Ilustrado Page 32

  “The safest place for us is in the car. Your driver’ll be here soon.”

  The dark mass moves closer. Sadie holds her breath. She switches on the headlights, but they are already submerged. What little light they cast skims the surface of the water, as if our car sits on the edge of the moon’s broad reflection on a pond. What had been looming now arrives.

  It’s one of those ice cream carts wheeled around town by bell-clanging vendors. Painted white with jaunty blue and red embellishments, the word STARBUCKS is stenciled along its side. The cart stops, then is moved again by a current that seems to be getting steadily stronger. The shadows behind it shift. A flash of green reveals two children perched upon the cart. A flash of blue shows them to be a girl of around ten carrying her naked toddler brother.

  *

  Even as he watches, he hears the keystrokes from a distant dream. An old man imagining and typing what must be said.

  Poor little rich boy. A side must be taken. If you choose your own, you side with oppression, fratricide, indifference—you will never be content among your own. Rich little poor boy. If you side with the others, you choose treason, patricide, betrayal—you will never be accepted among those unlike you. Religion taught you to revere the family. Education taught you to value the majority over the few. Something to be done, Pozzo. You cannot sit this out. The airplane has landed. The people have clapped. Take a last breath. You’re on the stage.

  He sits under the lights, thinking of a second option for a life. Patience, however, is just another name for inaction.

  *

  I watch them float haltingly, the cart catching on the submerged street. They are less alarming as shadows than when lit up and helpless.

  *

  Even as he thinks, he rationalizes yet a third option for a life.

  A splash is made to save the children, to hoist them the few yards to safety, to watch them scuttle back to hidden places, to be a hero engorged with hidden pride, the trumpets crying joyfully, to announce his guiltless return to America, having done his small part, to start a new life in Park Slope with the malleable young Sadie, and with the confidence that comes with being loved by a young beauty, he will sit down and finish my biography, and it will make him feel fulfilled, because he will have written with the vigor of the newly liberated, because he will have, in one single soggy act, absolved himself of our sins.

  *

  “If you open the door, the car will get ruined,” Sadie says. She’s crying. “My dad will kill me.”

  We both turn around. The road that was just several yards behind us is now vanished under the flood.

  “My driver will be here any minute . . .”

  I look at the water. What if it’s too deep? I think of my father, running into the burning airplane. What if he hadn’t been so foolhardy? I don’t want to go into that flood. What if he hadn’t been so selfish to his children? No. We need the people we love to be heroes. We need to know that somewhere someone better than ourselves can save us.

  “Please don’t,” Sadie sobs. She’s clinging to the steering wheel as if it were a life raft. “Nobody will see you.”

  I don’t want to go. But I’m afraid of what I would become. “Sadie, come with me.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “You don’t have to, either.”

  The door is heavy and won’t open. What if she’s right? I lean my entire weight against it and it gives only slightly. Water pushes into the car. It’s warm and oddly comforting around my feet and ankles. I can’t open the door. I’m stuck. I don’t have to, go. I look at Sadie. She’s tucking her knees up against her chest, Manolo Blahniks in either hand, her feet stacked on top of each other. The water is rising in the recesses of the car floor. I pull the door closed. I open the window. The electric motor grinds down with difficulty. I want it to make it, but I want it to fail. It makes it. The flood is almost level to the open window. When the fireworks light, the surface is glassy, gloomily reflective. I see myself in it, like a mirror, watch myself pulling my body through the window and falling forward, my face meeting my face, into the brown, muculent filth. My feet flay for the bottom. Sadie is screaming. Maybe she’s right. I find my footing. Her pleas urge me on. The water is chest high.

