ELEVEN
Setti once told me that during the final weeks leading up to a new season, an aura of hope would gather over the station and, like a quilt on a chill night, gently settle upon the cold framework of executive despair. This, she said, happened every year around the end of July. Whether PTN had only one new program in its lineup, or five, hope for a successful season came alive on the faces of every man and woman dressed in a suit. It was inevitable, my girlfriend promised. And necessary. Quite necessary. For without it, the network’s epoch of gloom would become eternal. At PTN a new season was something much more than just a new season; it marked the winter, and much celebrated death, of pessimism.
In the first week of August I reported to work with all confidence upon Setti’s wisdom. She’d been with the network for much longer than I. Surfed the ebb and flow of its emotional tides. And speaking of tides, that first week arrived with substantial amounts of heavy rain. I remember flooded streets. Stalled traffic. Half-dressed children playing in back alley rivers. Distant towers turned to charcoal sketches in a silver veil. I remember running up the steps to the front door of PTN, saying hello to the guard. There was a book on the table next to him: The Power Of Positive Thinking.
My confidence took a hit. This was the same book Rodrigo Reyes had once read, and had eventually come to reject. Plain and simple, its mechanism hadn’t applied to him. So far as Reyes was concerned, the author’s advice was a sham. He’d even gone so far as to confess a hatred for it.
And when it didn’t work I threw the book out this window. To this day I have no idea where it landed. I hope it was in a pile of shit.
I made a mental note to get Setti’s opinion on the book. The front door at PTN let on a large, well-lit waiting area where racks of plastic chairs were set ruler straight against walls painted in colors meant to encourage creativity. Setti worked in HR, which placed her desk square in the middle of these things. It also meant that hers was the first face I saw when I came through the door.
She was immediately horrified by weather’s effect on my appearance. Eyes bulging, she rose from her chair and began to berate my foolishness with hissing little teapot steams of incredulous questions. Had I walked all the way to work today? It certainly looked like it. And where was my umbrella? Did I bring along a change of clothes? No? Interesting. She hadn’t known that dying of pneumonia was an achievement I aspired to.
I did my best to kiss away these fussy little critiques upon my self-servitude, promising to set things to rights in the comfort room. Then, with a dosage of trepidation, I asked her: What color is the network’s mood ring today?
She shooed me off to the CR without answering. Here I got to witness first-hand the mess that waiting for a cab in the rain had made of me. In the mirror stood a man who looked like he’d been painted by Van Gogh. Over-moistened brush strokes of hair ran in blurry lines over my ears and forehead. My coat slouched; my trousers sagged.
It took a number of minutes, but eventually I was able to make myself presentable to the public eye again. Before going upstairs to my office I returned to Setti’s domain. I wanted her aware that my hygiene was back under control. But at some point during my absence she’d disappeared. Another girl had taken up front desk duty, one I hadn’t met before. Rather than go through the bland ceremony of making a new acquaintance, I decided to catch an elevator upstairs.
One of the network executives rode with me. He was older than Reyes, leaner, and far less susceptible to that other’s arbitrary leanings toward good humor. Still, I couldn’t help but discern how his stony face looked even stonier than usual. As the car cruised upward he didn’t greet me good morning, or even bother to glance in my direction. His blazer was an iron gate, the tie—blood red—a bolt through the hasp. It was the first of many dark portents to come during that week.
My floor was a grid-work of narrow hallways lined with walls made of glass. Some of the walls looked in on empty meeting rooms while others displayed small offices like my own. A sea of deep blue carpeting lay underfoot, so the halls took on the appearance of tributaries, complete with flora (plastic) and fauna (real, though captured on various framed posters meant to advertise programs come and gone; a boy and his dog, a girl and her cat).
I didn’t proceed directly to my own office. Instead I chose to conduct a discreet walk-around of the floor, searching for signs of giddy anticipation for the new season. My endeavor bore precious little fruit. All the pretty secretaries, with tiny fingers racing over computer keys and red lips jabbering into headset microphones, wore expressions much like that of the elevator executive. I saw no one smiling, heard no one laughing.
Then, in the hallway leading to Oliver Madilim’s office, I did hear laughter. The rather familiar laughter of Lysette Roxas. Madilim’s door hung open, but I could see Setti plainly enough through the glass. She stood before our executive producer’s desk, giggling at some shared bit of humor I had not been privy to. Her bare knees were pressed together and slightly buckled as if holding back an urge to pee. The frills of her white blouse heaved up and down.
“Knock knock,” I called, poking my head through the door.
