accept the fact that people are meant to use and be used. The issue lies on which role you choose. People do not own other people.

My work is giving me a hard time once again. New batches are coming in; therefore more work. I apologize for this short letter. I want to save some topics on the plate when we meet again.

M

PS. I agree. Your jacket should come with pheromones. But then again, my evolution is not programmed to your smell.}

10. Too blind to see the writing on the wall

19 May

YES, FINALLY.

But I’m copying your other mail for good measure. I don’t want you to miss a thing anymore. And I don’t want my absence felt doubly strong in your moments of loneliness.

Honestly I hold back for quite a number of reasons that’s why e-mail is my only point of contact. Even though I’m comfortable with people around me, I learned to check my emotions as I aged.

Good thing that there’s somebody to keep your loneliness at bay. For your other types of loneliness try me. You got me, as you used to say before.

One thing that came good out of this jacket is that I’m finally having it patented. I should tell you this when we meet and I want to show you how happy I am. You’re the first one to know. The wife wouldn’t get it, since she’s not into these things, as most people are. We’re yin and yang but that’s how we create balance in our domesticated universe.

Soon it will rain.

R

{Aged? It gives me a dreadful feeling inside as if it’s a great pale cloud above my head.

There’s a danger in what I do, a risk I know that will take its toll on me in the future. I fill the loneliness by surrounding myself with people, entertaining the flesh and the ego. Last week, I received a message from a good friend: “Don’t let anyone hold your happiness in their hands. Hold it in yours, so it will always be within your reach.”

I feel that it’s getting out of reach, the farther I go. I have another issue, Scout is falling and it’s hurting him that we can never be “we”. My point is life is full of complications, and there’s no other way to live it.

I appreciate the fact that you’re always there for me. Don’t worry; I will refrain from raping you, in any way. You’ve been good, and I don’t want to take advantage of it.

M}

11. Like there’s a storm in my soul and it’s escaping through your eyes

19 May

RAPE ME? HMMM, just let me know. I‘ll find ways to enjoy it if it’s inevitable.

I somehow felt guilty. It’s ironic that I said that you got me when I can’t even reply to your e-mail. And I thought absence would breed either fondness or abomination. In the end it’s all network issues, technical buffoonery we can’t control.

That’s why I checked you out last Saturday night. I hope you got my message. The thing with you and Scout—it’s expected. At least one of these things happen everyday: he’s the first one you see when you wake up, and he is the last great thing you see before sleep. He’s got into you and you to him one way or another. But remember, and this also goes out to Scout, that you are your own universe as I told you. The center to be exact. Don’t act like planets and revolve around. Just be.

I’m working on the jacket’s Doppler compensation. Satellites are too unfaithful to be trusted, they circumscribe all round the earth like a philandering husband. This is the reason why the electronic embrace signals seem alive at night and too ghostly by day.

Hello? I’m getting nothing but static.

R

12. Draft: The Doppler Effect

14 April (revised and unsent thereafter)

I FEEL LIKE a fake Vuitton bag left in the rain. I would like to tell you why.

Or maybe I was just too doused watching TV and the word “protect” is always there. Full House is on tonight. I heard the lines “I want to protect you from other people who may hurt you, because I’m beginning to like you” and “How can you protect me when you don’t even have me?”

And I guess that’s where your “People do not own other people” comes in.

Please don’t get me misinterpreted here, like I’m beginning to fall for you. No. Not that I would want to offend you. You are so beautiful; it hurts me. But I saw right through you as a person I want to protect, probably out of my fatherly, protective instinct. Protect from what or from whom? I don’t know. Except for the fact that I won’t be interfering with your life like a loud street preacher cornering you for a few nickels.

I’ve been running so fast right from the starting line.

It’s the Doppler Effect at work, my Doppler moment. I’m coming at you but not through you. At my unholy hour. Let me laugh at that. Or let me smile at that. I’m not putting it off, but I would like to take it lightly. It’s not difficult to love a person like you. It is too complicated for me to love a person like you.

Our screams got lost in a paper cup. The length of my words engulfed your mail space and left you wanting for silence. Like the jacket, I sent you my electronic signals but it seemed you sent one on a different frequency. Maybe you wouldn’t want to but I’m not blaming you for all the universe’s woes.

I’m beginning to be happy again. And I know you’re very happy with the one you have right now. I hope I don’t come off as wanting your attention, or envious of other people’s lives. You still have me even if you don’t own me.

The Doppler effect. Remember when an ambulance passed us by as we chatted at the cafe that Sunday full of portents? When its siren started out high, slid down as it passed, and continued lower as it receded?

Because the siren didn’t hit you, Mina Harker. I came at you but not through you.

I’ll try to gain some balance now.

R

River

ANDREW DRILON

TENDRESSE

Andrew Drilon won the 2002 Likha Comics Making Contest and was part of the National Book Award-winning comic book Siglo: Freedom. He has two self-published ashcans, The Germinator and Subwhere, and has also appeared in Grafic Magazine, The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Pugad Literary Magazine, Hilites, K.I.A. and hey, comics! His most recent comics work can be found in Siglo: Passion and Project: Hero, which he co-edited with Elbert Or. His upcoming works include Whapak! and Funky Monkey Comics.

“Tendresse,” an emotional coming-of-age story in the grand tradition of Dali and Dada, is Drilon’s first published work of fiction.

MORNING HAD SETTLED in after midnight, a wave of heartache and longing crashing on the breakers of the soul from the long stretch of darkness and stars. If you were to touch your lips to the imperceptibility in the air, it would solidify into words, and this is why the boy was sitting steady at the computer in the hours before dawn, fingers tapping lightly on the keyboard, slowly and with utmost care, as if each word drawn from air had to be condensed first in his mind, then in his heart, and finally, out onto the blank, emotionless screen. Had he been writing anything more than what he felt, he might have gone mad, but as it was, still, his heart had yet to be broken, and he was already twenty years of age, floundering in a sea of emotion far, far away from innocence.

Outside, the coconut man stood erect by the window, its shoddy brown head bobbing up and down, carried on an ocean of breeze, watching, watching the boy type. A childhood nightmare, the boy thought, nothing more, but still it inspired a primal fear inside him, lost and ignored but still screaming, and the boy had to put it away from his mind in order to concentrate.

Once, when he was only ten years old, the coconut man had found a way into his room, and the boy stayed under the covers, terrified of being found. The coconut man ran his hands over the blankets, rubbing the boy’s legs, his arms, his face, clutching at the sheets that the boy struggled with all his life to keep under. All the while he could hear the constant sloshing inside the coconut man’s hollow head, liquid and empty and so terrible. After what seemed like an eternity, the coconut man disappeared, leaving the clashing smell of buko juice and deodorant lingering in the air and an unrelenting echo of liquid sloshing in an airtight space. He had acquired an irrational fear of coconut trees since then, always fearful that the man with the coconut head, dressed in black from head to toe, would come out from behind the tall tree trunks and exchange heads.

(coconut) + (body) - (head) = (coconut man)

And one time, when he was fifteen, the boy had found a little girl swimming in his softdrink and, careful not to be noticed by his family at dinner, he gently put the bottle to his lips, opened his mouth as wide as he could, and swallowed the girl whole, hoping to preserve her in his guts until he was of the right age to have a girlfriend. She took up residence in his chest, just to the right of his heart, and sometimes in the night he could hear her knocking on it, begging to be let in. As the years passed, her knocking became less and less frequent, until recently, just a few days ago, it stopped. The boy felt lonely and began to find solace in writing.

Knock knock.

Here he was, tapping away at the keyboard in the dead of the morning, the coconut man hovering at the window, and the boy felt the bitter pang of loss, fueled in the most heartfelt sense of the word by an encounter at the gasoline station just two hours ago, when his best friend waved goodbye from the passenger seat of a taxi cab, headed for the airport and on to places he had never seen. All roads lead to Rome, and his best friend was off to the Vatican to be blessed by the Pope, and if “goodbye” truly means “God be with you,” then the boy meant it in the most meaningful way he could say.

Midnight turned to morning like a lost soul turns to faith, and in his darkest moments the boy wished he could dredge up every painful memory etched like scars on his body and excise them, quickly and methodically, like a surgeon. They rolled in like leaves on an august wind, glorious and dying, shriveling up into fragile crisps in the rainy cool of the mid-year. High above on a nameless hill, one that the boy could not see, obscured by the morning fog and drizzle, stood a church, and atop its highest parapet sat the Mother Superior, Yanilla, struggling hopelessly to count the unnumbered leaves of the acacia vines crawling upon stone walls, imbuing in each one a love story drenched in tears.

Far below, a slippery pebble road led from the back door of the weathered church into uncharted woods, and there the parish priest, Father Josephino, found a dead, fallen angel hanging from the branches of the great narra tree, its body bloody and ruined, but its wings still glimmering in the moonlight. To this day, the altar boys still whisper tales of this priest in the hushed candled walkways behind the cross. They say that Father Josephino took the dead angel’s wings, fashioned them neatly onto his shoulder blades, and flew off into the cloudless sky, joining the stars in their fleeting brilliance. His sister, Yanilla, upon hearing news of his disappearance, joined the convent, and was later revealed to be mad.

Years later, after her ascent to the esteemed role of Mother Superior, she threw herself off the church’s highest parapet, hoping to fly. As the ground slowly dawned upon her, she felt her years ebbing away, suffusing the night air with promise, which wafted on the breeze, across the forest, and into the town beyond it. They say her ghost still haunts the church at night, telling stories of a perfect lover from a future she had glimpsed at the moment of her death, who smiled with such sweetness that she forced her soul to stay on earth to search for those perfect lips, destined never to say a word that she could hear, or plant a kiss on her barren face, ephemeral.

The townspeople felt Yanilla’s longing on certain rainy days, set somewhere deep in their souls, irreconcilable with the truth of their lives. Their town was built out of boxes, perfectly-measured quadrilateral cases, each one belonging to a specific citizen with a designated function in their society. In one of these boxes, the man from Yanilla’s denied future was still trapped in the past, a boy without a broken heart, tapping away at the computer screen in the early hours before dawn, still fighting to convert a nation of rebellious words into some semblance of order, a causal sequence of events, leading up to a turning point in the realm’s chaotic history.

The coconut man had disappeared, and now the deep blue shadows painted the walls of his box with an unsettling silence, creeping up behind him from beneath the wooden floorboards, a silence imbued with the stealth of time. Afraid that it might rob him of the precious few words he had yet to set down, the boy focused on the perpetual hum of his computer and the clacking of the keyboards under his fingers, which vibrated just at the edge of his consciousness, hovering somewhere in space. A red orb twirled in the darkness past the moon.

In space, the stars are twinkling their way into supernovas, and the merry aliens of Mars were twirling down Olympus Mons in search of an imaginary god. They had come to this lonely planet in their joyful barongs and baro’t sayas, dragging their carabao carts and slave children, prepared to terraform the land. In their bags were plastics full of letters, and one by one, they tossed the letters into the red soil, watering them with ink, laying them out in the sun to dry, and hoping that one day, one sweet day, they could reap what they had sown. It is common knowledge that aliens have a taste for words, in fact, they barter for it regularly, and on Mars, a manuscript appeared, word by word, a story not confined to the gravity of earth. Writers would dream of this for centuries, and on certain nights, a boy could sit on his computer and lay out the manuscript for Earth-people to behold, attuned to words hidden somewhere in the sky.

The sky was cloudless, stars blinking. Shadows crawled into their corners and settled down, away from the light. “Goodbye,” his best friend had said.

“Goodbye,” the boy replied. (God be with you.)

The taxi swerved out of the gas station, screeching on the cement, leaving an almost transparent trail of smoke behind it. The boy smelled the fumes of gas and lit a cigarette, unafraid of an explosion, because the bleeding wounds that covered him from head to toe had scabbed over and left him impenetrable, invulnerable, nigh-indestructible. For God’s sake, he could have walked over to Tondo wearing tights and a cape, knocking the balisong knives and unloaded guns from holduppers’ hands, punching their lights out, bam pow sock, with a cocked head and a perfect smile returned valuables into the hands of their rightful owners.

“I believe in superheroes,” a well-dressed old man might have said. He would have gone on to his well-dressed mansion, and feeling himself losing control in a predatory world, he might have just taken off his head, flushed it down the toilet, and replaced it with a coconut. The superhero, unaware of this ominous plot development, would calmly return to his box, say his magic word, and instantly, the superman would revert to his alter-ego, a twenty-year-old boy, sit down on his computer like a good reporter and type out a story.

Mild-mannered and unassuming, the boy typed, a class-A, newly-minted, fresh-meat adult, wearing blinders and led down a quiet intersection by his driver, dragging a kalesa cart behind him. Click, clack, click, his hooves on the street, the noise they made when his fingers ran along the keyboard, words and sound and fury. In all honesty, the boy had forgotten his magic word, and was now busily trying to eke it out of himself by typing a thousand onto the computer screen. What would it be?

The boy searched his soul; an ancient, archaic labyrinth, gods and monsters walking its halls. Confusion spelled out by the tangled pathways of his knowledge, leading up to a forgotten corner of his vocabulary, a dusty, cobwebbed spot to the right of his heart, where something moved, something trembled, something yawned and awoke. His lips quivered.

Knock knock.

The boy began to choke on his own tongue, wait, it wasn’t his tongue, it was something in his throat, bubbling up from deep within him, an upturned stomach, no wait, the waiting vomit of his soul, ten, wait, it might have been something else, ten dresses, something in the air, a sputter, a cough, his lips forced open by silky hands. Something crossed his teeth, jumped his lips, fluttered out of his mouth into the computer. A magic word:

Tendresse

She remained still in the morning glow of the page around her, words lined-up straight like soldiers on a death march. Her fragile wings beat with a rhythm and tone not of this world. “Where do I belong?” she asked, “Don’t you remember me? I’m your girlfriend—caramel sweet, bubbly and light, a sure treat to sup from the veritable cup of life.” She slowly peeled off the many layers of her clothes, her dresses laid bare on the table, and the boy could see her naked before him, ready and willing to be used:

\Ten*dresse”\, n. [F.] Tender feeling; fondness. [Obs., except as a French word]

“Fuck me.” She was pleading. What else was there to do? The boy had found the magic word that would turn him into a man. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that someone so beautiful would want to consummate with him. The boy had always been so alone, lost and angst-ridden. Now here she was, on her knees, arms outstretched, lustfully waiting to be touched.

“Will it hurt?” the boy asked. “Is it a complicated process? What would I have to do?”

“Oh, just love me. Give me a little of your time. Some conversation, a word here and there… I could go with you to college if you wanted. We could do it under the table. Then at dismissal time, you could hold me around your arm and walk me home, and all your colleagues and classmates would be green with envy.”

“I should parade you around the campus? Wouldn’t that be… controversial? You’re very exotic, you know. People might talk.”

“People always talk. Why should you listen to them? They just waste your time with gossip and lies, saying things they don’t really mean. Me, I’m the real thing. I love you. Don’t you want me?”

“This feels wrong…it isn’t the way things should be. Shouldn’t we wait a few more years? Maybe when I’m older, when I have more time and money, I promise, things will be better. You know how hard life is already, without having to take care of you.”

“Life will be easier when you hold me. Simpler. Try it.”

“I—I just want to do the right thing…”

“How can you say that? Look at me! I’m beautiful! I’m everything you’ve ever wanted!” She stretched her hand out of the screen and ran her fingers down the side of his face. The boy felt blood rush to his cheeks.

“It doesn’t make sense…”

“Love doesn’t always have to follow logic, darling. You meet someone you like, and suddenly the world is changed. A plot twist, the stories diverge, and then nothing will ever be the same. But you. You don’t love me, do you?”

“I don’t know…”

“It figures. A girl waits half a decade to find true love, and all she finds is a boy who doesn’t want to break his heart. I need a real man to slap me around. Someone I can believe in.”

“I believe in you.”

“Do you? Would you fuck me? Even just once? No one will ever have to know.”

“Alright…”

They did what lovers do, and after, Tendresse disappeared into the crowd, the boy left her where she was, standing still somewhere in her own story, echoed twice, thrice, and the boy resigned himself to writing once more, tapping on the keyboard with the fury of one who had never met love, but knew of it. In the darkness, an angel flew over the moon, Lord knows how, a mad woman died, aliens made a home for themselves on Mars, more than we could ever do. And a story, a spiraling story of stories, winded itself down to an end.

“Goodnight moon. Goodbye.”

The boy was twenty. Ten years ago, the coconut man had found its way into his room. Here it was now, liquid sloshing around in its hollow head, standing gaunt over the boy as he click-clacked on the keyboard.

“I suppose you want to fuck with me as well.”

“No. I am here to ask you a question.”

“Why?”

“That is the question. Are you crazy enough to answer?”

*

THE SUN ROSE to stunning brilliance at dawn, a yellow orb of life, its ray washing over the dreary shadows of the boxtown and the church, light glinting off dewdrops, on the unnumbered leaves of the acacia vines, the forest of narra wood and coconut trees, swaying, still swaying, in the fresh, clean breeze of a new day.

The boy lifted his head from his computer, blinking away sleep. The screen was blank save for a single word; no stories here except maybe his own. Reality arrives. Time. It was time to get dressed and ready for school.

His mother walked into the room. “Happy Birthday, son! Good morning!”

“Hey mom. ‘Morning. It’s my birthday?”

“Wake up and get ready for breakfast, silly boy. Twenty years old, hmm...I suppose you’re a man now.”

“Nah, that’s still next year. But yeah, haha, maybe I am.”

It’s an old story, growing up, but no matter how often you read it, it always seems new. Look at yourself in the mirror. Can you see a wrinkle? A white hair? Can you see in your eyes the depths you’ve been plumbing all these years?

(coconut) + (body) – (head) = (coconut man)

(body) – (head) = (coconut man) – (coconut)

(body) – (head) = (man)

(boy) ?

The boy remembers the girl, Tendresse, with a fondness that grew since the first time he saw her, swimming. He might forget her one day. She might as well. And the coconut man is somewhere out there, on the byways and highways, on the streets with empty railroad tracks, in the shadows of your very own box, waiting to ask a question. He flushed his head down the toilet long ago, and could never look back. The hollow sloshing is echoed. Listen:

Would it really matter, if you were to count the days left with your hands?

Knock knock.

“Who’s there?”

It’s your life. Right outside. Knocking. Listen. Breathe.

Are you crazy enough to answer?

FRANCEZCA C. KWE

LOVELORE

Francezca C. Kwe’s fiction has been published in the Philippines Free Press, the Sunday Times, TOMAS, Dapitan, and OIST Magazine. She has received the USTetika and Don Carlos Palanca Awards for her work, and has been a fellow for fiction in four national writers’ workshops. She is currently completing her first collection of short stories and editing an anthology of contemporary fiction with Ian R. Casocot.

A shorter version of “Lovelore” first appeared in the Philippines Free Press.

THE EXACT DATE is lost, but they say it was a November night when Fray Domingo awoke to the sound of the wind keening outside his window like a grief-stricken woman. As he was of pure Castillian stock, the thought that it could be ominous never crossed his mind.

Seconds later, as he was sitting up in bed scratching his belly, the wooden door opened with a crash and in rushed an undetermined number of burly figures who pounced on him, wound strips of cloth round his head and stuffed him into a huge canvas sack. They bowed out of the room reverently, taking care not to disturb anything, and stole down the stairs of the convento as swiftly as they had come. Under the dark shadow of the church, they deposited the sack on a cart hitched to a restless horse. Once the company was on board, the driver prodded the horse into a back street away from streetlight and sentry, and then into the country road.

How long they traveled, no one knows—some say they exploited the cover of darkness, trying to outrun the dawn at unnatural speed, and some have them creeping cautiously for days around the fringes of towns, hiding out in abandoned shacks to slip away once night came. But after some time they stopped at the foot of Mt. Napulak. The men hauled the sack off the cart and trudged carefully into the bush, softly whispering prayers. Above them, thin clouds lifted off the moon’s languorous eye. They broke into a clearing and released Fray Domingo from the sack. Pinning his arms, they divested him of his robe and garment, and the rags round his face. Then they released him abruptly, pushing him into the forest’s arms. They stepped back into the trees, leaving the friar stumbling in the dark.

With his sight utterly black, Fray Domingo must have frozen before the strangeness around him, the hulking shapes of the trees, the hissing of the darkness. Rising around him was that immense presence which he had always sensed oozing out of this land’s every pore, even as he anxiously tried to dismiss it with cross and cassock. He must have realized how every bit of it was the absolute haughty European expatriate’s nightmare. Imagine him: fat, naked and whimpering, trying to fold unto himself.

He hears rustling, and his temper momentarily asserts itself, for after all he is the cura of the diocese of Jaro, Iloilo, envoy of God and one of the lords of this heathen land. Rage begins to stir inside him as he remembers this.

Who’s there, he calls out.

The sound of his frantic breathing fills his ears.

Warily he says, show yourself!

The trees start sweating profusely and the blue night parts for a large shadow. All around him, things start to come alive. When he opens his mouth, he hears the low cry of a bird in the distance.

In town, all through the night, the endless howling of the wind was heard, rattling the windows and the eaves, as if telling the future in an unfathomable voice.

*

OF COURSE, NO one knows exactly what happened in the forest. But thereafter, the world would be changed. In the aftermath, you and I would be born many, many years later, the mark of that night as fresh as if it had gone on endlessly in our dreams.

I first heard the friar’s story as a child, along with countless other children before me, whose yayas had employed its fantastic possibilities at bedtime. You were spared it in your own small world, but you must have wondered. Growing up in Jaro, the story was inescapable, like an invisible inheritance that spoke in different voices. And like everyone else, I formed my own clear memory of it, conjuring its sights and sounds at will.

There are many versions of Fray Domingo’s fateful night: a host of gigantic black beings appearing and bearing the friar away to their secret world at the tops of the kapok trees, grinning engkantos materializing slowly from the earth at his feet, the stench of rotting flesh announcing the arrival of the amaranhig, who pursue him through the trees all night, even the asuang leering their foul faces at him and sweeping him up to play catch, though in this version it’s a wonder that they did not try to eat him, for he was worth any good-sized pig.

But he managed to emerge out of the experience alive. All the accounts agree that he was found on the slopes in the morning, crazed. They say that those who found him saw his prized lion of Castille—which had mauled many town lasses—shrunken visibly to the size of a thimble. This punishment was attributed to the underground folk or the vengeful elementals.

But whoever his punisher may have been, Fray Domingo was a wasted man. The captain of the guard could not explain how he came to be wandering in the forest. After being washed and clothed, he was interviewed behind closed doors by the provincial of his order, who thereafter sent him home to Spain within that very month. Then no more was heard of him.

Nobody too, can remember his full name now. Fray Domingo de la O____ is all anyone can come up with, in whispers, because they say that the elementals stole away his name and that was how he came to be mad. Some explain that the night of retribution was a Sunday, purposely chosen, and that this was the truest bit of the story that had stuck through the years.

For retribution it truly was, not done for a mere scare. For a decade as cura, he had deprived many young men of their sweethearts and had possessed their dreams of becoming fathers and familymen. Thus, for the sheer number of deflowered young girls and violated women, he deserved nothing short of being killed. But as no one dared murder the cura, the next best thing was to bring him over to their side, to the care of their own gods.

Whether he had died as an old man plagued to the end by a livid insomnia, or shortly after his return had been found stiff on the cold floor of his room in the fortified castle home of his order, baffling purple thorns sticking out of his skin, as some say, after but a few years Fray Domingo passed into legend. The year 1896 came to pass, and the new century opened on a world where he had become as mythical as the beings that had taken him away from it.

It was into the new century that Inday Candila came of age. I myself met her when I was a child; I had always been sickly but one night I woke up feeling like I had been rolled over needles, able only to call out feebly to my mother. After reciting a dozen rapid Hail Marys, and seeing that nothing—not the crucifix, nor the small robed image of the Sto. Niño could alleviate my suffering, she gathered all her courage and brought me on her back, to Inday Candila. By then she was a harmless-looking crone, almost a century old, her irises as pale as the flame of the candle she passed over my rigid body. A poultice smelling of herbs and coconut oil was applied to my chest, and in my swoon I could hear her rapid whispers assuming different volumes all at once, as if a whole chattering chorus was bending over me. Through a haze I saw the darkness over her shoulder shift, assume eyes and mouth. Then her waxy palms on my knees and shoulders, and as soon as done the pain drained out of me like liquid.

As soon as I could open my mouth I bawled, grasping my mother, but Inday Candila’s hand darted out and clutched my chin. “Shut your mouth, boy. It will come back in.” For all my youngness I could sense the power tempered in her slight, shrunken frame, her milky eyes, the vise-like grip of her small bony hand. “It is the ill wind,” she told my mother, waving away the proffered bill. She locked her eyes on me, and I could feel the hair on my nape tingle.

I remember the many rooms we passed through on our way out, as we stumbled through the maze-like corridors after the servant. In one of them somebody was singing a sad melody. I snatched away from my mother towards one of the rooms, shuffling after the sound. No sooner had I peered in than I knew for certain that I had been cast with the most powerful of spells.

Inday Candila had been baptized Fortunata and was the daughter of Felicidad, the sole offspring of the Jalandineses, a rich family whose relatives possessed five of the eight mansions surrounding the plaza. Felicidad was by no means spectacular in looks, her sole commendable trait being her enormous piety and devotion to Our Lady of Candles, which led her often to the cathedral. Don Licaro Jalandines’ own house sat right beside it, and it was here that life took leave of Felicidad after she delivered the tiny, pitiful infant that Don Licaro, in a rage at her condition, had unsuccessfully attempted to dissolve in her belly by forcing her to drink cupfuls of a bitter concoction of various roots.

They were at a loss at the child’s tenacious will to live. Twice its grandfather accidentally dropped it on the steps, and still it recovered from its injuries. Don Licaro lost sleep sweating in his bed, recalling how the child’s eyes stared unblinking at him as it fell. For nights he kept looking over his shoulder at the door to the adjoining room, where the bassinet was.

The girl grew into an unnatural beauty, for though she had skin desirably fair as well as a full head of light brown curls and an aquiline nose, she had an eerie, brooding air that was almost terrible, because around her people felt like they were being watched though her gaze was elsewhere. At the dances in Don Licaro’s house she unnerved the guests by coming into the room clad in his nightshirt. She upset the servants and workers by following them around and predicting their deaths in extremely grisly detail. She had a habit of staring fixedly at Don Licaro at dinner, accusing him of wanting to murder her until he would throw up his hands and exasperated, command her to stop.

As Fortunata became an adolescent her behavior became more and more bizarre. She neglected her appearance—her rich hair becoming alarmingly matted and filthy, her restless gaze frightening in its intensity. The house buzzed with whispers about her parentage, and this sharpened her hostility. That she further felt unloved and unwanted may have prodded her odd behavior around the family, but the final straw came when she caught her grandfather astride one of the servants on the floor of his study. Don Licaro had closed his eyes for a moment atop the submissive girl and when he opened them again he met Fortunata’s bold, open stare. He disengaged himself from the girl with a start and hopped away with his trousers around his ankles. By the time he had gotten them back up around his waist, his granddaughter had vanished and the anxious maid was proposing telling the señora.

During succeeding attempts with the servants, time and again she would be there, staring down at him with an opaque look which nearly gave him heart attacks. He took his wife aside and told her to find a way to get rid of Fortunata. She suggested that the girl be sent to boarding school. Better a sanatorium, Don Licaro muttered.

At the dinner party at his house on the day he was elected alcalde mayor, Don Licaro explained his granddaughter’s absence by bemoaning that she had left them for the gardener. Fortunata was already an hour away from Jaro, on foot to the next town, the voice of the only father she had known ringing in her ears: “Come back and I will set the dogs on you.” He had called for her and the dark look she gave him when he asked where she wanted to be sent to for schooling had caused him to lose his temper wildly. “You are a bastard and no charity on my part can ever hide it,” he spat out as he grabbed her by the elbow and pushed her to the window looking out on the countless beggars harassing churchgoers. “Look at them,” he thundered, “the town is crawling with your cursed siblings!”

Nothing substantial was heard of Fortunata in Jaro for the next few years, yet here and there arose rumors: she had made a pact with the dark forces, as a way of redeeming her disgraceful lineage. She quit Iloilo, journeyed to Siquijor where she learned the black arts, came back and hid out in Dueñas where she hobnobbed with the asuang folk. She went up to the mountains to beg nature for her secrets.

After twenty years an astounding epidemic descended on the living Jalandineses and their closest relatives: they started dropping dead in the middle of mere everyday activities—dressing up, tending the garden, chattering at the dinner table. The elderly died in their sleep. The explanation offered by the family doctor was that a deadly hereditary disease had surfaced after scores of genetic slumber.

A stranger was seen attending all the funerals. This woman expressed a desire to acquire the various properties of the former Jalandineses and after a few months she had moved into the sagging old house by the cathedral.

The town’s memory refreshed itself. It was Fortunata, much aged, yet the oldtimers recognized her through the little girl she brought with her, who was a spitting image of Don Licaro’s long-lost granddaughter.

All sorts of gossip sprouted: Fortunata had worked death on her kin as revenge; the father of her small child was the famous enkantado of Madia-as. Her powers were supposedly so great that she could kill anyone she wished by the aid of the spirits she called to her bidding.

She came to be regarded with fear, but not without a degree of awe and respect. She kept quietly to her ways all the while projecting an aura of immense power. And although people were afraid of her, she developed a peculiar image as a protector of the town. The same folks who rushed, trembling, out of her way whenever she took a walk in the plaza were the same ones who went furtively to her house in the early evening and came out of it with jars of magical remedies. The name Fortunata was forgotten, as was the doomed family she had supposedly extinguished.

She married her daughter off to a planter from Negros and by the time the war came round she had already established the most powerful of Iloilo’s witch families, and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of her days as its almighty matriarch, under the auspices of the same forces that had tormented the father she had never known.

The beauty of the women in this family has always been short of being supernatural. Throughout the years they have retained their Castillian looks, and it is said that to look them directly in the eye would render one vulnerable to their magic. The young girls don’t venture out of the house until age eight, not even to be sent to school, until they supposedly acquire some sort of spirit-guide. Come eighteen they are introduced to the town with a lavish feast that crowds Jaro and leaves the townspeople with full stomachs for a week. They never cut their waist-length hair even when the beauty salon craze washed over Panay in the 50’s like a cold wave. It was also said they have healing powers, and the ability to make anything, be it man, spirit or nature, obey them. During my growing up years, there has never been a time when the queen of the fiesta was not one of them.

For these women there would be no love, only its shadow; the sins of men and fathers, had incurred for the friar’s descendants the fate of giving their lives to nurturing the old ways. Inday Candila herself had accepted the curse as willingly as she had renounced her past. They married only for money, and even then chose reticent, weak-willed men who would always be too afraid to look behind the cold, polished veneer of their mysterious wives. Every few years, a girl would go astray but her lover would encounter an abrupt, premature death—drowned where there was no water, suffocated where there was plenty of air. The luckier ones went mad or disappeared. Not too long after Inday Candila had cured me, a young man was found dead in the plaza, his body swollen to twice its size, angry veins almost bursting from his skin. He was a student from Manila; his visit to distant relatives had coincided with the birthday of one of Inday Candila’s great-granddaughters. He had seen the parade and the float of the young woman dressed in an ermine cape, like a queen. The last person to see him alive was the street sweeper stationed in the plaza, who reported that the young man had run past him the previous night from the direction of Inday Candila’s house, sobbing unabashedly. The chief of police had glanced briefly at the imposing mansion across the street, and called for an ambulance from the morgue. I stood in the crowd, shivering in the sun as they covered the corpse with a white tablecloth.

Still, we conducted our lives normally with these strange folk in our midst though of course there were the usual scary tales about them that every child grew up with, even as they rubbed elbows with the witch family’s children. Everyone had stories of the girl who was feared in class, who had stewed offal for recess and lunch, and introduced other children to invisible beings—sudden laughter slithering into the ears of those who walked home alone at dusk. Some had tales of befriending them, being invited to the family’s ancestral home and finding heads of strange animals mounted eerily on the wall, dogs howling in the backyard, phantom fingers skipping on necks. And always, the lore of merienda: dinuguan so thick and black it seemed to be alive.

You asked me once if I believed all of it. I hadn’t known what to say, even while marveling at how your thin summer dress the color of fresh leaves billowed in the breeze. Your face an upturned flower. I told you of my dream of becoming a doctor, of saving lives. You smiled sadly and said I was meant for bigger things than an uneducated country girl. I wanted to tell you that all I wished was to save both of us—from the fear palpable in the heart of every one born in that town, wary of the somber little girls with wild eyes and streaming hair in every era. And the stories: Inday Candila and her sorcery, Fray Domingo and his haunted forest, the hundred-year old wind brushing against our skins.

It was too late when I realized that these stories would keep us apart, though it wasn’t fear that gripped my heart when on that faraway night—the last night of my childhood—I lost myself in a magical forest of my own imagining, seeing you in that room for the first time, your hair the only darkness about you.

NIKKI ALFAR

EMBERWILD

Nikki Alfar has been a flight attendant, a bank manager, a magazine editor, a radio newscaster, an office administrator, and a copywriter. Her stories and articles have appeared in The Philippine Star and the magazines Smart Parenting, Stuff, milk, Seventeen, and Jam. She has written more comic books than she is readily able to remember, and edited the Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award-winning anthology Isaw, atbp. She has also won a number of Anvil awards for her copywriting, as well as the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature for her Short Story for Children, “Menggay’s Magical Chicken.” Alfar currently runs her own content development firm, Kestrel Studios, out of the home she shares with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, Sage.

“EmberWild” is a classically-told fantasy set in an imaginary world, both fresh and familiar to perceptive readers.

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND that all of this occurred some thirteen years ago, when I was young still and the Empire had but newly begun its campaign to rid the realm of the Wildness.

We were told—and not without foundation—that the Wild represented a threat to the ongoing unification of the realm, dispersed as they were throughout the lands, yet uncontrolled by any form of sanctioned governing body. Moreover, rumor had persisted over a course of decades that certain members of the Great Families had been pursuing some sort of complex schema of interbreeding, intended to result in the birth of a child with unprecedented affinity for all aspects of the Wildn ess. It was therefore generally agreed that reining in the Wild, particularly among the Families, was not merely a judicious course, but a necessary one in order to ensure the continuance of the Empire. No one strongly objected, as I was far from the only one who had heard some story or knew someone who knew someon e who had experienced some calamitous upheaval wrought by an untutored expression of the Wildness.

It is known, of course, that not all of the Wild were eradicated. Some of the affinities were deemed to be of use to the realm and therefore permitted to endure, albeit under the constraints of that wondrous Cantment that regulates every moment of its subject’s life, from breeding to breathing. To this day, maritime commerce and conquest alike are sped onward by the billowing winds summoned by the indentured SkyWild, always with a stalwart adept of Cant at hand to ensure that his charge’s Cantment is loosed only enough for the time and task required. The FlowWild, likewise, are kept in isolated reserve against instances in which rain may be required to alleviate drought; or conversely, when torrential downpours threaten the more flood-prone cities of the realm, such as the densely-packed, haphazardly-grown capital itself.

But now I misremember, for that was the old capital. The new one, it is said, is a triumph of planning and architecture—brilliantly conceived, meticulously executed. I have never been there myself; it is the old capital that I remember, and of which I speak.

