SEVEN
Later that week I went out drinking with Allen Bautista. I was still at the studio following his eleven o’clock news presentation—quite late indeed—going over Friday’s shoot on Lester’s Ghosts. There hadn’t been time earlier. Thursday’s shoot arrived in the guise of insanity. First, our director got himself into a minor car accident on the way to work, forcing his crew into the bureaucratic waiting game of phone calls and testimonies that ever so deliberately pursued. Then our own driver conducted a wrong turn during the journey to that day’s location. Then the van got a flat tire. Then one of the cameramen fell sick.
We arrived at the shooting location—Pasay’s Manila Film Center—three hours late beneath a redolence of diesel fumes and vomit. The film center’s shadowy glower seemed to mock us with a sarcastic greeting. Our work was not facilitated by the fact that none of the crew wished to enter the structure after dark. When I pressed one of the men as to why, he pointed at one of the film center’s enormous pillars (forming a majestic rectangle of 34, from whose depths I could not help but hear a hollow, haunted ring of Ephesus’ dedication to Artemis), and then down into the foundation.
Decrypting this message proved impossible at the time, though I, too, could not deny a certain unwillingness to approach the silent behemoth. It was after 6PM. The sun was setting on Manila Bay, and the hell’s furnace glow it cast upon the pillars—or rather, the darkness behind them—became unsettling to behold. Nietzsche’s abyss returned its stare upon the puny insects gazing into it.
“It is unsettling,” Bautista said presently. He knocked back another swallow of whiskey, then raised his finger for another.
“You’ve been there?” I asked.
“Of course.”
We’d decided upon one of Manila’s less popular bars. I eventually came to learn that the anchorman shared my displeasure with large crowds. Like the film center, this bar was dark, but rather than serve as ghosts, the shadows behaved more in the manner of guests, drinking with peers whose roots owed their origins to low places. Allen and I sat at the bar. Booths lined the walls behind us, in which I could make out the shapes of maybe a dozen other people, their whispers flickering like the candles between them. The room smelled of bamboo, incense, and old wood. And then there was the barmaid, a tiny girl who reminded me of Setti. When Bautista ordered another drink, her eyes flashed for a moment from a bruise-colored canvas of makeup, and I almost asked what she wanted for her birthday, now less than two days off.
“It was a pet project of Imelda Marcos,” the anchorman went on, “built in 1981. In November of that year a scaffolding collapsed during construction. Two hundred men went to their deaths in the concrete foundation.”
At that moment I felt the need to finish my own drink. No wonder the center’s enormity had chilled us so! It was probably haunted. “Are they still down there?” I chanced, remembering how small I’d felt on that silent, sentineled portico. Small and susceptible. Regarded by lurid quietude. A ketch at the jaws of a kraken. “The men?”
Bautista looked at me before replying. “I’m afraid so.”
“Barmaid?” I called.
The dark-eyed girl replenished my fortitude. Still, I began to wish for someone to turn on the television over the bar, perhaps to one of PTN’s mindless sitcoms.
“You know Setti’s birthday is on Saturday,” I pointed out, on the chance it might provide a suitable substitute to our aging laugh-track.
“Yes,” I heard Bautista say. “I bought her a new coffee cup.”
I waited for him to bait me with something along the lines of what about you? But no. The anchorman refused to cast. He was being unusually quiet tonight, fondling his glass as if some treasured, delicate object lay trapped in its facets, confounding all determination.
I didn’t ask him what might be wrong (though I missed his jokes, and his hearty laugh). Instead I asked for advice. Did he know of any special gift that Setti would like?
“Hmm,” Bautista pondered. “I can’t say that I do, Fredo. But if worst comes to absolute worst, take her out to dinner. Someplace nice. And don’t forget the flowers.”
I assured him there was no chance in hell I would forget the flowers (until that very moment, I hadn’t been thinking of flora at all), then, because I found his attention to detail so keen, asked: “Have you ever been married, Allen?”
“Twice. No. Wait. Three times.”
I laughed. “You forgot somebody?”
“She died on our honeymoon.”
I’d been taking a drink as he spoke. A sliver of ice touched the back of my throat. I winced, and apologized for laughing. The day had certainly been bleak, full of car wrecks, bad turns, haunted theaters. Now here floated the ghost of Bautista’s dead bride, substance of a haphazard resurrection, an innocent question. I needed a cut and a retake.
“You couldn’t have known,” Bautista said, as if reading my thoughts. “Besides, it was twenty-five years ago. 1981. We were staying on the 30thfloor of the Hotel Okura. That’s in Tokyo.”
The anchorman went on to describe the wonderful time he and his new wife had been having in Japan, strolling flower gardens, attending tea ceremonies, dining in fine restaurants. The days were sunny and scented with cherry blossoms, the nights cool, breezy, and alive with promises that, could Bautista only believe it, seemed written in the stars.