  An orange firework lights up the sky, then fades. The current is strong. The ground beneath me is reassuring. I stagger toward the children. A red firework paints the distance between us. The sister watches me with a blank expression. She becomes a shadow. The darkness between flashes is interminably private. She and her brother are bright yellow. I smile and wave. What the fuck am I doing? She shifts her brother higher against her shoulder, moves to tighten her fingers and legs onto the ice cream cart. The brother hides his face in her shoulder. Darkness again. Unseen things touch my legs, wrap around my waist, then are pushed away by the current. The children look like ghosts. Everything is too sodden or afraid or exhausted for sound. “I’m nearly there,” I shout in Tagalog. Then we’re all gloriously blue and I’m close. Five more steps. The little girl whispers something to her brother, who turns. He smiles, his round cheeks and forehead a fading sheen of azure, then a bright and deep yellow. The girl’s teeth flash livid lemon. Three more steps. The children stare like statuary, their slick faces brassy from the spectacle in the sky. Something brushes my leg. The children put out their arms to me. Two more steps. Their faces, orange on one side, emerald on the other, smiling like the kids I’d see at Fourth of July celebrations on the banks of the East River. One more step.

  My foot searches for ground. My whole body plunges into empty darkness.

  9

  In the dark emptiness, the light is a rectangle like the corona of an eclipse. The knob is wet in his hand. Maybe it is his hand that is wet. Two lines crease his palm like sister rivers. Or maybe they are different parts of the same river. The door swings. I call to him from inside, “There you are, my protagonist.”

  He steps gingerly on the sandy floor. I sit in a circle of brightness at my desk. “A dream is a palimpsest,” I say. My typewriter steams before me, the fingertips of my right hand embraced by the keys. My other hand I hold out to him. A bloody hole through the palm is where a scar once was. I tell him one of our jokes. “Why can’t Jesus eat M&Ms?” The young man shakes his head. I reply, “Because the M&Ms keep falling through the holes.”

  He turns to rush away, but moves ever so slowly. As if running through water. In the hallway mirror, he is naked. He leans toward his reflection. He sees an image of me, as I once was. He reaches out his hand. Or is his hand following mine? Our fingers touch. The mirror ripples.

  *

  The surface of the glassy sky shudders. His feet find a bottom, he pulls up, and follows his arm through and out the water, his fingers a rictus gripping a handhold in the air. Our gallant protagonist stands and coughs, lungs heaving gratefully. The warm water tasted like phlegm. The depth is now chest high. The two children are several yards away, their ice cream cart stuck. Floating quickly past are leafy branches, the head of a bald Barbie doll, an empty bottle of Silver Swan soy sauce, plastic bags like jellyfish. He wades through the sludge, his movement ever so slow. Gossamer newspaper pages wrap and disintegrate against his arms and chest. How—he wonders—did the distance between us become so great?

  He reaches the children. The fireworks continue, flashing their faces green, blue, red, yellow. He takes the toddler tightly in his arms. The sister clambers onto his back. They weigh surprisingly little. It is our young man who now feels safe.

  The riverized road glows suddenly with elemental whiteness. His shadow, stretching against a cinderblock wall, transforms into a three-headed monster. He turns around. It’s the twin suns of headlights. A four-by-four vehicle.

  *

  Mutya slides her hands over Antonio’s bare chest. “Mr. Astig,” she says, touching his many scars. He sits up before she can ask how he got them. He adjusts the satin sheet around her shoulders. Their sweat still trickles between her bounteous breasts from their lovemakin
g. He leans in and licks it up.

  “Now that you’ve saved the damsel,” Mutya says, running her hands through his hair, “what’s left?”

  “I have an old iron thumbscrew with Dominador’s name on it.”

  “That’s how the story ends?”

  “For him. Not me.”

  “Tony, you held him under a canning machine and he lost his testicles . . .”

  “But he got away! What about all those dead women? Life goes on without them?”

  “If you want to fight corruption, baby, you have to start with yourself.”

  Antonio stands and goes to the window. From that height, Metro Manila looks untroubled.

  “Antonio, I’m sorry.” Mutya wraps the sheet around her and goes to him. She puts her cheek on his shoulder and looks at the gray city. “It’s about more than Dominador. I know. But sometimes courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.”