*

THERE IS ALWAYS work for soldiers in an Empire so vast and so ancient that any other name it once had has long since been forgotten; in those days, however, the Wildness campaign kept the garrisons so busy that entire companies of soldiers were constantly in and out of the capital city, conveying intelligenc e, receiving orders, reporting for direct commendation or censure, and so on. They were celebrated by the general populace as well as generously compensated during that time, more so those that had managed to especially distinguish themselves on campaign. These heroes of the Empire were frequently accorded promotions upon presentation at court, and invariably awarded a significant purse in recognition of their valiant efforts on behalf of the realm. And the contents of very many of these purses inevitably found their way into the coffers of Madame Astranzia’s House of Boundless Bliss.

Then, as now, there was of course a plethora of pleasure houses to be found across the capital, and indeed throughout the realm wherever soldiers were known to be detailed. Many of these boasted courtesans reputed to be every bit as lovely and willing as those at Madame Astranzia’s; and every one of thes e other establishments was certainly considerably lighter on a man’s (or woman’s) purse. But the House of Bliss was exceptional, and not only because one of its ladies was rumored to be the favorite of the eldest prince of the realm.

From the outside, it appeared to be no more than another luxury establishment amid the prosperous hostelry district in which it was located. It was crafted of costly stone, with tasteful fretwork at the eaves and true glass, not shimmersheen, at each of its sumptuously curtained windows. It had a modest yet lush lawn, well-maintained with a carpet of green grass regardl ess of the heat or cold at any given time of year, though not a single flower graced the House’s premises on the exterior.

For the flowers were all inside, Madame Astranzia was wont to say—with a lifted eyebrow and complicit smile—and bloomed best out of the heat and light of the noonday sun. Indeed, of the residents of that House, none but the domestic staff and Astranzia herself were ever seen outside its rose-colored walls. But any male in the capital above a certain age could recite, whether from hearsay or experience, the use-names and descriptions of every coveted courtesan behind that discreet façade.

Once inside, it was said, one instantly perceived that the much-observed walls were in fact pared from stone so fine as to allow sufficient illumination from both moon and sun to bathe the interior in a muted roseate glow. This hushed incandescence was augmented as necessary by Cantment-crafted glass globes, which floated obligingly along to follow each courtesan and each guest, if they so desired; and in which floated, as if stirred by some internal current, infinitesimal glowing motes of that precious mineral called lambent, which even the highest Families of nobility possess only in short supply.

In either the muted or immediate glow of th ese light sources, the reception chamber of the House was revealed to be a most marvelous amalgamation of the most opulent indulgences from all corners of the Empire. Fine wines, cheeses, fruits, and sweetmeats—including, on occasion, such exotic delicacies as pickled slivers of adarna tongue or the cloudy, heady liqueur distilled from the potent tears of lung—were served to guests awaiting their favorite companions, or suffering an agony of indecision over which exquisit e beauty to select for the night’s pleasure.

Here, atop an irysk-fur rug mottled a pleasing indigo and cream, was strewn a sultan’s ransom of pillows handstitched by the otherwise-violent desert tribeswomen of the distant South; each pillow encrusted with semiprecious gems and threads of silver and gold, yet soft to the touch as the skin of the aptly-named courtesan Velvet, who hailed from that region and reclined upon those very cushions when she was not otherwise occupied entertaining h er gentleman visitors. It was said that every available inch of Velvet’s dusky body—saving only the harder tissues of her nails and teeth—was so smooth, so supple, so yielding that even the harshest scars inflicted on a man in battle would melt painlessly away upon contact with her, leaving only skin as unblemished as Velvet’s own, and a spirit similarly healed from the rigors and weariness that all too often shadowed a soldier’s career.

There, in the opposite corner, hung a profusion of rare story-silks created by the spider-people of Eastern Chiensai, who spend half of their lives suspended from ropes in mid-air so that they may use all four of their double-jointed limbs to craft those gossamer-fine, intricate tapestries of weave and wonder. In the House of Bliss, these finished silks were twined about pillars painstakingly carved from whole whalebones, also with scenes from stories of the Oriental demesnes. The courtesan named Lithe was often to be found perched elegantly atop these pillars, or entwined among the sumptuous silks of her homeland. Her porcelain skin and refined features were as d elicate as the masterpieces that surrounded her; yet her limbs were every bit as honed as those of the spider-people, and capable of all manner of acrobatic contortions within the more clandestine chambers of the House—including the famed Cerulean Room, where expensively-maintained Cant rendered the earth’s pull so weak as to be negligible, so that guests with a taste for adventure might be freed from the weight of their burdens in an ambiance of literal weightlessness. Lithe’s companionship was often requested in tandem with a reservation for use of the Cerulean Room; and it was said that the experience was itself a tale well worthy of chronicle in any story-silk or scrimshaw.

And of course there were the more commonplace beauties—fair of skin, blond or brown or red of hair—though not a one of them could truly be dismissed as merely commonplace. Golden-tressed Aria, for instance, tended to sing rather than shout her pleasure, in notes of such surpassing sweetness and purity that she was of necessity designated a room all her own, in which the mirror and window glass had been especially prepared so as to withstand the reverberant onslaught of her passions. And the higher and louder the note, it was knowledgably reported, the higher, as it were, a man found himself rising to the occasion.

But the center of the reception chamb er was devoted to Sorrow, so named because the depthless solemnity in her eyes belied their appetizing color of burnt sugar, as the charcoal-dark of her hair formed a cloak of nigh-impenetrable mystery over skin of delectable honey, kissed with cream. She alone in that entire room was wholly, perennially naked, for Madame Astranzia claimed that the fountain of perfumed water in which Sorrow basked was necessary to counteract the emanating heat that had been steeped into her very pores by the tropical sun of the island territories from which she hailed. She was accounted by all and sundry to be as dangerous as she was alluring—surpassing even the awe and dread tendered to her crueler colleague, Cicatrix of storm-scoured Odanis—for it was held that any man, having once been consumed in the fires of Sorrow’s fervid embrace, would thereafter yearn and burn for her touch till the end of his days, though he should be detailed to the farthest northern reaches of the Empire, where even the mightiest glaciers would prove incapable of quenching the flame of desire from his scorched and shattered soul.

One such unfortunate was a certain Nicolas, a bladearm of some repute from the 47th detachment of the Western brigades.

“I love you,” Nicolas said to Sorrow, as they lay in the starlit dark of the Ebon Room, the sourceless chirping of crickets becoming audible once more in the aftermath of their first time together. He was fresh from yet another victory at the front then, and nearly swaggering with it before he first caught speechless sight of her in her fountain-pool, glistening-wet and faintly steaming. From that moment, he had felt as though he were the one submerged, drowning in the scent of her, the taste of her skin, the feel of her hair, the burnt-sugar sea of her somber eyes. “Let me take you away from here. We can marry, if you want; or not, if you don’t. I know the quality of your Madame Astranzia—she’s an eye for profit, but she will not bar our way.”

Sorrow answered him as she had responded to countless other declarations of blazing ardor. “You do not love me,” she said; and though he could not clearly make out her face in the evening dark, her voice was not unkind. “You love what you think of me—and for that I thank you, and for the generosity of your spirit. But do not think, please, that lovemaking makes love, for we have known each other, yet we do not know one another. And I am well with that.”

“I love you,” Nicolas said again, greatly daring on their sixth night together, this time upon the sandy shoals beneath gently undulating seaweed and drifting glimmerfin replicas of rare fish in the Aquamarine Room. His need to be with her had led him to greater and greater feats in the fulfillment of his duties, such that he had been promoted so often that he no longer required monetary rewards to afford Madame Astranzia’s costly hospitality. He had also fallen, nearly, into Sorrow’s manner of speaking, so frequently had he r ecalled and reviewed in his mind their all-too-sporadic shared moments of communion and conversation. “Let me purchase your contract, please, so that you need no longer be required to entertain any guest but myself. If you insist on remaining here, then let it be at your leisure, and our pleasure, yours and mine.”

Sorrow gazed at him as he gazed at her, enthralled anew by the shifting tones of her honey-cream skin in the wavering unders ea light. “We dare not love,” she said. “Perhaps you might love me, and perhaps love may turn the world, as it is said—but at the other end of the world we would find the Empire still. And do not think, please, that we can belong to one another when we belong foremost to the realm. That is the way of things, and coin will not change it.”

“I love you,” Nicolas said to her on their seventh night together, their mingled scents wafting away into the fragrance of living pines, grass, and wildflowers in the Viridian room. His zeal for his vocation had diminished significantly since his assignment to a command post overseeing a spice-wealthy archipelagic protectorate. It was the humidity, he often claimed, both out loud and to himself; but by the solitary light of his utterly-unnecessary fireside he could acknowledge that he was troubled by the natives’ vague resemblance to his beloved Sorrow. And even the unending fire of his passion in the heat of that island air could not assuage his growing cold suspicion that he was not, perhaps, the hero his Empire presented him to be. “At least tell me your real name,” he implored.

Sorrow wept, unexpectedly— and beautifully, of course, her tears turning to vapor nearly on the instant that they touched her flawless, glowing cheeks. “I have given up striving not to love you,” she said. “It is futile, as striving to love is also futile, for we are neither of us who we are; nor can we be one when we are each of us less than half who we should be. So do not think, please, that my true name is of moment when my true self is not who I am. Love is for those who live.”

On the ninth night, the soldiers came.

“How long did you think you could conceal her nature beneath a fountain?” the leader asked Madame Astranzia contemptuously, even as he viciously kicked in the door to the Vermilion Room, the lovers’ haven of choice for that evening.

The normally-genteel doyenne bristled with outrage as she replied, “You are mistaken, I assure you; and you will regret this violation of my place of business! Your superior is a frequent guest here—”

As Astranzia thus loudly attempted to stall for time, Nicolas was already in motion, having thrust Sorrow to the far corner of the room and leapt across, still unclothed, to retrieve his previously cast-aside blades. For a moment, when the battle was first joined, it almost seemed that he might win, so experienced a fighter was he… but he was naked, and they were in armor; and he was weak with love and sudden, sick terror while they were strong with conviction and duty; and there simply were too many of them, in the end. It was the fourth or fifth soldier that ran him through, piercing the unprot ected flesh of his stomach and spattering the hectic walls of the Vermilion Room with the brighter crimson stain of freshly-spilled blood.

And the courtesan called Sorrow erupted in flame.

It began with her eyes, the eternal solemn darkness of them turning suddenly bright enough to elicit answering sparks from the exposed swords and cuirasses of polished steel massed before the narrow doorway. From there the blaze grew quickly—so quickly!—barely giving her own flowing hair time enough to rise, halo-like, in the air before crisping into soot; turning her skin to burnished bronze and then to purest fire as it devoured her face, arms, torso, feet; making of her a living effigy, at once glorious and terrible and indisputably Wild. And from her body the conflagration spread all but instantaneously—in a moment scarcely more than the moment between heartbeats—outward, ever outward.

The Vermilion Room was engulfed before any save Madame Astranzia could think to turn and flee. Even she was not quick enough to slip out the door—yet the flames did not touch her, nor the grievously-wounded Nicolas, nor any of the courtesans of that incomparable and ill-fated House. But the other soldiers burned, so swiftly and absolutely that they had not time even to utter a cry before they were seared to ash in their armor; and ev en the extraordinary stone walls, presumably proof against all but the most outward ravages of extreme heat, were lit and consumed as though they were flimsy as mer e parchment. And the once-green lawn blackened and charred to powder; and the conflagration grew, and grew, and grew.

“My name is Malaya,” said the woman once known as Sorrow, before she became indistinguishable from the rest of the burning.

*

VELVET HEALED ME, of course, when we found one another outside the House at the smoldering break of day—after which she, Astranzia, and the remaining disheveled courtesans fled to the compass points, to avoid being captured for complicity in the cataclysmic debacle. Even so, the injury and my unblemished record were sufficient to attain the honorable discharge I later sought—or perhaps the bureaucrats were merely all too occupied to intervene over a trifle such as mine, troubled as they were with the complexities of transf erring the seat of governance to the new capital at Aylanar.

In recent years, they have been more troubled still; struggling, for one, against the self-proclaimed “true” Emperor, who has mustered an upstart militia of his own in the once-echoing ruins of the cindered old court.

For another, even a retired officer such as myself has managed to catch wind of the inadequately-suppressed rumors—that numerous SkyWild slaves have been escaping from isolated ships at sea, aided by an inexplicable band of renegade Wild who are led, it is recounted, by a bald yet inarguably beautiful woman, with skin of bronzed honey, and eyes marked even in triumph by some fathomless, ineffable grief.

It is further said that she is attended, among others, by a girl-child of twelve or so years, who carries their company aloft upon winds of her own creation; who calms the oceans simply by speaking to the wat ers in a strange, susurrant tongue; who breaks the crafted chains of Cantment with a gestur e once thought dead and gone with the last of the hunted EarthWild. She is believed to be the bald woman’s daughter; for though her hair is long and lustrous—charcoal-dark—her skin is of a similar, if slightly lighter, honeyed hue.

But I like to imagine that she has my eyes: illuminated, yet not consumed, by sorrow.

JOSEPH NACINO

WALKING BACKWARDS

Joseph Nacino is the daytime online editor for philstar.com. Being an inveterate reader of science fiction and fantasy, the publication of his first story in a Filipino anthology of speculative fiction is a tremendous source of fan-boy glee for him. Hopefully, this wouldn’t be his last.

“Walking Backwards,” which Nacino describes as “a historiographical soft SF story”, looks into the ties that bind a young man to his past as well as his future.

DANNY KNEW THE antique clock on his desk intimately. The program, the result of tinkering with an old Macromedia Flash CD he found at a tiangge, was a bit slow compared to the clock on his computer despite several modifications.

Still, as he worked, it was at the antique clock he kept looking at. Though it was only a realistic-looking animation on his screen, he loved how it looked: a mantel clock of dark lacquered wood with the clock’s face lined with gold. Below it, its pendulum swung with a will.

Danny shivered. The office air-condition vent over his head was spewing straight down at him and he squirmed in his chair to avoid the draft. This knocked off the virtual reality mirror-shades on his face and his attempt to keep it steady ruined the screen, scattering a number of icons.

He sighed as he waved his gloves in the air—akin to a conductor and his baton—to clear the mess. Fortunately, no calls came while he was cleaning up.

“It won’t go faster, you know?”

Danny jerked in surprise at hearing the female voice. He put his computer on ‘hold’ and turned to see Marla’s smiling face peering over the cubicle wall.

“Yep?”

Danny’s team leader stepped into his cubicle and leaned against the wall. She always looked amused, as if she was on the brink of laughing at a joke only she knew about.

“The clock won’t go faster if you keep watching it, I said.”

His jaw dropped in surprise: “Huh? How did you know I was looking at the clock?”

Marla grinned and said, “You keep looking to the side where the clock is usually located. Don’t worry, I do the same thing.”

As Danny tried to explain, Marla waved a hand, “It’s okay, Danny. Anyway, Mr. Toledo wants to see you about the China tech-support report as soon as possible. Don’t worry though, I think he just wants to know how the Chinese are taking to the new English translation program.”

“Um, okay. No problem. ”

Marla gave him a thumbs-up and a smile before exiting his cubicle.

“She smiles a lot, don’t you think?”

“Why does everyone keep making comments at my back?” Danny grumbled aloud, turning to the speaker in the cubicle behind his.

Edgar smirked, his mirror-shades resting precariously on the slope of his forehead as he folded his arms before him. To Danny, Edgar’s fat frame looked like a piece of longganisa wrapped tight in the wrinkled polo barong.

Edgar said mock-innocently: “What? Weren’t you the one who told me she was cute?”

“Ed, quit it …”

“What?”

“I swear to God that’s the last time I’m going to tell you anything.”

“So you don’t want to boink her?”

Danny had to smile.

He once remembered Mang Bal describing Edgar as a “burbling stream”: unlike the polluted Pasig River, it was noisy but generally harmless. Mang Bal had taken a drink from his beer and pointed a gnarly finger at him to make his point, “But then again, he only likes you because you’re the only person he knows who can drink him under the table.”

“I wonder why?” Danny had replied wryly as he hoisted his own bottle.

Danny held up his mirror-shades to peer at the clock-program and compared it with the antique clock. They gave different times: 4:30 p.m. and 4:47 p.m. He sighed.

“So what’s on your mind that you’re so eager to leave?” Edgar said as he leaned sideways, the stylish-looking swivel chair creaking pitifully under him.

Danny sighed, massaged the bridge of his nose, and said, “Just tired out of my freaking mind, is what. This call center business gets old really fast.”

“Ah, fuck this,” Edgar declared, adding in a sing-song voice, “It’s a Friday night and we got mucho money. Let’s hit the town, pick-up some girls…”

“Nah. Have a prior commitment.”

Before Edgar could say anything, they heard Edgar’s name being paged via the network, a soft electronic voice declaring, “Edgar dela Fuente, you have a call on 124.”

As his friend went to answer the call, Danny stood up to stretch for a bit.

As he did, he found his gaze drawn around the ergonomically-designed pastel-colored hall where a dozen in-bound callers like him communed in their own private worlds behind their mirror-shades. Despite the occasional muttered conversations and the muted tap-tap of black gloves on tabletops, the silence was a palpable blanket over the cubicle-filled hall.

Patience, he thought. He wasn’t sure if he was referring to the clock or to Edgar. For a while, he imagined taking several swings at the computer with his swivel chair. That took around five minutes off the clock.

Finally, it was 5:30. The sound ding-dong echoed through the hall, effectively signaling the end of the day-shift. Likewise, a laser hologram of Ms. Remy, the office HR, flickered into being near the ceiling and made last minute announcements. As his officemates started moving out of the hall, the noise volume jumped.

Danny gestured to shut down his computer. As it did, he found his mirror-shades clear before his eyes like a television set turned off. He swiped his ID wrist-band through the electronic scanner near the console to log-out. As it processed, he took off his shades, placed it on the hook by his chair and stood up.

Edgar said from behind him, “Are you sure you don’t want come with us? Teresa, Frankie, and me are going to Enterprise Plaza to get a round of beer.”

Danny shook his head and replied, “No, it’s alright. I’m not going home to my apartment tonight. Gonna go home to Rizal to my Lola’s houseinstead. You guys go ahead.”

“All right. Your loss, man,” Edgar said with a grin. He waved farewell and turned to go with the others.

Danny turned around and took out his body-pack. He placed his lunch container, his notebook, and some pens in it. As part of his daily after-work ritual, he drew off his tie and pocketed it carelessly in his shirt chest pocket. Finished, he slung the pack on his shoulder and headed towards the exit.

At the glass doors, a line had formed with employees swiping their wrist IDs into a wall-scanner. Danny took his place behind the line and absentmindedly studied the plastic band around his wrist.

“So this is an ID band,” he remembered Mang Bal saying, looking at the bracelet with myopic intensity. The wristband’s queer black color, with glints within the band shining in the lamplight, made it appear as if Danny was wearing a small piece of the night.

“Yep,” Danny had replied with a swig of beer.

Mang Bal had asked, “How come it doesn’t have your picture? I mean, I know I’m as old as sin and I don’t give a whit for these modern things … but don’t IDs usually have pictures?”

“These are electronic ID bands, Mang Bal,” Danny had replied.

“So?”

Danny had sighed and said, “For simplicity’s sake, it’s easier to store data in an electronic ID—my company profile, my SS number, my TIN, including my picture. They’re all in there. Of course, to avoid any problems like ID switching, company rules state that you can’t let anyone else wear your wristband. Else you face dismissal or worse even, prosecution.”

“Watch your tone. I’m ignorant, not stupid,” Mang Bal had declared and added, “Thankfully, I’m too old for this stuff.”

“You’re never too old, Mang Bal,” he had countered gently.

At least, Danny thought glumly, he hadn’t told Mang Bal that his office was one of the few that hadn’t upgraded to the latest in palm- and iris-recognition technologies around. Then it was Danny’s turn and he swiped his own band past the scanner. It chirped his exit time at him and he stepped out of the office into the elevator foyer.

Already, a sizeable group was waiting for a lift downstairs. Danny groaned when he saw the eight elevators on the move and none near his floor. Damn it. Elevator rush hour again, he thought.

Ten minutes later and two elevator rides down, he exited the building. As always, traffic on Ayala was a stand-still due to the slow progress of construction of a new railway system right down the middle of the avenue. The cacophony of traffic was also deafening as clamoring car horns dueled with the persistent shrieks of buses’ air-brakes and muffler-shot engines.

Despite the sound, the dust and the distance, Danny decided to walk to the MRT 1 train station instead of taking a crowded bus. Walking towards the Glorietta Mall, he took his time and let people rush around him like river water around a boulder.

Danny wondered if there was any difference in traffic now that Makati had banned public utility jeepneys within its city limits. He remembered the protests and violent demonstrations by militant groups against the city government so well. But now, he thought, it was back to business as people took the bus or their own cars in resignation despite the interminable Makati traffic jams. Or, like him, they walked.

Like lemmings was how Danny once described to Mang Bal the rush-hour crowd’s hustle homewards in the evenings. Unfortunately, he had to explain to his old friend what lemmings were. Mang Bal never did take to watching cable television, much less Discovery Channel or National Geographic.

“People nowadays are so much in a hurry,” Mang Bal had said, and pointed a gnarled finger at Danny in admonition: “That’s why you get so tired just coming home. Better you should stay at the office or at… hrmm, what’s the name of that mall? Glo—Gloriska?”

Danny had shaken his head in amusement and popped a piece of chicharon bulaklak dipped in suka into his mouth. “It’s Glorietta, Mang Bal. And besides, I won’t have anything to do in the mall.”

Mang Bal had snorted and said, “Nothing to do? Only unimaginative people have nothing to do!”

“Well, I’m tired after work that I sometimes just sleep during the travel from Makati to Rizal. But it doesn’t really matter since I only go home on the weekends.”

Danny glanced up at the sky past the high-rise buildings and saw it was almost twilight. A sound like an angry wind disturbed his reverie and he saw in the distance the old MRT line. With a sigh, he joined the crowd heading towards the escalators to the train station.

At the bottom of the escalators were salesgirls in their dark-blue SM uniforms, dusty trabahadors finishing the day shift from construction sites, and harassed-looking yuppies on their way home. Likewise, there was a smattering of Koreans in the crowd.

Danny thought Kornoys or Korean-Filipinos had nothing on Chinese-Filipinos ever since pop idol Sandara Park came out in 2004. This, plus the infusion of South Koreans seeking better opportunities in the Philippines, had ensured the rise of a new breed of Filipinos. He wondered at times if the Filipinos as a breed were dying out. But then, he thought wryly, what’s a Filipino anyway?

“Your parents were Filipino,” Mang Bal had said, “so you’re Filipino.”

“I don’t know about that,” Danny had replied evenly. He hated talking about his parents. “My dad was three-fourths Chinese, remember? Lola used to say all my bad habits came from his blood. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Lola was a racist.”

“What’s a racist?”

“Never mind, Mang Bal.”

Once past the escalators, he lined up at the queue leading to the turnstile and took out his Nokia cellular phone from his pocket in readiness to pay. As he neared the turnstile, he pressed a button on his phone and the screen lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors. Ahead of him, a pretty young woman dressed in corporate attire had done the same and was now flashing her phone at the turnstile. Then it was his turn and the turnstile scanner deducted the proper fare from his phone.

However, just as he arrived at the platform, he saw the tail-end lights of a train vanish into the darkness. He sighed and turned to look for the next one. Soon enough, the platform filled with the next batch of commuters going home.

“I hate waiting for the train,” Danny had told Mang Bal, “I always have the bad luck to get to the platform just as a barely-full train pulls out. And then when the next train comes in, it’s topped to the brim!”

“In my day,” Mang Bal had said past a mouthful of crunchy sisig, “people had someone to blame about those things. During my day, they called him Bathala. Or God or Allah or…”

“Hey! Us young people still have religion.”

“Could have fooled me,” Mang Bal had muttered, “Nowadays, it’s easier for you youngsters to go without any spiritual education—and I don’t mean attending churches. What I mean is that you have the sense that you’re part of a bigger picture.”

“What do you expect? Nowadays, the younger generation has to have a sense of belonging to a group in order to be enthusiastic about it. But we—and yes, I’m including myself despite being 27 years old—we don’t get that feeling,” he retorted.

“That’s because you expect everything to be handed to you on a plate. Look at what we’re eating now! Sisig in a can?” Mang Bal had said, waving the tin can before him. “In my time, I used to butcher the pig myself and chop up the pieces to make the dish.”

Mang Bal slurped another spoonful of the pork dish before continuing: “Younger generations are content just to let things go their way as time goes by. It’s easier to feel contentment rather than working for what you want. And what do you get in return? Mediocrity.”

“Whoa!” Danny had said, “Wait a minute. I was just commenting on my bad luck with trains and now all of a sudden, we’re a generation of slackers and losers?”

“Yes. Do you have a point?”

When the next train arrived, Danny was swept into the train carriage as the crowd jostled to get seats. As the train signaled its departure with a pitiful whistle, he thought he was going to be crushed as the last few passengers tried to squeeze into the carriage before the doors closed shut.

Fortunately enough, he found himself with enough space wedged against the train window. He tried to concentrate on the view outside as he breathed through his mouth. Despite the air-conditioning in the train, people were perspiring badly in the stifling heat and the odor of sweaty bodies was making him nauseous.

Outside the train, he saw the traffic was marginally better than on Ayala Avenue as a bumper-to-bumper river of red lights fed southwards. Turning his head, Danny found himself with a spectacular view of the Makati business towers. The buildings themselves were lit both inside and out with a Donald Trump-esque extravagance.

As they neared Guadalupe Bridge, he saw a number of people on the train taking advantage of the giant television screens near the river. Danny figured whoever thought of the idea of planting screens near grid-locked major highways was a veritable PR genius. He thought it put a whole new spin to the term “captive audience.”

And speaking of the Pasig, the river itself looked as if it had finally given up the ghost. Only a small muddy trickle ran down its length as decrepit and rickety houses lined the sides, a growing squatters’ colony politicians had dubbed “River Town.”

“I still remember when there was a Pasig River,” Mang Bal had said, staring moodily at the gas lamp, “There were fishes in the river and birds flew its length without being overcome by the fumes. And during the rainy seasons, the river would overflow to flood the banks.”

“Well, the government did try to revive it before in the late ‘90s,” Danny had said. “They even put in a ferry service complete with stops along the river.”

“And look at it now,” Mang Bal had said.

Several stops later, his train pulled up into the Cubao station and he waded through the crowd to exit the train. Walking to the bridge that connected the MRT to the LRT line, he looked out at the thriving bazaar that filled the empty and half-constructed buildings of the Cubao commercial center.

Despite an effort to invigorate Cubao in the early 2000s, the venture had failed, forcing real estate investors to leave the environs to the tsangge crowd: the DVD bootleg movie sellers; the ukay-ukay marketers; and the cell phone syndicates. However, despite the failure to change its face, Cubao was still alive.

From his spot on the bridge, Danny saw a veritable sea of lights amidst tarpaulin tents and covered stalls selling almost everything: second-hand clothes, cheap Taiwanese toys, stainless steel pots and pans, cell phone covers as well as used cell phones, pirated CDs and memory sticks, pearls and plastic jewelry.

Likewise, he could smell the palengke a few meters beside the train station that was marked by a garbage pile at the center of the wet market. Disturbingly, the smell of offal had combined with the heady aroma of sizzling barbeque, crunchy kwek-kwek eggs, and a dozen other fares being cooked on the spot to make his mouth water. Already, hawkers had taken over the front of the Cubao station’s ground floor.

“That only goes to show that the Filipino ingenuity knows no bounds,” Danny had told Mang Bal.

“Or is it because Filipinos are still poor after so many years,” Mang Bal countered.

“Aren’t you cynical.”

“Hah! I read the newspaper. Sometimes, when I get the urge, I watch television. And so far, nothing’s changed. People are still struggling to get by.”

“Well, us young ones have to have something to be hopeful about because you oldies are already past your due anyway.”

“During my time, we lived in trees, remember?” Mang Bal had snorted in reply. “Pass the bottle opener by the way.”

Danny soon reached the train and boarded it. A shrill siren blew and then they were moving swiftly above the sharp lights of Aurora Boulevard. Not too many people were on the train and he was able to get a seat.

As he peered into the darkening evening, he wondered if a sign of progress in Marikina was the proliferation of billboards. Already, most of the signs cast multi-colored lights below at the residential communities that nestled beside Marcos Highway.

Like the city of Manila, the passage of the years had taken a toll on the cities of Marikina and Quezon. Residential suburban areas had quietly stumbled into ill-regard as moneyed families moved out to far-flung subdivisions in Bulacan and Laguna. Danny had studied at the state university in Diliman so he had an idea how Quezon City had once been regarded as the premier green city with its forested parks and grassy fields.

“I once visited U.P. myself,” Mang Bal had announced proudly.

“You did?”

“Yes. When your mother and father were still young, still studying. I took the time to walk around to see the beautiful trees stretching their branches over the streets as if the roads were rivers.”

“Yep, I remember those. I used to wonder if you knew those trees, some of them were so damn old. Last I heard, those trees are all gone now.”

“I know.”

Fortunately for Danny, Mang Bal had turned maudlin at the subject and they didn’t talk about it again.

By the time the train crested to its final stop at the top of the Antipolo hills, evening had fallen. Danny got out. He trudged past the exit turnstiles of the station, joining the crowd down the stairs. As he exited the station, he looked at his watch—its digital face faintly glowing in the dark—and wondered if he would be able to make it home early enough.

He felt his stomach growl and he detoured to a nearby food stall. He still had a little money in his wallet—around a hundred bucks—and this was enough for a small dish of kikiam doused in sweet-and-sour sauce and a cold glass of gulaman. Finishing his meal, he wiped his hands on a small piece of napkin and threw the rest in a nearby garbage can. He then went looking for an FX shuttle.

Fifteen minutes later, Danny was in an FX shuttle together with a number of passengers as it climbed the roads to Rizal. He napped now and then as the travel was uneventful despite an occasional jeepney or tricyle on the road. Lining the road were trees: miles and miles of it cloaked in a darkness that was almost primeval except for distant, isolated island-lights of a house here or a streetlight there.

At times he could almost think the whole world was just the circle of headlights that enticingly revealed a view of the road before them. That, and the heartbeat-like thumps—pada-bump, pada-bump, pada-bump—of the shuttle’s wheels on the pavement.

One time while he napped, he dreamt/ remembered Mang Bal telling him about his parents.

“Your mother and father was a nice couple. They loved each other so much. There was actually a moment I thought your Lola would cry herself to death when she received the news of their accident.”

Danny had gritted his teeth. “It wasn’t an accident, Mang Bal. It was only an accident that they were in the wrong place and time during the bombings in London. Besides, I barely knew them. I was still a baby when they moved abroad to work.”

“Be grateful, Danny. From what your Lola told me, they went abroad for your sake so that they could send money home.”

“Yeah, but it was Lola who took care of me from day one. Is it my fault that I can’t even remember how they actually look like? The only way I even know is through Lola’s pictures.”

Danny woke up as the shuttle chugged up a steep hill, a sound that told him that he was nearing his destination: a small dirt road leading off from the main thoroughfare.

“Para!”(“Stop!”)

Danny got off the shuttle and started walking. Despite the blackness of the night, he wasn’t afraid. He had grown up under the eaves of this forest and knew each and every root and rough patch of ground from the road to his house.

Still, Danny felt something stir from the pit of his stomach. Despite his familiarity, this part of the forest reminded him of ancient nightmares that haunted his ancestors. Unfortunately, he knew all the old tales: the dark underground-dwelling dwende, the malicious cigar-smoking kapre, and the bestial horse-headed tikbalang.

He shivered a bit as he heard the leaves rustling high above him. Was there a wind? For a moment, he imagined it to be some creature with sharp teeth and immediately felt the top of his head itch. But before his fears ran out of control, he saw a small well-lighted bungalow standing at the end of the dirt track and knew he was home.

He swung open the creaking brown gate. A couple of dirty-white mongrels came out from underneath a rusting Beetle in the garage and started barking. When they realized who it was, the two dogs started jumping up and down in excitement.

“Hello, Bernadette. Hey, Eliza,” he said fondly, scratching the ear of one dog while patting the head of the other. He walked into the house, swinging the screen door shut behind him and shouting, “Lola! I’m home!”

A small, wizened old woman came scuttling out from a side door and admonished him, “Shhh! Your lola is sleeping already.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Everything okay, Manang Baby?” he asked the household help, dropping his bag on the wooden sofa.

“Yes, but Mang Bal was troubling the hens in the backyard again,” Manang Baby replied, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Hah. Okay, I’ll talk to him about that—again,” he said and headed for the refrigerator. Opening it, he grabbed the nearest pair of bottles of San Miguel beer.

“Drinking again? Not too much, I will still cook dinner for you.”

“Alright, Manang,” Danny said. He closed the fridge door and headed outside to the backyard. Standing at the veranda, he looked around and saw the ancient balete tree looming at the edge of the backyard lights.

“Mang Bal! I’m home!” Danny said, feeling happy for the first time today.

At the sound of his voice, two eyes blinked open in the middle of the balete tree, shining blood-red in the eaves’ shadows.

ANGELO R . LACUESTA

NEW WAVE DAYS

Angelo R. Lacuesta was born in 1970. His first book, Life Before X and Other Stories, won the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award as well as the National Book Award. A Don Carlos Palanca Awardee, his fiction has appeared in the Philippines Free Press, The Best Philippine Short Stories and Future Shock: Prose, an edition of Sands and Coral.

“New Wave Days” is from his second collection of short fiction, White Elephant: Stories.

SHE ENTERS THE cigarette bar, parting the crowd, and my first thought is, haven’t I seen her before, somewhere? She takes a seat at a corner table. A waiter whisks away her reservation card, opens a glass cabinet and plucks a pack from a stack of Marlboros. Her name is on a brass plate on the shelf. She doesn’t speak, and doesn’t appear to be waiting for someone. She is dressed in a silver top and pants.

The music at the bar is strictly New Wave. A Flock of Seagulls is playing “Wishing.” The walls flash videos of the Cure, Kraftwerk, New Order, other bands I don’t know or can’t remember from stories from my father. It’s after hours. The bar is packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The ionizers are working overtime to clear the smoke.

Why does she make such an impression on me? Let us say that I feel an impulse, a tiny electric prick of instinct that triggers in me a mild curiosity, a gentle push toward something I can’t figure out. Sure, she is beautiful. In this part of town, gentle genetic tweaking makes all the women beautiful. But it isn’t that. I can’t quite put a finger on it.

The music seems to mean nothing to her, not even when they play a U2 anthem and the smoky, sweaty crowd goes wild. But when she lights up her Marl light I see a breath of pleasure flit over her face. When was the last time I was witness to such pleasure on a woman?

How odd, I think, as I light up a moderately priced filterless, that our kinship, our courtship, our long and hopeless relationship begins around such vice.

*

FROM MY TINY flat in the uplevels, morning skies are the texture of brushed steel. My window looks out into the cleft between beds of clouds, a westward view, with the spires of other residential buildings faintly visible in the distance.

I call Paula’s number. The beep comes on and I announce that I am coming over in two weeks to see our children. I’m not coming over this week because I’m doing something this weekend. “Message sent,” a voice recites. It is a female voice, warm and synthesized.