Both their faces snapped to look at me. It was as if someone had taken hold of Setti’s throat and squeezed, so sudden did she quit laughing, while Oliver—seated behind his desk—wore the vague smile of a repeat offender being led away in cuffs for the umpteenth time.
I kept my tone cheerful. “What did I miss?”
They both started to answer at the same time, but it was Setti’s musical larynx that won the day. “Ollie was just telling me about the first unit director. For Lester’s Ghosts,” she added quickly. “Does he really get mad when his actors ad-lib too much?”
The question had doubtless been fired off to dilute any suspicion I may have felt at the idea of these two sharing a good laugh. Nodding, I agreed that yes, the director did indeed possess a certain hatred for insurrection on the set. I also had to admit that sometimes the boiling over of his passions could be amusing.
“Well!” Setti’s lungs sighed. “Guess I’d better get back downstairs!”
I wondered why she’d come up in the first place, but elected to let the matter drop. I did take some pleasure in blocking her exit, however, in case she really did need to pee. Keeping my body in front of the door, I asked Oliver if he was excited about our new series.
“Not particularly,” he answered, all too forthcoming. “I still think the one we let go is the winner.”
“Which one?”
“Boom Boody Boom.”
“Oh, that.” Of course I knew which one he meant.
Setti had moved closer during our talk. Now her knees were together again. Casually, I leaned against the frame to prevent her getting through. I asked Oliver if Boom Boody Boom would be premiering on the same night as Lester’s Ghosts.
“Yes,” he said. Then: “You haven’t seen the promos for it yet? They’re hilarious.”
“Well, then we’re talking about two different demographics. Lester isn’t a comedy.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Now that remark stung, but I didn’t allow Oliver the satisfaction of seeing me wince. For Setti things were different. She had begun to wince.
“Fredo,” she said at last, “can you move? I need to use the CR.”
“It’s out of order.”
A look of desperation took hold of her features. It pleased me immensely. Perhaps from now on she would think twice about laughing with such reckless abandon at anecdotes shared from a pit of grease.
I hesitated a moment longer, then stepped aside to let the girl dash off.
“I don’t remember the CR being out of order,” Oliver remarked.
It was a warm volley I found no reason to let pass. “Really? Perhaps you’ve grown too affable with the condition.”
He pretended to look confused. That was fine. A quick, efficient return over the nylon strings of discontent between us, yet one that required no effort on my part to defend. I hovered long enough to give him a chance at further retaliation. When none came, I nodded farewell, and glided off down the hall.
∞
On Friday night of that week I took Setti to a wrap party for Lester’s Ghosts. They held it on the network rooftop—they being a network department in charge of social events. We rode the elevator, Setti and I, to the 60thfloor. That no one else rode with us only served to further my anxiety about just how much faith PTN held for the coming season.
“Big crowd tonight?” I asked as the floor indicator passed 20.
Setti shook her head. Like the rest of the network, she hadn’t been talking much lately. Her mood was that of a thrush crouched among moss on a rainy afternoon. I wondered what fields lay sprawled before the boundary of the woodland she called home. Hilly grass, perhaps, drowned in tears of uncertainty, tears she never let fall unless the sky itself, overcast as it had been of late, could mask them. And did she look up when she walked, as had that crooner from Japan who in 1985 had found himself with a bird of his own, plummeting toward the last of any sunny day he would ever know? Could Setti fly without tail feathers, or had she already become a true rainbird, transparent as those contingent tears, though not nearly so warm?
The doors whispered open.
I led Setti through an empty hallway to a spacious meeting room that was also empty. As we walked, I cast my senses forth in search of tonight’s occasion. Yet there were no sounds. Our footsteps were hushed upon pale yellow carpeting. Carpeting that illustrated quite grimly the ague of our conviction—or shall I say, the network’s conviction, for I still believed that Lester’s Ghosts would draw plenty of viewers. I was the hold-out. The optimist for an unlikely victory. It was all up to me.
There was a sliding glass door in the meeting room. It opened onto the roof, where about 30 people were sipping cocktails beneath arced wires of bare-bulbed lighting. Tables stood between them, their white skirts stirring in a cool, rain-scented breeze. An imposing black amplifier played music too soft for its size. Too soft, indeed, for a gathering that was supposed to be celebratory.
Floating above the twinkling glasses were some faces I knew—Allen’s, Oliver’s, Rodrigo’s—but most of them looked strange. I saw a woman in red dress stroking her chin, as if she’d been bearded in a previous life. A man, either drunk or tired, lay back in one of the chairs like stricken prey.