“But there was something wrong, Fredo. Something dark. It wouldn’t show itself, but I could feel it. A cold hand on the rail of our spiral staircase romance. You know I loved her. Not only because of her beauty. My Marissa was so kind. She gave food and medicine to homeless children. Made sure the stray dogs on our street always had cold water to drink on hot days. She...she washed my clothes and straightened my tie. Never let me go to work without a kiss.”
“Allen,” I began, with an intent to end. He needn’t relive this age-old tragedy for me. I wanted him to understand that. To ascertain and desist.
“Allow me my tale,” Bautista commanded, raising a hand in paradoxical symbolism. “I want to face it. To fulfill its demands.” He took another drink before continuing. “My father used to say, harapin ang katotohanan, bago ka harapin ng katotohanan. Confront the truth before the truth confronts you. And I’ve been pursued for such a long time. So many years.”
I told the anchorman that I would listen. He seemed satisfied. The ice in his glass rattled as he drank the last of that night’s moxie.
“One day we rode a bus through some villages north of Tokyo,” he began. “It was Marissa’s idea. Total whimsy on her part. She wanted us to see a part of the country that most tourists passed over in favor of more urban temptations. We got off at Nikko and went hiking into one of that village’s cedar forests. The day was overcast. Rainy. Water fell from trees high as some of the towers here in Manila. I could smell foliage and wet wood. Soil. Our path led around the side of a hill, where the tiny fingers of that region’s Paris teteraphylla seemed wistful to help us climb. Of course we didn’t climb. We just kept walking, hand in hand. Marissa was smiling. I think I was, too. We didn’t mind the rain.”
“Closing in fifteen minutes,” the barmaid deigned to inform us. She wiped off the counter, daring us with her eyes to make it dirty again.
Bautista thanked her and continued with his story.
“At some point during that walk we came to a tiny Shinto shrine, located on its own little plateau about halfway up the hill. Marissa wanted to climb to it, but I was reluctant. Something about that shrine raised my hackles. A narrow flight of broken steps led to the plateau. At their base stood a leaning Torii that looked unkempt. Unloved. Rained dripped from the twin spaces between its arch-beams, giving them the appearance of weeping eyes. I asked Marissa to leave off. We weren’t Japanese, I reminded her. We had no business forming communication with whatever spirits might be lingering beyond that weary Torii. But she was adamant that we take a closer look, and before I could say anything else, her feet were bounding up the stairs.”
“The most interesting women are the ones most difficult to reign,” I said, taking great care that my tone be affectionate. My success with the endeavor shined when the anchorman smiled and nodded. I had Setti in my heart. I’d been thinking of her as I spoke.
Bautista followed his new bride up the steps. The hem of her dress lifted in the breeze, so that she reached the shrine as if in flight, like that mystical nanny from the pen of Travers, ever so delicate, ever so slight. Her chest heaved a little as she turned to Bautista and flashed a hopeful smile. Knowing what she wanted, Bautista all too happily placed some money in a small red box. Then each of them bowed twice, sent out a prayer (“I didn’t pray for anything, Fredo,” the anchorman told me, “I was already happy...”), bowed once more again, and left the shrine.
“Perhaps I should have prayed,” Bautista mused presently. Behind us, the booths were deserted, their tables clean. Through the bamboo archway I could hear plates being gathered. We were the final patrons. “Or bowed more deeply. I don’t know. That evening we arrived back at the Okura and had dinner. Later I made love to Marissa, though we were both tired from the journey. She fell asleep in my arms.” He paused. “It must have been after midnight when she rose, went out to the balcony, and jumped. The doorman heard something hit the sidewalk. He thought at first one of the guests upstairs had dropped a bag. But no. It was my Marissa. Dead. When she landed, her wedding ring popped off and bounced over the curb. A policeman found it. Many days later, after the administrative autopsy, it was returned to me, slightly bent. Warped. The impact had damaged its integrity.”
I stared at Bautista, unable to manufacture any kind of suitable response. His story was impossible to measure on an empathetic scale. I had no experience tragic enough to compare it to. I looked at my empty glass, then back to Allen.
“Magkano bato?” he muttered to the barmaid.
We paid for our drinks and went outside. The sounds of honking Jeepneys bore down on us from a busy street that smelled of blowing trash. Two dirty children held out their hands for money. I gave them twenty pesos while Bautista hailed a cab.
“How long have you been here now, Fredo?” he asked, after giving the cabbie his address (his condo was closer to the bar than mine).
“I got here in March. Just three months ago. A lot’s happened since then.”