Boredom pushes me to do something, to go somewhere, and I go to Thailand, where the worn-out wats await, rotting and sinking silently, their walls and towers half-buried in the hot earth. On my way to Ayutthaya, there are crowds of people at every bus stop. I try to take solace in the shade of broken stupas and at the feet of idols of dying religions, but even here there are hordes of students, honeymooners and backpackers. At the Wat Phra Mahathat there survives a celebrated row of fifteen stone buddhas, all with severed heads, but in the face of such violence posed so calmly and quietly, with joined hands, as though they had expected this to happen, hundreds of years after their creation.

The sunlight makes sightseeing a nasty, unbearable affair. Hot and hungry, I call the service for a restaurant. The voice suggests the Duangporn restaurant, just around the crowded corner. I am relieved to find that it is as quiet as a temple. I cannot remember ever being alone in a restaurant. I pile my pack and solar veil on a seat and look at the menu, written completely in Thai. It gives me a secret pleasure to find other languages still living in the quiet, hidden corners. The waitress, small and brown, is mechanical with her translations and explanations. I order two kinds of noodles, a vegetable dish and a Coke.

The glass door swings and it’s the woman who walks in, fresh from the dangerous sunlight and the dry and dusty air. I know this, even before she lifts her solar veil to reveal her face, stricken with a pale, wide-eyed look, the look of a tourist, shy, inquisitive, almost stupid, all at the same time.

I am filled with a strange, liberating, paralyzing energy. Trembling as I sip my customary hot and sour soup, sweating from the long walk across ancient stone and earth, I look at her furtively, from behind my bowl. She is in a khaki-colored dress. I can see her shins, milky, shiny, vulnerable to the hot light. She seeks out the waitress, mutters something to her. She opens her pack, reaches into the bottom and retrieves two cigarettes. I imagine the kind of money or the kind of connections it would take to smuggle in two cigarettes through the airport.

She looks around, at the wide window behind me, at the hard, reddish sunlight and the lumbering crowd outside, and then locks eyes with me, very briefly. I struggle with all my might to break her gaze. Does she recognize me? Her eyes glaze over as she inhales. The cigarette end glows, she blows out a stream of smoke and a ribbon of pure satisfaction courses through her. The smoke is whitish grey, a sign that it comes from pure tobacco, made more precious by its journey through her liquid mouth, her soft lungs, the delicate chambers of her nose.

I lose my rhythm in Bangkok. It is meant to be a paradise for antiquarians like me, but as I walk the streets and brave the market crowds I am constantly visited with the feeling that I am being watched and followed. On street corners I look around furtively, searching for telltale signs, plumes of contraband cigarette smoke, or the sound of footsteps, gracefully light but with a quick, purposeful cadence. I am sleepless in my midpriced hotel. I sit stonefaced in restaurants. No spice can bring tears to my eyes, no color can move me, no lissome prostitute can charm me. I ride to the airport early, and wallow in my thoughts as I wait for my flight home.

*

I HAVE COME across such phenomena in my readings. One of the most memorable instances is chronicled by Krip Yuson, who wrote of a “doppleganger,” which is German for “double self,” that seemed to follow him wherever he went. Never mind that his double self was a religious leader of a self-made faith. Father Tropa dressed in white robes, walked barefoot and liked to sling a six-foot reticulated python over one shoulder. Krip Yuson would find himself in the same office building with him, at the same café, or even at the same bank. He would be depositing his writer’s honorarium and Father Tropa would be making similar transactions.

At the time, which was before my time, Father Tropa ran a little-known program called “Fr. Tropa’s Spaceship 2000 E.T.” airing in the late evenings over one of the weaker free channels. Father Tropa postulated that in the year 2000, an extra-terrestrial spaceship would land and carry the righteous away to the utopia of another universe, a heavenly civilization far more advanced than our own. To Father Tropa being righteous meant walking barefoot and loving the forests and the seas as much as he loved his python and the forests and hidden waterfalls of his native Dumaguete City.

Father Tropa and Krip Yuson have since moved on, pythons have gone extinct, and the exploding population has crowded into every hidden place. Our dependency on forest and sea has gone, and while there are still no absolute signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, we have huge, unmanned robotic spaceships, preprogrammed to mine planets and moons. But, apparently, strange coincidences and synchronicities abound, such as the phenomenon observed by Yuson and involving him and an unsuspecting Father Tropa.

When I get home I remember the children and call Paula. Instead of a beep, her response comes, “okay,” in two syllables, followed by another voice in a warm whisper: “end of recorded response.” That synthesized female voice again. I imagine the kind of woman a voice like that would make, and if she were a real flesh-and-blood woman, what kind of messages she would hear over a day, or a month, or a lifetime. How many of the same messages would she have to listen to, over and over again, cloned across time and space?

The last time something remotely synchronous happened to me was when I bumped into my great-grandfather at one of those low-end malls in Davao. I was young then, still working. I was there for a convention, only in and out. I decided to kill some time before checking in at the airport. I instinctively told the cab driver to head for the nearest mall.

I almost didn’t recognize my great-grandfather because he had grown so old. Perhaps also because I had forgotten what he looked like. But he recognized me, and gently collared me as I turned a busy corner, like I was a young boy. But perhaps to him I was young and feckless. I felt his weak grasp, turned, and saw that he was so old that he resembled an otherworldly creature.

Davao is a big city, but my grandfather had found me in a mall full of people. I was genuinely happy to see him—years later I recognize that some guilt was at work here. He was on his way to the bookstore. I went with him. I was curious because it was my first time to visit a bookstore. It was tiny, with space for only the shopkeeper and my grandfather and me, and it had the brown, acid smell of rotting paper. I treated him to a heap of sorry-looking pocketbooks, Westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. He loved them both, loved all their books. It amazed me that one could write so many books in a single lifetime. I couldn’t even imagine reading so much.

My great-grandfather told the children he was a cowboy in his younger days. He liked to remind us by walking in a bowlegged swagger. He wore his slacks low on his hips, and from behind he really looked like those cowboy gangsters in the movies. He would tell us stories about actual gunfights and surprise encounters, about lynchings and the law of the jungle. But when I knew him, he was already thinning out, turning into a transparent, worn-out waif. He was completely mechanical from the waist down, and the sun had degraded his skin into a stretched film. Only constant medication, organ implants and delicate nanosurgery kept him alive.

On weekends, there is no work, and what sustains me is my yearning to see my children and the memories of Paula waking me with the smells and sounds of cooking. I head for the city station, where the early crowds await the interisland train.

*

THIS TIME, IT seems that I am the one following her. As I board the train, I see the woman sitting calmly, almost directly across me, staring at the middle distance, oblivious to the Sunday rush to the provinces. She has her hands in her lap and her fingers are laced together. It seems as if she’s wary of the crowd, full of ordinary people, old men and old women, laborers in slippers, carrying sacks of merchandise, or produce. She is in a dress of what almost seems like real linen—white flowers on a field of blue.

She raises their eyebrows when she notices me and almost makes direct eye contact. The look of shock and recognition is sustained for a few moments, but I am quickly lost in the huddle of people. My own thoughts are whirling as I find my place among the standing crowd and reach for a handle. There is almost no room to breathe, no space to perch my satchel, heavy and bulging with gifts for my children.

The train makes a long stop at Bacolod, and I lose sight of the couple as the people shuffle and squirm their way out. A fresh crowd enters the train, and a few moments later, I hear the beep and that female voice calling from the ceiling speakers, in a warm whisper that cuts across the din: “Doors closing. Please mind the doors.”

It takes eight more minutes before the train reaches Cebu station. The doors open and I let myself be swept by the crowd into the hot and briny air. Umbrellas are unfurled, solar veils unrolled, and I scramble for a taxi.

Paula is an economist who works for the Central Bank. Everyone in her uplevel building works in the same office. She chose government work because it allows her a four-day workweek and gives her more time for the children.

When we were still married I worked as a technician at a statistical firm. I managed the machines that direct the flow of traffic from city to city, that drive the turbines and the engines, the same interconnected system that assigns airplane seats, plans vacations and compiles the television programs you’re most likely to like. It’s a complex, continuous, self-correcting process, perfecting itself over a number of years, adapting to an individual’s evolving tastes. On a plane the machine always assigns me to a window seat because my skin is darker than normal and my vision is 20/20. Ten years ago I would always get aisle.

We had some good times, we shared some love. She was a woman of some intelligence. She understood some of what I was doing. But soon enough, cracks and white hairs began to show. The white hairs were ours—she assiduously died hers black, while I left mine sprouting from my crown like a spreading halo of clouds.

But the cracks, I confess, were all mine. They appeared on the delicate matrix I had formed around our love. She was always the practical one, while I had spent the last moments of our marriage rediscovering the joy of reading. I spent most of my salary buying books in tiny antique stores and brought stacks of them into our already cramped apartment. It began to smell of paper, musty and acid-soured. Paula imagined it carried ancient diseases and would make the children sick.

That was the other thing that happened during my chance encounter with my great-grandfather. It awakened an obsession for reading—not just for the tatty Westerns and archaic spy-thrillers that were once fashionable with the old and distinguished, but for classic literature, the antique arts of fiction, theatre and poetry, works that held in their depths patterns of thought, and patterns within patterns. It thrilled me to find nested meanings and well-planned coincidences.

I met Paula during a population commission seminar, where everyone was being encouraged to fall in love and marry early. At the popcom center we give blood samples and cheek scrapings and the system works it out so that our compatibility quotients are optimized, the search is narrowed down and we waste less time, less space.

They served snacks and beer. There was a New Wave band and everyone was dancing. Paula was seventeen. She spoke with a trace of Visayan she had picked up from her Cebuano mother. She knew the words to the songs because her mother was in a New Wave Band. She liked the Go-Gos, Modern English and the B-52s. I was New Wave, too. My dad turned me on to Japan and the Lotus Eaters and New Order.

They seat us beside each other because we have these things in common. By the end of the session we’re harmonizing on “Melt With You” by Modern English.

The actuarial programs were right about our affinity, my virility, her fertility. What they failed to see was our failure, our lack of bravado, our resistance to the natural flow. We quickly became an anomaly of the times, arguing under the hot sun, polluting the air with our angry noise, infecting the harmony with our unease.

“Arrival at destination, time is ten hours forty-five,” the female voice says, and the taxi’s doors open at the foot of a skyscraper, to the noise of people and the sudden heat of the sun. Crowds wait to board my taxi, and when I enter the building there are long, unruly lines at the elevator bays.

When I reach Paula’s flat the door senses me and recognizes me but remains closed. “The party you wish to visit is away,” the voice whispers to me, and a small green light flashes in the eyehole. “You may record a message if you wish.”

On the ride back I cannot find the woman. It feels strange, I almost feel incomplete.

*

I AM THRILLED by the idea that occurs to me over the next few days. I place a call to the popcom and, at the voice prompt, request for an anonymous search. I give details from memory: the name of the cigarette bar, her last name on the brass plate, her visit to Thailand.

There is no waiting, no discernible sound of files being accessed or databases being queried. The voice answers me as easily as though I were asking one of those Thai prostitutes their name. That the woman’s name is Elena Chan, that flesh-and-blood woman whom I encounter now at almost every train, every shopping trip, every random turn I take. The voice patiently tells me her contact numbers and addresses. It breathes to me her hobbies and interests: archaeology, art, textiles and tobacco smoking. I am soothed by her cadence, her tones and her sibilance as she whispers above the crowd. Elena Chan is Filipino-Chinese, a businesswoman whose company holds interests in trading, freight forwarding and mining. The report is short but comprehensive. “Thank you for using this service.”

Elena has the complexion of a flesh-colored pearl. Her flawless body seems to have been thawed from cryogenic chambers. Her skin, synthesized from the skin of those unborn. Her flesh formed whole and new, without trauma, without memory, to become the woman that she is now, needing no words to be wise and beautiful, needing only to be silent, glimmering on the edge of my vision, visiting almost every public place I visit, perfectly by chance.

Slowly, over the repeated chance encounters, Elena has ceased to be a stranger to me. I know her backward and forward, and I know whether she is coming toward me on the sidewalk from a mile away, or sits several rows in front of me in a dark movie theater. I am now familiar with the color of her arms, the movement of her hair, the shape of her smoke. I have grown almost comfortable with my obsession.

I never saw my great-grandfather again after I bought him that heap of pocketbooks. One day he ran into a freak accident on his way to the market. The jeepney he was riding lost its brakes, swerved to avoid a child on a bicycle and flopped like a fish on the main road.

But I remember him from his cowboy stories. He boasted that back in World War II they made him commander of a local guerilla army. He was a vigilante. He and his gang ambushed supply convoys and small encampments. They liberated small prison camps. For a while he had become the town hero, the one thing the Japanese feared. He took no prisoners. He would execute every Jap he found and report to his superiors that they had tried to escape. He had a past to defend us from. It was a past steeped in war and disease and violence, he would tell us. The words gripped us in silent terror, me and my seven brothers and four sisters, children of the new prosperity, a world where the golden path is prescribed for all.

I feel an inner eye open, and I see Elena and me, our paths inscribed and reinscribed on the same ground by invisible hands and invisible voices, those that have seated us at the same bar, in the same car of the same interisland train, that have sent us roaming around the same temple, our hungry spirits seeking comfort and meaning from the same silent stone.

Paula is not home again when I arrive for my next visit, but the door accepts my presence and opens to the sight of my children, sprawled on the floor playing videogames. I unwrap my presents for them: wooden replicas of the lost Buddha heads, rendered in the Ayutthaya style, with pointed crowns, elongated earlobes and the thin, closed eyelids of the enlightened. And as an afterthought, a present for Paula, who has never been to Thailand, a replica of Buddha’s hands, in shiny brushed steel, closed in a final acceptance.

At the shopping mall I try calling Paula again. The voice tells me the party is unavailable. The system picks up my location, my slightly raised blood pressure, perhaps my ancient fear and distrust of crowds, and in warm, reassuring tones, suggests refreshments and guides me to a nearby café.

At the café Elena sits with an old book and a half-empty cup of coffee. OMD is playing “Talking Loud and Clear.” She turns her head to look in my direction, and I’m rooted to the spot.

It’s like a Mexican stand-off, a showdown at high noon. She walks toward the door, toward me, until she’s terribly, dangerously close, now close enough to shake my hand, now close enough to touch my face. The possibility unnerves me. I see the individual strands of hair on her eyebrows, the pores on her face moist with sweat, the marks under her eyes, tired from the strain of the sun and the mass movements of the crowds all around us, everyday. I can almost smell her breath, a neutral smell, but with a trace of tobacco and something else I will not be able to know, not until I taste it from her mouth and skin, perhaps one day, when my fear is gone and I will be able to see Elena as she is, a gift, a prophet of joy and pleasure. While I am thinking this she moves past me, tucking her book into her handbag and disappearing into the crowd, but I know I will see her again.

Back at the apartment, overlooking a steel-colored sunset, I light a cigarette and linger in the delicious smoke, spiraling toward the ceiling, on the inescapable path of self-healing and enlightenment.

DEAN FRANCIS ALFAR

L’AQUILONE DU ESTRELLAS

(THE KITE OF STARS)

Dean Francis Alfar is an author and a businessman. His first novel Salamanca won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards Grand Prize for Novel this year and is scheduled for publication by the Ateneo Press.

“L’Aquilone du Estrellas” first appeared in Strange Horizons, and subsequently in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror Seventeenth Annual Collection (edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin Grant).

THE NIGHT WHEN she thought she would finally be a star, Maria Isabella du’l Cielo struggled to calm the trembling of her hands, reached over to cut the tether that tied her to the ground, and thought of that morning many years before when she’d first caught a glimpse of Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore: tall, thick-browed and handsome, his eyes closed, oblivious to the cacophony of the accident waiting to occur around him.

Maria Isabella had just turned sixteen then, and each set of her padrinos had given her (along with the sequined brida du caballo, the dresses of rare tulle, organza, and seda, and the diadema floral du’l dama – the requisite floral circlet of young womanhood) a purse filled with coins to spend on anything she wanted. And so she’d gone past the Calle du Leones (where sleek cats of various pedigrees sometimes allowed themselves to be purchased, though if so, only until they tired of their new owners), walked through the Avenida du’l Conquistadores (where the statues of the conquerors of Ciudad Meiora lined the entirety of the broad promenade) and made her way to the Encantu lu Caminata (that maze-like series of interconnected streets, each leading to some wonder or marvel for sale), where little musical conch shells from the islets near Palao’an could be found. Those she liked very much.

In the vicinity of the Plaza Emperyal, she saw a young man dressed in a coat embroidered with stars walk almost surely to his death. In that instant, Maria Isabella knew two things with the conviction reserved only for the very young: first, that she almost certainly loved this reckless man; and second, that if she simply stepped on a dog’s tail — the very dog watching the same scene unfold right next to her — she could avert the man’s seemingly senseless death.

These were the elements of the accident-waiting-to-happen: an ill-tempered horse hitched to some noble’s qalesa; an equally ill-tempered qalesa driver with a whip; a whistling panadero with a tray of plump pan de sal perched on his head; two puddles of fresh rainwater brought about by a brief downpour earlier that day; a sheet of stained glass en route to its final delivery destination at the house of the Most Excellent Primo Orador; a broken bottle of wine; and, of course, the young man who walked with his eyes closed.

Without a moment’s further thought, Maria Isabella stepped on the tail of the dog that was resting near her. The poor animal yelped in pain; which in turn startled the horse, making it stop temporarily; which in turn angered the qalesa driver even more, making him curse the horse; which in turn upset the delicate melody that the panadero was whistling; which in turn made the panadero miss stepping into the two puddles of rainwater; which in turn gave the men delivering the sheet of stained glass belonging to the Most Excellent Primo Orador an uninterrupted path; which in turn gave the young man enough room to cross the street without so much as missing a beat or stepping onto the broken wine bottle; which in turn would never give him the infection that had been destined to result in the loss of his right leg and, ultimately, his life.

Everyone and everything continued to move in their own inexorable paths, and the dog she had stepped on growled once at her and then twisted around to nurse its sore tail. But Maria Isabella’s eyes were on the young man in the star-embroidered coat, whose life she had just saved. She decided she would find out who he was.

The first twenty people she asked did not know him. It was a butcher’s boy who told her who he was, as she rested near the butcher’s shop along the Rotonda du’l Vendedores.

“His name is Lorenzo du Vicenzio,” the butcher’s boy said. “I know him because he shops here with his father once every sen-night. My master saves some of the choicest cuts for their family. They’re rather famous, you know. Maestro Vicenzio, the father, names stars.”

“Stars?” Maria Isabella asked. “And would you know why he walks with his eyes closed? The son, I mean.”

“Well, Lorenzo certainly isn’t blind,” the butcher’s boy replied. “I think he keeps his eyes closed to preserve his vision for his stargazing at night. He mentioned he had some sort of telescope he uses at night.”

“How can I meet him?” she asked, all thoughts of musical conch shells gone from her mind.

“You? What makes you think he will even see you? Listen, “the butcher’s boy whispered to her, “he only has eyes for the stars.”

“Then I‘ll make him see me,” she whispered back, and as she straightened up, her mind began to make plan upon plan upon plan, rejecting possibilities, making conjectures; assessing what she knew, whom she knew, and how much she dared. It was a lot for anyone to perform in the span of time it took to set her shoulders, look at the butcher’s boy, and say, “Take me to the best Kitemaker.”

The butcher’s boy, who at fourteen was easily impressed by young ladies of a certain disposition, immediately doffed his white cap, bowed to Maria Isabella, gestured to the street filled with people outside, and led her to the house of Melchor Antevadez, famed throughout Ciudad Meiora and environs as the Master Builder of aquilones, cometas, saranggola, and other artefactos voladores.

They waited seven hours to see him (for such was his well-deserved fame that orders from all over the realms came directly to him — for festivals, celebrations, consecrations, funerals, regatta launches, and such) and did not speak to each other. Maria Isabella was thinking hard about the little plan in her head and the butcher’s boy was thinking of how he had just lost his job for the dubious pleasure of a silent young woman’s company.

He spent most of the time looking surreptitiously at her shod feet and oddly wondering whether she, like the young ladies that figured in his fantasies, painted her toes blue, in the manner of the circus artistas.

When it was finally their turn (for such was the nature of Melchor Antevadez that he made time to speak to anyone and everyone who visited him, being of humble origin himself), Maria Isabella explained what she wanted to the artisan.

“What I need,” she began, “is a kite large enough to strap me onto. Then I must fly high enough to be among the stars themselves, so that anyone looking at the stars will see me among them, and I must be able to wave at least one hand to that person.”

“What you need,” Melchor Antevadez replied with a smile, “is a balloon. Or someone else to love.”

She ignored his latter comment and told him that a balloon simply would not do, it would not be able to achieve the height she needed, didn’t he understand that she needed to be among the stars?

He cleared his throat and told her that such a kite was impossible, that there was no material immediately available for such an absurd undertaking, that there was, in fact, no design that allowed for a kite that supported the weight of a person, and that it was simply impossible, impossible, impossible. Impossible to design. Impossible to find materials. No, no, it was impossible, even for the Illustrados.

She pressed him then for answers, to think through the problem; she challenged him to design such a kite, and to tell her just what these impossible materials were.

“Conceivably, I could dream of such a design, that much I‘ll grant you. If I concentrate hard enough I know it will come to me, that much I‘ll concede. But the materials are another matter.”

“Please, tell me what I need to find,” Maria Isabella said.

“None of it can be bought, and certainly none of it can be found here in Ciudad Meiora, although wonder can be found here if you know where to look.”

“Tell me.”

And so he began to tell her. Sometime during the second hour of his recitation of the list of materials, she began to take notes, and nudged the butcher’s boy to try to remember what she couldn’t write fast enough. At dawn the following day, Melchor Antevadez stopped speaking, reviewed the list of necessary things compiled by Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy, and said, “I think that’s all I’d need. As you can see, it is more than any man could hope to accomplish.”

“But I am not a man,” she said to him, looking down at the thousands of items on the impossible list in her hands. The butcher’s boy, by this time, was asleep, his head cradled in the crook of his thin arms, dreaming of aerialists and their blue toes.

Melchor Antevadez squinted at her. “Is any love worth all this effort? Looking for the impossible?”

Maria Isabella gave the tiniest of smiles. “What makes you think I’m in love?”

Melchor Antevadez raised an eyebrow at her denial.

“I’ll get everything,” she promised the Kitemaker.

“But it may take a lifetime to gather everything,” the artisan said wearily.

“A lifetime is all I have,” Maria Isabella told him. She then shook the butcher’s boy awake.

“I cannot go alone. You’re younger than me but I will sponsor you as my companion. Will you come with me?”

“Of course,” mumbled butcher’s boy drowsily. “After all, this shouldn’t take more time than I have to spare.”

“It may be significantly longer than you think,” the artisan said, shaking his head.

“Then please, Ser Antevadez, dream the design and I‘ll have everything you listed when we return.” She stood to leave.

That very day, Maria Isabella told her parents and both sets of her padrinos that she was going off on a long trip. She invoked her right of Ver du Mundo (when women of at least sixteen years, and men of at least twenty years, could go forth into the wideness of Hinirang; sometimes to seek their fortune, sometimes to run from it). They all gave her their blessings, spoke fondly of how she used to dance and sing as a child, saluted her new right as a woman and full citizen of Ciudad Meiora, accompanied her all the way to the Portun du Transgresiones with more recalled memories of her youth, and sent her on her way. As for the butcher’s boy, he waited until she was well away and then joined her on the well-worn path, the Sendero du’l Viajero, along with the supplies she had asked him to purchase.

“I’m ready to go,” the butcher’s boy grinned at her. He was clad in a warm tunic in the manner of city folk, and around his neck, for luck, he wore an Ajima’at, a wooden charm fashioned in the form of a wheel.

“What did you tell your kinfolk?” Maria Isabella asked him, as he helped her mount a sturdy horse.

“That I would be back in a month or so.”

IT TOOK ALMOST sixty years for Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy to find all the items on Melchor Antevadez’s impossible list.

They began at Pur’Anan, and then trekked to Katakios and Viri’Ato (where the sanctuary of the First Tree stood unmolested by time).

They traveled north to the lands of Bontoc and Cabarroquis (where the Povo

Montaha dwelt in seclusion).

They sailed eastwards to Palao’an and the Islas du’l Calami’an (where the traders from countries across the seas converged in a riot of tongues).

They ventured westwards to the dark lands of Siqui’jor and Jomal’jig (where the Silent Ones kept court whenever both sun and moon occupied the same horizon).

They visited the fabled cities of the south: Diya al Tandag, Diya al Din, and Diya al Bajao (where fire-shrouded Djin and the Tiq’Barang waged an endless war of attrition).

They entered the marbled underworld of the Sea Lords of Rumblon and braved the Lair of the M’Arinduque (in whose house the dead surrendered their memories of light and laughter).

When they ran out of money after the third year of travel, Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy spent time looking for ways to finance their quest. She began knowing only how to ride, dance, sing, play the arpa, the violin, and the flauta, embroider, sew, and write poetry about love; the butcher’s boy began knowing how to cut up a cow. By the time they had completed the list, they had more than quintupled the amount of money they began with, and they both knew how to manage a caravan; run a plantation; build and maintain fourteen kinds of seagoing and rivergoing vessels; raise horses big and small, and fowl, dogs, and seagulls; recite the entire annals of six cultures from memory; speak and write nineteen languages; prepare medicine for all sorts of ailments, worries, and anxieties; make flashpowder, lu fuego du ladron, and picaro de fuegos artificiales; make glass, ceramics, and lenses from almost any quality sand; and many, many other means of making money.

In the seventh year of the quest, a dreadful storm destroyed their growing caravan of found things and they lost almost everything (she clutched vainly at things as they flew and spun in the downpour of wind and water, and the butcher’s boy fought to keep the storm from taking her away as well). It was the last time that Maria Isabella allowed herself to cry. The butcher’s boy took her hand and they began all over again. They were beset by thieves and learned to run (out of houses and caves and temples; on roads and on sea lanes and in gulleys; on horses, aguilas, and waves). They encountered scoundrels and sinverguenzza and learned to bargain (at first with various coins, jewels, and metals; and later with promises, threats, and dreams). They were beleaguered by nameless things in nameless places and learned to defend themselves (first with wooden pessoal, then later with kris, giavellotto, and lamina).

In their thirtieth year together, they took stock of what they had, referred to the thousands of items still left unmarked on their list, exchanged a long silent look filled with immeasurable meaning and went on searching for the components of the impossible kite — acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable to leave), winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the three eldest brothers of Duma’Alon, assembling the pieces of the lower edge connector while fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq, solving the riddles of the toothless crone Ai’ai’sin to find what would be part of a wing tip, climbing Apo’amang to spend seventy sleepless nights to get the components of the ferrule, crafting an artificial wave to fool the cerena into surrending their locks of hair that would form a portion of the tether, rearing miniature horses to trade to the Duende for parts of the bridle, and finally spending eighteen years painstakingly collecting the fifteen thousand different strands of thread that would make up the aquilone’s surface fabric.

WHEN AT LAST they returned to Ciudad Meiora, both stooped and older, they paused briefly at the gates of the Portun du Transgresiones. The butcher’s boy looked at Maria Isabella and said, “Well, here we are at last.”

She nodded, raising a weary arm to her forehead and making the sign of homecoming.

“Do you feel like you’ve wasted your life?” she asked him, as the caravan bearing everything they had amassed lumbered into the city.

“Nothing is ever wasted,” the butcher’s boy told her.

They made their way to the house of Melchor Antevadez and knocked on his door. A young man answered them and sadly informed them that the wizened artisan had died many many years ago, and that he, Reuel Antevadez, was the new Maestro du Cosas Ingravidas.

“Yes, yes. But do you still make kites?” Maria Isabella asked him.

“Kites? Of course. From time to time, someone wants an aquilone or—”

“Before Ser Antevadez, Melchor Antevadez, died, did he leave instructions for a very special kind of kite?” she interrupted.

“Well ... ,” mumbled Reuel Antevadez, “my great-grandfather did leave a design for a woman named Maria Isabella du’l Cielo, but—”

“I am she.” She ignored his shocked face. “Listen, young man. I have spent all my life gathering everything Melchor Antevadez said he needed to build my kite. Everything is outside. Build it.”

And so Reuel Antevadez unearthed the yellowing parchment that contained the design of the impossible kite that Melchor Antevadez had dreamed into existence, referenced the parts from the list of things handed to him by the butcher’s boy, and proceeded to build the aquilone.

When it was finished, it looked nothing at all like either Maria Isabella or the butcher’s boy had imagined. The kite was huge and looked like a star, but those who saw it could not agree on how best to describe the marvelous conveyance.

After he helped strap her in, the butcher’s boy stood back and looked at the woman he had grown old with.

“This is certainly no time for tears,” Maria Isabella reprimanded him gently, as she gestured for him to release the kite.

“No, there is time for everything,” the butcher’s boy whispered to himself as he pushed and pulled at the ropes and strings, pulley and levers and gears of the impossible contrivance.

“Goodbye, goodbye!” she shouted down to him as the star kite began its rapid ascent to the speckled firmament above.

“Goodbye, goodbye,” he whispered, as his heart finally broke into a thousand mismatched pieces, each one small, hard, and sharp. The tears of the butcher’s boy (who had long since ceased to be a boy) flowed freely down his face as he watched her rise — the extraordinary old woman he had always loved strapped to the frame of an impossible kite.

As she rose, he sighed and reflected on the absurdity of life, the heaviness of loss, the cruelty of hope, the truth about quests, and the relentless nature of a love that knew only one direction. His hands swiftly played out the tether (that part of the marvelous rope they had bargained for with two riddles, a blind rooster and a handful of cold and lusterless diamante in a bazaar held only once every seven years on an island in the Dag’at Palabras Tacitas) and he realized that all those years they were together, she had never known his name.

As she rose above the city of her birth, Maria Isabella took a moment to gasp at the immensity of the city that sprawled beneath her, recalled how everything had begun, fought the trembling of her withered hands, and with a fishbone knife (that sad and strange knife which had been passed from hand to hand, from women consumed by unearthly passion, the same knife which had been part of her reward for solving the mystery of the Rajah Sumibon’s lost turtle shell in the southern lands of Diya al Din) cut the glimmering tether.

Up, up, up, higher and higher and higher she rose. She saw the winding silver ribbon of the Pasigla, the fluted roofs of Lu Ecolia du Arcana Menor ei Mayor, the trellises and gardens of the Plaza Emperyal, and the dimmed streets of the Mercado du Coristas. And Maria Isabella looked down and thought she saw everything, everything.

At one exquisite interval during her ascent, Maria Isabella thought she spied the precise tower where Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore, the Stargazer, must live and work. She felt the exuberant joy of her lost youth bubble up within her and mix with the fiery spark of love she had kept alive for sixty years, and in a glorious blaze of irrepressible happiness she waved her free hand with wild abandon, shouting the name that had been forever etched into her heart.

When a powerful wind took the kite to sudden new heights, when Ciudad Meiora and everything below her vanished in the dark, she stopped shouting, and began to laugh and laugh and laugh.

And Maria Isabella du’l Cielo looked up at the beginning of forever and thought of nothing, nothing at all.

And in the city below, in one of the high rooms of the silent Torre du Astrunomos (where those who had served with distinction were housed and honored), an old man, long-retired and plagued by cataracts, sighed in his sleep and dreamed a dream of unnamed stars.

JAY STEVEN UY ANYONG

THE COWARD’S QUEST

Jay Steven Uy Anyong has been a roadie on a Hello Kitty mall tour, sold miniature Space Orks to underage children and successfully convinced an American to keep up with house payments while in the middle of an earthquake. His roleplaying game articles have appeared in Seeker magazine. An active member of the Alliance of Eclectic Gamers and Interactive Storytellers (AEGIS), Jay is often found holding pen and paper roleplaying games for newbies.

“The Coward’s Quest,” Anyong’s first published short story, concerns the Coward of Silver Vale and a Mysterious Stranger TM who tries to convince him to undertake a quest to Save the World TM.

THIS STORY, LIKE many, many other stories before it, begins in a quiet little town. Why a little town, you ask? Because every one knows that a good fantasy story always starts in a small, little-known town, where nothing exciting happens and the old people are still talking about that last time that a sheep got away last year. And that’s exactly where we’ll start.

Or maybe just outside of one.

It was one of those nights, when most people prefer the warmth of a fire and the company of friends rather than be stuck outside. The weather was rather depressing, a constant, if light, rain making little puddles on the road. A small wagon with a creaky wheel trundled along, not bothering to avoid any of the puddles, much to the consternation of the hitchhiker sitting in the back amongst the vegetables.

“Are we there yet?” The hitchhiker asked irritably, pulling his robes tighter around his shoulders to ward off the cold. He was old and tired, and being out in the rain isn’t the kind of thing people want to do in their dotage.

“Nearly, sir,” The wagon driver answered. “It’s just around this hill.”

“Good.” The old man looked at his ring and gave it the necessary mental command to activate its magic. The ring glowed slightly before a small magic rune manifested, hovering in mid-air over the band. At last, he had found the man he was looking for. Things were finally going somewhere.

He looked up, seeing the lights shining through the windows of the sleepy, boring town. The old man smiled in spite of himself. No matter how cliché, one finds heroes in small places like these. It was part of the formula, heroes come from tiny towns and farmsteads, and villains automatically come with their very own castles and armies.

“I’ll be getting off here,” he spoke, digging into his pocket to take out a gold coin and flipping it at the driver. “Thanks again for the ride.”

The driver caught the coin and looked at it curiously, before his eyes grew wide with the realization of how much was in his hand. “Think nothing of it, good sir!”

The old man grunted as he got off, threw his pack over his shoulder and brushed off a few lettuce leaves that stuck to his cloak. He watched as the driver shook the reins, and the shaggy old nag tugged the wagon onwards in the rain.

“Why couldn’t you live your life that way, Aranas?” The old man spoke to himself. “Of all the lives to be born into, it had to be the bearer of bad news.” Aranas smiled wryly as he began to walk to his destination, a quaint little tavern in this little town.

It was a squat building of stout wooden construction, and would have been rather unremarkable, much like the rest of the dreary old town, had it not been for its name: The Rosy Barmaid. Nobody knows where the name came from, but everyone immediately knows that they’re there the moment they see the sign hanging over the door. I’d go into further detail, but I’m trying to appeal to a majority of audiences here. Perhaps in private.

Aranas reached the Rosy Barmaid, glad to at least have a place where he can sit down comfortably, get dry and maybe find the person responsible for saving the world. Not a bad deal after having to sit through several days of being entrenched in lettuce and listening to a man talk to his horse about his wife’s problems in the bedroom.

He had barely entered when an attractive young lady walked up to him. The woman wore a rather revealing outfit, showing off her shapely form and her smooth skin. She also had a mischievous grin as she looked him over.

“Say Grandpa,” she licked her lips. “You look like you could use a nice little girl like me to get you all warm again.” She winked.

While she was rather attractive, Aranas chafed at her use of the term ‘Grandpa’. “Sorry, Miss…?”

“Call me Maylee, Grandpa.”

He gave a condescending smile. “Maylee then. I’m sure that your services are… exquisite, but I’m looking for a man.”