We were approached by a waiter with a tray of champagne. Setti and I each took a glass and set forth on our best efforts to mingle. The task proved daunting. As I moved from one little island of people to the next, it became too apparent that no one felt willing to speak above a whisper. Even Allen, whom I’d seen boisterously drunk at other occasions like these, remained taciturn in the face of my best jokes. He merely puffed his cigar, sipped his drink, and smiled. Meanwhile Setti had wandered over to the far end of the roof. Like everyone else, she was chatting quietly, making no attempt to build upon the coming release of PTN’s new show.
I could stand it no longer. “Allen?” I asked. “What’s the matter?” The anchorman’s head tilted in puzzlement. “Oh, come on,” I pressed. “This is a wrap party. We should be having fun. Dancing and singing videoke.” We both turned to look at the videoke machine. It was vacant. I had been in the Philippines long enough by then to know that vacant videoke machines at Manila parties were tantamount to vacant deployment bags on a parachute jump. It was something that just didn’t happen.
“Well,” Allen sighed, “it’s been a crazy week.”
“Crazy why?”
Here the other looked at me as if I’d gone slightly mad. “We had a fire in the parking garage.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
But my friend had only just begun. “The office supply room got vandalized.” His eyebrows went up. “Did you see the graffiti?”
“I hadn’t even heard about it,” I confessed, growing more shocked by the moment.
“Oh my. Terrible words. Sprayed in red all over walls. Stuff urinated on. Paper and ink cartridges. The floor of course.”
“Allen,” I said, or tried to say, “that’s impossible. How could someone get away with that in a downtown office building?”
He sighed again. It was the sigh of a man contemplating everything wrong with the world we live in. “Whoever did it must have known where all the surveillance cameras were trained. He managed to dodge them, though the police did get glimpses of a shirt-tail. A shock of blurred hair. A shoelace.” The curious expression on Allen’s face resurfaced. “You honestly hadn’t heard? It’s pretty big news. Been missing my broadcasts?”
I confessed I hadn’t spent much time in front of the TV this week. Still, information of this sort should have found its way into my office. It hadn’t.
“The supply room in question isn’t on your floor,” Allen said. “I guess you could have missed it.”
“No one here’s been speaking to me much of late.”
“That’s because there’s a lot riding on this show of yours. People are antsy.”
“It’ll be fine.”
The anchorman looked at me. “Fine won’t be good enough, Fredo. We need a hit.”
“How big of a hit?”
I’m not sure how he would have answered. One of the news department execs had sauntered over. The exec held a reputation for talking fast and being impatient with outsiders. I offered a polite nod which wasn’t returned.
“Allen!” the exec sang. He wore visor-shaped glasses over a triangular face, lending his presence over to something near otherworldly. “How would you like to have a female co-anchor?”
Allen laughed. “Depends what I’d be having her for. Dinner or dessert?”
And just like that my friend was led away to a different section of the roof, this one exclusively reserved for newsies.
Later that night I asked Setti about the crimes. I was driving her home to Greenheights, where I would stay for the weekend, keeping her tiny car in check far better than its owner typically condoned. We’d come abreast of a hill on Epifanio de los Santos. Beyond the windshield, a forest of city towers gleamed, though it was well after midnight. As with that other city in my own new world—an orchard of red fruit where I was yet to walk—Manila knew little of sleep. In that respect a tiny part of it belonged to me.
PTN had attempted to shelter its female employees from details deemed too sordid for pretty heads; thus, Setti could not tell me much. She knew more about the fire than she did about the closet. It had been set next to one of the pillars in the parking garage. No, she did not know which pillar, but it should be easy enough to locate the sooty remnants, if I wished to do so. For kindling, the culprit had dumped over one of the garbage cans. Why? How on Earth was she supposed to know why? She’d been nowhere near the scene of the crime when it happened.
“Baby?” I asked, concerned by her standoffish tone. “Is everything all right?”
She was crouched on the far side of the passenger seat like a child denied some toy store treasure. We shot across the Pasig River bridge. Her eyes were on the window. I could see their reflection hovering in the glass.
“Setti?”
She still wasn’t looking at me when she said: “I might have to quit my job, Fredo.”
I tried to remain calm. But like my efforts to mingle at the party, success didn’t come easy. “Why?” I asked.
“My dad. He’s getting sicker all the time. He needs someone at home with him.”
“There’s no one else in the family?”
“No one else he trusts.”
I shifted lanes to let a bus blow by, at suicidal speed, on our left. “What about a nursing home?”
She looked at me in disgust. “This is the Philippines, Fredo. We don’t dump our loved ones into a hole when their usefulness has expired.”
