THIRTEEN
Premier night.
Setti and I watched at the condo with a bowl of popcorn between us. I knew that at good movies—quality movies—there was never enough popcorn to go around. The audience became a kind of zombified machine, haunted by the vast, silver glow of creative despair, pumping one handful of cooked pericarp after the next. Punctuation of a sort came in the form of carbonated hostility for the blood. Yet both were but minions of the typewriter. The cadence of a spoken line. The wandering thoughts of so many who longed for office space in the business of telling stories.
We hardly touched any of the popcorn.
The first act of Lester’s Ghosts was bad. Poorly written, poorly directed, and poorly cut. Lester’s first case—the plot of the pilot—concerned the ghost of a woman who floated about beneath the trees of Baleta Drive. It was supposed to be scary. Spine-tingling. Cameras rolling at midnight should have captured our actress (a little dolly of a thing who chain-smoked Marlboros at Oklahoma cowboy echelons) in banshee white, eyes without pupils and lips devoid of blood. In her first appearance she ran screaming from behind a tree, more like a cheap Halloween decoration than an actual ghost. Two pedestrians screamed back. Their performances were not convincing. I winced at their jittery legs and flailing hands. Worse, the director had lined up the shot all wrong. A setting sun, glimpsed in the background, gave away the lie about it being midnight.
Setti let out a short, clipped laugh. “Look,” she said, pointing.
I saw it. One of the screaming pedestrians had forgotten to zip his fly.
“Jesus,” I moaned. “Couldn’t we have noticed crap like that in screenings?”
The rest of the movie’s problems were less obvious, though no less absurd. In one scene Lester told a friend he was going to Burger Burger, but then the board cut to him eating chicken instead. In another we saw him shaving, only to appear minutes later with a full beard. Nor was continuity the only problem. The script was bad. That we hadn’t noticed it was bad during filming made it even worse.
“Lester?” the protagonist’s girlfriend asked at one point. “Are we a couple, or more like pictures on a wall? Nice to look at but framed away from each others’ scenery?”
At this Setti laughed out loud again. I shot her a look. She pursed her lips, trying hard to be a good girlfriend. The dam, however, continued to buckle beneath the weight of lines like:
“Ghosts are apparitions of our dreams, and our dreams are but prayers in a void.”
“Lester darling? May I enter the comfort room, or are you still performing?”
“This,” Lester intoned from his knees. In his hand was a random rock one of our crew had found in Baleta Drive’s gutter. “This is the solidity of our fear, striking against our skulls, smashing them to pieces.”
Setti could contain herself no longer. She burst out laughing.
“You won’t think it’s very funny when Rodrigo cancels the show,” I all but snarled. This was easily the angriest I had ever been with her. My hand ached to smack her across the face.
“What do I care?” Setti giggled. “I’m in HR.”
“Sometimes,” one of Lester’s friends was saying on the screen, “it’s like we’re gay. But we’re not. Like we can just...feel each other.”
“Oh God!” Setti collapsed, holding her belly. “This is so bad! So bad! Thank you for cheering me up, Fredo. It’s just what the doctor ordered!”
I took the bowl of popcorn and dumped it over her head. Still laughing, she began to throw some of the lost kernels at me. But I wasn’t playing around. Her remark about not caring had driven my anger up another notch. My eyes found her throat. Oh, how I could have given her a squeeze just then! Choked her blue with such humiliated rage!
The landline beeped. Pretending the receiver was Setti’s larynx, I snatched it up. “Sir?” I asked, for I knew already whom it would be.
Rodrigo Reyes’ voice was like thunder down a dry well. “Fredo! Are you watching this? ARE you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s trash, Fredo! My wife is crying! My children are laughing! This has never happened on premier night before! NEVER!”
“I—I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems, sir.”
“YOU will be IN my office FIRST thing tomorrow! Understood?” The station manager’s fury was of the actor Cage in that movie about a kiss from a vampire. Or of Montalban’s character on his stolen vessel of new beginnings, chasing vengeance through the stars.
“Yes, sir,” I replied. What else could I have said?
The line went dead. Slowly, I placed the receiver back in its cradle. Setti was cowered against the arm of the couch. She wore the grin of a naughty sprite.
Sobered, I told her: “I’m glad this makes you so happy, Setti. Maybe it’ll be the one good thing that comes out of the whole mess.”