Maylee blinked.

“What?” Aranas raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry!” She said, holding a hand up to cover her laughter. “I didn’t, I mean, I wouldn’t have expected… Well, maybe Benson over there might be interested…” She waved off to a rather burly looking man reclining in a far table dressed as a milkmaid.

Aranas gave her a flat stare. “That’s not what I meant,” he sighed. “I’m looking for a certain Garret, the Coward of Silver Vale?”

“Oh, him!” Maylee smiled as she tossed her hair back over her shoulder. “Why didn’t you say so sooner, Grandpa?”

“I was trying to.”

She dismissed that statement with a wave of her hand. “Garret should be around here somewhere. He’s always here. Never says much, just sits down and mopes. Still kind of cute though, even if he’s perpetually depressed.”

“Considering his reputation, you’d be surprised that he hasn’t hanged himself,” Aranas said as he looked around.

“I guess,” Maylee agreed. “I’d go look for him in the darker corners of the place. If there’s a place to mope, then it would be the darkest side of the tavern, right? Anyway, I gotta go Gramps, the night is young and the men are horny.”

True enough, within the smoke-filled and noisy common room of the Rosy Barmaid, there sat a man. He sat in the manner of moody men, hunched over and brooding, holding his mug in one hand, his dark eyes staring intently at the fireplace.

Aranas recognized the Coward immediately and was about to walk towards him when the door opened behind him, the sound of the rain outside drowning out the patrons voices, all of them turning to look at the new arrival. It was a tall man wearing an elaborate black cloak, standing just inside the doorway, eyes scanning the room.

The stranger cleared his throat. “I am looking for a man called… George,” he announced, his eyes narrowing.

“Ah!” A large man with a full beard stood up. “That would be me. Come on over and have a seat.”

The mysterious stranger nodded, and walked over to George’s table. With that over and done with, the rest of the Rosy Barmaid’s patrons got back to drinking and chattering.

Things like this happen all the time. The mysterious strangers are a perfectly legitimate enterprise working for the Council of Wizards. They travel to various towns, finding the various “chosen ones” for different tasks, and do anything to make their marks take the job. It’s happened enough times that the villagers don’t really care much about it anymore. Besides, as long as the stranger doesn’t come looking for sandy-haired farmboys named Luke, they know that it’s not a big deal.

Aranas shrugged and looked over at the corner to where Garret sat. Aranas had waited a long time for this, and he was not allowed to fail. Garret had gone through a lot since the Silver Vale, and Aranas was certain that he would not pounce on the idea of having to go through it again.

Aranas had barely reached the table when Garret spoke. “The table’s taken, Grandpa. Go away.”

The older man’s eyes narrowed at Garret. “Brave words, Coward.”

“Are you trying to pick a fight, old man?” Garret glared at Aranas.

“Perhaps I am, if beating you to a pulp will calm you down and make you listen to a geezer like me.”

“What do you want?”

“Some of your time,” Aranas said. “And a chance to speak with you without having to resort to manly theatrics.”

“Manly theatrics?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t too clear with that phrase,” Aranas said dryly. “All this macho posturing is unnecessary. Is this the result of your years of isolation?”

“Heh,” Garret smiled for the first time. “You’ve got a point. Now, who are you? You obviously know who I am, so I’m at a disadvantage.”

“My name is Aranas, of the Wizard’s Council,” the old man replied, pulling a chair to sit down in front of the Coward. “I’ve come here to seek you out, Garret.”

“Wonderful,” Garret said, setting down his beer. “I’ve been out of the business for years. This world doesn’t need heroes anymore.”

“We don’t need a hero,” Aranas said. “We need a Coward.”

The fireplace crackled as the two men regarded each other in stony silence.

“I thought we were going to stop with the manly theatrics,” Garret pointed out.

“Sorry,” Aranas gave a sheepish grin. “Force of habit.”

“There’s no point in sending me off on some fool’s quest,” Garret said. “I failed the Silver Vale, remember? There’s nothing left of it now, nothing but charred rock and ghosts of the dead.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of telling that story?” Aranas asked. “I thought that after the first few thousand times, you’d get over it.” It irritated him to see Garret this way. Garret was the Hero of Silver Vale, the man who single-handedly stopped an invasion by another country by feats of valor alone. That Garret was a cunning general who rallied his troops into frenzy, bestowing them with boundless courage.

“Well, I didn’t,” Garret said. “There’s no glory in being a hero.” Garret refused to look the Wizard in the eye, instead fixating on his beer. “I didn’t care for the land, or the title, or even the money. After it was over, none of it meant anything. I couldn’t do it anymore, not after what happened to them.”

“Your companions?”

“All of them,” Garret said quietly. “Think about it old man. Take a moment to think of how it feels to be me? When I turned aside the Tullaran invasion, how many people marched to their deaths that day?”

“Those men chose to march under your banner,” Aranas’ voice was tinged with annoyance. “You’re an arrogant man if you think you made that choice for them, Coward!”

“But if I didn’t fight in the invasion, then the Silver Vale would have still lasted,” Garret reasoned. “I fought the first war for politics, Aranas. I watched my companions die to keep a boy on the throne, and his widowed mother to care for him.”

“You fought because you knew it was the right thing to do,” Aranas reminded him. “It was what you felt in your heart of hearts. And you followed it.”

“And what now? That conviction is gone, old man. It crumbled the night I watched my companions die. They suffered alongside me, fought for me and the cause I called them to follow. I abandoned them the second time around.”

“I understand your grief, Garret,” Aranas said. “But destiny is not done with you yet.” The old man’s eyes glowed with an eerie green light.

“You can’t intimidate me that easily,” Garret sneered. “If you think showing a few pyrotechnics and pretty sparkles is going to make me leave my beer, and my chair, then you’re dead wrong, old man.”

“I’m hardly showing you this as a cheap trick,” Aranas replied, his voice icy cold. “I am not a mere hedge magician or medicine man, Garret. I can see where destiny leads the lives of men.”

Garret flinched slightly. “If you can see so much, why don’t you deal with the problem then? Why do you need me?”

“Because your destiny lies in finding the Incarna,” Aranas said. “Something no other man stands a chance at doing.”

“Incarna?”

“The manifestations of the virtues,” Aranas said.

“I know that!” Garret snapped. “But they’re stories. The Incarna aren’t real! If they’re here, then that only means that the gods have called for the Sundering.”

Aranas merely looked at the Coward.

“You’re kidding,” Garret blurted. “I refuse to believe that the Sundering is going to happen. Where are the signs? Aren’t we supposed to see strange omens all over?”

“Are you blind?” Aranas asked. “Look around you. Even in this tedious backwater town, the Council has been set in motion.” He gestured to George and the other shadowy stranger. “He is being sent to protect a town near the Crimson Falls. There, he will fail.”

“What?”

“He will fail,” Aranas repeated. “But his death is necessary — a woman lives in Crimson Falls and she will see his courage. He will die, but her potential will be unlocked.”

“So that’s it? You’re sending agents to fill people’s heads with illusions of grandeur to get them killed?” Garret was appalled. “Forgive me if I’m even less eager to help you out now, old man.”

Aranas smiled. “Ah, but you see, Garret. Here is where you come in.”

Garret glared at the old man. Just what was the Wizard planning? Garret was a fighter; comfortable with a sword and honest dealings. Even after working with Wizards before, he could never bring himself to trust magic. It was too easy, too many loopholes.

Aranas nodded. “You can’t escape your destiny, and I’m here to make sure that happens. If you agree to find the Incarna, then I’ll make sure that nobody has to suffer the same futility that you have. No one else has to watch their friends die, and no one else has to make unnecessary sacrifices to stop the Sundering.”

Garret shook his head. “That’s too big a promise, Aranas. You’re putting all your plans on one man. Why?”

“Because I trust my magic the same way you trust your sword, Coward,” Aranas said. “It has never failed me, and it will not lead me astray now.”

Garret looked down at his hands, wondering if he still had it in him to do something of this scale. “What’s in it for me?”

“Gold, perhaps? Gems the size of your fist? Some land and a title?” Aranas said. “The Council can be very generous to those they choose to reward.”

Garret thought about it. He needed the money. Ever since he gave up being a soldier he had been living off on his savings. Now that the Vale was gone, there was even less for him to live on. He tried making a living as a carpenter but couldn’t make a decent chair even if his life depended on it.

He looked up from his drink. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” the wizard nodded. His eyes lost their eerie glow as he reached into his pack, taking out a scroll case and handing it to Garret. “Here.”

The Coward took the scroll case, looking it over. It was a beautiful scroll case, ornately decorated leather with a clasp made of silver. The seal on the cap was that of the Wizard’s Council. Garret opened it, taking out a roll of parchment. “What’s this?”

“Just a few instructions that might help you along the way.”

“Instructions?” Garret frowned. “It reads like it was written by a delusional scholar looking for prophecies from the sounds of a farting cow!”

“True, it was written in a rather cryptic fashion…”

“Cryptic. Right.”

“Just keep the damned thing,” Aranas hissed. “It’s supposed to help you find the Incarna. I’m not too clear on how it’s supposed to do that, but it will.”

“That’s what I don’t like about you Wizards,” Garret sighed. “One moment you’re all ‘I trust my magic like you trust your sword’, the next it’s ‘I’m not too clear on how it’s supposed to do that, but it will.’ ”

“Stop that,” Aranas snapped irritably. “I’ll point out that I did mention that I trusted my magic, as you so clearly quoted.”

“So you’re saying that you don’t really think these instructions are all that accurate.”

“I’m saying that they’re open to interpretation.”

“Fine,” Garret said, as he slid the scroll back into its case.

Aranas let out a long sigh; this was more tiring than he thought it would be. “The last thing I’ll give you is this ring.” He held up his hand for Garret to see. The ring was a simple band, inset with a large red gem. Aranas took off the ring and gave it to Garret. “That ring is a little bit more… ahem, idiot-proof.”

Garret looked as if he was going to say something but decided against it.

“Let me explain what it does,” Aranas pointed at it. “That ring is enchanted to respond to your presence, as well as the presence of any of the Incarna. Destiny itself gathers in your life threads, marking you as having a greater destiny than most men.”

“So it finds people with great destiny?”

“Not really,” Aranas said. “If you concentrate on it, it will show you if there’s an Incarna nearby. I believe that it has the range of a small town.”

“But it doesn’t tell me how near or far that person is…or even which direction to look.”

“Correct.”

“That’s just sad.”

“I’ll make sure to pass on your comments to the Spirit Smiths,” Aranas said dryly. “They so enjoy receiving criticism for making items out of their own life force.”

Garret leveled a glare at Aranas. “They could have at least put a little arrow to tell me which direction to go.”

“Ah, but they rely on you, Garret,” Aranas smiled. “You’re the arrow. Your destiny will guide you to them.”

Garret frowned, he hated believing in things he could not see or feel, and all this talk about destiny was beginning to annoy him. He wanted to walk away from it all, but he had already agreed to the job. He was a man of his word or at least, he’d like to think that he was.

“Sounds pleasant,” Garret said bitterly, tossing the ring on the table. “Should I expect any kind of resistance? I’d like to know what I’m up against before I go traipsing around the wilderness like an idiot.”

Aranas nodded. “Some doomsday cults might get in your way, but only if they realize what you’re doing.”

“I see,” said Garret.

“Once you find all the Incarna, I will know,” Aranas continued. “The ring will tell me.”

“Convenient.” Garret finished off his ale. “It’s a fool’s errand, chasing after people I will have no way to identify while I race against the Sundering.”

“Perhaps,” Aranas said. “Or maybe it’s just because the Council has faith in you.”

“Faith? Well, let’s just hope it’s enough.”

“It will be,” Aranas said, as he stood. “It’s time for me to go, Garret. Good luck finding the Incarna.”

Garret didn’t reply, watching as the old man made his way out of the Rosy Barmaid.

“Damn it Garret, how the hell do they get you into these things?” He berated himself as he finished his beer, his eyes coming to rest on the ring.

“Your hero days are over, and you’re nothing more than a common man in a bar, and now they’re dragging you out to do the hero thing again.” He reached out for the ring, looking at it intently. “Can you really do this?”

He rubbed it between his thumb and index fingers, feeling the band. “Ah, to hell with it… at least the money’s good.” He finished his beer with one swig, trying to deny the excitement building inside him. Memories of his triumphs and the thrills of his victories threatened to override his reason, a small smile coming to his lips.

Garret took a deep breath, as he slipped on the ring, feeling its magic alter its shape, the band fitting itself on his finger perfectly.

Destiny was taking hold.

PAULINE ORENDAIN

ROOM THREE

Pauline Orendain dabbles in photography, copywriting, web and graphic design, parenting and fiction. Her articles and photos have previously been published in The Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Manila Times, and The Philippine Star. Currently, she is most comfortable foraging nuts and berries and unearthing arrowheads, peyote buttons, and ancient cooking pits in the American wilderness with husband, Dino, and four-year-old son, Dylan.

”Room Three” shows what happens after the bell tolls... and before the gates open.

LEONIDAS BEGAN TO feel the scorching heat in between his toes and on his face as the flames licked around his immense, supine, immobile body. The first thought that came to his mind was, Somebody better help me up before I become chicharon, man!

Charon stood next to his shoes, crookedly bent over, with arms folded across his chest, eyes rolled up to the ceiling of the crematorium furnace.

“What do you want?” Charon sighed as he spoke. He looked down, impatient or bored, Leonidas could not tell. He gave a yawn that was barely visible through the grizzle of white hair around his lips and cheeks.

“Who are you?” Leonidas was baffled by the sudden appearance of the bent old man in the chamber, and by the sound of his own voice which he hadn’t heard since his last gurgling breath at the hospital bed.

“I’m Charon. And it’s pronounced ka-ron, by they way, not ‘charon, man!’” Charon rolled his eyes again.

“What’s up with you? Why don’t you help me up instead then, hey? Before I get charred, Cha-ron!”

Charon threw out a skinny arm to Leonidas and the flames died out around them. It was pitch black and as Leonidas took his first step in many days, there was the crunching noise of pebbles. As they walked in the dark, a light began to gleam and sparkle up ahead. They stopped to wait. The light grew larger as it slowly progressed towards them. Leonidas began to make out the shapes in the dark; an empty boat came into focus and it seemed they were standing on the bank of a river, although the water did not rush or make a sound.

“That’ll be three coins, since I had to personally pick you up.” Charon held out his thin hand. Leonidas patted himself down. He came up with a cigar, a wedding favor, five perfectly rolled joints and some matches.

“I don’t got anything, man. Puta! I don’t have my wallet!”

Charon stood looking at him, impatient this time. “You’re not going anywhere then.”

“Where am I supposed to be going? And where the hell am I anyway?” Leonidas continued to pat himself down.

Charon was silent for a minute. “We’re at the left bank of the Styx and according to the book you are not supposed to be here yet. I don’t know why you even called.”

“I didn’t!” Leonidas continued to search his inside jacket pockets, still flustered with the absence of his wallet and flustered with the way his suit fitted at the moment.

“You did indeed!”

“I said chicharon, man! Loco, ka, ah? (“You’re crazy!”) Who the hell are you?” Leonidas finally stopped groping around for his wallet and was getting ready to roll up his sleeves and ball up his fists when Charon said calmly, “My name seems to cause much confusion among your race. And please do not use that word so freely.”

“What?!”

“It will soon be your place of torment – most likely.”

“Ano ...?” (“What … ?”)

Leonidas suddenly felt hot and sweat beads broke across his forehead. He loosened his tie and looked down at his gray pinstripe suit. He wondered why it felt so odd and why he was wearing the suit it was so damn hot and humid. Then he noticed around his neck dangled a dog tag. He picked it up and imprinted on it was a picture of himself with his three boys. It was the eldest boy’s graduation. He remembered that day back in July. They had all gone out for Chinese buffet afterwards where he gorged on snails and crab legs. He began to feel hungry. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He tried to focus, to remember what he was doing last, before the fire. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, and as he did so, his pants slipped down his waist. He gave it an upward tug and realized his belly was gone. He patted himself down again and felt spare; only half there. It puzzled him, but all he could think of was his growing hunger and how a juicy slab of steak would just hit the spot. He decided he should eat first before trying to think about the river, the boat, and his shrunken waist.

“Hey man, got a diner or something around here?”

“Unless you’ve got something to pay for it, you won’t be getting any food for the next millennium.”

“Look, I don’t know what I’m doing here or how I even got here. I’d call my wife to pick me up, but I don’t seem to have my cell phone, or anything else on me. I just need a bite to eat, then I’ll be able to think properly, or even remember. Hell, I’ll even wash some dishes for a sandwich!”

“Everyone goes through the disorientation. Reality will hit you in a short while, once we can get on that boat and take you where you really need to be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have my wallet, my phone – my car keys – where the hell is my car? I can’t tell you where I’m supposed to be going, or pay you.”

“Would you please stop using that word? I’ll take you where you need to be. Payment doesn’t have to be in cash.”

Leonidas instinctively patted himself down again. His watch jangled loosely on his arm and he pulled up his sleeve. His arm was thin and emaciated. He wondered how he had gotten so thin. He really must not have eaten in weeks. He took off his watch.

“Is this O.K.? For the boat?”

Charon took the watch and looked discerningly.

“Seikos aren’t worth much you know. Didn’t you ever own a Rolex? They fetch more at the Junction. I’ll have to get a valuation on this. You’ll have to wait.”

Charon floated onto the boat and it started moving away. The darkness crept back in, blinding Leonidas as he stood alone in the pitch black.

“Hey! Are you stealing my watch? Motherfucker! Come back here!”

Leonidas was hotter than ever, fuming at having lost the watch, or perhaps it was fright that struck him, being alone in the dark. He took off his coat, slowly crouched to the ground and sat on the loose pebbles. After a while, the silence and the darkness became too much. He decided to light a joint.

When Leonidas came to, it was still black and the faint smell of the marijuana lingered. He again tried to remember before the fire and before Charon, but nothing came. He closed his eyes, trying to search his fuzzy mind.

“You’re lucky. Someone fancied your watch. We can go now.”

Leonidas jumped. Charon and the boat had returned without a sound.

“And where’s that?”

“To Hades, of course. It’s no guarantee you’ll get in beyond that. But I suppose that is where you’re supposed to be. Your name isn’t anywhere so you’ll have to wait there until it’s decided.”

“Hades? The Underworld…Hell you mean?”

“Not exactly. You’ll wait it out there until They confirm that you are indeed going to Hell. Or elsewhere if you’re rarely lucky.”

“They? Who they?”

“The judges. I’m sure you have a case. Your name isn’t listed anywhere. Not metaphorically up, nor down – you are in a word, hanging – by a thread. Snip-snip!” Charon managed a low chuckle as he motioned a cutting action with his two fingers.

Leonidas reeled. It must be a dream. He needed to wake up. Move a leg. A finger. Just a centimeter. Damn it, move! he thought. But as he swung his arms around him and jiggled his leg, he was still at the same spot he was a moment ago: in a dark empty place with an old scrawny man waiting by a boat and a lamp.

“What on Styx are you doing?”

“Trying to wake up. This shit is weird, and I’m going to wake up, have some longganisa, fried rice and eggs, and play Warcraft online for a couple of hours.”

“Well, that isn’t going to work is it?”

Leonidas began to jump up and down, then again tried any vigorous movement that would usually wake him out of his nightmares, but to no avail. Then he tried to scream. But his bellowing became a low growl.

“Oh, will you please keep it down?!” Charon was growing irritable. “Just get in the damn boat will you? I’ve got other appointments to keep as you’re not the last fool in the world.”

Leonidas grew hoarse. He finally stopped. He felt like he had been hit by a moving Escalade. He felt as if his breath had stopped short, but he wasn’t even breathing. He took his pulse. Nothing. He fell to the ground as he thought his limbs had weakened and realized what had happened. It was true. He was dead.

Charon’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Ah, here we go. First it will be denial, then recollection, then anger, then grief, then…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Leonidas’ voice was shaky as the tears streamed down his face profusely. “I’m fucking dead! And where the hell am I? Getting ready to ride a fucking barge to Hell’s waiting room. Fucking funny, Cha-ron.”

“If you’re finished with your twelve steps, we can get a move on then.”

Defeated, Leonidas put on his coat and followed Charon to the boat. Despite being only half his weight now, his six-foot frame still swayed Charon and the boat violently as he moved onto the rickety wooden planks.

He stared into the lamp. “This is fucking great. What about all the anointing, the prayers, the novenas – I’m sure as hell they did the novenas. I’m sure my wife made sure of that.” Leonidas sniffed and wiped his tears with the back of his hands.

Charon was all cheered up. “Humans are always so confident aren’t they? Prayers aren’t the answer to everything.”

Leonidas sat on the floor of the boat with his head hanging down as he began to recall the last two painful weeks that he suffered through the dizziness and nausea of the chemotherapy. He remembered that he could barely keep his food down, despite all the delicious outpourings from friends and family: puto, sinigang, manggang hilaw, siopao, and on, day after day. He felt the pangs of hunger again in the pit of his stomach. He felt he could eat an entire lechon.

“So, you think I’ll find some food where we’re going?” Leonidas had perked up and was hopeful.

“If you should be so lucky. I’m surprised they didn’t send you off with any. Perhaps that’s the Chinese.”

Then they were silent for a long time. Leonidas was lost in thought about his final moments on earth. He was fighting the tears again when the boat bumped to a stop. Leonidas stood to see where they were, and his breath, if he still had been breathing, would have stopped. The darkness had opened up and there rose before him an endlessly rising jagged mountain with a black, gaping hole. All was silent, unmoving, uninviting. A little fear crept inside him as his hair stood on end.

“Well, here we are,” Charon spoke as he floated onto the bank. Leonidas followed, still agape at the sight before him.

“Through there,” Charon pointed at the black hole that served as entrance to the jagged mountains. “Watch out for the dog.”

Here, the sky was a strange fiery twilight; streaks of orange and purple slashed through and left shredded ribbons of cloud. Leonidas took hesitant steps toward the infernal black hole. He couldn’t decided which was more frightening – the mouth of the cave he was headed for or the portentous firmament of this unknown world. Charon motioned for Leonidas to continue as he began to fade away into the darkening distance. Leonidas stood still for a while pondering. He tried to reason through his fear: what could happen? Fuck, I’m dead already! He brought back his audacity, took one step forward and then stopped. Random thoughts of torture dropped into his head: What if they put a million hooks through my loose skin and pull it off? What if they force-feed me maggots until I vomit for days? What if… A deep snarl emanated from the opening.

“Holy shit! It’s the fucking three-headed dog!” Leonidas slowly backed away from the opening. “It isn’t just a damn myth!”

A deafening roar ripped through the silence. Leonidas was transfixed. He had an urge to see what would come out of the cave, but at the same time he desperately wanted to turn and run. His body was stiff. He couldn’t move. He watched the cave intently. A large black mass, an indefinite shape suddenly flung out, but was gone in an instant. In its wake, a bundle of shiny, black snakes had dropped to the ground. They slithered toward Leonidas, but seemingly, they were absorbed into the ground before they could reach him. He plopped down and almost wished Charon was there to argue, to tell him that he was in the paralyzed-with-fear-stage. He groped his pockets and produced another joint and the matchbook. His fingers shook as he brought the roll to his lips and took a deep hit and wondered how the smoke was making out – he wasn’t really breathing after all. Still, the pressure was off and he even began to feel mellow after a few more puffs. He pinched the end of the lit joint and saved the remains in his jacket pocket. He didn’t want to move and sat looking into the cave for a while. It had gone quiet again, not even a breath from within. He considered waiting it out at the entrance until Charon showed up again with someone else headed for the same fate. It wasn’t as if he was in a hurry. The longer he put it off, the further away he would be from his torturous future. Then he thought the better of it. What if he could plead his case and go the other way? He’d surely be cozying up to the grill with a nice cold bottle of San Mig and some pork chops on the coals. He began salivating. If only his boys had slipped some beef jerky into his pocket! Suddenly he was seized with grief so sharp as his randomly shuffling memory brought to play his wife in the kitchen, skewering pork meat for the barbeque. They were talking and quickly the conversation turned into an argument. His eyes welled up. How did the argument end? But his memory had reshuffled and now he was sitting in the kitchen with her over Sunday brunch while the boys played, screaming, and running back and forth through the house. He felt the small torture hooks tugging at his chest, where his heart would be, hurting him without even touching him. He resolved to fight for a place in the other direction. Surely there would only be good memories and surely there must be a way to get into those gates? If his name was yet to be written in the books, he still had a chance to be in the good one.

Leonidas got up and dusted himself and took out his half-smoked joint and lit up. He would get through the cave come hell or high water. He furtively entered the now silent cave. As he did so, he furiously puffed on the joint hoping to transport himself into oblivion before the three-headed monster would notice. He lit another with the dying embers of the last one. His pace quickened though he could not see a path nor direction which to take. He kept walking into the dark, into the black void that could end in fangs or snakes. His resolve and the intoxicating feeling of humor kept him going. Then he stop dead in his tracks. Echoing through the cave was the sound of dogs lapping and smacking their lips. For sure the creature was on the ready to devour him. His heart would have skipped a beat as he hesitated a moment before deciding to run in the same direction he was headed. The dog was after him, after the peculiar smell that was emanating from him. He dropped the still burning joint in his haste. If he could only see in the dark, he would have seen Cerberus stop and devour the remaining embers.

Presently, Leonidas came to the abrupt end of wherever he was as he slammed into something that was blocking his way. He picked himself off the ground and began groping before him. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out a desk of some sort.

“Can I help you?”

He was taken aback by the high pitch voice, a woman perhaps.

“Who are you?” he asked, trying to feel for its face. There was nothing but the edges of the table and what seemed to be a dim but slowly brightening lamp.

“Your eyes will adjust.”

Leonidas could see a shadowy shape but could not make out any distinct features.

“Name please?” the voice asked.

“Uh, Leonidas.” His voice wavered.

“Religion?”

“Catholic. The last name is spelled…”

“We don’t need it. You can wait in Room Three.” The voice offered nothing more and the shadow dissipated in the growing light.

Before Leonidas stretched rows upon rows of doors, but not in any chronological order that he could discern. He decided that he would just have to systematically go to each door to read off the number: seven, one hundred-twelve, thirty-nine, seven – the numbers seemed to change. He stood for a moment rubbing his eyes. Then he jumped back. Someone had suddenly swung out of one of the rooms and looked him straight in the eye.

“Pssst. Lookin’ for a room?” It was a burly, squat man. He wore a dirty tank top that must have been white at one time and belted trousers up to his breasts. He motioned with his finger for Leonidas to come closer. Leonidas approached and smelled the smell of butcher shops; veal chops, ground beef and pork shoulder. The man talked closely to him, but decidedly his voice wasn’t low, as Leonidas had expected.

“What room ya lookin’ for pal? I know where all a ‘dem rooms ahr. But show me what ya got first and we’ll tawlk”

“Are you human?”

“Last time I checked, now whaddaya got?”

“Where you from?”

“Not too far from hear – across da river – Joisey City, asshole of America, where yew from?”

Leonidas let out a laugh for the first time. “Same place. Right by highway four-forty.”

“That’s a beyootiful place comperd to mine. Now show me what ya got, and maybee I can get yews in.”

Leonidas remembered he had nothing left to barter with and turned out his pockets of its contents once more.

“Eh, not so good. Shoulda asked for cash – like dem Greeks do.” He picked up the cigar and sniffed. “Cuban Habano. Not bad. Someone was lookin’ for one earlier. Now, dis here would get you places.” He picked up one of the remaining joints, but Leonidas quickly snatched it back.

“Look, I don’t know how long it’ll be, but that would be asking too much.”

“Hey, do whatever ya want. Some people are out here for centuries. That’s ya choice.”

Leonidas stood firm, “I got time.”

“Ahright. Don’t lemme save yews from lung cancer, but dis here cigar is a cheap price to pay – coz ya from da neighborhood and all. I’ll make ya a deal, O.K.?”

“O.K. Take the cigar,” Leonidas offered.

“Here, dis door will take ya where you want to go.” The burly man pointed to the door that he had exited from and on it was the number three. Leonidas wanted to kick himself as he turned the knob. It opened up to a spacious place, more like a train station with benches interspersed rather than a torture chamber that he had half expected. Some had balled up their coats and used them as pillows as they slept on the benches. Others read newspapers or books, prayed on rosaries; others still, stared off into space, dreaming, perhaps of their waiting time to be over. Some people looked up at him, others didn’t notice him. He found an empty bench and sat down. He looked around him, people talked but he could barley hear them. After some time, he looked at his three boys. He hoped they weren’t eating too much and exercised daily. He thought his stomach growled. He tried to turn his mind to other things and found himself wondering what the other rooms might be like.

“Other rooms look almost the same. Easier for Them to handle similar cases. You’re free to move about. Wag ka lang mawala Just don’t get yourself lost.”

Leonidas turned to see an older woman sitting next to him.

“You must be Filipino!”

“Oo. Madami dito Yes. There are lot of Filipinos here.”

“So, is this the Junction then?”

“Yes, one of them, and if you’re craving lechon, Nanay Gloria will most likely have a plate of it lying around, although not a whole pig, mind you. We take what we can get. The butcher charges a lot – figures you’re most likely in for a lifetime of suffering, so why not have a final feast?”

“What’s your name?”

“Just call me Inay, everyone here does. Nanay Gloria will be making her rounds shortly. Make sure you have something nice for her if you’re hungry.” She patted his hand and was gone.

Leonidas had a million questions. But he felt for the wedding favor in his pocket. He hoped it would be enough for a steaming hot plate of anything.

*

LEONIDAS HAD NO concept of time where he was. There were no windows and the light that filled the room was neither day nor night, like an afternoon ready for rain to pour but never quite getting there. He had walked around for months it seemed, but there really was no way of knowing. Some people passed the time playing games. Once in a while, people would disappear out of the door. Some would come back, sometimes not. He had been offered MP3 players, Hustler magazines, strange keepsakes. He wasn’t interested. In time, he had learned to quell his hunger and had made fast friends with a group of rowdy, belligerent drinkers that sometimes gave him a shot or two in exchange for his fight stories. They continually played Pusoy and placed bets with anything they could trade: a pen, an orange, a watch, a cigarette. Things would go around in circles until after some time, the original owner would have it back again, and the cycle would begin anew in hopes that it would eventually get them somewhere closer to adjudication.

Most days, Inay would come and talk to Leonidas and they struck up a friendship of sorts.

“How long have you been here, Inay?”

“Too long it seems.”

“Napakabait mo, Inay, why are you here?”

“I hear my case can be pleaded.”

“How did you ever get past the three-headed dog?”

“Fear is what you make it, Leonidas. It is different for everyone.”

“Hmm. You think people could have bought their way out of that one? Seems like everything has a price around here.”

“People, especially the Pinoys are enterprising. Plenty of time to learn the system – that’s how we are.”

“How’s your case coming along?”

“Oh, I’ve patience. It will be resolved eventually, although I hear that my husband’s been waiting for some time. I’d like to see him. Kahit sandali. Pero, ganon talaga. Pasensya lang.”

Leonidas was about to ask her what could be done to speed up his case, but she cut him off and said, “Mag-ingat ka lang. Lahat dito may pag-asa, depende sa presyo.” Then she was off to assuage a new soul.

After what seemed a long time to Leonidas, a man in a dapper suit appeared in Room Three. He carried a briefcase with papers and met with various people. He made his way to Leonidas and sat down to speak to him.

“So you might have a good chance.”

“Good chance for what?” Leonidas tried to understand what the man in the suit was trying to sell him.

“Well, to go where you and everyone else would like to be.”

“Heaven, you mean? Who are you?”

“I represent you, well, most of you here in Room Three.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“You might say that I’m an advocate.”

“Are you then pleading my case?”

“Well, yes, but let me ask you this, what can you offer?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it worth to you?”

“Heaven?” Leonidas thought for a while. “I’ve had a lot of time to think things through. If I remember correctly, my family and I did everything by the book and really, I shouldn’t be here.”

“Look, they missed one novena for you, so technically, they only prayed eight days, and eight days is a day short. But everything else looks good, so you certainly have a chance.”

“You have me out on a technicality they probably weren’t even aware of. I’ve made my peace. My family did what was necessary. What if I had been Jewish or Seventh Day Adventist or Mormon? Would I have had this much trouble?”

“I wouldn’t be your representative, if you were.” The man in the dapper suit looked intently at Leonidas. “Look, all I’m saying is if it’s worth it to you, I can make your case happen, and maybe even speed up the proceedings.”

“Otherwise?”

“You could be looking at hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.” The man cleared his throat, “Unless of course, it was a clerical error and your name really belongs in one of the books.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“All I’m saying is, you could have something that might be worth a lot more to someone else.”

“Who says?”

“An Italian butcher said I should come see you.”

“So that’s how it really works here, eh?”

“All I’m saying – you could be out sooner. But don’t take too long. Try to have a decision the next time I come around.”

“What if I have a decision now?”

“Tell me.”

“Inay’s case.”

“Look, if I were you, I’d be more concerned with my own case.”

“Inay’s case?”

“She’s been a generous woman. Too generous, she’s got nothing now.”

“She’ll be here forever for being nice?”

“It will be a long time.”

“I’ve got something. Make sure you work her case. Otherwise.” Leonidas nodded towards the group of drinkers he had befriended, then handed something over to the man in the suit, got up and left.

It was only a short while before Inay finally came to talk to Leonidas for the last time. Her eyes gleamed and she held his hand for a long time, as if to give thanks. Leonidas smiled and said, “He’ll be waiting for you.”

*

LEONIDAS GENTLY ROLLED around his last joint between his fingers. It momentarily caught on his loose wedding band. Then he ran it under his nose as he sniffed the potent, green scent of the dried herb. He sat back on the bench, stretched out his legs, moved around, finally got comfortable and lit up. He took a deep puff. It was going to be a long wait and there were hundreds of rooms yet to explore.

GABRIELA LEE

INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO DISAPPEAR:

A STORY IN SEVEN PARTS

Gabriela Lee received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where she majored in Creative Writing. She has been published in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, Philippines Free Press, and The Literary Apprentice. She has also been a Fellow for Poetry in English at the Iligan, Dumaguete, and UP National Writers Workshops. She also has a children’s book entitled La-on and the Seven-Headed Dragon, published by Adarna House, which she co-wrote with her mother. Lee received the Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio Literary Award for her fiction and poetry. She has been a member of the UP Writers Club and UP Graphic Arts in Literature.

A unique twist on an otherwise cliché break-up plot, “Instructions on How to Disappear captures a” woman midway towards shattering in seven brief steps.

7. Clean your room

RESURFACING, YOU NOTICE for the first time the light, the way it moves across your room. The light is an invader, an intrusion into the quiet darkness that you’ve come to know. The light inserts a finger, and then another, into the four corners of your womb, illuminating your arms, your entire body. There is spittle coating the corners of your lips, and your sheets are crusted with sweat. Your eyes are swollen from keeping back the tears.

“Get up.” The source of the light. “Get up, Sue.”

For a moment, you refuse to heed the call. It’s always easier to sink, to surrender to the heaviness that weighs you down, that place in your chest that is suddenly heavier than any anchor. You throw one arm over your eyes in a weak effort to block the light.

“Susan.”

“Ruiz. Go away.”

Ruiz takes a look and shakes his head. “You have to get out.”