“I didn’t mean a hole.” I glanced at her, then back at the road. “Is the diabetes making him senile? Does he still recognize you?”
From the corner of my eye I caught the gleam of bared teeth. “He sees me better than I’m seeing you at the moment.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean my father is dying and you don’t seem to care. To you he’s just a nuisance.”
We had arrived at the expressway tollbooth. I stopped. A weary-looking girl gave me a card. I drove off. As for the girl sitting next to me... Well, her deduction was mostly accurate. I wished I could tell her as much. I wished I could tell her that I hadn’t known Mark—her dad—long enough for him to be anything else but a nuisance. Or at the very most a simple prop in his daughter’s love story—the one that starred me as her leading man. A painting on the wall. An antique sofa. A gun, hidden in an old shoe box at the back of a musty closet.
We reached Greenheights by 1AM. Intermittent rain had been sprinkling the windshield, but for now the village streets were dry. The duhat trees along Setti’s drive bowed in a light, steady wind. A gathering of fallen leaves rushed over the lane.
Once inside the house we were met with a waggy-tailed greeting from Tikki who, given the hour, somehow knew not to bark. There was one light on in the living room, casting a soft orange glow on the hardwood flooring, and another in the kitchen. Everything—the walls, the furniture, Setti’s father—slept to the sound of the hushed night breeze.
The small guest bedroom awaited. Within the hour I was there, trying to mimic the slumber of the house. It was more difficult than it should have been. I’d turned on the room’s portable TV while brushing my teeth. An ad for Boom Boody Boom popped up. It looked raucous, energetic, and downright hilarious.
“This September,” a narrator sang, “you’re going to have a gay ole time!”
Cut to a man in a yellow dress, blue eye makeup, and a red wig. “Help!” he screamed. “He’s shooting blanks!”
Cut again, this time to a pimply convenience store clerk with a gun. The clerk fired the gun, which made silly popping noises I hated myself for laughing at.
Now the narrator came back. “Boom Boody Boom is a show about life, love...and the finest ube cake you’ve ever tasted!”
The man in the dress shoved a piece of purple cake into another man’s mouth. The other man also wore a dress. “Sarap!” the cake-shover squealed.
“Hindi naman,” the other said around a grimacing mouthful of sticky cream.
“Oh, shut up!” said the guy in yellow, before splattering the whole cake in the other’s face.
With a nervous stomach, I switched the TV off. I could not for the time being bear to face the wisdom of that Chinese general who’d lived in ancient times of blossoming, withering, and warring states, and who’d written of victory gained through knowledge of one’s enemy alongside knowledge of one’s self. I needed to sleep. Or rather, I needed to try.
A vague dream materialized. I was chaperoning a girl I’d not seen since high school. We were on a windy pier that jutted into the ocean. Salacia, wife of Neptune, assailed us with one mighty wave after another. Every moist, mountainous onslaught deafened me. A car crash on the decking. I tried to shield the girl, who in fact didn’t seem to mind. Her hair was blowing in mad tangles. Her laughter was that of a lunatic, creating a second storm on the churning skies. A twin.
I snapped awake to a black bedroom. Yet the lunacy had not abated. Now it came in the form of arguing voices from downstairs. Voices I knew.
“Sino ka?” Setti’s father screamed. “Sino ka?”
Then Setti, just as furious: “Alam mo kung!”
“Ikaw ay isang babae at iba pa!”
“Hindi!”
Months ago I had awoken in this house to Setti and Mark screaming at each other, only to discover a quiet domain at the bottom of the stairs. This morning I expected the same, and sure enough, as I stepped silently onto the landing, there was no one abroad. I saw Tikki in his little box on the half landing, sound asleep. I heard the hollow, familiar knocking of the grandfather clock in the living room. The time was a little past 4.
I turned to go back to bed, only to find that a wraith with corpse-colored skin had sneaked up behind me. Her gown was chalk-white, her hair black as buried murder. Setti.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, for even at this hour there could be no mistaking that she was ill. Setti’s eyes brimmed with tears. Her lip quivered. I put my arms around her. “Honey? Are you all right?”
And of course she wasn’t.
“Dad,” she whispered, collapsing into my embrace. “He’s dead.”
Salty drops from closed eyes dripped onto my shoulder. I thought of my dream again. Of Salacia’s vehement attempts, or seeming attempts, to drown me alongside my past.
Mark Roxas died in his sleep. After a middle of the night stroll to the bathroom, Setti had gone down the hall to check on him. He wasn’t breathing.
Later, the city coroner released the official cause of death: Diabetic ketoacidosis.