The grin faltered. Beneath I could see the original Setti, the one I’d met in March. She’d been there before the deviant and before—so very long before—the Rainbird. She was the girl I’d been well on my way toward falling in love with.
“What happened?” she asked. “How could the show have turned out so wrong?”
My eyes wandered back to the screen. Lester was walking down Baleta Drive with a bouquet of flowers, calling for the banshee to show herself.
“Maybe I trusted too many people,” I said. “Writers, directors. Executive producers. Maybe it just got too complicated.”
“Executive producers?” I heard her say. “I thought Oliver wanted to pass on the whole thing.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning to glower at her. “Was he right, Setti? Hmm? Is that what you two were laughing about last week?”
She blinked. “Huh?”
“In his office. You were laughing so hard you needed to pee.” I nodded at the space between her legs. “That tiny little bladder of yours was practically bursting.”
Her brow line furled, crunching out what little remained of that guilty sprite. Now she was defiant. A cover model for Ms. Magazine. I found it positively infuriating.
“I’ve known Oliver a lot longer than I’ve known you,” she scowled.
“Oh, I just bet you have.”
And of course she sensed what I meant. The defiance became disgust. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know Oliver at all.”
“I don’t care to know him.”
“Yeah. And that lack of empathy, Fredo? Maybe that’s why what we’re seeing tonight is so bad.”
“It’s not—“
She cut me off. “Did you know he used to date a stunt-woman? And that she died on camera?”
My eyes trailed guiltily to the floor, where Tikki had gotten busy with vacuuming the spilled popcorn. “Yes. Rodrigo told me.”
“Okay. Did he tell you why she died?”
“Why? He told me how. She drowned. It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident, Fredo. Giselle committed suicide.”
I looked at her. She stared back for a few moments, saying nothing, then rose from the couch. She grabbed a broom from the kitchen. Came back. Began sweeping up the popcorn. While she worked I demanded more information. Whatever had given her the idea that it was suicide? And even if it were true, why would Giselle do such a thing? Setti refused to answer. She refused to even look at me.
“You’re lying,” I said at last.
That triggered something. The broom stopped. “That’s right, Fredo,” she nodded, shifting her gaze in my direction. “I’m lying. I always lie.”
“Setti—“
“Your whole life here? It’s one big lie. But you can’t just forget about it and go home, can you? Can you?” she stressed, when I didn’t answer.
“After tomorrow,” I managed, “I may not have a choice.”
She laughed. “No, no, dear. You won’t get fired. PTN doesn’t fire anybody. Rodrigo might put his foot in your ass, but he won’t fire you.”
“That’s a hell of a way for a girl to talk.”
“Fredo,” she said, ignoring my plea for her to act more stereotypical, “I want you to sleep on the couch tonight. Away from me.”
Better, I thought. Then I told her I would indeed be sleeping on the couch. That I thought it was a good idea. Setti finished cleaning the mess without saying another word. What she couldn’t finish—what neither of us could—remained on the screen. I watched her dump the dust pan into the trash, then storm into the bedroom. The bathroom faucet came on. Next came the buzzing of a large, angry insect. The clipping of wings against certain truths, certain lies, and curdled aspirations. Or perhaps it was simply the sound of her electric toothbrush.
“My dear girl,” Lester said, “are you here?”
“What do you think?” the Baleta banshee asked back.
“I think that you’re dead,” Lester told her, “though I still want you. Can a man ever love a ghost?”
I clicked off the TV. It was going to be a long, long night on the couch.
∞
Next morning I went to work in very good acquaintance with the toes of my shoes. The friendship, I knew, was late in coming. By now everyone else at PTN seemed set to marry their own. No one in the halls greeted me good morning. What few pairs of eyes I did chance to meet reminded me of those I’d seen at Mark’s funeral or, worse still, of a dog who’d made a mess on the floor.
A folded, forbidding newspaper lay upon my desk, crooked, as if loosed from flustered fingers. The front page said nothing of Lester’s Ghosts. Instead, it featured an article about the thrashing of public amendments to the constitution. More thrashing, I suspected, awaited in the pages beneath. I didn’t wish to read it straight away. I made a pot of coffee first. Then I sat down. Then I stood up again. I walked down the hall to the CR and straightened my hair. Setti preferred my face to be a bit on the scratchy side, so I’d neglected to shave before leaving the condo. It showed badly under florescent lighting. Rather than come off as rugged, my features appeared tired. Defeated. Left behind on a hot, dry battlefield by better soldiers, there to atrophy among the buzzing of fat flies.