The cab rolled beneath an elevated train line. Shantys clung to graffiti-decorated concrete pillars. Dogs foraged—for masters, for food—around fires nearly dim as the hope in their tenders’ eyes.
“Homesick yet?”
“Not yet. In fact I’ve only called my family once so far. My dad seemed rather distant, like he couldn’t quite remember who I was. And my mom...”
I trailed off. My parents were divorced—had been since I was eight years old. Calling home to Cleveland meant calling two different numbers. My dad had indeed been taciturn on the line. Aloof, like a red balloon over distant trees, drifting further and further away. Fredo, why? That’s what he’d kept asking throughout the call. Fredo, why? I tried to explain that work for television producers in Ohio was scarce. That I needed the experience. Data for my resume. It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Fredo...why? Finally I apologized to him (for what I am still not entirely sure), and promised to call again soon.
My mom had not asked any questions at all. Instead, she had cried. Cried and, to my complete shock, begged for me to stay away. Don’t come home, Fredo. Never come home. It’s so terrible what happened. Gently as possible, I denied this preposterous claim. I told her that my leaving Cleveland had nothing at all whatsoever to do with family. There’d been a job opening and I’d taken it; it was just misfortune the job was located on the other side of the world. Still, my mother spoke as if she never wanted to lay eyes on her son again. Stay away, Fredo. I mean it.
I related these things to Bautista as we rode through streets now wet with rain. The cabbie had switched on a pair of squeaky windshield wipers. Morbidly, I pictured Bautista’s dead wife lying on the sidewalk outside my window, her nightdress drowned in the storm, her broken skull drooling blood. My curiosity quivered to ask what the results of her autopsy had been. That it would have been tactless and insensitive almost didn’t matter enough.
Bautista’s condo was in Bel Air—an upscale neighborhood near Salcedo. When we stopped, a doorman with an umbrella burst from the confines of a maroon awning. He kept the anchorman’s head dry while he stepped from the car.
“Goodnight, Allen,” I called.
Bautista turned to look at me. And his expression...he seemed to have forgotten that I’d ever been riding with him at all. Then, like cigarette smoke drifting from a room, the look of surprise slowly drifted from his face, and Bautista’s eyes became clear.
“A father thinks with his head, Fredo,” he told me from beneath the umbrella, “a mother with her heart. Ilagay ang iyong tiwala sa dalawa.”
With that, he and his doorman trotted off to let the mouth of the awning swallow them whole.
I didn’t know what his Tagalog words meant: My command of the language had yet to become acquainted with what hinterlands lay beyond the elemental walls of necessity. But that was okay, because when I asked the cabbie, he was kind enough to translate.
“Sir!” he barked with a smile. “It means put your trust in both!”
∞
I spent Friday on the cutting room floor with our director. Oliver Madilim was with us. He refused to speak to me; indeed, he barely registered my presence in the room at all. His behavior reminded me of the cab ride with Bautista, how I’d somehow become transparent, my presence in his world for that brief time unlearned.
Rodrigo Reyes wanted eight minutes shaved off the pilot to create more room for commercial interruption. Both the director and myself attempted to explain that, since the pilot wasn’t yet complete, a trip to the cutting room felt premature. But the station manager was already nervous about bloating. The previews, he told us from behind his desk (there were two crushed out cigars in the ash tray), still played out dull. There was too much talking. Where are all the dead people? He kept wanting to know. The show is called Lester’s Ghosts, not Lester’s Tea Parties.
For once I was glad Madilim chose to ignore me. As he and the director bickered about what to cut and what to keep, my thoughts were on Setti. Her birthday was just hours away; I had no idea what to buy her. A number of station hands had already attempted to help. Their ideas ranged from body lotion to jewelry to a new cell phone. One of the outsourced cleaning boys had even suggested, after overhearing echoes of my dilemma in the stairwell, a cappuccino maker manufactured by one of the local brands; that same day, Sammy the waitress informed me (between puffs of cigarette smoke) the boy’s grandfather owned a large share of equity with the brand.
By the time we left the cutting room I’d given up. The next day—Saturday—I took Setti to one of Muntinlupa City’s posh malls. Here I told her she could pick out whatever she liked.
“Do you mean that?” she asked, her eyes glowing in the light of that mall’s immaculately polished marble veneer.
Fearlessly, I told her I did indeed mean it.
We strolled hand in hand to an outdoor shopping area, where a number of new cars were on display. Setti checked my progress as we approached one of the Porsches. For a moment I became tense, but she only lamented that the color was not to her taste. From here we wandered into a neon-lit novelty shop which housed a veritable jungle of stuffed animals. Setti paused in front of a brown bear that was taller than her. Its marble eyes had doubtless experienced one pragmatic rejection after the next. There was a green ribbon tied around its neck. There were red hearts stitched into its paws.