  “There’s too much that needs to be done.”

  “Don’t be a hero.”

  “I never said I wanted to be one.”

  —from Manila Noir (page 182), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  Sadie doesn’t say a word inside the F150. She just sits as if at the edge of a deep sobbing. Her eyes are so dark they look like they have been gouged out. Her driver has no face and he stops at the police substation behind the Hotel InterContinental. They let the sodden trio out before roaring off without a word. The truck’s red lights blur, then fade, then disappear in the rain. The police lieutenant looks surprised. Or perhaps it’s more like he’s just woken up. He gets blankets for the children, kneels to dry their hair, rub their shoulders, then looks up at the young man. Another cop, wearing fuzzy bedroom slippers and a wifebeater shirt with his uniform’s trousers, reclines behind a desk, playing a guitar. The old rock ballad “Patience.” A third cop sits on the desk, his bare foot held in his hands as he clips his toenails. The lieutenant carries the children to where they can lie down. He then tells our courageous protagonist, kindly: “Hurry home.”

  The young man runs in the rain, his limbs loose and free. The puddled sidewalks splash with an irrepressible joy. Suddenly, the hotel is there before him. Its power is out. The desk is unmanned. Upstairs, in candlelight, standing naked and tall in the shower, he stretches his arms up. The bathroom in the darkness looks exactly like the one he and Madison had in Brooklyn, with its peeling paint and Tibetan prayer flags hanging by the window. The water’s flow is cold, as cold as can be stood. It is so cold it does not even feel cold anymore, but reassuring, cleansing, clear.

  *

  “What are you writing?” whispered Millicent.

  “Stuff,” Dulcé said.

  They were sitting beneath the plastic bonsai bodhi tree in the corner of the rec room. Other patients were playing pusoy-dos at the card table, or making portraits of creatures at the art table.

  “What sort of stuff?” insisted Millicent.

  “Just stuff.”

  “Let me guess. A letter to your real dad? Or, hmm. Maybe our escape plan?”

  “Just stuff I’m making up. Fiction.”

  Nearby, Ceferina glanced up from her painting of a three-headed cat. She stared at Dulcé, then called out, “Nurse Erlinda! I think Dulcé is talking to herself again!”

  The pencils and cards and paintbrushes in the room froze as everyone stared at Dulcé. Nurse Erlinda looked over from where she sat at the art table. She smiled sadly. “Ceferina, Dulcé’s just writing silently,” she said. Josie, who was painting beside Nurse Erlinda, offered in her mousy voice, “Maybe she’s praying.”

  The quiet activity resumed in the room. A few seconds later, Dulcé whispered carefully, “I told you, Millie, be more quiet.”

  “Gee! Well excuuuse me.” Millicent started pulling at her curly purple hair the way she did when upset. “I suspect Ceferina knows your real dad will break us out of here.”

  “There’s nothing to know. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Hey, Dul, when we get out of here, what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I think I’d like to be a pilot.”

  “I don’t think they’ll let you be a pilot.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  Dulcé put down her notebook and studied her friend unrolling the curls in her frizzy hair and watching them pop back.

  “I’m sorry, Millie,” Dulcé said. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “So whatcha gonna do when you get out?”

  “I think I’ll be a writer.”

  “What are you going to write?”

  “A book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “A book of possibilities.”

  —from Ay Naku!, Book Three of Crispin Salvador’s Kaputol trilogy

  *

  When he awakens in the midafternoon, he is not surprised that there were no more dreams. It’s as if he closed his eyes briefly and night changed to day. Water still sloshes in his ears, like echoes of things familiar. Downstairs, the regular concierge is behind his desk, sleeping with his head on the registration book. The concierge startles awake to greet our serene protagonist as he walks outside. “Hello, Sarge,” the concierge calls out. Across the wet, busy street, breakfast at Tapa King is already waiting.