The newspaper was still there when I got back, happy to wait. After pouring a cup of coffee I sat down to read. As expected, a review for Lester’s Ghosts had been printed up in the entertainment section. Nor was I surprised at the author’s opinion. Yet again though, I found myself wondering as I perused the hateful column why we hadn’t halted this junk in pre-production.
PTN’S NEW “LESTER’S GHOSTS” IS SAD AND FUNNY IN THE WORST WAY
Coming off of last season’s deplorable—and blessedly short-lived—The Haunting Of Gretchen, I held high hopes for Lester’s Ghosts. Perhaps PTN had learned from its mistakes and was ready to turn things around. With the hiring of a new producer from the U.S., perhaps it had taken a vow to re-establish its former glory (remember This Alone Is Love? Anybody?) in the guise of American freak show idealization. Alas, within the first five minutes of watching the abortion that is—or at least should be—Lester’s Ghosts, my hopes were dashed.
Here we have a show about a would-be ghost hunter who dropped out of college to chase dead people in the street. I could have saved this jerk a lot of trouble—and maybe even preserved for him a more respectable education in some field like testing dog chew toys or trimming pubic hair for the homeless—by merely sending him on a walk down Quezon Avenue, but leave that. Lester Capili loves dead people. Lester Capili wants to be with dead people. I say fine: Let Lester Capili lie with them and rot.
If you saw last night’s pilot you’re probably thinking the same thing. Consider: Our protagonist veers away from a promising career in computer programming to study and document paranormal goings on all over Manila. Why does he choose to do this? Well, because one night when he was ten years old, Lester had a dream about an old man in a bathtub. That’s right—a bathtub. The old man looked at him and said: I am your grandfather; I died in a crash; I lost my head when it smashed through the glass. Now Lester’s grandfather was still alive when he had that dream, but a year later, he got decapitated in a car crash. Okay. That’s premonition for you. Except poor Lester just couldn’t let it go, even while he was typing code for his industry’s next big video game. So he decided to quit coding and become a ghost hunter full time.
There are so many questions here I can’t for the life of me cover them all. Let’s just hit the basics. For starters, where did he get the money for all the fancy equipment we see? The guy comes from a middle class family that lives in an apartment. I seriously doubt he could afford things like rechargeable headlamps, infra-red cameras, digital voice recorders, and a big, blue van to carry all this junk in. Maybe he asked the ghosts to rob a bank for him. Oh, and also: He hires assistants. Hires them. With what? Monopoly money?
And then there’s the ghost he actually does find on Baleta Drive (note to Filipino film makers: please stop using this location in your scary movies; it’s so commonplace these days that nobody cares whether it’s actually haunted or not). The ghost looks tacky—and I mean tacky. She wears a white gown (surprise, surprise) with a green belt, green shoes (do ghosts buy shoes? where at? maybe Green Belt?), and pink mascara. Now why the hell would a ghost wear pink mascara? Why would she wear make-up at all? She’s dead!
I closed the paper and tossed it into the waste basket. The critic’s article went on for another few paragraphs, but I felt no incessant need to further endure the bludgeoning. For all of our work over the summer (the rainy season, the rainy season), for all of the obstacles I and my crew had overcome, Lester’s Ghosts was a turkey. It had a poor pilot that would, I realized with very little effort at reflection, lead into an even worse serial. In short: We’d blown it.
No. I’d blown it. And now it was time to face the music.
I arrived at Rodrigo Reyes’ office to find that Oliver had gotten there ahead of me. He was waiting in the hall. He glanced at me, nodded, and began to whistle. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it sounded far too cheerful for the setting. I asked if he knew any dirges.
“Or are you feeling more celebratory?” I finished up.
“Don’t attack me,” Madilim said. In this light, his long black hair gave me the impression that whom he really wanted to emulate was Tommy Wiseau. Except that film maker normally associated himself with material of better quality. “You green-lit this joke.” He had the audacity to point at me as he made the accusation. “Put the whole network at the mercy of your poor judgment.”
“And Mr. Reyes agreed with me.”
“No. He trusted you. And you cocked it up, Mr T. Big time.”
I might have punched him had the door not come open just then. A very stony-faced Rodrigo Reyes stared at us both. “Delawang talunan,” he grumbled. “Welcome. Now get inside.”
“Mr. Reyes,” Oliver began. Already, he wished to plead his case: innocent passenger of a doomed expedition.