“This?” Setti asked hopefully.
And that was how we dined that night with a giant teddy-bear between us. She chose a candlelit Italian restaurant decorated in the rustic style of that country’s Etruscan era. The wooden tables all had legs that curved into bestial feet. Gorgon heads grinned from ceiling high shelves. Shields hung on the walls.
Setti’s face—along with that of our new friend—seemed to hover in the gloom. She thanked me for the gift, and for dinner. Then she wanted to know why I liked her so much. Would I still feel the same if I didn’t find her pretty? And what exactly was “pretty” to me anyway?
“Beautiful,” I replied over the candle, replacing a word too mundane for the likes of Setti, “is five feet tall with long, dark hair.”
“But what if I weighed two hundred pounds instead of ninety?”
“My dear lady, you are being hypothetical. Such questions moisten the palates of scientists and cynics.” I leaned forward to offer her a not too mordant question of my own. “Which one are you?”
It made her laugh. “Touche, Fredo. Your point.”
“No, Setti. We are not in competition. We are in love.” I smiled. “Or at least I am.”
It was the first time I ever told Lysette Roxas that I loved her. Did she believe me? Does the Rainbird believe when I speak aloud the same? I acknowledge the dust, old and soft, upon its sentiment. It is a living room photograph of the Victorian age. A walnut davenport. An upholstered chair. A pine cheval looking glass, haunted by the spirit of a savage murder, her black blood the terminus of pale, pedagogical forensics. It is bygone. It is beautiful. It lasts forever in a moment of light. It dies extant in eternal night. It is love—what I felt for Setti. Aking mahal, patay na dyosa. Mahal kita.
“Tell me,” Setti said, giving no sign that my confession had moved her in the least, “a story from when you were young.”
I may have been less confident about such requests had the candle been brighter, or the bear smaller. As circumstances abode, my reminiscence was able to hit upon a time when, at the age of eight, I played hooky from school. I did not commit the crime alone. My abettor was a boy from the next street whose reputation for tomfoolery already preceded him. He loved the idea, though I’d only presented it as a kind of joke. We’ll leave for school in the morning, I told him, just like usual. But on our way through the park we’ll stop, and play on the monkey bars, and swing on the swings, and count passing cars till the lunch bell rings.
“’And then,’” I went on, “’we’ll go home for lunch. Just like usual. The teachers will think we’re out sick. Our parents won’t know we skipped.’”
Setti shook her head. “But they would know. Once the school calls them wondering why two of their kids are absent without notice.”
“I was eight years old. I didn’t think things through.”
“So you got in trouble?”
In Setti’s tone I could hear an echo of the young delinquents who’d skipped school that day, romping joyously through the valley of a small town park near Cleveland. We kicked leaves and threw stones. We talked about baseball, and life, and how the two were inclined to dovetail off the bat of a line drive (sometimes the ball found its way through, and sometimes it didn’t). I showed him how to make a samara fly high as the trees. He showed me how to skip a rock in the stream. We spoke of girls we liked (not many), and teachers we didn’t (all of them). Ominous shadows moved though the park as we arrived at the subject of grades; the portentous clouds above made every attempt to enhance our academic advertence. These attempts went ignored in favor of follies far more fanciful. We laughed. We ran. We played hide and seek.
And just before lunch, we got in trouble.
There was a dead body in back of the tennis courts (discovered by my friend, whose appreciative cries brought me running). A human male. Naked. Blue. His shocked gaze stared past us into the treetops, as if imploring God to please come take his soul to heaven. His black hair, matted with wet, rotting foliage, fell back from a brow misshapen by whatever blunt object had shattered his skull. In his fist was a gun, in his chest, a long-handled knife.
Suddenly I realized my lack of taste in relating this tale to Setti. I apologized sheepishly. It was no way to treat a birthday girl. It was no way to treat a girl at all.
“On the contrary,” she said. “I find it very fascinating. Who was the man?”
“He...he wasn’t from our town. The police traced his address to the south. A town called Howling. He had a long, uncommon name. Unktibar or Unshibar. German.”
Setti sipped her champagne as I spoke. “You remember a lot about it,” she remarked, putting down the glass.
“They never caught the killer,” I felt compelled to add.
“What a shame. For someone to get away with that, I mean.”
I didn’t tell her how the story became even more strange; after all, this wasn’t a day for grim tidings. We were supposed to be celebrating an occasion.
But the German man never received a proper burial. Two days after we found the body it disappeared from the morgue, never to be seen again. As to what happened—who had killed him, why, and where he wound up—I find it wasteful to hazard a guess. Unless the case might provide information as to how these cold cloaks of impassivity so often find their way about the shoulders of a murderer’s deeds, to exonerate the consciousness, the memories, which follow.