You put your head between your knees. You can’t remember the last time you took a bath, or your last meal. You can smell yourself — sweat, shit, salt on skin. “How long has it been?”

“Three days.” He sits down beside you, thighs barely touching. “Mrs. Ebo is worried.” Mrs. Ebo is your Korean landlady.

“My keys?” You almost choke back your words.

“David returned them to me yesterday.”

“And how is he?”

“Getting on. He’s wondering how you are.” Ruiz takes a deep breath. “I told him you were... adjusting.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. You feel your fingers trembling as you grip your head in your hands. Everything is shaking — your body, the bed, the room. You clench your teeth.

And then it happens — you feel the cold, tendrils of ice seeping underneath your skin. You hear your fingers crackle as they change, morph into something other than flesh and blood. It hurts, these moments, and you realize you’re taking short, shallow breaths; you realize that everything has stopped.

Carefully lifting your head, Ruiz untangles strands of your hair from your fingers. Everything from your elbow to your fingers has turned into glass. You look wearily at your own limbs, frozen in the act of cradling your head, your fingers like glass claws catching the reflection of the light. In this angle, they are almost translucent, capturing your moment of despair. You want to cry, want to move your arms, your fingers, but they are stiff and unresponding.

Ruiz enfolds you into his arms, and cradles you, carefully maneuvering around your fragile limbs.

For the first time in three days, you cry.

And then the darkness, the comfortable darkness, moves in again.

You wake up in your bed, curled up around your pillow. Your arms have returned to their flesh-and-blood state. You flex your fingers experimentally. Carefully, you turn around in your bed. The light is now coming from your desk lamp. There is a Styrofoam container on your desk; the smell tells you that it’s tapsilog, still warm. You swing your legs over the edge of the mattress and conform the soles of your feet to the floor. Everything seems slightly blurry, as if you’re viewing the world through a thin sheet of water.

Ruiz has cleaned your room. Everything is swept and dusted, the books arranged on the shelves, the CDs stacked beside your stereo, your clothes folded in your drawers. The loose paper is in a neat pile on one end of your desk, beside your dinner. There are three balikbayan boxes pushed against one wall, taped at the top and labeled “Trash” in Ruiz’s firm handwriting. There is that faint scent of Glade in the air.

You move towards your desk, weaving unsteadily. Your legs have forgotten how to support your body, let alone walk. The table is empty except for the desk lamp, the Styrofoam box, and the stack of papers weighed down by a ceramic dolphin. The pictures are gone, the shoebox of letters, his ring bound copy of the MLA Handout that you were using for your thesis. The necklace he gave you for your anniversary is not in your jewelry box anymore. His CDs have left gaps in your case. Looking around the room, you realize that everything is gone. Your room looks the way it was ten months ago.

You sit down in front of your desk before your knees give way. Ruiz has done a thorough job.

6. Erase everything with your name on it

“BASA, SUSAN.”

You stand up. Your blue schoolgirl skirt barely reaches your knees. You may not have been more than ten years old.

Behind you, your classmates titter. You brush a stray lock of hair away from your face and struggle to understand the question the teacher just asked you. Your eyes start to water. You look down, stare at your dirty fingernails, at your dusty shoes. You can feel a trickle of nervous wetness down your legs.

“Basa si Susan, o! Tingnan mo! Basa siya!” Joseph Arambulo, the meanest boy in class, stands up and points at the pale yellow puddle around your feet. Your socks are now soaked. The unmistakable smell of piss surrounds you. “Susan Basa, Susan Basa!” he chants, forcing the syllables of your surname to change in meaning, contracting the last syllable as if he was burping it instead of saying it. You can feel your neck redden, heat flaring up from your too-tight collar and moving upwards to your cheeks.

“Susan!” your teacher yells. “Ang tanda-tanda mo na, ganyan ka pa!”

You wish that you could just disappear.

“Susan Basa!”

“Nakakahiya ka!”

A welcoming numbness spreads from your fingertips, creeping beneath your skin like a million tiny caterpillars, tickling the underside of your flesh. The feeling of discomfort would come later, when you became older, but now you watch in mute fascination as your fingers lost all color, taking on the transparency of glass. The cold moves upwards, trickling across your elbows, an army of tiny fingers taking over your skin. You smile in relief.

Puddles of color stain your eyes, and the sound of voices fade, muffled, as if you were underwater. Even the light seems to ripple, distort. You try focusing on individual things in the room: the paper cutout of an apple on one of the side bulletin boards flanking the blackboard, the row of green dictionaries lining the edge of the window, the crucifix above the door. You try and think of a prayer. Our Father who art in heaven…You wonder if you are dying, and realize that it’s actually kind of pleasant.

“Ma’am Obando, Susan’s turning into glass!”

The voice of your classmate crashes into your consciousness, and cascading warmth flows through your arms. You remember when you were five years old and you accidentally toppled the pot of steaming molo soup on your lap. The liquid seemed to eat up your skin, melting away your legs as if they were butter. You remember screaming, just screaming, screaming, screaming.

You blink. Everyone is staring at you, wide-eyed. Your teacher looks frightened. You can still feel the final traces of piss dripping down your legs. You slowly curl your fingers into fists; it feels as though it has fallen asleep. Your nails dig into the flesh of your palms. Everything seems too warm, too humid, too wet.

“Susan… Miss Basa. Please go to the clinic and ask the nurse to help you wash up,” says Miss Obando carefully.

You march out of the classroom, your chin level with the floor. You pretend not to hear your name.

5. Burn your pictures

RUIZ VISITS YOU the next day. He brings with him a paper bag filled with your things. You wonder if you’ve left that many things at his house. It takes you a few more seconds to realize that he’s seen David, and suddenly all the strength you’ve gathered up the night before seems to desert you.

“He wanted me to give this to you,” says Ruiz, and you realize that he’s uncomfortable about the entire thing. You peer momentarily into the bag, and a circular package catches your eye. You realize he’s given back the watch that you gave him two weeks ago, the watch that you blew your entire month’s savings on. You feel tears prickling your eyes, and quickly bat them away – but not before Ruiz sees them.

Dropping to his knees, he grabs your hands and presses them between his. His palms are dry and rough, like fine grains of sand are bundled up beneath the skin. You can feel the warmth emanating from his fingers as they grasp yours tightly, forming a protective cocoon around your smaller, paler palms. “Don’t start,” he whispered fiercely. “Don’t you dare, Sue.”

You clench your teeth together so tightly it’s almost painful. The need to cry ebbs and flows. Ruiz tightens his hold – a prayer with four hands instead of just two. “Save me,” you whisper, your control over your tears slipping away. The familiar cold is back now; the tips of your fingers are starting to change.

Ruiz starts rubbing his hands around yours, the friction enough to make you feel as though a small fire is being lit between your fingers. The fragile transparency recedes, replaced by the fleshy tips of your fingers, the pink reminding you of raw meat. Ruiz notices that you’re back, and smiles tiredly. He lets go of your hands, and you suddenly miss his touch.

He shoves his hands into his pockets and stands up. He gestures to the paper bag leaning forlornly against the side of your desk. “So, um, what do you want me to do with these things?” he asks.

You shrug. Inexplicably, you want something sweet in your mouth.

“I’ll just… I dunno, take them home, you want that?” Ruiz bends over and picks the bag up again. “I don’t think you want to see them right now.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey listen, if you’re up for it – Tin and her band are playing at Shirley’s Temple next week, if you want to come along.”

Shrugging seems to be the easiest way to answer questions right now. Ruiz interprets that as a yes, and says nothing more. You find your mind wandering again, and –

“Hey, Ruiz. Where did you put my camera?”

That night, you sit at your desk. Outside, the fat moon beams benevolently over the corrugated tin rooftops, the occasional tree. Streetlamps flicker, creating strange patterns of shadow across the empty street. Your window faces across the compound, beyond the cement wall, where the occasional tricycle breaks the silence of the neighborhood. It is just past midnight.

You hold your camera in your palm. The small silver gadget was the last purchase you allowed yourself to make – the rest of your money went to David: to his gifts, to the movies he wanted to watch, the food he wanted to eat, the places he wanted to go. Going through the photographs stored in the camera, you feel as though you’re watching your life pass you by, a life that happened to someone else, someone else with your face, your smile, your hair, your hands, your curse. Such a difficult thing, keeping yourself together, the surety of completeness lost once he walked out the door.

You flick a switch on the camera. One by one, a blank screen takes over the images. You wait until the hourglass in the middle of the screen finishes turning. It takes a few seconds, a few lifetimes, but finally the camera tells you that everything has been erased.

You go to the window and aim the lens, fiddling with the zoom, waiting for the perfect moment to capture the curve of moonlight on the glass.

4. Hide from your friends

WHEN RUIZ PICKS you up the next day, you are too tired to notice that he is wearing that shirt that you gave him last year, a green Deftones shirt that fits well on his lanky body. He takes your arm and guides you outside your compound, ducking slightly as you step out; the gate’s opening is too low for him. You feel as though you want to bolt back to your room, to hide under the blankets. “What if I see him?” you whisper urgently.

Ruiz pats your hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry. You know this isn’t his scene.”

Shirley’s Temple is a small bar and restaurant just off Aurora Boulevard, squashed between Paulette’s Salon and Body Spa and a funeral parlor. You climb the rickety wooden steps that lead to the second floor; the first level is filled with old men playing chess, smelling of cigarette smoke and overcooked sisig. The lampshades in the bar are made of colored capiz that makes it seem as though you are surrounded by small stained-glass domes. You settle in a corner table and fish around your bag for your camera while Ruiz greets the band.

Tin is a small girl, only reaching your chin when she wears her platform Mary Janes. With her long thin braids reaching down her back, she looks like a small Filipino Alicia Keys. Ruiz puts his arm protectively around her. “We’re so glad you could make it, Susan. We missed you,” she squeaks. She plays the keyboards for the band. The other three members are all girls, and none of them look over eighteen. It must be the matching schoolgirl outfits and the plastic, heart-shaped sunglasses – no wonder they call the band Lolita.

You hug Tin peremptorily, and then retreat back into your seat. Ruiz gives her a tender kiss, and then ushers her back to the stage where the rest of them are setting up. Then he slips into the seat beside you and grins, brushing a thick lock of hair away from his face. He is growing it long now, zigzag clumps that mingle with his forehead, and curl down to his nape. For some reason, you are tempted to tease the strands, curl them around your fingers. You close your eyes and try to fight back the beginnings of a headache.

Ruiz orders a beer for the both of you. You toy with your bottle, peeling the sticker tape wrapped around the neck. The band finishes their set; there’s a quick applause, and a customer walks unsteadily towards the men’s room. The girls sit at your table, and Tin leans her head on Ruiz’s shoulder as she introduces the other band members to you: Eva, Bethany, and Dori. They settle into a conversation that seems to involve song choices, missed chords, and Eva forgetting the words to “Silent All These Years.” More beer is ordered, and Bethany asks for gambas and garlic mushrooms from a waiter who may or may not be gay. Ruiz whispers something to Tin, and they both laugh.

You watch Ruiz and Tin with a strange sort of longing. His arm is draped around her shoulders, and she is leaning on his shoulder, her cheek on the sleeve of his shirt. You know how that feels, that sense of belonging to someone so easily and so completely that it almost resembled a physical joining. You open and close your fists on your lap, and watch the shadows crisscross your palms like superimposed life lines. You suddenly realize how much you’ve actually lost.

It is only when his name is mentioned that you snap out of your reverie – Tin is talking about him. The sound of his name feels like a frozen blade sliding through your abdomen. It takes a moment before you realize that you are starting to transform again: your hand is becoming translucent, reflecting the mood lights mounted at the corners of the bar. You observe, dispassionate, at the way your skin slowly slips away from you, at the delicate sheen of light coloring the surface of your arm. You tap the inside of your elbow, listening to the dull, hollow sound of your fingernails on your arm.

You force your mind to return to the present, to refuse the call of nostalgia. Everyone looks at you questioningly; you quickly yank down the sleeve of your jacket, hiding your arm. Ruiz touches your shoulder tentatively, as if in comfort, and pushes another bottle of beer in your direction. You drink, finishing half of the amber liquid in a few seconds. The taste slams into the back of your throat, almost gagging you, but you keep it down, swallowing until you feel the warmth spread across your stomach, a fluid hand rubbing away the memories.

“Sorry,” Tin mutters, looking guiltily at your fingers. The flesh had faded, and now it was the translucent shape of your fingers against the iron tabletop, the curve of your knuckles reflecting the light. Glass, after all, is only defined by radiance and mirrors.

You shove your palms underneath the table and smile reassuringly at Tin. “I’ll be fine,” you say without much conviction. You wonder how long it would take before your entire body dissolves into something more fragile, breaking easily, a thousand Susan crystals on the floor of the bar. You haul your mind back to where things were more tangible: the sweat beads on the beer bottle, the way Ruiz strokes the beginnings of a beard on his chin, Tin’s braids swinging whenever she moves her head. Stone Temple Pilots is playing on the loudspeakers, and you sing along in your mind, focusing on each word as you hear it, and forgetting it as soon as you move on to the next line.

You wish it were this easy to forget him.

You tighten your jaw, feeling your entire shoulder grow cold underneath the thin fabric of the jacket. It was creeping up now, the chill of glass, reminding you of when you and David –

No, no, no. Stop.

You are frightened of shattering.

Ruiz reaches underneath the table. His hand is warm and reassuring, pressing against your glass palm, carefully twining his fingers around yours and squeezing gently, so that you could almost feel the blood pounding against your fingers. You try to smile at him, a genuine smile, and slowly the pulse of blood returns to your arm. Everyone at the table is staring at you, not quite knowing what to say.

3. Break all mirrors

SNIP.

“This isn’t the smartest idea in the world, Sue.”

“Shut up.”

Snip. Snip.

Curls of your hair drip from your head to the floor, a puddle of strands dark against the pale linoleum. You take another lock between your fore- and middle fingers and set the blade of your scissors to work. Ruiz looks on helplessly. “Can’t we at least go to a salon and have this professionally done?”

“You didn’t want to do it, so I’ll do it myself. Besides, you know I can’t afford a haircut right now.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

Snip. Snip snip snip.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he says, pacing around the room. You are seated in front of your dresser, your back to the mirror, watching Ruiz move across your room. Sunlight slants across the walls, a shower of golden light, a halcyon afternoon.

Ruiz pauses. “No, on second thought, I know – it’s still about David, isn’t it? Everything is about David nowadays. Why he left you, why you’re here right now making a mess of yourself. You’ve been changing – ”

Snip. Snip.

“ – almost daily now, Sue, do you realize that? Before, it was just once a month, a couple of times a month. You could go on for weeks without transforming. And now – almost every fucking day – ”

Snip snip snip. Snip snip snip.

“ – you suddenly morph like some fucking mutant, and do you know how scared that makes me? To watch you go through something like this and know that it’s not your fault, and you’re just making it so fucking hard for yourself!”

Snap.

You close your eyes, breathe, open your eyes again. The scissors feel heavy in your hands, the blades cool and smooth and long. You wonder how it would feel if you draw it across the inside of your arm, watch the scarlet blood well up like a fat liquid balloon. You wonder if you would transform in the middle of death, your body unable to take the shock, the pain, your insides turning into a fragile sculpture, frozen in the moment of your last breath. You wonder what would happen if your organs change into glass – your lungs unable to squeeze out your dying breath, your heart stopping in the middle of its last pump.

Ruiz is staring at you. You lift the last length of your hair and cut it in one smooth motion. The lock flutters to the ground, strands of hair separating like dark moths freed from a glass bottle, floating gently to the ground. You stand up and run your fingers through your newly-shortened hair. It feels strange, the ragged edges ending at your nape, an uneven cut. You turn and stare at yourself in the mirror, and wonder if that’s really you with the too-pale face, the wide eyes, the sunken cheeks, your hair floating around your head like an unsteady halo. Your tank top is flecked with strands, and you absently brush them away.

Ruiz comes up behind you and wraps his hands around your shoulders, pulling you to him. His hands settle beneath your breasts, skimming your ribcage. “You’re too thin,” he whispers, the hair on his chin tickling the rim of your ear.

You look at your reflection, at his reflection as he buries his face into the tangled forest of your hair. You feel as though you are empty, a vessel made of sallow skin and bones, blood pulsing weakly beneath your flesh. You wonder if he realizes his arms are around a ghost.

The next day, your mirror accidentally breaks as you totter towards the bathroom, your arm swiping it from your dresser. Ruiz didn’t hear it shatter; he is still asleep in your bed, one arm covering his eyes from the sunlight. You didn’t bother buying a new one.

2. Destroy all clocks

OVER THE NEXT few weeks, you realize that the easiest thing to do is to pretend that nothing happened. You slowly return to your routine, and wonder why, at the end of the day, you still feel hollow and empty. Your hand constantly searches for something to fill it up – another hand, the feel of someone’s fingers between your own, a possessive grip.

You have yet to see Ruiz these days; your eyes constantly search for him in the hallways, at class, during breaks. He tells you that he’s busy, that Tin’s band is playing almost every night, that he’s studying for the midterms. You let his words slide through your body, exhale his memory between your lips. You tuck the events of that evening into a secret corner of your mind, and attempt to forget.

Days trickle into weeks, and you glance at your calendar one day and realize that it’s been more than a couple of months already and you’re still alive. Your room is now clean – the boxes that Ruiz packed in the past are now gone, removed from your room, as are the shards of glass from your broken mirror. You’ve burned all of David’s letters, and the gifts that he’s given has long been taken away by the weekly garbage collectors. What he returned, you kept: the books are now on the shelves, your clothes laundered and folded in your closet, the ceramic dolphin is perched on your desk. You wear the watch he returned; the metal band looks awkward on your wrist, the face too large for your arm. But you persist on wearing it to school – it was too expensive to throw away, and nobody else wanted it.

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.

“Morning, 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.

He 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.

He feels for the psychosomatic throbbing soreness on his head. He wishes he had woken early, like 06:00:00, but had not heard the mistoku’s ringing. That thing is broken again, although the technokeeper has promised it would last till the 33rd Quarter. He knows better than to trust a merchandise pirate—but given his memory status, Dr. Lamco knows he can do no better: how does one exactly teach old dogs new tricks? And not even an old dog, he quickly smiles.

Already, the day feels heavy. He opens the window shades, then shields his eyes from the sunlight, which streams into the room like a threat. He flips the switch right below the console to make the bed, which mechanically wriggles, the puratex sheets and compillows straightening.

“Good morning, Pepe,” a mechanical voice intones.

“Morning, Monroy,” Dr. Lamco responds to the nickname, resigned to it finally. He sighs. “Monroy, make sure the technokeeper knows about the mistoku. I can’t be late again for any important meeting. And you know what today is, of course.”

“Very good, Pepe. Headquarters tells me that the Parliament of Elders expects you within the hour.”

“I know, I know,” he sighs again.

He gets to the task of switching and pressing for housekeeping. In truth, he has never gotten over that ritual of making way for the day. It is the only complete thing in his life. There are no questions involved in its actions, only a certainty of foregone movements. How he wishes that is true for most of life! Finally there is nothing else to do, except go down to General Quarters.

Dr. Lamco hesitates. There’s still time, he thinks.

He presses fingers into belly andfeels the comfortable sensation of churning void. He wills it.He makes a mental note to take something—a pear octoblet—from the Refriger. He feels a slight disorientation—a whirring in his ears that soon disappears as his thoughts come clear, and quick. There is a little static in his head, but that is natural in 2064.

Soon enough he can see the world clearly again outside his bay window: the sky is blue, the clouds fluffy white—just the way the Day was meant to be. It had been so ordered: the Nø355287H Meeting of the Elders had seen to that.

The Minister of Pharmagriculture had insisted on rain during the Meet. It was broadcast three days ago through the ABS-CNN MonitorNet on the HoloVision, a stream of color and movement that materialized in the air, bringing him news, or illicit masturbatory porn.

The news had shown Pharmagriculture Minister Jorge Rosales debating for precipitation to jumpstart the pharma-production of the new crop of emergency octoblets. But First Minister Oliver de Abad, quickly taking the Podium, wanted sun for his International Pageant of BioScience. Quite visibly, in the cramped chambers of Parliament, heads shook in disagreement.

The HoloVision camera quickly drew into the debate, taking in the sight of the Minister Rosales standing to protest, punching his Ver-push in the middle of the First Minister’s speech. The Ver-screen behind Minister de Abad sprang to life, and Rosales crowed, “Grand Sir, there is famine in Cebuhol!”

On screen, the two-island province—separated by a faint trace of sandbars only a mile long and gray as lead—looked hazy from above. Buildings and highways—dots which teemed like cancer cells—were spilling into Tañon Strait. There were gray dustclouds obscuring the high-resolution Heli-Cam, residues from the cataclysm of the Canlaon Eruption seven years ago. Only Talinis Island and Canlaon Island remained of what used to be Negros.

As the camera swooped down to earth, a montage proved Minister Rosales’s pleading: they saw carbonans furtive in hunger, their faces grimy, with small bodies clad in Bagets 2050 ukay-ukay. Dilapidated buildings from the early 2000s bore down on them like threats. The final shot showed a long line of people. A sign read: “NOTICE FROM THE SOCIAL SERVICE MINITRY: Three rice octoblets for each family only. Jam, vanilla, and pork flavors available in limited supplies. First come, first served. People without cedula will not be entertained.” There was a sluggishness to the people—but perhaps it was the Heli-Cam’s digital cast.

Then the Ver-screen flickered dead. The First Minister only smiled, well-poised in his coifed hair and Inno Sotto IV Season Four Suit. “We just signed the Contingency Action Resolution for the Immediate Appeasement of Cebuhol Destitute Carbonans a few hours ago,” he said. “Elder Tomita Osmeña seconded the Action. There will be food for Cebuhol to last the 31st Quarter.”

Rosales quietly sat down to a scattering of applause.

The First Minister punched his own Ver-push, and on the screen flickered the government’s double-helix logo. “But let’s talk about other important things,” the First Minister began.

Hearing that on the HoloVision, Dr. Lamco had grumbled, “Who is it this time? Apolinario Mabini without polio?” He thought that at this time in history, they would have had enough of waking heroes. Even Afghanipakistan had ceased with their Bin Laden Project.

The First Minister, on the HoloVision, only said two words, “Jose Rizal.” A snatch of the word “tomorrow” started Dr. Lamco’s heart sinking. He had quickly turned the HoloVision off.

This was three days ago.

Later, shortly before coming home from the Clonaid Laboratory where he was Project Coordinator for Specimen Testing (a grandiose name for genetic quack), he finally stumbled on the truth, his culture having gone through the accelerated process of tissue formation.

He saw the Creature.

He remembers how he had wished so hard to disappear.

IT HAS LONG been acknowledged even early in the 21st century that true humanoid cloning would require taking a somatic cell, as opposed to a reproductive cell such as an egg or sperm cell, from a donor humanoid, and removing its nucleus. The DNA of the somatic cell is then transferred to an enucleated egg cell. This proved impossible for a long time—until only eight years ago—because somatic cells were specialized cells, and early cloning advocates, equipped only with rehashing the disastrous “Dolly Method,” always ran up constant dead ends, realizing that many of the genes involved in the procedure had subsequently been “turned off”—and nobody quite knew how to turn them back “on.” It took time and an abundance of exquisite technology, but Dr. Lamco found the button.

And how he worked, sweated, fine-tuned. Bringing up, then slaying little monsters—grotesque creatures with mouths for eyes, or limbless torsos that moaned in pain. The process took time. The mandate was perfection.

The rebirth of Rizal had to be perfect to answer the riddle well.

The other night, in the slush of liquid simulating amniotic distillation, the seemingly perfect being had finally revealed itself, and not even the acceleration of biologic growth thwarted what he had longed to see for seven years. The black hair, dripping with slime, fell and stuck to familiar cheekbones. Stature: short. The blood registers: close enough to historical records. All to negate any chance of a past being unresurrected. This is Rizal, incarnated beyond God, bowing only to the slow perfections and manipulations of science.

Dr. Lamco remembers sighing in relief, all tests finally revealing the perfection he has wrought. The creature had come out of the sac in the Clonaid chamber like a butterfly from a cocoon, dripping with amniotic fluid. It slid, and he caught it, cradled it, its baby-breathing coming close to his face as it turned to him.

That was when he knew.

Even with that secret, he remembers mostly only the Rizal creature’s eyes, brown and searching. There was a look of pleading to them. It had not done anything, only settled to a ready bed. Trembling, Dr. Lamco had laid it down and closed the chambers, only telling the staff it was time to break for the day.

“What about the results, Doctor?” the young research assistant newly graduated from the Center asked.

“There is always tomorrow,” Dr. Lamco waved him away.

With the last of the technicians gone, he carefully finished the task himself, stored the necessary information into plastidiscs ready for presentation, closed the laboratory doors, went to his private mini-quarters to cleanse himself in the quirinth showers. The soothing steam invading skin and clothes was a sudden, wanted comfort.

The eyes....

“There was a reason for the overcoat, after all,” he murmured.

When he got home to his main quarters, he made sure he scribbled the right memorandum to the Gender Ministry, and slept.

Descending to his troubled dreams, he hazily thought of the first summons to the grand meeting with the Elders for initiating what was called “Project Waking.” How the news that day from the HoloVision was crowing with the latest bio-mathematical breakthrough involving what had been dubbed a “cultural anthropo-reincarnation.” In Eurussia, they had already done considerably well with a midget Mozart—but that had been a well-publicized disappointment: the cloned Mozart had no taste for music, not even for a few bars of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

They, too, missed with Ninoy Aquino, but the attempt was nevertheless considered a “successful failure.” The clones were all badly disfigured—one had three eyes and died within three hours, another had a heart outside his chest. But the Elders saw beyond that, knowing only, in the words of a colleague, “how to be more ambitious.”

They wanted Jose Rizal.

Gender Minister Justin Emeniano was quick to admit, leaning forward to Dr. Lamco, “This is what we want, to re-body the ultimate paragon of our malehood. It will be our crowning glory…”

There was a stir. “But with all due respect, Grand Sir,” Dr. Lamco rushed to say, “we haven’t yet perfected the procedure. No one in the world has. You’ve received the latest reports from our team with regards the difficulties of creating the perfect clone. Our Aquino project has not been successful. We’ve produced only monsters….”

“Because you are not trying hard enough,” Minister Emeniano said.

Dr. Lamco fell silent.

Around the darkened room, most of the Elders murmured in agreement, a sound as dark as the faux wood paneling that overwhelmed the penile-shaped room, which sank quickly into Dr. Lamco’s growing sense of dread.

Then Minister de Abad said, “You will be given ample time. We have patience. We are Men after all—“

“But I don’t have a specimen to work on. No biological artifacts to extract even dead cells. We know his bones in Luneta have long disappeared during the Great Explosion.”

“We have tufts of his hair. He apparently cut off a few strands earlier, in jail, and hid them with that valedictory poem bundled in the lamp he smuggled to his…biological sibling.”

“And what if we do get Rizal? Is his life not a danger to our Male Tradition?”

“You talk, of course, of mythological creatures. Things you call sisters, wives, mothers. That is not your worry. What we must bear in mind now is the resurrection of a Male Paragon.”

“But the technology—”

“That would be your challenge,” Minister de Abad quickly cut in. “Of course, you have our full support, this you need not worry over.” He stood up. “And now, if you will kindly excuse me, I have other pressing matters. You can stay here with Minister Emeniano. I believe he has more to say?”

Minister Emeniano nodded. And as that last import resounded, the First Minister exited, followed by the rest of the Council, gray men floating out the door. Dr. Lamco remained seated as silence—notwithstanding the familiar mechanical whir that pervaded their world—engulfed him. He looked up, and said, “I guess I have no real choice. This is an assignation.”

“It is the project of a lifetime.”

“But why all these? When we had stumbled upon the initial discovery of post-Dolly procedures, it was meant to hasten the manufacture of stem cells, something we need more.”

“Ah, the perfect short-sightedness of scientists,” the Minister chuckled. “You have no idea, do you, of the possibilities of your discoveries? It goes beyond medicine to the realm of mythological—of course you cannot imagine that.”

Dr. Lamco remained still.

“Nevertheless, you will soon know why, I would hope so, when you are done,” the Minister shrugged, and turning to a bureau beneath the penile conference table, took out an electronic ledger marked with confidential Green.

“What’s this?” Dr. Lamco asked.

“This, Dr. Lamco, is what we need you to uncover about Jose Rizal…”

“What of him?”

“To find out, however you can, if he was a homosexual.”

Dr. Lamco shivered. It was a word long suppressed by the Maintaining Infrastructures—an identity so vile and dripping with secrets and taboo. It felt like a shock hearing it so openly acknowledged, and by the Gender Minister himself!

“By the look on your face, I see that I’ve shocked you,” the Minister said, laughing a bit.

Dr. Lamco only nodded.

“You should be. Such aberration remains a total abomination in Manly Society. That is why we need you to clone Rizal, and determine from his full genetic make-up if he has the trigger of a homosexual nature. We cannot accept such an icon. It weakens the symbolic Maleness we must foster for society to stay true in its path.”

Dr. Lamco found his voice. “But we can determine that with simple gene culture! It won’t be a complete result as you might get from a full humanoid body, of course—but it is revealing enough.”

The Minister shook his head. “We need the full procedure to determine the truth. No chance should be left to genetic metonymy.”

“All right…but why the sudden interest?”

The Minister pushed the power button of the ledger and it quickly sprang to life, the hologram dissolving into a compendium of data floating about, glowing orange and green in the air. With his right hand, the Minister brushes on a menu to his right, and a folder opens to reveal a monochrome picture of a man with a mustache. A short man, with the eternal overcoat. It was a familiar sight, yet also foreign, the pixels in the picture revealing the age of the relic.

The Minister coughed. “This is the Rizal. Photographic evidence gleaned from old records. I suppose you are familiar with this picture? It is the picture we can best approve to suit our needs. But this folder is even more important.” The Minister pointed to another menu, which opened to a holographic text.

“This is Rizal’s diary. The historian Guerrero points out an interesting erasure in the section called My Life Away from My Parents¾My Troubles, the second chapter.”

The Minister indicated the faint trace of handwriting, something so ancient it bore the primitive device of ink. The details of the script, appropriate to the age, was faint, and the erasure made it much more so. Only a palimpsest remained. The Minister coughed again. “To date, historians believe the erased word might be in reference to a nickname by which the boy Rizal was teased …”

“Who would tease a hero?”

“Not quite yet. As was the case in the Old Period of Chaos, childhood was cruel. Rizal’s boy classmates in Biñan town called him names….”

“I recall a bit of this from Historical Records.”

“Yes, yes…we had to edit out a lot of material for the bio-course, enough to be accepted by the Maintaining Infrastructures.”

“Is this why we cannot, until today, read…Noli Me Tangere and that other book?”

“You would have been shocked by the blasphemous mentions of strange creatures and practices. The Elders thought it best to… But enough of questions for a bit, if you may. I wish to finish.”

Dr. Lamco nodded.

The Minister continued, “In 1949, the historians Alberto and Tomas Barretto, who published the Spanish edition of Memorias, decided—we think erroneously—to put ‘Calambeño’ as the original word, which, as you can see, had been crossed out so thoroughly in the manuscript. So thoroughly it denotes a kind of shame in Rizal’s part. And yet…” The Minister brushed another folder, and another text ran. “This is what the 21st century gender theorist J. Neil C. Garcia had written. I must warn you this is sensitive, confidential material… It cannot be shared with anybody, not even the closest associate in your research team.”

Dr. Lamco again nodded. The Minister continued, “Garcia said the word ‘Calambeño’ did not seem to be, as an epithet, ‘sufficiently opprobrious to have called for an excision.’ If you look closely, the pattern of the three tall strokes are not consistent with what you can see as definitely two tall strokes of the original word. The question we had in mind, when we first thought of this project, rose because of this historical mystery. What could be so derogatory that it needed to be savagely erased by Rizal?”

The Minister paused.

“Could this word be the Tagalog ‘binabayi,’ which was a taunt meaning ‘sissy’?” he continued.

Dr. Lamco found himself taking a deep breath.

“If you notice,” the Minister looked at him, “when the very word is written down, you could very well see the two tall strokes spaced just right.” The Minister pushed the off-button, and the ledger’s parade of holo-graphics shrunk to their shell.

“Binabayi, my dear Dr. Lamco…” he said. “You must tell us, was Rizal gay?”

DR. DOMINGO LAMCO marches to the Hall of Man, opens the doors to where the Elders sit, all quiet and attentive. The First Minister sits at the head table, and Minister Emeniano towers over him at his rear, eager too for the report. Dr. Lamco takes his designated place near the mouth of the penile table, and gingerly inserts the plastidisks into the terminal.

He begins, “Gentlemen, you’ll be glad to know that Rizal was not a homosexual.” The Council claps.

Dr. Lamco nods, and continues, “All the genetic scans, holoid projections, and individual DNA mapping—made possible by examining a whole specimen seven years in the making—reveal this…” They clap some more.

Dr. Lamco clicks the switch to the terminal, and he can vaguely imagine the whir of the plastidisks as they turn to reveal what is the final, unredeemed, catch.

“This is your Rizal, gentlemen….” he breathes, voice suddenly falling.

With the suddenness of thunder, the men fall silent, contemplating the small mounds that grow from what should have been Rizal’s fleshy plains of chest.

Two mounds. Perfect hillocks that drag south, pointing to the delta beneath, lush as the forest of pubic hair that covers it.

VINCENT MICHAEL SIMBULAN

IN THE ARMS OF BEISHU

Vincent Michael Simbulan is a two-time Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Awardee for his anthologies, Isaw, Atbp. and Siglo: Freedom. He is the co-founder of Quest Ventures, which is both a publishing house and a coalition of Filipino comic book creators. His work has appeared in Project Hero, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Stuff, and Guide Magazine. Siglo: Passion, co-edited with Dean Francis Alfar, is his latest comic book anthology. He is in the process of editing a collection of stories about dragons, due in 2006. He is also the general manager of the Comic Quest chain of comic book specialty shops.

“In the Arms of Beishu,” a tale about longing for one’s homeland, is set in the time of the Spanish rule over the Philippines. It marks Simbulan’s first published work of short fiction.

TIEN PU STARED at the approaching shores with a mixture of anticipation and nervousness that accompanied the prospect of new beginnings. A salt spray whipped his loose clothes as he steadied himself on the railing of the junk to keep from falling over. His raven locks, tied back in a long ponytail, swung with the rise and fall of the junk as it crashed against the waves. The voyage had been long and taxing, crowded months spent with people like him, dreaming of a brighter future in a new land. A land called Hinirang.

Hinirang. Such an unwieldy name for a land, Tien thought to himself. Quite unlike the comfortable simplicity of Tsin, the homeland he had just left behind. The idle thought became a cascade of memories and Tien smiled. Memories of home always brought a smile to his face, no matter how painful some of them were.

“What are you smiling at?” Mei Lung asked, her now familiar sharp tone cutting through the quiet. Her face was a delicate porcelain mask, framed like the moon by her long dark hair, which flowed across her back, a cape woven from fine strands of the night sky.

Tien remained silent, mesmerized by her eyes, which burned with a fire that was missing from her heart. This did not stop him from loving her, from hoping that he could be the one to spark a reciprocal love. A foolish hope, some would say, but for now, in his seventeen-year-old, her beauty eclipsed the flaws of her heart.