Reyes would have none of it. “Inside.”
The door closed on a gray, cheerless room. This despite the presence of a box of Kit-Kat candy bars on the station manager’s desk. A humid, overcast day shined through the windows. A day of muddy walks from the previous night’s rain. Trees still as stone in an empty park. Bitter coffee. Bad tidings.
Oliver and I sat at opposite ends of a couch along the back wall, while Reyes went behind his desk and dialed a number. The phone’s cheap, plastic keys clicked.
“Our director will be joining us from the hospital,” Reyes informed, without looking up.
My jaw dropped. “The hospital?”
“His wife went into labor last night. I almost did, too.”
I heard Oliver stifle a chuckle. To laugh then would have been bad.
“We’ll also be having our writer on the line,” Reyes went on. “That’s makes five of us.” He shot a look at me, then at Oliver. “We have a mess to clean up. A big, fat, disgusting mess.”
Within minutes we had everyone present and accounted for. During the wait I could do nothing but twiddle my thumbs, while Oliver, doubtless from some justified high chair, kept his chin in alignment with integrity.
“All right, then,” Reyes said, placing his hands on the desk. He had sat down after dialing the phone, and now—with two silver eyes and a frown tight and thin as a razor—looked ready to dole out death. Thus, what he said next came out within a surprisingly docile jurisdiction. “We all know why we’re here. Lester’s Ghosts is terrible. Worse than terrible.” I winced inwardly. “They way I see it there are two choices: cancel or retool.”
A weighted pause drew over the room. Oliver pierced it by saying: “Retool? Sir, we have three episodes in the can. Ready for release.”
“Don’t release,” a tinny voice came from the phone. It was our writer, who this morning sounded drunk, or hungover. But then he carried a reputation—as all writers are wont—for late nights in empty bars.
“Why not?” Reyes asked. “You wrote the damned show.”
“Yes, but so many other people got their fingerprints all over it. My original vision is completely lost.”
At this, Reyes called out the director’s name. Then: “What do you have to say to that?”
The director’s voice sounded amused. “We didn’t touch anything. We were given a shooting script and stuck to it.”
“Okay,” the writer said, “so who sabotaged the shooting script?”
I had to resist turning to Oliver. He’d been against the production of Lester’s from day one—that much we all knew. The production had been rough—full of broken equipment, flat tires, and vandalized storage closets. We knew that, too. Now we had our writer claiming that what he’d submitted had not been what we’d shot. Now I did spare our executive producer a look. As always, his expression remained strong. A clean, crisp flag over a field of defeat. Earlier, I’d attributed it to his not feeling responsible for the outcome. Earlier still—months ago—I’d wondered just how much he truly wished for things to succeed.
“Sabotage is a strong word,” I heard him opine. “No shooting script travels from the printed page without at least some modification. It’s only natural. There are a lot of minds involved in the process. A lot of artistic ideals.”
“Is that Oliver?” the writer wanted to know.
“Yes.”
“Well, I agree with what you just said. But this isn’t a case of artistic alteration. This is flipped. Look at the shooting script and tell me otherwise.”
“Does anyone have copy?” Reyes asked.
Of course the writer was quick to respond. “Right here.” A sound of ruffling pages came through the speaker. The man’s anxiety had plenty of merit. His reputation was currently shackled before the teeth of a whizzing buzz saw, and its legs were spread wide. “Okay. Page five. Here’s what I have Lester saying...”
I leaned forward, ready to listen.
“Look,” the director cut in, “I can tell everyone right now that I received suggestions—some of them good, some of them not—from our cast, our crew, and even our producer—“
At this my chest went tight, as if a stream of icy water had suddenly deluged the atriums, the ventricles, of my heart. Me? When had I ever suggested a change? My mind scurried back through July, and then June.
“’Dad?’,” the writer spoke, quoting the script, “’I’m going to Baleta Drive tonight to conduct some research for a paper I’m writing about local folklore.’ And then we have the dad asking: ‘For school?’ Then Lester: ‘Yes.’ Here, Lester is lying to his dad. He had already quit school.”
Oliver shrugged. “What’s wrong with it?”
“That’s precisely my point,” the writer said. “There’s nothing specifically wrong with it. But how did the telecast go?”
“Ay, diyos ko,” the director moaned. “I know how it went.”
And the writer: “I believe the telecast had Lester spouting needless poetry about Georgia day lilies being k