  Today’s headline in the Gazette declares: “Dec. 8, 2002—a morning for democ racy as crowds mass for Edsa 5!” The main photograph shows Senator Bansamoro standing protectively beside President Estregan at Malacañang Palace. Bansamoro is in jeans and a bulletproof vest, and is brandishing an ArmaLite. Estregan—paunch tightening the green satin of his hooded robe from his boxing days, making it ride dangerously high on his legs—smiles porcinely. They are surrounded by special-ops troopers in battle gear. The article explains that the restive masses had come close to overpowering the riot cops and storming the palace. Tear-gas canisters and rubber bullets had been loaded. Rocks had filled pockets and lighters had lingered by the wicks of Molotov cocktails. Blood was about to be shed. But Bansamoro appeared outside the palace with troops formerly of his command and held up his pistol to fire a single shot into the air. (The tabloids dubbed it: “The bullet that saved the country.”) The throng surged backward, as if on cue. Before first light the streets were empty.

  At sunrise—says another article—police took possession of the Changco house to discover the couple shot dead. Their son was found hiding inside the household’s large freezer, where he had lain beneath a large turkey as soon as the gunfight started. He suffered from mild hypothermia. “It was a good thing he is very fat,” said Dr. Manuel Manabat, the attending physician at Philippine General Hospital.

  The story on page three says the cause of the explosion at the Philippines First Corporation has not been determined. The office of CEO Dingdong Changco, Jr., issued a statement. A leaking roof and faulty wiring in a generator were blamed.

  *

  I remember the last joke I shared with him.

  Boy Bastos’s daughter Girly asks her father, “Daddy, what is politics?” Boy is very proud of her inquisitiveness. As he’s gotten older, spent and rebuilt the small inheritance his father Erning left him, risen in politics, watched his daughter grow, witnessed his son being born, seen his marriage shed its glitter, he’s realized that our greatest doom is to raise children who’ll repeat our mistakes. This he knows is something he doesn’t want.

  He says, “Well, Girly-girl, let me explain it this way. First, I’m the head of the family, so you can call me the President. Your mom makes the rules, so you can call her the Government. We’re here to take care of your needs, so we can call you the People. Your yaya Inday works for us, and we pay her for her work, so we’ll call her the Working Class. And your baby brother Junior, let’s call him the Future. Now think about that and see if it makes sense.”

  Girly goes to bed, pondering what she heard. In the middle of the night, Girly awakens. She hears baby brother Junior crying, so she check
s and discovers he’s totally crapped in his diaper. Girly goes to her parents’ room to find her mother fast asleep. Unable to wake her because of the sleeping pills taken every night, Girly goes to her yaya’s room. The door, however, is locked. Girly peeks through the keyhole and sees her father in bed with Inday. Girly goes back to bed.

  At the breakfast table the next morning, Girly tells her father, “Daddy, I think I understand politics now.”

  Boy is proud. “Wow!” he exclaims. “You really are sharp! Explain to us in your own words how politics work.”

  “Well,” Girly begins, “the President is really fucking the Working Class. And the Government doesn’t do anything except sleep and sleep. Nobody ever pays attention to the People. And the Future, well, the Future swims in shit.”

  Boy Bastos kisses her proudly on the head.

  Eventually, Girly grows up. She marries the prominent Attorney Arrayko and becomes the country’s most popular economist, senator, and then vice president. When the president at the time is ousted by yet another Edsa Revolution, Girly succeeds him. As she takes the presidential oath of office, she remembers all the wise lessons she learned from her iconoclastic father, Boy, and the legacy of her industrious lolo, Erning. President Girly Bastos Arrayko becomes the hope of the country. The end, however, proves that the joke’s on us, and we all know the punch line.

  *

  The taxi driver asks cheerfully: “Forbes Park, sir?”

  “Yes,” the young man says. “How did you know?”

  The driver whistles the tune from the Marlboro ads, his window down and his hand making content, sinuous motions in the cool wind. “Not yet sun,” the driver says, “but no rain.”