“Are you going to answer me or keep gawking, peasant boy?” She whirled gracefully, her hair dancing behind her, a pirouette of dark strands that left him breathless.

Tien winced at her words. Mei Lung still refused to utter his name, a reminder of their positions in the world. “I’m sorry. I was just reminiscing about my home along the mountains of Chen Lu province. Around this time I would be lighting the lanterns outside our house. My friends would be running home from our kite flying, and my A-yi would be cooking rice and steaming dumplings.” Tien’s stomach rumbled and his mouth watered as he spoke.

“Well, at this time I would be bathed by the servants in scented oils before I go down to dine with my family,” Mei Lung said, her eyes fixed beyond him, staring into the past. We would have eight different dishes served on regular nights. But on special occasions we would have as many as sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Tien marveled at how so much food could be lavished on one family meal. “Surely the Emperor himself would be green with envy.”

She laughed, and her laughter was sunshine and the flowering fields of home.

*

THE UNLIKELY HAPPENSTANCE of their first meeting occurred at the docks where Tien sat, his boredom mounting as he waited for an opportunity to load his meager belongings onto the large junk that would take him to a new land.

“What are you sitting around there for?” The sharp voice that cut through the early morning chill belonged to a girl of barely sixteen summers. She stared at him with eyes that sparkled, emeralds in sunlight, favoring him with a smile that suddenly sent his heart dancing.

“I’m waiting to load my bags. Why are you wandering the docks alone?”

She laughed at him. “I am not alone, silly peasant boy. I am Mei Lung and my parents are on the other side of the dock, waiting for our servants to load our belongings.” Then she looked at him expectantly, as if he was yet to pay proper homage to her.

Struck speechless, Tien regarded her with an amusement mixed with an unfamiliar feeling he could not name, for he had never yet fallen in love. He found himself staring in rapt attention while she preened before him; her dress was fine embroidered silk of the deepest crimson with inlays of gold, highlighting her delicate features.

“Hello, Mei Lung,” he said at last, recovering his lost voice. “My name is Tien Pu, and you are welcome to sit here with me if you wish.”

“What a boring idea, peasant boy,” she said, gracefully navigating the edge of the docks, wrapped tightly in the fog that hung in the air like a blanket of ghosts. “It’s so rare to be free and away from the eyes of my family. Get up and follow me! If you catch me I will allow you to escort me back to the junk.”

Tien followed her across the dock, drawn to the sound of her laughter, their sandals clacking on the rotting wood. Just when he thought he had lost her, a flash of red showed him where she had disappeared to. He ran with anticipation dogging his every step, possessed by the urge to sweep her into his arms, to never let her go, treasuring the sudden notion, absurd as it was, of making her his bride.

A sudden crash and shout shattered his dream, and he saw the elderly woman sprawled on the ground, with Mei Lung already rising and running away. The woman lay still for a moment, and Tien was almost irrationally certain she was dead. Then she stirred and struggled to get up. He rushed to her side and gently helped her up, brushing the dirt from her simple green and yellow robes.

“A thousand pardons, venerable grandmother.” He wished he were elsewhere, to avoid the scolding that must surely follow. “Forgive us, we did not see you. We were foolishly playing in this fog.”

“We?” the old woman’s confused voice began. “I see only you, and I know it was someone else who struck me down.”

“Please accept my humble apology, I’m sure my friend meant no disrespect,” Tien said, bowing low.

“Could she at least speak for herself, or perhaps she has no voice of her own?” The woman looked pointedly at the trees where a fluttering of red waved in the breeze, before turning her piercing gray eyes squarely on Tien. “At least you seem to have been brought up with some sense of courtesy.”

Tien felt his cheeks burn with shame as he struggled to mouth another apology, but she silenced him with a wave of her hand.

“Such courtesy should not go unrewarded, just as one should not be made to suffer for the failings of one’s companions.”

“You are most kind, grandmother. But it is reward enough that you are well.”

“Ah, but I insist. It looks to me like you will be needing what I have to give.”

His curiosity building, Tien bowed lower and spoke reverently. “I do not deserve the honor, but I humbly accept your gift.”

“Well said, but you must first make a choice.” The woman produced two pendants from the folds of her robe. One was brilliant gold, finely crafted with the image of a dragon, its long sinuous form rendered in lifelike detail, dancing as if frozen in time. Ruby eyes flashed with an inner fire straining to be free, and for an instant, Tien was overwhelmed by a presence that burned with savage pride, filling him with a terrible hunger. And then it was gone.

Tien gazed at her with surprise, but her face revealed nothing as she raised the second pendant closer for his inspection. It was simpler than the first, yet no less beautiful. An elegantly crafted diminutive pagoda in burnished bronze, replete with miniature lanterns and tiny windows inset with fragments of jade. The craftsmanship was beyond anything Tien had ever seen, and it suffused him with the warmth of the hearth, the feeling of returning home after a long voyage away.

Tien glanced from one to the other and reached for the dragon pendant, then reconsidered and took the house in his hand. It felt warm to the touch. Bowing low, he thanked her for the unexpected gift.

“A wise choice, Tien Pu,” she said, approval crossing her face. “It is called Lujing Beishu, ‘The House That Chose Its Own Path’. Like you, it is destined to bring the glory of Tsin to alien shores. You have a long journey ahead of you, but I can see that you will be up to the task. Always keep in mind that to conquer through force of arms is not our way. To prosper is.”

Without another word, she bowed to Tien and walked away, a shadow melting into the fog.

*

AS THE JUNK sailed into the harbor Tien and Mei Lung got their first glimpse of the Ispancialo capital in Hinirang. The imposing stone walls of Ciudad Manila crowded the sky, casting them into insignificance. Even as Tien admired the foreign craftsmanship of what the Ispancialo builders had wrought, his awe was tempered by the small kernel of wisdom his A-yi had shared with him the night his parents were laid to rest.

“The greatness of men and their creations may blind you, but never forget that it is only the divine grandeur of Heaven that will endure. Mortality is a cloth we all wear. Even the greatest Emperor will cross the Black Gates when the day mandated by Heaven arrives.” He heard her voice, clear as the day she spoke the words to him.

The junk finally docked and immediately the cacophony of commerce surrounded them. The Tsin enclave in Agora was alive with buyers haggling and vendors hawking their wares. The market was ripe with exotic scents, all carried by the October breeze, assailing Tien with their strangeness.

Tien gathered his small bag, lining up with the other passengers anxious to set foot on the new land. He saw Mei Lung lingering behind her family, watching him.

“Farewell, Mei Lung,” he said, helping her down from the junk. “The Seven Fortune Stars have blessed me with your company on this voyage.” After a brief moment of hesitation, he was betrayed by his heart. “I love you. May we one day meet again.”

“Farewell,” she whispered into his ear. “I fear we shall never meet again, save in your dreams.” She bowed slightly, favoring him with a fleeting smile and for an instant Tien imagined the slightest hint of regret cross her face.

Tien could think of nothing more to say so he remained silent as she turned and walked away. He said a small prayer to his ancestors and bid farewell to his old life, vowing to honor the memory of his parents by working hard and earning his fortune. In his heart he felt like a tree uprooted by a raging gale, left to perish on foreign soil. But he kept his mind free of doubt, refusing to remain in the shadow of uncertainty, resolving instead to take root and grow strong. Without a backward glance he lost himself in the crowds of Agora.

*

THE YEARS THAT passed were kind to Tien. He found work quickly, and with his savings he managed to buy a modest stall at the Lotus Emporium, a market at the fringes of Ciudad Manila where Tsin merchants sold replicas that could be had at a fraction of the original’s price. His stall prospered and he quickly expanded his holdings to Agora itself, where his shop, Ample Flowering Bliss, sold goods from all across Hinirang. His hard work and persistence extended his influence beyond Ciudad Manila, to the jewelers of Vezcaia, and as far as the mysterious lands of the South, where exotic spices, colorful tapestries, and magnificent wooden sculptures from Diya al Din were much in demand.

His growing prosperity was matched only by his humility, which kept him in good stead with all those around him, for he never lost sight of his roots as most men who reach the lofty peaks of success often do. He devoted much of his wealth to improving the conditions of the ever-growing Tsin enclave in Hinirang, making it as close in likeness to their homeland as possible. As he grew older, many of the Tsin merchants looked up to him as a wise and respected leader, seeking him for advice on business opportunities.

Tien also made a point of paying the Ispancialo taxes regularly, and more importantly, tithing a hefty sum to the coffers of the Ispancialo church of the Tres Hermanas. Tien knew that it was wise be in good standing with the church, even if he was not, and would never be, a believer.

Yet through all the years that passed, it was the night which saddened him. Nights filled with dreams of Mei Lung, the girl who kept hold of his heart, her hair flowing in the night, her skin glowing like the moon, tormenting him with the thought of what could have been.

But even in this regard good fortune proved itself on his side, for on his fortieth year, despite her promise to the contrary, fate brought Mei Lung back into his life, heavy with the change that only time could bring.

Their unlikely meeting occurred at the very docks where they had parted ways. Tien was unloading a shipment of spices when a familiar voice, sharp as his fondest memories, spoke from across the gulf of years.

“Hello, peasant boy.” Mei said, her dark hair billowing behind her.

“I am no longer a boy, and hardly a peasant,” Tien countered, masking his surprise with an awkward smile.

“And I am no longer the girl you knew, Tien Pu.” The familiar stranger laughed, her eyes ablaze with a fire that had finally, impossibly, burned in her heart, kindled at last by the hard won wisdom of experience.

In her eyes, Tien saw for himself the truth of her words, even as she spoke his name at last, for the first time.

They were married that very week, a courtship that seemed all too brief for those who witnessed their union, but it was a promise ordained by the stars on that day, a lifetime away, when the unlikely friendship between a young peasant boy and a rich aristocratic girl blossomed.

On the eve of Tien’s eighty-eighth year, he knew it would be his last. He knew with a certainty spoken by the secret voice of his soul, even as his body, which had served him faithfully through the long years, succumbed to the betrayal of time. As he celebrated the day of his birth with Mei, their children, and their children’s children, as well as the extended family that had grown around them, a seed of disquiet took root in his heart. In that moment he knew that he could not be truly happy. He longed for the homeland he had left behind, on behalf of his children and those that followed them, who would all grow into old age and die, never knowing the warm embrace of the land of their ancestors.

He spent the rest of that day alone, paying his respects to the spirits of his ancestors at the small yet well-kept altar he had built at the center of his humble home. Though he could afford to live in the most lavish mansion, his humility bade him to live in simpler surroundings. His only extravagance was the elaborate garden behind the house, filled with rare orchids arrayed in a dazzling symphony of color and fragrance, and grottoes covered with roses, lilacs, and the native sampaguita.

He sat upon the small wooden bench at the center of his garden and wondered idly, as most men of his age did, whether his existence held any meaning, or if he had lived in vain.

In answer to his unspoken question, a voice spoke to him in a language he not only heard but also felt in his heart. “You lived as you were meant to live Tien Pu, and Tsin is proud to call you one of her most favored children.” The voice reminded him of the crackle of the hearth fires, and the bubbling of rice pots. “There is no one who does not carry scars on his heart; what matters is how well you bore those scars, child of Tsin.”

“Who are you to say these things?” Tien remained calm in the face of such strangeness, for he had seen his share of spirits in this land filled with wonders. “Please, show yourself.”

In reply, a soft glow sprang from his chest. Tien reached into his shirt and pulled a worn leather strap from around his neck, gazing in mute awe at the shining pendant he had worn through the long years, the only possession he would never part with. The jade windows of the house were glowing, all the lanterns lit like miniature stars.

“You know who I am.” The voice enveloped Tien with the warmth of his homeland, and he gasped with delight as memories lost to the passing years became vivid once more. He stared, entranced, as the pendant of Lujing Beishu unfurled. Brilliant light shot out of the pendant and whirled around him in a display of scintillating colors, filling the sky with a thousand woven rainbows, coruscating and bursting with fireworks that spilled teardrops of pure gold, emerald, ruby, azure, indigo, russet, silver and vermilion. They fell to his feet, meshing with the earth, snaking tendrils of light towards the wooden steps of his home. Spires and walls and tasseled windows and jade sculptures sprang from the ground like a lotus in bloom, shining like the sun, rushing upward into the heavens — a house, a glorious house, transformed from his own.

“I am Lujing Beishu, the House of Tsin,, and this is the path that I have chosen.”

Tien blinked back tears of wonder, for beyond the house he glimpsed the ghost of familiar rice paddies, the mountains of his youth beckoning to him as the manifold paper lanterns of Lujing Beishu swayed like wayward stars in the night. Tien could only weep with joy as Mei joined him, stumbling to his side, too astonished to speak, and they embraced while a faint breeze filled the air with the scent of a land far across the sea.

“This land has brought you prosperity, and by this I will bring the glory of Tsin to these far shores.” The voice of Lujing Beishu rose to a thundering roar. The force of a hundred hurricanes swallowed Tien as tears of time and memory glistened on his face.

In his mind he saw the wealth and influence he had amassed throughout the lands of Hinirang, the routes of commerce that snaked from North to South, through the East and West, veins pulsing with the lifeblood of Tsin, feeding Lujing Beishu with the power to root itself on foreign soil. He felt the spirit of Hinirang greet the newborn yet ancient fragment of Tsin with open arms, through the benevolent commerce and exchange of cultures between the native Katao and the Tsin.

“Rejoice o children of Tsin! Your verdant homeland has come to be with you on this day.” The words echoed in the ears of all the Tsin in the enclave, rousing them from slumber with the voices of their ancestors, filling the empty spaces left in their hearts by separation from the land of their birth.

Tien and Mei stood before the grandeur of Lujing Beishu as people emerged from their homes and cheered. A thousand multicolored peony lights blossomed in the sky, banishing the darkness, while dancing dragons filled the streets with sound and color, the frenetic beat of drums chasing misfortune away. And in the silent hours after, all the Tsin of Hinirang knew that they were finally reunited with their homeland.

When the first fingers of dawn broke through the morning sky, Tien awoke to the news that the Guvernador-Henerale of the Ispancialo conquerors himself was coming from Ciudad Manila to see him. He hurriedly put on his best robes and stepped out to the sound of horses.

“Vueno arao, Ser Alejandro Baltran Ignadzio du Valenzia ei Ramirez,” Tien said, bowing low as the Ispancialo leader reined in his horse, stopping just short of him.

“Vueno arao, venerable Tien Pu,” the Guvernador-Henerale spoke in a tone that warned Tien to be most careful of the words he used. “I’m sure you are aware of why I have come here today.”

“You must forgive my ignorance, Ser, but I have no idea what would bring your illustrious presence to my humble abode this fine morning.” Tien was aware of the scrutiny of the Ispancialo official. He counted a full complement of twelve mounted guardias all looking at him with interest. “Perhaps some tea?”

“No, I did not come for a social visit.” Ser Alejandro said with a wave of dismissal, his gaze thoughtful as it swept across the enclave. People emerged from their homes, trying hard not to stare at him and his entourage. He could find no actual changes — it looked to be the start of another day in the Tsin enclave — but his heart felt what his eyes could not see. A profound yet intangible change had occurred.

Finally, he returned his attention to Tien. The old man’s head was bowed respectfully, but his back remained straight and proud. “I am here because of reports of disturbances in the night. Loud explosions, and strange bright lights. How do you account for this?”

“I am sure I have no idea of what you speak, good Ser. There were no disturbances reported to me.”

“Indeed?” The Ispancialo leader looked him straight in the eye. “It would do you well to ensure that there are no further reports of the kind I spoke. Otherwise you will be getting more than simple words of warning.” Without waiting for a reply, Ser Alejandro turned his horse and galloped off, the faint scent of incense lingering in the air behind him, following him all the way to the gates of Ciudad Manila.

That night, for the first time since his youth, Tien slept in peace, dreaming in the arms of Lujing Beishu, the secret city of his homeland.

J. POCHOLO MARTIN B. GOITIA

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LUMINESCENT

J. Pocholo Martin B. Goitia was born on Halloween 22 years ago. He is currently a journalism student at the University of Santo Tomas and is the editor of one of the college magazines and its literary portfolio. He is a fellow and former president of the Thomasian Writers Guild and attended the 3rd UST National Writers Workshop a couple of years ago. He claims to be tempted by the allure of jumping on the call center band wagon one of these days for the cash to buy incredibly expensive imported novels, graphic or otherwise, at his leisure. He is currently working on and off on his first novel.

“An Introduction to the Luminescent,” a look into the Philippines of tomorrow and the people who live there, is Goitia’s first published work outside of UST.

SHE KNEW DECEMBER of 2105 was the future; there was no more looking forward, and we had nothing else but this:

We had sun-baked tiles of Marikina clay, worn by years of torrid atmosphere and cluttered footsteps, whitewashed and coat-chipped dozens of times in the last 75 years. They were wet now with gray rain, filled to look like a brick wall felled years ago by the sheer might of hyper-civilization thus epitomized by the ultrasaur of a mall standing massive across the street. The mall blocked the horizon and half the sky. Here was our last meet before Magenta’s father rocketed her family to the stars. She told me time wasn’t measured in space the way it was on Earth. There you lived forever, for as long as you wanted; you looked up time in libraries.

That Magenta lived in the mall was one of the worst things in the world. You might as well have been born in space. You weren’t an earthling in a mall. You were too hellishly rich to be a backwater-planet dweller. You were the privileged. We called you La Luminosa—not as a compliment. More of a joke.

She was the privileged and her name was the color of the clouds. Magenta had it all: a Hyundai Exoscraper flightcart for her 18th birthyear; a fully poseable, always obedient, lobotomized (and pre-castrated) clone of herself for her sweet 16th; a stellar cruise to her Andromeda for the 13th; a Neurotech Dreamplanner 21000 for her 11th; a candle ant colony for her 8th; a white winged pony for her 5th; a pair of gravity disruptors was secured for her before she was even born. She lived in an artificially temperate climate enclosed by four walls, programmed for bearable winters and cooler summers. The acacias of her vintage playpark were evergreen in the mall, they had no ants or caterpillars. Her hair was the color of her choice. Her eyes were the same ones her mother wore, the same ones her grandmother wore during the war as a fighter pilot, preserved after death to be passed on through the generations, changing color like chameleons do whenever the mood dictates. Magenta’s DNA credit status could feed an earthling family for seven years. She was of the privileged, had a star named after her, a Neptunian gas farm to her name, and friends who were exactly like her but happy about it. She had an Enron Infrared Tracking Chip injected into her brain before her skull turned from cartilage to bone as a fetus.

The clay tiles were slippery under the rain, most especially under Magenta’s heels. Gravity disruptors never worked outside the mall. High-heels were something no earth woman had worn for over half a century. When she slipped I caught her and our wet bodies embraced.

Most earthlings thought La Luminosa were cold-blooded, not needing the fortitude of mammalian composition due to years of being pampered by the atmospheric solace of their homes. The truth was that most earthlings knew squat about them, so mythmaking was rampant.

Under the rain, Magenta didn’t look at me. From the embrace she turned to the Terrans: my people, lounging in the most expensive earthling café in the city—all wanting to be inside the building that blocked the sky. They saw what I cradled—a shard of silver, a light daemoness. They were all shocked: La Luminosa. Magenta’s eyes were the color of the clouds; her hair was silver because gray didn’t suit her. She stared them all down. She was on fire: I saw it in their faces. The fear.

“Can’t you see?” she said, her accent the song of extinct birds. “I’m with my husband, and you can drink your coffee.”

At the mention of the word “husband,” three women and a man fainted. With the new infrared eyes Magenta gave me, I saw two erections rise.

Magenta, usually as cold as her silicon fingers, made three points clear to me:

1) We humans, wherever we live, spend our lives under the notion that it’s ludicrous to make our emotions public. We’d make ourselves too vulnerable in an age wherein vulnerability could kill or drive one crazy. But the times we do show emotion, they come in gusts worthy of holoflicks. The flood-gates burst open. They inspire, and pulses hasten, hair-follicles stand, eyes swell, fists clench. We live for these short spurts. Everything else is in-between.

2) Mankind invented high-heels hundreds of years ago to make strong women fall when the tiles are wet. Heels made women look taller, but they deformed their feet and turned them dependent—which was just what men needed: spouses who couldn’t stand or run away. It became clear to me that high-heels were a crime unless gravity-disruptors—or love—were involved.

3) Magenta was still human, for all the bio-synthetics, electronics, and cybernetics. She was warm-blooded and crying. She belonged on Earth because she wanted to. And she didn’t lie when she promised she would marry me one way or another. It was fine that a pluvial blessing was the closest we could get.

I wanted to tell her I saw her grow wings once, on the day we met. But the clone warriors arrived and took her away. She always wanted wings, something their scientific advancements haven’t lived up to just yet. You would have thought she’d like the idea: she’ll be joining her artificial race above the sky from now on. When I left for home, crowds parted at my approach.

*

NOBODY REMEMBERS when the socioeconomic rift started taking turns for the grossly extreme. Few people even noticed. It was something you noted when clicking through 21st century literature and archives. Few people could stand the flatscreen these days, much less paper.

My undergraduate thesis, a study of the clandestine society of La Luminosa, hypothesized that the rift started when private citizens began taking to the stars around 2023. The resources of first the moon, then Mars, then the rest of the Solar System, then 1/50th of the Milky Way, were so immense that the next quadrillion dollar stellar mining expedition became easier to achieve than the last. Technology grew by leaps and light-years but the costs were enough to keep regular consumers confined to the negative A — not even in Earth’s economic pyramid. For the better part of the last century, almost everybody under the planet’s atmosphere was ignorant of the new technologies.

And the planet was dying. The last nature-raised eagle was auctioned off in 2056, the last wildflower three years later. Neglected, sapped of its resources more potently each year, the most privileged of its inhabitants focused on breathing life into Martian deserts. But we—they—got richer. And since the ancient day Cro-Magnon eyes first sparkled at the sight of gold, that’s all that mattered.

“The mall is an ultrasaur”—verbatim from my study. Large and pre-historic. At 30-years old, it has gone through countless renovations, its first 15 floors making up the oldest non-sentient thing in the district. It was also a megamongrel of sorts: it survived the years wherein shopping centers were fitted in with residential facilities for the ludicrously wealthy, and it was bypassed until recently by the general movement to completely segregate outsider facilities from those of what was then referred to as the space monarchy or the space merchants. The result was a 2km by 1/2km structure with 32 floors, the top 27 of which were composed of luxury residential condos, schools, business centers, while the bottom five were for shopping and recreation of the general public: cheaply decorated and heavily patrolled by a security force of mindless, burly clones cultured for the purpose of sentry duty and subtle brutality.

My thesis started as a juvenile offence perpetrated from the 5th-floor ledge of the Capricorn wing with an illegally acquired pair of gravity disruptors locked around my ankles. It took Jethro Dong and me two weeks of fiddling to get them working.

My grandfather always reminded me of the times digging through garbage was looked down upon. Still is, just now it’s more profitable, if you know what to do with the junk.

The plan was to get the grav disruptors working, then make cheap replicas, then get rich. That nobody had attempted it before didn’t bother us. Jethro Dong fancied himself a mechanical genius. He had the goatee and eye-patch to prove it.

About to do something risky, illegal, and completely taboo, I tried to remember what my grandmother used to do before praying. Jethro Dong told me to touch my chin, my chest, then my two ears with my right hand. Sa ngalan ng Ama, ng Anak at ng Starship Galactikus. Alright.

Jethro Dong pushed me off and I had two minutes to test our product then leap my way to the Scorpio wing exit before the clone warriors were alerted of my activities. That is, if I didn’t fall and break my legs at first jump.

Sharp, short-lived pains shot my thighs, ankles, pelvis, and upper back, then invisible hands lifted me to the 4th floor ledge. I was adopted by waves of anti-gravity far more powerful—albeit more gentle—in those two plastic rings than in my two-ton hover engine parked outside. My veins were pumped hydrogen. I was on the moon.

I dove down to the first floor and calculated a lunar jump to the 8th. I found myself floating to the 15th utilizing as much effort it would normally take to stand up and scratch my head. I didn’t grab the ledge upon reaching the high point. While in airborne standstill for two seconds: I saw a McDonalds with crystal seats. I saw a man eating a Big Mac the size of his head. The halls were lit with fireflies with abdomens the size of macopas. There were no stairs, but there were waterfalls everywhere. And everybody was floating around leisurely like it was the easiest thing in the world. It was. I let myself float down before anyone noticed—outsiders weren’t allowed beyond the fifth. Outsiders weren’t allowed gravity disruptors.

With a little acrobatics and recycled swimming skills from high school, I torpedoed to an 8th floor wall to ricochet back to the 5th to celebrate with Jethro Dong our success and impending wealth.

Jethro Dong was running, his mouth foaming and sputtering yellow spittle—the way it did when he was terrified or high on isotopic nano-brain-stimulators injected to the temple and immediately neutralized by ingested counterbiotic pills.

Jethro Dong was frightened of a few things, which included wherever he was taking backward glances of terror over my shoulder. The clone warriors, two of them, in anti-grav packs fitted with micro-turbines, grabbed an arm each and flipped me over in midair to take an ankle and grav disruptor. We were in aerial standstill: their equipment was a step above disrupting gravity, capable of completely stopping it—which was a necessary capability when enforcing the peace in a three dimensional city.

“Outsiders are not permitted to ascend beyond the 5th floor,” said Clone Warrior 1 in a cold monotone.

“I know,” I said back up at him. My head was welcoming blood by the pint.

“Hindi maaaring umakyat ang mga taga-labas lampas sa ikalimang palapag,” said Clone Warrior 2, following mall security protocol to communicate with outsiders in both English and Filipino lest they don’t understand the standard former.

“Alam ko,” I replied in turn.

“Outsiders are forbidden to use Gravity Disruptor Rings,” said Clone Warrior 1.

“Bawal gumamit ang mga taga-labas ng mga Gravity Disruptor Rings,” said Clone Warrior 2. They flew me upside down to the central security office on the 6th floor. My forehead slammed on a railing. I was to be detained and “disciplined.”

“Ikukulong ka at ididisciplina,” said Clone Warrior 2. Jethro Dong was out of sight somewhere.

A section of my thesis focused on the total disregard for the laws set by the Luzon Provisional Government that the inside communities have practiced for decades. In paper, they were citizens of the Luzon Republic, but have ignored the fact since long before the Philippine Civil War—which they neither participated in nor supported. Slowly but surely, as bio-replication technology advanced, the space merchant communities’ need for earth’s failing natural resources declined, and the economy of the country became a separate entity from that of the inner communities, benefiting only through land, income and business tax. By the time the Philippine Republic turned into the Philippine Union of Independent Nations, there were fourteen esoteric space merchant communities with an independent collective economy that was later required by the government to pay tariffs when exporting goods to the outside.

Hanging upside down, with the two clone warriors silently flying me to security, I remembered from school that, “On the September of 2090, through Republic Act 3045, cloning human beings was declared a criminal offense.” Space Merchants, though, mostly through the enterprising of Pfizer Clones Inc., have been cloning humans en masse long after it became illegal. The only reason the United Earth Human Rights Committee hadn’t cracked down on them yet was because the clones produced weren’t considered human at all—the process involved human cloning, which made it illegal locally, but the products had genetically altered brains that gave them the thinking capacity of late 21st century service androids. With computing power far less than any human being ever recorded and brains easily reprogrammed at the click of a remote control, the Pfizer Clones were biological robots at best. With the “soul” argument having been debunked generations ago, you could kill your clone and your neighbor’s dog and be detained because of the dog. And because minerals exported from space colonies were too expensive, clones were cheaper to make than androids.

“You cheap pieces of putangshet!” I shouted at the Clone Warrior. They never processed the protests of the abducted until they got to the interrogation deck. I wanted to lash at them, curse them to death, bite their heads off. They’d never know.

“Mga puke niyo bulok!” I screamed.

“Hostess niyo bakla!” I hollered.

La Luminosa stared. Children’s ears were covered. Parents shouldn’t have bothered. Most of the kids didn’t speak their people’s ancient language anymore.

“Mamatay na kayo!”

“Tae niyo itim!”

“Wala kayong TITE!” I said. They really didn’t have penises.

Clone Warrior 1, the dickless shit, told me I was disturbing the peace. I should be quiet.

“Manahimik ka,” said Clone Warrior 2. “Wag kang manggulo.”

I told them to drop dead in both languages. I screamed it from the top of my lungs. The Clone Warriors pressed shockrings against my shins and the current threatened to fry my internal organs. I was too busy being half-dead to acknowledge the pain with a scream. I knew I wasn’t cooked because of what I was saying, because of the decibel of my voice. I imagined my kidneys frizzled into prunes.

The Clone Warriors injected cellular restabilizers into my bloodstream, which hurt almost as much as the shockrings. By the time we got to security, I was fully healed and incapable of speech. By the time Magenta was brought in for destroying mall property, the Clone Warriors were in the middle of their Gestapo routine.

“We have ways of making you talk,” said Gestapo Clone Warrior 1.

“Kumanta ka na,” said Gestapo Clone Warrior 2. He didn’t mind that what he said meant he wanted me to sing. He did whatever he was programmed to do. His program dictated he shock me if ever I burst into song.

The first time I saw Magenta, I was being pumped with enough cell regenerative chemicals that I was virtually immortal. The Gestapo Clone Warriors could have struck me with lightning and I would have fully recovered in five seconds.

It was through the open door of the interrogation room that I saw her and found out why we call them The Luminescent. She was the first one I saw who gave justice to the name. Magenta was led in by the arm by a Clone Warrior of the presumably female type—square jawed and stern faced, big breasted and made up, no vagina, no nipples, no uterus, no clitoris. No belly button.

Magenta’s hair was fiery bronze, her eyes her namesake color. She was angry, defiant towards her sexless abductors who bound her to a chair but could not hurt her. She waited for the truant officer—an Attack Clone programmed to scare kids—while her skin glowed like a dying firefly, tapping her fingers on the desk beside her, but making no sound.

She noticed the open door, the screams coming from inside. Her pupils disappeared in shock. She didn’t move, but she watched me die a dozen times.

The Clone Warriors were programmed with enough medical know-how to serve as paramedics if ever a resident meets an accident. In the meantime, they used their skills on me. They slit my throat, punctured my lungs, blowtorched my face, stabbed my gut, and snapped my femur, with the precision of surgeons. Five seconds later, I was good as new.

Nothing pissed off the Luminescent more than some outsider crashing their party. The Gestapo Clone Warriors injected me with hallucinogens, truth serums, speech inducers, things that felt like engine grease and kerosene mucked up my blood vessels. They wanted to know how I got hold of a pair of gravity disruptors, how I got them to work.

I vaguely remember somebody once telling me—I think it was a veteran from the Great Sino War—that the height of a civilization’s medical technology is also the height of its ability to inflict pain. He said the Red Army used to keep their prisoners awake for weeks, only to install specially prepared nightmare simulations in their brains when they dozed off. He said death was a doubly terrifying process in the camps. Torture hasn’t gained any sophistication since then. You’re better off being done-in by malaria.

Through short windows of chemical numbness and mental clarity, I felt diamond-laced eyes watching me. When one of the Gestapo Clones moved enough to his left for me to peek out the door, I saw Magenta trying not to stare, her skin losing its glow, fading into a mortified transparency.

When the mind drugs kicked in, I saw her grow angel wings. When the torture started, the apparition grew horns from her nostrils as her body burst into flame.

I told them where I found the gravity disruptors after they crushed my pelvis with a sledgehammer. I told them about my get-rich scheme while blood gurgled from my nose. My head struck the concrete wall more times than I could remember before they accepted I didn’t know exactly how we got them to work. There were no cameras, no records. As long as nothing was amputated, no evidence of this would survive. No evidence detectable by primitive tech at least. Fanged butterflies were everywhere and the world was spinning when they pried from my mouth Jethro Dong’s name and address.

For all the wonders the space monarchy adorned their homes with, their jails were pigsties: grey concrete, iron oxide, vermin, feces, cages instead of cells, stainless steel cots, five-foot low cage ceilings, no bedding, shadows for space.

My body was healthier than ever, but the memory of the past hours lurched at me whenever I let my eyes rest or my guard down. The clone warrior on duty stood still in the middle of the room, piercing the whole place with night vision eyes.

Keeping me company was Magenta’s dim glow from the far end of the cage beside mine. With the hallucinogens out of my system, she was reduced to a slight girl whose skin had a mellow glow, whose hair was like the soft glowing tentacles of a cuttlefish. Her dress was a simple white, dirtied from an earlier adventure which got her locked up. Above vintage stiletto heels were the gravity disruptors, deactivated, fashioned to look like charming gold ankle bracelets. From what I gathered, she was to spend the night: the worst punishment short of exile they could have given someone of her status.

She picked and destroyed a security lock at the Scorpio wing emergency fire exit. She was caught just outside the parking lot wearing a lead helmet of her own making. Her plan was to escape to the outside, jam the signal of her security chip with lead until she found a surgeon willing to remove it. Then she would have disappeared. But lead didn’t work. This was her 7th offence of a similar nature.

In the dungeon was the only time I remember seeing her eyes dark. In the shadows, Magenta’s sockets were hollow black. She was looking at me; I felt it through my skin. I knew she wanted to talk to me. Tell me some secret. Tell me how terrible things are. She saw me beaten to a pulp, faceless, half-dead, whole-dead for seconds at a time, screaming when I wasn’t. I wanted to talk to her. My mother didn’t know me as Magenta did that night. In that dungeon, we were quiet. I wanted to tell her she was beautiful.

The clone warrior was watching me, his medical kit readily hanging from his belt. He would jump at me if I so much as whisper a word to Magenta. We weren’t allowed to talk.

From a section of my thesis: “The social situation of the country has steadily devolved over the last century into something comparable to that of millennial Indian society, wherein people tamely accepted their degenerate standings in society, believing it is the will of a higher power that the concept of equality be unheard of. Contact with lower classes was as unspeakable then during those savage times as it is here and now.”

Scared shitless of a Gestapo encore and shivering, I rubbed the spot on my chest from where a rusty dagger was pulled once upon a time, leaving a scar that vanished as fast as water on Mercury’s surface. Magenta clicked her tongue, the sound a hot dagger through tension. She got my full attention.

The clone warrior stirred as Magenta produced a silver pin from her hair and held it up for her audience of two to see. I imagined how hard the circuitry was working up in the clone warrior’s Neanderthal skull, processing how to act upon this.

From the intro of my thesis: “An 18th century Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once stated you could dissect a culture by observing its deviants: the lowlifes, the criminals, the outcasts. In light of this, the truest testaments of cultural identity would come from the people who wish to relinquish themselves of it.”

Magenta’s criminal record boasts fourteen arrests for various offenses, most of which involved attempts to elude the mall’s and her father’s strict policies regarding time spent on the outside. This made her the mall’s most notorious resident on record.

Magenta finished first in her space flight class, majoring in atmospheric aviation—something her father forbade her to take up.

She once cut off half the mall’s power supply just to get out unnoticed.

She once hospitalized a clone warrior with a civilian stun ring. Her father gave her the ring in case she was attacked by an outsider.

Magenta was voted the prettiest girl of her floor three years in a row. She was the only recipient who rejected a modeling job in Venus.

When Magenta spoke, everybody listened; when she passed, everybody watched.

She once hacked into the mall’s security files in an attempt to erase records of her existence.

She had the most expensive eyes on earth.

Before I knew any of this, I watched her pick at her deactivated gravity disruptors with a silver hairpin, in the dungeon where we first met without talking. The clone warrior had an inkling as to what she was doing, and ordered her to cease her activities immediately. She kept on it. There was nothing else he could do.

When her gravity disruptors lit up and started warming up, the clone warrior, confused and upset, called for backup. Seven other clone warriors quickly entered the room, every one of them an exact copy of the other, down to the socks under their boots. They huddled around Magenta’s cage, scratching their heads, tinkering with the shockwave emitter that was supposed to keep her grounded.

It was protocol that her gravity disruptors be rendered dysfunctional during her sentence, but it was also a strict rule that residents were not to be harmed even when detained. It was a peripheral but equally important rule to refrain from touching her while she was in her cage, and to only apply minimum force if she tried to escape. The only way they could have stopped her from doing what she was doing without breaking regulations was throw her cage out a window. Only the mall had no windows.

Magenta wasn’t trying to escape, she was just turning her disruptors on. She was just pissing the clone warriors off. I watched her in awe.

She gave me a look: This one’s for you.

The clone warriors were going crazy—she was untouchable. They were close to banging their heads at each other. They slammed their fists at the bars, they jumped up and down and screamed. Their fists were clenched, sweat rolled down their hardened cheeks like beads, they grit their teeth. They were close to tears.

When the gravity disruptors had warmed up, Magenta put her hands behind her head and got up on an invisible hammock, ignoring the barbarian threats and growls. Bobbing up and down, swaying in contentment on a nonexistent breeze, she had a smirk on her face more wild than subtle. She gave me a wink. I wanted to tell her I saw her grow wings. Everything else was in-between.

The next morning, I woke to find her gone, back to her world somewhere in the mall depths. On the floor of my cage, near the corner where Magenta could have easily reached, I found nine etched digits. I memorized them because my life depended on it.

It took the next three weeks after my release for me and Jethro Dong to figure out what to do with the numbers. We spent the time in Jethro Dong’s secret workshop in Binondo, where the clone warriors couldn’t have found him. It took thirty minutes for him to make sure I wasn’t bugged. It took three days for us to run out of brain stims.

From my thesis: “Space monarch society is so insulated that their standard means of communication excludes everybody outside their homes. They utilize a wholly different set of com satellites, a whole different type of phone wire. Their contact numbers, when looked at by anybody unfamiliar with the system, would be meaningless. It is easier for a Luzonian mall resident to contact a Canadian than it would be to contact someone living three blocks away.”

By the end of the three weeks, Jethro Dong felt safe enough to go home, and I had a makeshift communicator more contraband than the gravity disruptors. The only place safe for me to actually use it was the red-tiled sidewalk across the street from the mall.

Drinking coffee in the most expensive coffee shop of the outer city, I spent hours dialing her number, listening to a 20th century waltz that I hoped was her ringtone, until it turned into a more familiar busy beep too loud for comfort.

It was a week before she answered: she’d been grounded she said. She had an hour limited to go across the street. When she stepped out of the mall, things lit up in ways I never knew they could. Maybe that’s why she wanted to escape. She was being charitable.

*

I GOT A good grade for my study. I dedicated it to Magenta: “To the months we spent trying to fill the spaces in-between: the doors of her Exoscraper, the sky and the pavement, the mall and our red side-walk, our tongues and our teeth.”

From my study’s definition of terms: “The term La Luminosa originated from the South Americas, where the social situation is similar to that of Luzon. It was first used on record by a young man who worked in a five star mountain resort in the Andes who used the word in his holonet journal. In Spanish, he wrote: ‘When I first saw them I believed everything my grandmother used to tell me, about angels and the armies of God. We men fly with our chariots like men, they fly like the shooting stars at night. They are the luminescent, and they grace our mountains with light every time they descend from their cities in the sky. When they leave, I weep at the thought of never seeing them again.’”

KHAVN

THE FAMILY THAT EATS SOIL

Khavn is an internationally-awarded filmmaker whose explosive forays into fiction and poetry are not for the faint of heart. His personal anthology, Ultraviolins: This is not a book by Khavn, collects his poetry, fiction, essays, plays and screenplays, and is available from the UP Press.

“The Family That Eats Soil,” a surreal tale, won the Carlos Palanca Award for Short Story in Filipino and became a film. It was translated by Singapore-based poet Mayo Uno Martin, the author of Babel, a volume of poetry published by High Chair, and producer of the spokenword album Uniberso: New Pinoy Poets Calling.

1

“SOIL AGAIN,” GROANED Baby, who was turning one on Saturday. “Soil for breakfast, soil for lunch, soil for dinner. Soil for snacks. Don’t tell me we’ll be having soil on my first birthday.” “There, there, child,” said Mother. “I promise we won’t have soil.” “What then?” “It’ll be a surprise.” The words were barely uttered as Baby’s face lit up while munching on stewed soil.

*

“Aaaah! Aaaah!” In a dark alley in Suburville, the eighth teenager was having his way with Sister who was as beautiful and frigid as a mannequin while being recorded on video by the next kid in line. “Aaaah! Aaaah!”

*

“Please pass the fish sauce,” said Father. Someone passed the fish sauce. Still, Father thought, he hadn’t gotten it. So he went to the sea and caught some fish and fermented it until it became fish sauce. Father’s finally happy. No thanks to his good-for-nothing children.

*

“So? Are you gonna confess or not?” Whoever Brother was asking couldn’t answer, confession or not. Because his eyes were bulging, his mouth gagged and his head was in a vise-grip. “Motherfucker! You’re really bullheaded!” Brother whipped a metal pipe and crushed his chest.

*

Mother cut herself on a chipped plate while washing the dishes. Blood mixed with water in the sink. Mother’s fingers continued to bleed as she remained oblivious to the war between blood and water.

2

“YOUR COOKING’S REALLY great, Mother! You’re the best!” said Brother, even as he stopped himself from puking out the latest dish of soil. He felt it wasn’t cooked enough. And too salty. But he couldn’t find the strength to say anything to hurt his mother. Not even during that one time when she kicked him hard. However much bad the cooking was. Because it was clear that he wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for his mother. Brother knew how to be grateful. Exemplary child of an exemplary mother in an exemplary family.

*

Father was mixing up a new medicine concoction from the dextrose bottles he had taken from the children’s ward of Troma Hospital. During their break, the nurses and doctors were whispering conspiratorially in the canteen. Father had just come up with his new brew in his basement lab early that morning and named it “Gardener.” Once it enters the bloodstream, all the red blood cells turn red and plants will sprout from every orifice: eyes, mouth, nose, ears, asshole, etc. In other words, you’re dead meat. The children’s ward of Troma Hospital smells lovely.

*

Sister still doesn’t have an appetite. Is it because she’s on a diet. Is it because she’s stoned. Is it because she doesn’t like stewed soil. Is it because she’s had too much spunk. Is it because she’s deliberately starving herself for her date later with Prince Charming. Is it because Father always gets mad at her for coming home after her midnight curfew. It is because she had a tiff with Mother about the new curtain’s color in the sala. It is because she thinks Brother stinks to the high heavens. It is because she’s grossed out by Baby who refuses to wear diapers or any underwear, walking around in all his fresh glory. It is because her soul is in another dimension and food tastes better there. It is because her soul is next door where the new tenant is a hot-looking bachelor. It is because she has no more will to live. It is because she doesn’t like eating with her family anymore and doesn’t believe in the saying “The Family That Eats Together Stays Together”. It is because she really has no appetite.

*

When Mother wasn’t looking, Baby slipped out of the house, went to the bus stop, headed straight for Aparri, passed by Tawi-Tawi, stopped over at Libangon, then went back home, all this before Mother looked at the crib and cooed, “Kuchi-kuchi coo, I love you!”

*

Mother still doesn’t want to sit down. Hands over the rice here. Gets a glass of water there. Since Father forbade Mother to get a maid, Mother became the maid. Father’s a real class act. Imagine, your maid has a PhD in Economics, president and founder of Arkweist, graduated summa and valedictorian from grade school until post-grad, aside from the fact that she’s your mother.

3

SISTER’S THE BEST. Every hole in her body has a “Welcome” sign. Be it a wound. Be it her navel. Be it infected. Be it gets worse. Then again, what are her doctor-clients for? She’s a real pro.

*

“Please pass the soy sauce,” said Father. He doesn’t really need soy sauce to complete his dinner. In fact, just a drop would be enough to turn his stuffed soil dish into a culinary delight and make him puke when he sleeps. He just has his crazy fits. And he wants you to have it, too.

*

The police are once more chasing Brother and his gang. It doesn’t seem to matter how much you pay them off, their pockets are really deep. Ester got hit. He’s down. Brother can’t stop to help even if they got circumcised at the same time, de-virginized at the same time at Bad Luck Club by a whore with FDT, killed their first Chinese at the same time. Because he knows a bullet is a bullet is a bullet. Because he knows, the Chinese guy had paid the cops double. Because he knows, things like this happen in war. Us versus You. To hell with dead friends.

*

Baby’s sleeping on Mother’s bosom. Hungry as hell. A bottle of powdered milk’s stuck up in his nose, a mixture of cow and goat’s milk is running IV through his veins, while he’s suckling poor Mother’s teats.

*

Business’ still good at the wet market. Even for the blind. Mother still gets three hundred for a blind whore. A blind whore! This new drug, “Mice,” really fucks you up. Sells like hotcakes. Supplies snatched up before you can even blink.

4

FATHER CAN’T GET enough. His hunger is insatiable. Even when everyone at Troma Hospital’s had their fill, from fine patients to sickly doctors, he still can’t get enough. He’s shivering in the shadows of the alley. Like a cat starving for a week. Like an addict in a basement. Waiting. For fish going flip-flop on dry land. For a wayward hit. Drizzling.

*

Brother’s plate is licked clean. You’d also clean yours if you were beaten up as a child for not finishing everything until your backside was sore. Then you’d have nightmares at night: hunted by leftover rice that would catch up and stick all over you, then turn to rice paste, you turning to rice paste, until it’s impossible to even move, much less escape, until it dissolves, but it wouldn’t matter because you’re part of it and you’re not sure if you had dissolved yourself.

*

Baby’s gone AWOL again. The whole family’s looking for him. Where’s their beloved baby? Finally, they find him at the cockpit. The gamblers had mistaken him for Christ. Oh Baby, what have you gotten yourself into now? Too bad though, he had bet on the loser cock that offed the winning Texas breed.

*

Mother is wailing in front of her soil stew. She forgot it’s forbidden to cry at the dining table. Father stood up and stomped out of the house. Mother’s wailing became louder. Sister and Brother followed. So did Baby. When she was left alone, Mother abruptly stopped crying and gorged on her favorite dish.

*

“You’re really delicious!” moaned the greasy stink-turned-shit-turned-man pumping on top of Sister. “You’re the best!” Sister wasn’t enjoying herself at all. She wasn’t high on uppers like Phoenix. She wasn’t crashing on downers like Germs. She wasn’t getting wet on her OST aphrodisiac. Wasn’t horny. Wasn’t happy. But she’s here. Not there. And all the doors and windows have been sealed up.

5

BROTHER COULDN’T ERASE from his mind the final look of Ester. The one with pieces of brain oozing out. It wasn’t even a decent image of Ester’s, before the tragedy. He’s gone, so why’s he still here? Ester is Father. Ester is Mother. Ester is Sister. Ester is Baby. Brother gagged and rushed to the toilet. Even in the mirror, Ester is Brother. But Ester’s dead and Brother’s still alive, right? Right?

*

Father is one lucky bastard tonight. Guess who’s coming closer? The president himself. Why is the president walking under the rain in the dead of night? It’s forbidden to ask things that aren’t important. Action speaks louder than words. And Father started to do what he had to do. Even if it was late at night and it meant risking pneumonia.

*

It’s Sister’s turn to lead the prayer. “Bless (I can’t take it anymore!) us (Please have mercy!) O (You motherfucking cunts!) Lord (Aaaah!), and (Shit!) these (Fuck!) thy (My God!) gifts (Help!), which (Let me out!) we (Haven’t you had enough?) are (Fuck you!) about (Don’t you have any soul?) to (Don’t you have any sisters?) receive (Don’t you have a mother?) from (Help!) thy (Jesus Christ!) bounty (Beasts!), through (Just kill me!) Christ (I’ll kill you all!), our (Lunatics!) Lord (Assholes, all of you!), Amen (Fuck you!).” And Sister had no more appetite left at all.

*

Mother is opening a new branch today. The ninth Love Heaven at New Metropolis. Complete with every new gadget for one’s pleasure and satisfaction. The winners of the Miss Love Heaven contest have just arrived. Smelling sweet and fresh. Cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony is Domina, former Miss Love Heaven International.

*

It’s Baby’s birthday. They won’t be having soil. Not barbecued soil, not carbonara soil, not soil stew. There’s no trace of soil on the table. Baby’s surely ecstatic. If only he was there. But Baby was there. Get it? Hahaha! Served up on a silver platter. Hahaha! Whathefuck... You got me there.

(Translated from Tagalog by Mayo Uno Martin.)

SEAN UY

REGIMENT

Sean Uy has been writing since he was 12 years old, and has explored a broad selection of genres in the span of a largely unheralded writing career. He has been published in Singapore’s Eggplant magazine, and has done work with characters and settings for Anito: Defend a Land Enraged, the first entirely Filipino-made computer game.

In “Regiment”, five men returning to their homeland discover that there is more to the strange old woman they meet on the way, just as she knows that there is more to them than they expect.

WE FOUND THE old woman on top of Eikenfast Ridge, her tattered blue cloak and her wispy white hair floating in the soft breeze. She sat upon an ancient tree stump, supporting herself with a wooden cane that looked about as withered and aged as she did.

Clay drew his sword, but Gelarus held up a hand to stop him. “We need a healer,” he said. “Danaan doesn’t look like he’s going to last, and we’ve still got a good number of leagues ahead of us.”

“How do we know that she’s not a spy?” Clay asked, his battered breastplate glinting in the sun.

“We’ve been walking west, Clay,” Gelarus said. “I don’t think the Harazen would have crossed this far inland.”

Mantu gently set Danaan’s litter upon the ground. The tall Southerner loomed over the rest of us, his usual stoic expression upon his face.

“What do you think, Ishar?” Gelarus asked.

“She’s an old woman,” I said, although I felt somewhat uncertain of her. “What harm could she cause?”

“She could kill us in our sleep,” Clay insisted.

“Then we’ll post watch,” Gelarus said.

“But she...”

“We’ll post watch,” Gelarus repeated, glaring at the younger knight. Clay frowned, and slid his sword back into his sheath.

The old woman continued to wait patiently, watching our conversation with little more than feigned indifference.

I took a few steps towards her. “Are you a healer, old one?”

“No healer of wounds am I,” she said, “but a healer of spirits, yes.”

“What does that mean?” Clay interrupted.

“You seek aid for your fallen friend?” the old woman asked, ignoring Clay.

“Yes,” I said. “Danaan — our wounded friend there — well, we were attacked by the Harazen two days ago, and he took poisoned steel in his stomach and left leg. Danaan still lives, but he grows more delirious with each passing day. We can get him help once we reach the city of Morhengaard to the west, but he may not live that long.”

“We need a healer, old one,” Gelarus said. “You must help us.”

The old woman considered this for a moment. “And if I do not, sir knight?”

Gelarus took a deep breath. “That was not a request, woman. We are knights of Morhengaard, stewards of this land, and we order you to aid us.”

The commander’s stare was threatening, but his eyes told a different story. I wondered just how well she could see through us.

“Let me see your friend,” the old woman finally said.

HER NAME, IT turned out soon enough, was Annyn. We never did find out exactly how old she was.

By nightfall, Danaan was sleeping peacefully for the first time in days. The rest of us sat around the fire, picking through what little remained of our rations.

“I still don’t like her,” Clay said. “We’re walking through a wasteland. We’re not supposed to meet anyone else out here.”

Gelarus leaned back, weary with the day’s travel. “Danaan’s still breathing,” he told Clay, “and that’s good enough for me.”

“I don’t trust her,” Clay repeated.

“Mantu seems to trust her,” I said, looking at the tall Southerner. “Don’t you, Mantu?”

Mantu looked up at the mention of his name. Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t a knight — only a mercenary who was once part of a separate unit. His expression hardened as he searched for the right words to say.

“Mantu trusts,” he finally said, in a thick accent. He had been carrying Danaan’s litter for a long time, and perhaps he was glad that part of the burden had been taken from his shoulders.

“What about you, Ishar?” Clay asked.

“I’m sorry, Clay, but I agree with Commander Gelarus. Annyn can stay for a while, if only to take care of Danaan.”

“There are Harazen mages who can make themselves look like any person of their choosing,” Clay pressed. “They could be anyone — your comrades, your siblings... perhaps even an old healer from out in the middle of nowhere.”

Gelarus squinted at the old woman, crouched over Danaan’s litter in the flickering light. “She doesn’t feel like a Harazen to me,” he said.

“I don’t trust her,” Clay insisted.

“Then you can take the first watch tonight,” Gelarus said, sternly. “She’s doing us a service, Clay, and I don’t care what your instincts are telling you, as long as she keeps Danaan alive. Is that clear?”

Clay mumbled a sullen answer.

It occurred to me that the old woman had not had her dinner yet. “I’ll bring Annyn something to eat,” I said, clutching at the last remaining piece of bread.

I stole over to Danaan’s corner of the campsite, the light of the fire fading behind me. Annyn was there, hunched over Danaan’s resting figure.

“His breath is steady,” she said, as I sat down next to her. “The Fates have been quite merciful to him.”

I held up the piece of bread, and she slowly took it from my fingers.

“My thanks, sir knight,” she said, picking at the sodden loaf.

“May I ask a question, old one?”

“As you wish,” she said.

I paused, trying to find the best way to voice my concerns. “Where do you come from, Annyn? What are you doing in such a place?”

“What does it matter, sir knight? I was there when you needed me, was I not?”

I considered her then, wondering whether or not Clay was in the right. We had all seen Harazen spies at work, and if Annyn truly was one of them, then we all could have been dead before the night was over.

“Clay doesn’t trust you,” I said.

“Sir Clay is a young man, sir knight. He would naturally be suspicious of people like me.”

“He thinks you’re one of the Harazen,” I said.

“I know of the Harazen,” she told me. “You fight against them.”

“Yes,” I said. “We came from a massive battle to the east. Our four kingdoms against the Black Empire. Thousands of men now lie dead upon the Rivalic foothills, all for a war of no consequence.”

“So why are you here, sir knight? I would think that you would be alongside your fellows in battle.”

I remained silent for a while, as she waited patiently for a response.

“Sir knight?” she asked.

“We return to Morhengaard,” I answered. “Our home.”

She looked at me with gentle eyes. “You have been away for long, yes?”

“Far too long, old one. Far too long.”

WE REACHED THE bottom of the ridge the next day. Gelarus led our march, with Clay close behind him. Annyn and Mantu followed, with the large Southerner bearing Danaan’s litter once again. I guarded the rear, in case anything decided to attack us from behind.

“What lies ahead, sir knight?” Annyn called.

Gelarus paused, both feet on the rocky trail, and turned to face us. “Morhengaard, old one. Morhengaard, the Elder City.”

“What do you seek in Morhengaard, sir knight?”

Gelarus shrugged. “Sanctuary for Danaan,” he said, “and solace for the men under my command.”

Annyn placed one bony hand on Mantu’s arm. “What of Mantu, then?” she asked. “Mantu is not from Morhengaard, unlike the rest of you.”

“Indeed,” Gelarus said. “Mantu is not one of us. But he is free to go as he wishes.”

The Southerner appeared to consider Gelarus’s words for a moment. Finally, he straightened and looked each of us in the face.

“Mantu stay,” he said, in his thick accent. “Help Danaan.”

Gelarus nodded, and continued walking.

We marched for a while longer. Annyn continued to clutch at Mantu’s arm, as though she needed the support. Mantu looked as though he did not mind helping two different people at the same time.

IT WAS BARELY two hours later when the ambush took place.

Gelarus heard the rustling sounds first, and managed to draw his sword just as the Harazen emerged from their hiding places. Each was dressed in long, billowing white robes, and each howled a vicious war-cry as they set upon us. The commander shouted a desperate warning, slicing through the chest of the first attacker to reach him.

Mantu dropped Danaan’s prone form and left him for Annyn to watch. Clay dove into the fray, slashing madly with his drawn blade. I ran frantically in their direction, drawing my weapon at the same time.

I counted at first two, and then five, and then twelve before I drove four feet of steel into the nearest Harazen; to my surprise, the man did not slow or flinch one bit. I narrowly avoided a dagger aimed at my eyes, and I pulled myself back to reassess the threat.

I saw Mantu slash at a Harazen’s throat with his daggers, only to see the blades pass through their target as though they were made of mist. The Southerner leapt aside as a curved blade almost sliced him in half; He looked just as surprised as the rest of us.

Clay and Gelarus fought wildly, as they desperately struck at opponents who seemed as though they were made from the air itself. Clay swung his sword through another of the illusory figures, and it passed through the Harazen’s visage with no effect at all.

The four of us gathered, our backs to each other, facing the Harazen with weapons drawn. They surrounded us in a tight circle, each one gibbering curses in their strange language and gesturing with their naked blades.

“Harazen magic!” Clay cried.

Gelarus’s face was grim. “Take as many of them with you,” he said. “Buy Annyn the time to escape.”

One of the Harazen lunged towards us, and I suddenly felt a chill breeze waft through the mountain air. My hair stood on end, and for the first time my heart froze, as though something were terribly wrong.

Everyone — knight and Harazen alike — turned to look at Annyn. The old woman stood some yards away from us, chanting in some arcane language. Two of the Harazen broke from our circle, approaching her with blades drawn but with confusion clearly written on their faces.

Then Annyn looked up, and we saw her eyes glow ghostly white. Her chant reached a low crescendo, and one of the Harazen screamed something that I could not understand.

There was a loud sound, much like a thunderclap, and the Harazen clasped their hands to their ears. They howled a long, mournful cry, and as we watched in stark fascination, each of them began to disappear.

The Harazen faded away from their moccasined feet upwards, like ashes in a strong wind. Their faces were the last to dissolve, and each of us could see them, screaming, to the very end.

Afterwards, Annyn never said a word, not even as we picked up Danaan’s litter, and pressed on.

CLAY SET DOWN his bowl of stew. “No,” he said.

Gelarus paused, and in the flickering light I could see that the commander’s bowl was untouched. “She must be a sorceress,” he said. “A great sorceress.”

“Then why don’t we feel any better having her around?” Clay whispered hoarsely. “You saw what she did to the Harazen! You all saw what she did!”

“Yes,” Gelarus said, looking the young man squarely in the eye. “I don’t know what she did to them, but I also know that she hasn’t done it to us.”

Everyone remained silent. I stirred the contents of my bowl, looking for something to say but not finding anything at all.

Clay kicked at the rocky soil with one foot, then stood up and walked away. Gelarus ignored him.

After a few more minutes of silence, the commander turned in my direction. “Bring her a meal, Ishar,” he said. “And watch yourself.”

I found Annyn crouched over Danaan’s litter once again, and I cautiously approached her, bearing her portion of the evening’s stew.

“Come closer, Ishar,” she said suddenly, almost causing me to spill half the bowl. She looked up, regarding my nervousness with faint traces of amusement.

She took the bowl from my hands, and for a moment I saw her as we had originally met: just an old woman in a tattered blue cloak and wispy white hair. She stroked Danaan’s forehead with one bony hand.

“How are you, Ishar?” she asked.

“Not very good.”

“You never told me why you return to Morhengaard, Ishar.”

“I already told you, old one,” I said. “We return home.”

“What is home?” she asked quietly, still looking into Danaan’s sleeping face. “Home is what we make. Home is what we believe.”

“Yes,” I said, unable to make sense of her words.

“Home is what we dream,” she said.

“Yes.”

She remained silent for a moment.

I took a deep breath. “What did you do to... those Harazen in the pass?”

“What I was supposed to do,” she answered cryptically.

“Magic?” I asked.

“You could say that.”

I sighed. That was as far as I was willing to go.

There was the sound of footsteps behind me, and I turned to see Clay making his way towards us. The young man’s face was weary and anxious, and I wondered what he wanted.

“Ishar,” he said.

Annyn looked up at the younger knight. “Are you all right, Master Clay?” she asked.

Clay shuddered, although it might not have been from the cold night air. “Ishar,” he said, respectfully, “I need to talk with An... the lady Annyn.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Alone.”

At first I thought to dissuade him, but there was an intensity in his eyes that took me aback. Clay wished to get something off his mind, and I was not about to prevent him from doing so.

I turned towards Annyn. “If you need anything,” I said, “then you are welcome to make requests of any one of us.”

She smiled. “Thank you, sir knight.”

IT WAS GELARUS who jostled me awake the next morning.

“Clay!” the commander almost shouted at me. “Have you seen him?”

“No,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What happened?”

“I don’t know!” Gelarus said. “Clay’s gone. His armor, his sword, his pack! All gone!”

I scrambled into my armor and stepped into the circle where the campfire had been the previous evening. Mantu was already there, a look of stoic expression upon his face. Danaan remained asleep on his litter, with Annyn still watching over him as a mother did to her child.

“Have you searched everywhere?” Gelarus asked Mantu. The Southerner nodded.

Maybe he just went to get more firewood,” I told Gelarus. I was startled when the commander then shoved me against the nearest tree.

“Think, man!” Gelarus roared in my face. “His equipment is gone, and his traveling pack is nowhere to be found. Clay’s gone, Ishar! He’s deserted us!”

I breathed slowly. Clay didn’t strike me as the sort who would desert. None of us did, and in fact, I thought it was probably why we were together in the first place.

“Last night,” Gelarus said, making it sound more like a question than anything else. “Last night, did Clay do anything... strange?”

“No, sir,” I said, trying to remember. “He went about the way he usually does. But he had a talk with Annyn just after the evening meal.”

Gelarus remained silent for a few minutes, as though lost in thought. Then he turned, nodded to Mantu, and began walking towards the old woman.

Annyn looked as though she had been expecting him. “Sir knight,” she bowed, acknowledging his presence.

“Where’s Clay?” Gelarus asked.

Annyn looked at him carefully. “He understood,” she said.

I could see the confusion play across the commander’s face. “He understood what?” Gelarus asked.

“The young man understood where we were, Sir Gelarus. He understood everything that he was.”

Gelarus slowly lowered himself to the ground. He opened his mouth to give the old woman a proper retort, but then appeared to think better of it.

“Yes, sir knight?” Annyn asked.

Gelarus shook his head. “Clay’s gone,” he finally said.

“I am aware,” Annyn replied.

“How’s Danaan?”

“Better,” Annyn said. “Much better.”

Gelarus gave her a suspicious look. “But he hasn’t awoken yet,” he said.

“One does not have to awaken to recover,” she answered.

Gelarus stared at her then, and he continued staring for the longest time, searching for something — anything — in the lines of her face.

Even after we resigned ourselves to Clay’s desertion, Gelarus still watched her. He watched her for a long, long time.

MILES LATER, WE had mostly forgotten about Clay. Gelarus walked in silence, cautiously watching the path before him. Mantu followed some distance back, still carrying Danaan’s litter. Annyn followed the tall Southerner, and I trailed behind her, carefully watching our backs.

The landscape rasped under our feet. The mountain passes twisted and turned, forcing us up steep passageways and down dangerous slopes. Strangely, Annyn seemed to take everything in stride.

Gelarus checked his maps sometime that afternoon. “No more than three days at the most,” he guessed. “Three days, and then we can get Danaan the help he needs.”

“But that is not why you walk this path, is it?” Annyn asked suddenly.

We turned to look at her. “What?” Gelarus asked.

Annyn knelt beside Danaan. “You did not leave Rivalic for the sake of this fallen one,” she said.

Gelarus frowned at her. “No, we did not,” he admitted.

“Then why do you make this journey, sir knight, when your battle is clearly farther to the east?”

Gelarus glared at her, and in that look were his questions about how she dealt with the Harazen, what happened to Clay, and why Danaan had remained so quiet. Annyn looked back at him, an old woman in a tattered blue cloak and wispy white hair.

“Keep moving,” Gelarus said, ignoring Annyn’s question.

Mantu was as stoic as always. I looked back at the old woman, but she apparently chose not to press the matter further.

“SOMETHING IS WRONG,” Gelarus said that night, as we clustered around the campfire once more.

“Clay didn’t trust her,” I said.

“Yes,” Gelarus replied, “Clay didn’t trust her.”

We remained silent, sitting across each other in the faded light.

“I need to bring Annyn her meal,” I remembered.

“Take Mantu with you,” Gelarus said.

“Why?”

“Because Danaan hasn’t spoken for three whole days,” he said. “Before we met the old woman, he spent whole hours raving at things he couldn’t see. Now he sleeps all the time.”

“But... that’s good,” I said, trying to rationalize the issue. “We can’t doubt that Danaan looks a lot better than he did before.”

“Just think about it, Ishar,” Gelarus said, sternly. “She claims to be able to ease his pain.”

“Yes,” I said, unsure at what he was getting at.

“But none of us has seen her do anything. She uses no herbs, or poultices. She uses no magic, or at least none that that any of us has seen.”

I stood, pondering the commander’s words. “I’ll talk to her,” I told him.

Even with Mantu behind me, however, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Three days’ worth of travel, and we obviously didn’t know Annyn – we didn’t know her one bit. I thought about Clay, and I thought that perhaps he was right when he first said that he didn’t trust her.

Annyn sat beside Danaan as she did every night, one hand on his forehead and a look of serenity about both their faces.

“How is Danaan?” I asked, standing beside her.

“He dreams,” Annyn answered softly.

I gave her an amused look, albeit one that was more anxious than I intended. “What does he dream of?” I asked.

Annyn fixed her clear blue eyes at me. “He dreams of beyond, Ishar,” she said. “Do you?”

I stepped back, unnerved, and almost bumped into Mantu. The tall man produced long shadows against the firelight.

“Southerner,” Annyn said.

Mantu nodded. “Danaan is well?” he asked.

“Yes,” Annyn said. “He is well.”

Mantu nodded, as though understanding her perfectly.

“You worry for him,” Annyn said. “A strange gesture for a man who is not even of the same race.”

I glanced at Mantu. The man was as stoic as always, betraying nothing to the ancient woman who sat before him.

“That is why you carry him, is it not?” Annyn asked.

Mantu did not respond at first, but after a moment I could see him nod.

“You are no knight of Morhengaard, Southerner,” Annyn said, “but you have an honor that is quite your own.”

Mantu did not respond, and I chose to leave the crone and the Southerner at that point. Perhaps there was something I was not meant to hear about their conversation.

Then again, I wondered just what Mantu knew about all this.

GELARUS STRUCK me in the face, and I awoke almost immediately. “Get up!” he shouted. “Get up!”

“Wait!” I shouted in response, holding up both hands. Gelarus struck them anyway, sending me reeling back.

“Danaan’s gone!” Gelarus shouted once again, and those words hit me harder than any of his blows.

“What?” I asked, not believing him.

“DANAAN’S GONE!”

The commander half-dragged me across the camp, stopping only when we reached the space where Danaan once was. I saw that even the litter — the makeshift stretcher that we cobbled out of wood and straw — was missing. In its place, Annyn and Mantu sat waiting for us.

Gelarus let go of my shirt, dropping me to the ground. I stood, dazed with the realization that another of us was missing.

Gelarus glared at Annyn. Silence pervaded the clearing for a good five minutes.

“Where’s Danaan?” Gelarus finally asked.

Annyn did not answer. She only looked up at Gelarus with clear blue eyes.

“WHERE’S DANAAN?”

More silence.

Gelarus lunged at her, raw fear giving him speed. Mantu merely raised one muscled arm and knocked the commander back into the rocks and dirt.

I helped Gelarus up. The commander glared accusingly at the mercenary, who now stood over the old woman like some towering guardian.

“Danaan has moved on,” Annyn said, in a normal tone of voice.

“Where? The man could not even walk!” Gelarus shouted.

“He understood, even as he slept,” Annyn said.

“No more riddles!” Gelarus shouted. “Who are you, old one, and why do you plague us like this?”

“I am Annyn,” Annyn said, and her white hair floated in the morning breeze.

“Then who are you, Annyn?” I asked.

She placed one bony hand on Mantu’s arm, just as she always did when we were walking. “Mantu does not belong here,” she said. “He is a mercenary, a Southerner, among a company of knights.”

“Mantu has our trust,” Gelarus said, his voice even. “But even he must explain his actions this very morning, just as you do yours.”

“Mantu only has to explain his actions in the days since you left the battle in the Rivalic foothills,” Annyn said. “You would not always trust a Southerner, but the Southerner would trust you.”

“More riddles,” Gelarus spat.

“No,” Annyn said simply. “Answers.”

Mantu moved slightly, as though calling attention to himself. “Mantu carry Danaan,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered, not sure of what he was saying.

“Danaan good man,” Mantu said, looking at both Gelarus and I. “Danaan save Mantu’s life.”

I stared incredulously at him. Gelarus stared at me, not quite understanding yet.

“Mantu owed Danaan a life-debt,” Annyn said, looking into the Southerner’s stoic expression. “Your fallen comrade performed an honorable act during battle, one that took his life at the cost of preserving another’s.”

Gelarus stared at Mantu. The tall man shrugged, his shoulders giving no indication of the weight he had borne every day, for every league we had traveled.

Mantu’s word, if anything, was as good as his honor.

“Now Danaan has moved on,” Annyn told Mantu, “and your debt has been paid.”

Mantu shifted, looking straight at her.

“Do you understand now?” Annyn asked the Southerner.

Mantu nodded, still and silent as always.

Then his form began to fade away. Mantu disappeared from the feet upwards, like ashes in a strong wind, as though he never was and never would be again.

Mantu regarded us solemnly as we stared back at him. Gelarus’s mouth was open in sudden, paralytic shock.

The last thing to disappear was Mantu’s face, and he wore his normal expression to the end — just as stoic as we had always known him.

GELARUS WALKED BESIDE her as though she were a venomous snake. The sand and the gravel were rough underneath our metal greaves.

We walked on, ignoring the trees and the rocks and the path, staring into an endless sea of dirt and gray. Morhengaard was near, but somehow the idea gave no comfort to any of us.

When the sun was high in the sky, we stopped for a quick meal before moving on. None of us said a word.

It was only when we had navigated most of the rocky passages that Gelarus finally spoke. I did not know if he spoke to break the tension, or merely to assure himself once again, but I was glad for the sound of his voice.

“We make good progress,” Gelarus said.

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Perhaps one more day,” he answered, “perhaps less. We make better time, now that... now that...” Gelarus trailed off.

“Now that the wounded no longer slow us down,” Annyn finished.

Gelarus slunk back into silence.

We passed a great cluster of rocks, perhaps undisturbed since the dawn of time. As we did, I glanced at Annyn’s ancient and withered form, and once more I wondered just how old she was.

“You have not answered my question yet, sir knight,” she finally said, at a point when the sun hung low in the sky.

Gelarus looked at her with a weary expression. He was unclear, I think, on how to deal with the old woman, and that was likely why he finally decided to answer her.

“We joined together in Rivalic,” he said, “part of a four-hundred-strong force from Morhengaard. We took up our positions there, only to find thousands of Harazen swarming us from their mountain country. I have led men to battle on many occasions, but my heart turned me away from this war.”

“And why is that?” Annyn asked.

“It was not honorable,” Gelarus said. “Our four kingdoms merely wished to humble the Harazen, whose emissaries had shamed us in a few merchant deals some years ago.”

“Commander,” I said.

Gelarus waved me away. “On the morning of battle,” he continued, “I looked into the faces of my knights and saw that most of them did not deserve to be there. One was less than fifteen turnings in age, taken from a family that had already lost two sons to combat. One had a young wife and three children who worried for his return.”

“So you ran?” Annyn asked.

“No,” Gelarus shook his head. “I did not run. I spurred them on to battle as any noble commander would do, all for the glory of the four kingdoms.”

“And you died,” Annyn said, “surrounded by the ghosts of the men you led to their deaths, and by the guilt that you suffered for such blind loyalty.”

Gelarus was silent for a moment. “The fault was mine, and mine alone.”

“You died there, Sir Gelarus, along with the rest of your men. Four hundred... and four more.”

“Yes,” Gelarus said, his expression softening. “I died.”

There, with the gravel whispering under his feet, the commander’s form began fading into the colors of the gathering twilight.

“MORHENGAARD,” I SAID, staring down into the valley.

Morhengaard, the Elder City, stood below us. It was as glorious as the stories told, with towers and buildings and gardens and slated roofs that reached into the sky. I looked upon it with a sense of peace and home, and it favored us with its benevolent and enlightened gaze.

“Home,” I whispered. Annyn hovered at the edge of my vision, watching as I took in the wondrous sight.

“Do you understand now, Ishar?” she asked. “You have come all this way, after all.”

“No,” I said, without even glancing at her. “I do not yet understand.”

For the first time in the days I had known her, Annyn laughed a surprised little laugh. It was dry and ancient, much as she was.

“Home,” I repeated, savoring the word.

“Clay understood,” Annyn said. “Danaan understood. Mantu understood. And in the end, even Gelarus understood.”

“Am I the only one who does not understand?” I asked her.

She paused at first. “What do you think, Ishar?” she asked. “What was the last thing on your mind as you lay dying there, on the foothills of Rivalic?”

I didn’t answer.

“Ishar?” she asked.

“Morhengaard,” I finally said. “I thought of Morhengaard.”

“Your home.”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought of home.”

And I understood.

Even in the soft breeze, I could feel my body unraveling. It felt... right, as though it was something natural. Something determined.

I turned towards the old woman, in the face of the rising wind that now swept about my form and blew it away like… ashes.

“What of you, Annyn?” I asked. “When shall you understand?”

“I understand many, and I understand most,” she said, smiling gently. “But I do not yet understand all.”

I paused, letting soft light flicker across what remained of my face.

“Will we meet again, Annyn?” I asked mere moments before I vanished.

“Perhaps, sir knight,” she said. “Perhaps.”

K. MANDIGMA

THE CATALOGUE OF THE DAMNED

K. Mandigma is 25 years old and works in Makati City as a researcher. A self-confessed bibliophile, Mandigma professes to be more of a reader than a writer, experiencing confused literary ambitions.

“The Catalogue of the Damned”, a story deliciously difficult to categorize, marks Mandigma’s first publication.

LAST NIGHT, WE talked about nightmares.

Mine always begin with a precise temporal premonition: It’s going to rain. Not the rain of a summer thunderstorm, or that of a morbidly delineated typhoon, but the rain of high monsoon, when the sky is dull gray and the earth smells like overripe fruit and dog droppings. Nothing rides on the wind but a single blossom from my grandmother’s ylang-ylang tree and the soft lazy gasps of death pretending to be an afternoon siesta. I find myself standing underneath the ylang-ylang tree, watching that small beautiful blossom float past, then I look up at the sky and I know it is about to rain and I should go back inside the house. Dirt encrusts my slippers as I approach the back door. I open it and enter, leaving my slippers on the mat. The house is empty and silent. I think I smell something burning. I tell myself it must be my grandmother’s old coal-fired iron, so I go up the stairs, clutching the banister, my eyes fixed on a small altarpiece my Protestant grandfather had built into the alcove at the head of the stairway. Saint Joseph, my grandmother’s favorite saint, stares back at me while he balances a sleepy Infant Jesus on the crook of his arm. I tread quietly lest I step on an unstable wooden plank and I wake Jesus from his siesta.

I open the door at the westernmost end of the corridor. It is the room where Lola likes to stay during the late hours of the afternoon, ironing starched clothes that we have grown out of, repairing torn curtains and communion caps on her antiquated Singer sewing machine, while I perch on a chair and excavate boxes of her old school records. The capiz windows are open from end to end, and we can see the sun set on the horizon. This time, when I enter, the windows are closed, and there is no one else in the room. The iron is cold to the touch. I spin the wheel of the sewing machine as I walk towards the windows. The stench of burning is so strong now that, were it not for the knowledge that it will rain soon, I will run away. I am suddenly so afraid but I must find the fire first. I do not want to get caught in the rain, and Saint Joseph will be angry if I run. So I slide the windows open, slowly, and I find myself gazing through another open window. The room inside is very dark. Then I see the shadow of a door opening, and someone steps into the room, carrying several blazing candles. I cannot see his face. The rain must be falling hard, I think, stupidly, because they have no electricity over there. Then the door behind me opens, and I realize what is burning, after all.

Dogmatic repetitions are the morphology of my nightmares. I know it will rain. It never does, but I know it will, so I open windows, I open doors, and these windows open to other windows, and doors open to other doors, and the scent of a flower then becomes that of a burning candle, or burning flesh, or my favorite afternoon merienda. I never feel trapped, or lost, but I am always turning a handle, unfastening a shutter, looking out, never looking back. My nightmares are transitive functions infinitely transposed.

M’s nightmares as she recounts them, on the other hand, are perfect, elaborate cinematographies. Where I used to open my doors to childhood monsters wearing cheap goth eye makeup, her persecutors have beautiful serene faces, and they touch her cheek gently with fingers dripping with long threads of blood. She walks in the town plaza of Jaro when the church bell is tolling the noon mass, and she sees young girls dressed in white funereal clothes calmly falling back on the sharp iron spikes of the gate leading to the cursillo house. She says she is always walking in her dreams. She finds herself following the path of a small creek, where baroque guns float along waters of swiftly flowing blood like flashflood debris. A man she loves sits where the creek ends. He picks a gun, douses it once again in the blood, then places it on his lap, where he cleans it carefully, oils it until the blood strangely shines, and then loads it with bullets.

While Joy disclaims these grand—mannered sentimentalities, her nightmares are calibrated like malfunctioning film reels of a fashionable urban noir, like a Banana Yoshimoto literary device — they are made up entirely of the wrong awakening, the horrifying volt-face. She is lying on her bed, in her bedroom, and she opens her eyes to see a young boy, whom she knows and does not know, laughing while he opens and shuts her bedroom cabinet, asking over his shoulder if she has found his math homework. A friend who is living six hundred miles away is seated at her vanity table, applying her lipstick, which Joy has just bought yesterday, as if it is the most natural thing to do. This is the sort of nightmare which is signified by its existence at that slightest, most formal angle to reality, where the known world is skewed with such precision that hallucinations reflexively become facts, and one inevitably wakes up to a crazed vision, thinking, terror-stricken, that one must be dreaming, and then goes back to sleep. The noise of the electric fan is the devastated whirring of a film projector.

YY’s nightmares are the manifestation of a singular physical fantasy. This fantasy is a spiral metal staircase, without banister or support, and every step is a digression, somehow but not quite an illogical syntax. It is rather like a little girl’s, says YY, but the physics are also quite correct. It might be the ubiquitous double-helix, an Iron Maiden prototype, the shape of a divine dick, a quantum computer, the model of a black hole. Or it might be a sort of retrograde Tower of Pisa, we point out, and when you find yourself at the foot of it, you know Galileo, Zeus, some pre-Newtonian asshole is going to cast you back down and you’ll have to find your way up again.

Ida sits throughout this entire discussion, sipping her coffee silently. When we ask her about her nightmares, her pseudo-conscious morbidities, she shrugs and says that sometimes she dreams she is flying. Then she hears people shouting and she looks down at the road, and she sees them running. When she asks them why they are running, they scream: “Monster! There’s a monster!” Her heart pounds, knowing then that the monster is right behind her, and she thinks hysterically that there must be a way for her to land, even if she has to fall. She tries to do so, but something pulls her back up. She looks over her shoulder and she sees the wings of the monster looming over her. Then the fear is gone and she is irritated at herself for being so stupid. She realizes the truth. The mob starts shooting at her. She ignores them now.

The wings hurt her spine.

DOUGLAS L. CANDANO

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HERMES UY

Douglas L. Candano graduated in 2005 from the Ateneo de Manila University, where he was given the Development Studies Departmental Award and the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts for Fiction. A former Associate Editor of Heights, the official literary publication and organization of the Ateneo de Manila University, he has been awarded fellowships to the Ateneo-Heights and Ateneo National Writers Workshops. A Don Carlos Palanca Awardee, his stories and essays have been published in Heights, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the Philippine Star. He is currently conceptualizing his first novel, while doing consultancy work for a Canadian International Development Agency project.

The Life and Death of Hermes Uy, which combines world mythology, alternative Chinese-Filipino history, and pop-culture, first appeared in Heights.

REPRODUCED HERE is most of “The Life and Death of Hermes Uy,” which is found in Rainier Chua’s Mysterious Ongpin: a Collection of Stories on Chinese Entrepreneurs (1972, Manila: Newlife Publishing)

[A]nd if one were to go down P. Damaso, one would surely notice the site of the first Athena Drug Store. Although boarded-up for more than a decade, the building still hints of an opulent past. Each intricate groove of the once-famous carvings on the facade is still deep; every plank-covered window still retains some welcoming magnificence. On rainy days, when the drains clog and the floodwaters begin to rise, one can see the drug store in a dirty, ever-changing mirror. Frankly, there is not much difference. For all its hints of an opulent past, the building is still abandoned and decaying. However, in the 1950’s, the first branch of the Athena Drug Store chain was one of the most talked-about places in Manila, mostly due to the efforts of Hermes Uy, its owner.

Born in the middle of the 1930’s, Hermes was a child of the War. His father migrated from Nanking in the 1920’s, bringing nothing but his doctorate in Classical Western Studies. Nonetheless, he was able to marry, finding a wife from the thousands of sangleys that occupied Manila in its post-Parian era.

Without any university post, his degree simply did not translate into money. Because of this, Hermes’ father had to find employment in his father-in-law’s furniture shop, where his job was to carve the less-intricate designs on the cheaper orders.

Being a specialist in Hellenic mythology, Hermes’ father chose to name his firstborn Hermes, for all the kicking in his wife’s stomach reminded him of the wily messenger of the gods.

However, when Hermes Uy was born on November 18, 1935, there seemed nothing godly about him. At birth, he weighed seven pounds and had no birthmarks. Hermes Uy’s first years were also not very memorable. However, This was to change with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hermes was barely six when war broke out. By then, he had lived a life that, save for the occasional stories from Greek mythology and the constant exposure to the smell of lacquered wood, was perfectly nondescript for a Chinese boy in Manila. With the outbreak of war, Hermes’ father, the memories of the Rape of Nanking still fresh in his memory, immediately forsook his life as a minor furniture carver and volunteered to serve as a member of the Hua Chi militia, leaving both wife and son to head for the hills. Despite this, Hermes and his mother did not starve throughout the war.

In the days of the Japanese occupation, when the most basic necessities were rationed and Mickey Mouse money caused massive inflation, Hermes proved himself very resourceful. A few weeks after the Imperial Army established itself as Manila’s new ruler, some of those who ventured outdoors were treated to an interesting sight.

Outside the Uy’s house, people noticed little papier-mâché figures on a cardboard box. There was a Manchu emperor, flanked by an elegantly dressed courtesan beside a caged Pegasus. There was also a barong-clad gentleman on a carabao, which was being led by the Greek god Pan. All the papier-mâché figures were all automated.

The little Manchu emperor, seated on his Imperial throne, would look up and down, his contented smile visible to all. In contrast, the pretty courtesan would cover her face with one of her long sleeves, now and then moving her arm to show an intricately designed face, with the lips drawn in a demure manner. The comedy of the elegant man in a barong riding the carabao was highlighted by the mans scratching his butt as the carabao swung its tail. However, Pan and the Pegasus were faulty in that their divinity seemed to be more nominal than anything. Pans movements resembled a slow goat, while Hermes Uys Pegasus was more of an old nag than anything else.

Nonetheless, the public did not seem to mind these faults and as the days passed, more people stopped to watch the performances of the papier-mâché figures. Eventually, the show caught the attention of the Japanese Imperial Army.

The Japanese dispatched several soldiers to check the shows. When the soldiers returned, they made a full report to Lieutenant General Kinhide Tanaka, who commanded Manila during the early days of the occupation. The news the soldiers gave was interesting. The show apparently amused the soldiers, who said that although they found no subversive material in the show, it would have been better if Japanese figures were included. Lt. Gen. Tanaka regarded this matter for a few seconds. He saw Hermes’ figures as a way of gaining public support for the Japanese. He quickly sent for Hermes.

Although an ethnic Chinese, Hermes did not show any resentment towards the Japanese. He agreed to put in a grand samurai and a kabuki actor in his theatre of papier-mâché figures, the Japanese pledging to supply them with two extra rations of food for the duration of the war. The next day, the Japanese were pleased to see a grand samurai warrior beside the barong-clad man on the carabao. With his great katana, the samurai would strike at invisible enemies. The kabuki actor never did show up. However, nobody seemed to mind, not even the Japanese, who never noticed that their samurai was made out of shredded Mickey Mouse money. The Uys ate well for most of the war because of the agreement, even after the mechanical movements of the Manchu emperor finally grounded to a halt.

A few months after leaving to join the guerrillas, Hermes’ father came home. He had been injured in one of the skirmishes that the Hua Chi unit figured in, a stray bullet shattering his kneecap. Although he hated the Japanese, he accepted his family’s extra rations without a qualm, as he had learned in the front that hunger was more dangerous than any human enemy.

As the war progressed, the family craved and ate many times, usually under the obscure cover of anonymity. However, the 1945 surrender of the Japanese heralded new times for the Uy household.

His father-in-law long dead and the furniture business long gone, Hermes’ father found a job in the US army stock rooms. He made friends in the US army, who encouraged him to sell surplus army goods to the public, whose appetites were already whetted by years without Coca-Cola, Hershey’s and Spam.

While his father grew wealthy, Hermes moved into his teens. He did not do well in school, despite his father’s PhD. By his 16th birthday, he had only completed a third grade education. The odd skills that he showcased as a child seemed to have disappeared. He spent most of his time idle, the only sign of brain activity was his fiddling of the abacus his mother gave him when he was younger. Occasionally, the sharp collision of beads would be heard around the Uy household through the wee hours of the morning. Though her sleep was disturbed, Hermes mother would wear a strange smile as she listened to the sound of clashing beads. However, his father thought differently. He attributed his sons behavior to a childhood enclosed in the smell of lacquer. The former professor of Classical Western Studies seemed to forget that it was his sons shows that kept the family full during the War. It didnt really matter though. Business was brisk. Life was good.

And so, when his father died of an aneurysm during the early months of 1950, Hermes found himself with a sizable amount of money. Yet, with his mother an unskilled housewife and Hermes halfway to a grade school diploma, the family knew that their present life was not sustainable. Adding to the family’s problems was the fact that Hermes was still a Chinese citizen under Filipino law and therefore prohibited from professional occupations. As such, like many other Chinese, he was forced to set up his own business.

For weeks, Hermes did not know what to do. He paced around the house, smoking pack after pack of cigarettes. One night, Hermes suddenly stopped in mid-track. To the amazement of his mother, he told her detailed ideas on how he was to dabble in the pharmaceutical trade, how he was to make and market placebos and how he would import chemicals from Taiwan. His mother’s shock wore off the next day as she woke up seeing Hermes sitting down, staring into space as he moved beads on his abacus. Yet, Hermes was all but idle. As he sat, Hermes toyed with using his name on the shop’s signboard. He imagined a big sign with the words Hermes’ Drug Store – The Fastest Service in Manila in bold colors. However, when he checked his father’s notebooks for the meaning of his name, he discovered that Hermes was also the god of thieves. He looked at the other pages of the notebooks, and saw many interesting possibilities. From Zeus to Apollo to even Asklepios. Eventually, he decided on the goddess Athena, conjuring up the now-famous slogan of Athena Drug Store –The Wise Choice.

With Athena Drug Store already a reality in his mind, the next few months was a flurry of activity for Hermes, who tirelessly went through the bureaucracy involved in setting a business.

On March 14, 1951, the first branch of Athena Drug Store opened on P. Damaso. Only Hermes’ mother, a few curious people and those enticed by the promise of a 10% opening day discount bothered to drop by.

People found the early version of Athena Drug Store neat but bland. It was a one-floor place, its centerpiece a huge wooden counter with the insides hollowed out and made into a glass-covered cupboard. Different-sized medicine bottles were put on display under the green-hued glass. During the first few weeks, the neighborhood children would go to the store, and press their hands and foreheads to the glass display case. Then, they would step back and giggle at the foggy green imprints they left. They would then run out to the shouting of Hermes Uy. It seemed that these periodic episodes were the only things that gave life to Athena Drug Store, which almost broke even on the first month.

Poring over his receipts, Hermes couldn’t understand why Athena Drug Store had made such a small profit. His selection was complete, his store clean and he served his customers courteously and quickly. Seeing nothing wrong with his store, he decided to look outside his shop.

Hermes noticed the different vendors hawking their wares. He looked at their sun-baked faces and their sweat-stained camisa de chinos and skirts. They sold a variety of goods. There were wicker baskets full of ukoy, biscuits and balut. Bilaos of puto and kutsyinta were beside plastic water pistols, rosaries and candles. Each vendor had his or her own way to attract customers. Some gesticulated in the air, drawing attention to their goods through the language of movement. Others whistled in high and low pitches, filling the air with disorganized musicality. There were even those who took to tapping the shoulders of prospective customers then, with a smile and a wink, would offer a sliver of puto or shoot a stray cat with a water pistol. After looking at the vendors, Hermes went back into the store. He had an idea.

The next day, Athena Drug Store did not open. Instead, Hermes was seen talking to some vendors. Their meeting was held under the oppressive April heat. There were proposals and counterproposals, ideas accepted and refuted. Finally, after three hours, the two sides reached an agreement.

Over the next few days, people passing through P. Damaso noticed something odd. Save for the ones near the Church of Sta. Catalina, there were no more vendors. Absent were the gestures, sounds and distractions that somehow gave character to the avenue. Although a lot of people were flabbergasted, it was not long before it became known that the missing vendors had begun working at Athena Drug Store.

With the introduction of the street vendors, Athena Drug Store changed. New shelves were added, since the store now began to carry a variety of goods, some common on the street, while others, rare imports. The usual bilaos of kakanin were placed beside bottles of the finest balsamic vinegar. Plastic water pistols were guarded by red-coated tin soldiers. It seemed that Hermes Uy was bent on Athena Drug Store becoming a self-contained commercial center. As they had done in the streets, the vendors used their methods to coax customers into buying, their shrill sounds and amusing gestures infusing the store with a bazaar-like aura. Yet as before, Hermes would always be the one who closed the store, checking and tabulating the receipts for the day.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people began to visit the drug store. Professionals and the unemployed, maids, and even lawyers were among those who rubbed elbows daily at Athena Drug. Clearly, Hermes’ plan was a success, albeit not without problems.

While the number of customers grew, the store still stayed the same. In only a few weeks, the store began to look cramped. The vendors drowned each other’s sales pitches. People increasingly found it difficult to buy what they needed. It soon became apparent that the bazaar idea would only work if the number of people remained constant at a certain level. As such, no one was shocked when Athena Drug Store was closed on January 28, 1952 for renovations. People saw this as a minor inconvenience and as most of them were wont to do, went elsewhere to shop.

It is hard to know Hermes Uy’s activities during the period between January 28, 1952, and October 29 of that same year, when the Athena Drug Store reopened. Rumors were common among the curious. It was said that he was involved in some shady deals during those months. Others even hinted of dealings with the occult. However, in truth, no one was sure of anything.

On October 29, 1952, Athena Drug Store reopened. Although the sidewalk vendors were still there, people saw that the store was much different from the one that tried to be the people’s bazaar.

Spanning three floors, the new Athena Drug Store was much bigger, as if it were a whole world compressed into an area only three stories high. Aside from the vendors of yesteryears, there were also a lot of new employees. It almost seemed that Hermes went around the whole world, looking for new employees and goods. There were Khmer silversmiths, Chinese contortionists, British tailors who churned out bundles of tweed, and even Japanese who lacquered pieces of driftwood. There was even a Greek merchant selling antiques, with rumors circulating of Athena’s mirrored Bronze shield and helmet of invisibility, as well as the tapestry woven by Arachne as being hidden among his trunks. As the first floor still looked like the grand drug store bazaar of old, with its bilaos of kakanin and red-coated British tin soldiers, the second floor seemed to belong to a different world.

Here, there was a theatre where porcelain-faced dolls sat up, danced and talked, not just among themselves, but with perspective buyers too. They would tell melancholic stories that were not just untrue, but also painful and almost credible as well. They would talk of separations from old loved-ones and the possibilities of new love stories. They would dance their nimble beats, their glass eyes somehow reflecting the pain that the listeners felt with every syllable said by the doll. It was a weird sight, really, with grown men loving and crying over dolls, which were controlled by a puppet master in the background.

The second floor also contained a small, darkened bar, where the soft strains of jazz fluidly moved with the soft murmurs of people. The trombone player was a Negro, and just like the others downstairs, no one knew where he was from. Although the bar served the usual drinks and cocktails, there was one drink that brought attention. Called Bacchus’ delight, it was a gold-hued concoction that was said to contain ambrosia and nectar. With this drink, rumors ran rife that Hermes had found the secret to happiness.

Although people moved around the first two floors of the new Athena Drug Store, there was a big, thick chain that wound around the banisters of the staircase that led to the top floor. In time, people began to whisper about what was on that floor. Those who still believed that Hermes Uy had demonic connections said that this was where the black Sabbath was held. Others thought it to be a calamansi-soaked depository for the corpses of immigration officials who had threatened to have Hermes deported. Some even speculated that the third floor was a gateway to a realm that had everything but was nothing in itself, a place of nil where one could procure anything out of the void.

The third floor was actually the store’s stock room, a dusty place with bales and crates labeled in scripts both familiar and indecipherable. For his part, although Hermes Uy was somewhat aware of the rumors that went around about him and his store, he paid little attention to quashing them. It didn’t do him any real harm, and was even good for business in a way.

During those times, business was truly good, and Hermes found himself reaping rising profits. Yet, money didn’t change Hermes, who remained in control of the subtleties involved in running the drug store. During the lean hours, Hermes would remain behind the green-hued glass counter, filling prescriptions. However, as soon as the crowd thickened, Hermes would leave his spot behind the counter and go around the store to supervise his realm. He would make his rounds round the grand bazaar, looking over the quality of his merchandise and questioning the vendors about the day’s details. It seemed as if his sharp eyes were many, such things as loose threads and mild discolorations not escaping the web of his all-encompassing glance. After going around the bazaar, he would then head to the theatre of the dolls, where in the shadows, he would talk to the puppet master. When the whispers in the backdrop of the theatrical laughter and tears had finally fallen silent, he would then usually head towards the bar. In the bar, Hermes would have a glass of Black Jade liquor and with that done, would walk back to his spot behind the counter. He would then wait for closing time, watching as each person left. After the last customer left and the last employee gone home, Hermes would start going about the receipts for the day.

Yet people rarely talked about the work ethic of Hermes Uy. Aside from the different rumors that periodically circulated about Hermes’ evil dealings, people also put their sights on looking for flaws in the store, things that they considered telltale signs of an inevitable collapse. These people would point out that the store’s partial nature as a bazaar made it a potential haven for pickpockets. The same ilk would also sneer that the theatre of dolls was a sham that played on people’s love for archaic melodrama, and that the presence of the jazz bar drew people away from church. Even though the presence of these flaws were argued eloquently, there were things that were obviously overlooked. First, these people were not aware that ever since part of it became an unofficial bazaar, there have been no incidents of theft in the drug store. Unknown to most, Hermes Uy employed quite a large number of plainclothes security men, who silently whisked people away at the slightest movement towards trouble. Moreover, almost no one knew that Hermes had a huge computer installed in a bunker beneath the store. A vacuum tube-loaded monstrosity that filled the whole room, this computer was designed to monitor and record all the activities happening within the store at all times, which it stored as encoded data. The store’s detractors also overlooked that the appeal of the theater was the raw emotion the dolls brought forth to people who considered themselves immune to emotions. In fact, some of the people who scorned the theatre covertly owned a few talking dolls in their homes. The comedy behind the jazz bar comment was heightened by the fact that Hermes Uy was a non-practicing Buddhist.

As time passed, the store’s profits grew, and accordingly, Hermes turned to philanthropy, donating sizable amounts to the Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, The Sun Yet Sen Society and The Hua Chi volunteer’s fund. Though life was good, Hermes knew that things would not always go smoothly.

In November of 1953, Hermes’ mother died. Hermes closed the store for a week. The wake was at the old La Funeraria Paz in Recto. Through Hermes’ philanthropy and sheer number of loyal customers, there were a lot of guests offering both flowers and condolences. While the servants rolled the fake money and listed the real kind, Hermes sat in the front pew. He received guests cordially, shook their hands, exchanged a few curt words, then slunk back into his pew.

On July 24, 1954, President Ramon Magsaysay signed the Trade Nationalization Act into law, which made it illegal for foreigners to take part in the rice, rubber and retail industries. A lot of foreign-owned businesses were affected. Athena Drug Store was no exception, especially since rice, rubber and retail goods formed an integral part of the bazaar. And so, despite rising profits, Athena Drug Store was once again shut down on August 11, 1954. For one whole year, the store remained closed, yet during this time Hermes tried to drum up excitement for the latest incarnation of his shop.

In the months preceding the opening of the newest version of the drug store, people began seeing interesting posters around Manila. In the early months, the posters depicted the Greek gods in different states of repose. There was the splendor of Zeus and Poseidon in the majesty of their realms. The twins Apollo and Artemis were shown contemplating their lyre and bow. There was even the misshapen Hephaestos working the bellows. Yet the poster that was by far the most popular was the one of a bare-breasted Aphrodite smiling seductively from her crib of foam. However, in the weeks leading to the actual opening of the store, a different series of posters began circulating.

While the Greek gods were once again put into focus, the new posters seemed to attempt to reach a wider audience. It was apparent that Hermes Uy had managed to crack some sort of deal with the Vera family, who owned Sampaguita Pictures. In her usual place as the lead role, Gloria Romero posed as different incarnations of Athena. Ranging from parodies of Uncle Sam’s I want you posters to more original posters showing Athena as a pinay everywoman, the posters appealed to everyday Filipinos. There were also posters that included Marlene Dauden as Aphrodite, Susan Roces as Artemis, Mario Montenegro as Zeus and Eddie Arenas as a sinister-looking Hades. Like Gloria Romeros Athena, the latter posters of the other gods were mostly caricatures. There was Zeus in his philandering mode, surrounding himself with lithe maidens. There was Hades proclaiming to the world that Athena Drug Store was the path towards an exciting life. There was even a poster of Pan, half of his face human and handsome where he had applied Athena Drug face cream.

And so, when Athena Drug Store finally opened again on August 11, 1955, hundreds of people eagerly turned up. They were not disappointed. While the world bazaar was greatly cramped by the trade nationalization law, the new store made sure that people would not miss the vendors and their goods.

Outside the store was a huge bronze statue of Athena with one of her hands outstretched towards an olive tree. On the first floor, where half of the bazaar once stood, there was now a mini theatre that not only showed the latest films of James Dean, but also the most exciting 3D movies as well. The scaled-down bazaar sold the trendiest goods such as stateside wiffle balls, phonographs and hair grease. Perhaps the most notable addition was a Belgian who would create caricatures of clients on small tapestries in half an hour. There were no more stairs in the whole store. Instead, Hermes Uy installed the first escalators in the country. How the excitement burned on people’s faces as they rode the escalators, terror and pleasure melding into one as they saw the ground shrink right in front of their very eyes. Women shrieked. Children squealed. Men gasped.

While the escalators proved to be popular and amazing to the crowds, nothing could prepare people for what lay on the second floor. The theatre of the dolls was gone, the only things that hinted of its existence being a sense of melancholia and a faint smell of tears that lingered in the air. In its place was a row of glass boxes, each filled with muddy water and framed by layers of polished brass. While the dolls were appealing because they touched and released each person’s inner melancholia, the brass-trimmed boxes bored into the recesses of each person’s soul, satisfying lifelong hungers in a few rented minutes. Through looking at what was reflected through the opaque muddiness, people began to satisfy dreams that were once implausible and unreachable. Some chose to blend into the darkness, twisting their beings into shadowed abstractions until they returned to nothingness. Others saw the need to transform themselves into beings of superhuman power. There were even those who tried to reconstruct their features towards what they considered as the perfect human.

The bar remained where it was, with the same drinks and the same band, which oddly enough, still played the same songs.

Perhaps the biggest addition to the Drug Store was the opening of the third floor, which was now the Hallway of Clear Minds. There, the distraught walked around in circles. The rejected and the heartbroken remained autistic to others. The bankrupt sat in the corner, silently reminiscing better times. Even those without problems roamed the hall, as most found the soft lighting relaxing. When these people would leave, they always felt much better, as if they were able to sort their minds.

As Athena Drug Store changed, so did Hermes Uy. No longer was he seen behind the green glass counter in the middle of the store. It is said that he enjoyed roaming around the drug store in different disguises in order to find out what people wanted to be improved and expanded. One day he was an old, bespectacled lady laden with jewels. The next day he was one of the few vendors that were left in the old bazaar, a Zulu. And the day after he was a disheartened youth wandering around the Hallway of Clear Minds. However, Hermes still gave increasing amounts of money to charity. And even in disguise, Hermes Uy still insisted on being the last one to leave the store, only leaving after going over all the receipts for the day.

It is apparent that all the disguise-filled days of Hermes were not wasted in vain. For, in the next few years, while a few new branches of Athena Drug Store opened, the original store also grew bigger and more intricate.

In December of 1955 and without closing the store, Hermes started the first of his new improvements. He redecorated and revamped the first floor. In a move similar to his pre-reopening posters, he had workmen paint murals of the Greek gods on the walls. Now, customers could go around the shop under the watchful eyes of Poseidon quenching his thirst on an Athena Drug tonic or Helios applying suntan lotion. The bazaar, now a fraction of its former size, was now divided into different themes. There was an Arab souk and a Chinese medicine corner; the different smells of frankincense, cloves and rose water intoxicating customers. Under the projector at the back of the theatre, a strange box etched with indecipherable inscriptions was placed. Upon receiving their 3D glasses, each moviegoer was hooked to the box via a special apparatus that was strapped to their torsos. As the movie started, and things started jumping off the screen, people had an experience of the 4th dimension, the sensations they felt being a flurry of something beyond description in the limits of the three dimensions.

From this point until April 14, 1957, Athena Drug Store underwent a series of changes. New annexes and extensions were built. Some proved man’s mastery over the tools that allowed him to move above his normal capabilities. These included a machine that allowed one to understand all the subtleties involved in each word and a room that allowed people to actually experience their dreams. Other rooms, such as the one-way portal to unknown places, failed to generate any income. The huge Athena statue also changed a few times as well, with a depiction of Athena’s birth from Zeus’ split head erected one day, then replaced by Athena receiving Medusa’s head from Perseus the next week. Towards the end of 1956, Hermes installed a chorus of automated mud dolls. On all floors, they sang, moved and played among themselves, letting their bird-like voices resonate through all the rooms in the horizontally growing building. It is said that the songs of the singing mud dolls were reflective of Hermes Uy’s mood. Yet, for all the sad and happy, bitter and lovesick songs of the dolls, nobody knew much of what Hermes had become. So, it was to the shock of most on Christmas day, 1956, when the dolls began to sing Christian hymns.

While no one is sure if Hermes really did convert to Christianity, it still remains an interesting possibility. Around this time, the newer additions to Athena Drug Store were mostly empty rooms of gold carpet and white paint. And so people naturally figured that Hermes might have been spending more time in Church than his drug store. The empty rooms continued to sprout up, and not a word was ever heard of Hermes until the middle of the next year, when he died.

Although no exact records exist, the account of the death of Hermes Uy presented here is judged by most to be the most accurate, since it is based on data supposedly found in Hermes’ underground computer.

The humid air of that April 14 night was as always, a bother for Hermes Uy, who had just completed the day dressed as a police officer. He had just finished the last of the 79 rooms that made up what was once a simple drug store. Making his way to the green-hued counter in the middle of the store, he switched on the electric fan. It had been wise of him to make the little mud dolls sing Christian hymns, he thought as he twirled the scapular around his neck. He took out thick ledgers from underneath the table and went through the receipts for the day.

While he was going over the figures for the day, something caught the corner of his eye. Though the movie stars that graced the Athena Drug Store calendar that hung in one corner were all still there, the image of the goddess was not. Hermes put down his pen and moved closer.

It was definitely gone, the paper intact but blank. The smiling Athena was really gone. Perplexed, Hermes looked around.

All the images of Athena were gone. There was no trace of her on the posters, murals and calendars that were scattered all over the room. He realized that they were all gone, all missing from the different items in the 79 rooms and three floors of the drug store. It was then that he saw them. Two-dimensional bodies of plastic, paint and paper translucent in the fluorescent glow, flanked the latest version of Athena’s bronze statue, an Athena in full battle gear.

Though clunky-looking, the statue moved so swiftly that Hermes Uy had no time to move before he was slapped by the statue. The slap was so strong that Hermes was flung to the floor, his head crushed, the bronze Athena walking away as the multitude of smaller Athenas rushed towards his body, the plastic ones swaying more fluidly than the ones made of paper.

Quickly they fell upon him, flat bodies worming their way up his legs, then up his torso, to his neck and face.

Athena Drug Store failed to open the next day. People thought that it was another of Hermes Uy’s renovations and paid it little attention. Months, then years passed, with most unaware that not only was Hermes Uy gone from this world, but the doors of Athena Drug store were never to open again, cobwebs and dust collecting where a goddess once roamed.

Copyright © Dean Francis Alfar 2012

Cover art by Lester Banzuelo

Cover design by Adam David

ePub design and production by Flipside team

eISBN 978-971-9951-00-1

This e-book edition published 2012 by Kestrel DDM

and Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.

Quezon City, Philippines

flipside.ph

Table of Contents

Title page

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Jan’s Door

The Doppler Effect

Tendresse

Lovelore

EmberWild

Walking Backwards

New Wave Days

L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)

The Coward’s Quest

Room Three

Instructions on How to Disappear

The Pepe Report

In the Arms of Beishu

An Introduction to the Luminescent

The Family that Eats Soil

Regiment

The Catalogue of the Damned

The Life and Death of Hermes Uy

Copyright page