SIXTEEN
She rode back to work with me on Monday.
We took her car, though she didn’t feel like driving. Owing to her wanton spirit behind the wheel I was more than happy to bear the torch. Respectful of the disrespectful traffic, I navigated us from Greenheights to Quezon City without incident. Making conversation with Setti during the drive proved much more daunting. She sat in the passenger seat like a wax sculpture of a trivial land’s dead princess. No one could quite remember her name. No one from the other side of the mountain, or beyond the killing dunes of a desert wistful of the Rub’ al Khali, had done more than hesitate, ever so briefly, at her photograph, the result of a chance encounter within the dated pages of a high school history book. And who had taken the photo, and for what purpose? Captured behind a grainy screen of black and white, Setti’s once vibrant features are here devoid of color. She looks up from the page as the reader, unwilling to so much as glance at the caption, flips by. It is just as well. For the princess is not only devoid of color, but of things to say.
Nevertheless, I tried to make her speak. On Friday a lawyer had called with information about her father’s will. He wanted to talk to Setti. Setti had not been strong enough.
“I think he’ll call back today,” I told her, keeping my eyes on the road. “There’s a chance that your father left you the house.”
“Okay.”
“If so, you’ll need to meet with him. Discuss legal matters.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anyone else in the family who might be in Mark’s will?”
“Okay.”
Now I looked at her. We had stopped at a light. “Setti?”
She wasn’t answering. Her face looked rigid as the silver grills of a hundred cars passing in the opposite lane. I said her name again, and when she didn’t answer a second time, I told her that if the lawyer did call back, I would request that he give the daughter of the deceased a little more time to grieve. This seemed to placate Setti. Her shoulders loosened. The light turned green. We drove on to PTN.
That was the first day people at work began to ask—really ask, over and over—how Setti was doing. Sammy the cigarette waitress asked me. So did Allen Bautista and Rodrigo Reyes (the latter with a contempt in his stare typically employed upon the criminally inclined). Setti’s workmate in HR asked while the very girl in question stood right next to me. It happened in the lobby. I was showing Setti the Christmas decorations in the hope they would buoy her spirit. The ploy failed. She was still too far gone to reach. Indeed, the workmate (that pretty little flower who looked a lot like Setti, remember?) seemed to barely notice her presence. What could I do but answer the question best as I could?
“I think she might still be a little too tired to come to work,” I said, sparing my partner a chiding glance.
“Let her rest,” the pretty workmate replied. She spoke as if I might have been a cruel hansom driver wielding a bull whip.
Leaving Setti to her work, I went upstairs to mine. Our director wanted to speak to me about a new show for the network. It was not be a private discussion. This I learned via an email from the man. He wanted a meeting. He named the time and place. There were two other invites. One of them was the station manager.
The other was Oliver Madilim.
At 10 o’clock all three of us sat down to hear the director’s official pitch. Goodness! How can I describe it? In this book I’ve already outlined two other shows—one a comedy, the other a thriller. This new endeavor fit neatly—in my ephebic yet precocious opinion—into what may commonly be referred as teen romance. It included a boy and a girl. Aloof parents. A school bully. A demanding teacher. The boy played the violin. The girl was a cheerleader. Straight away I understood the solidity of the program’s gantry, and why it had fallen under Rodrigo Reyes’ serious consideration. After the debacle of Lester’s Ghosts, PTN harbored no further desire to shoot craps. It wanted something that worked. Something that worked right now.
The director’s confidence fairly soared as he reminded us how well shows like this did in South Korea. He mentioned titles such as Did We Really Love? And Fireworks. From here he moved to more local titles. Mara Clara, Vietnam Rose, and Sa Piling Mo all made the list. Manifesting arguments to his case would have been impossible. Nor did I wish to embrace such an endeavor. Quite contrarily (Mary, Mary), I was all for the idea. It made too much sense to oppose. I did, however, bring up the fact that we had three more episodes of Lester’s Ghosts ready to air, with the first set for Tuesday night. Had we been plugging it in a dutiful manner? There’d been no commercials over the weekend. Our target demographic was lost in the dark. How could we expect them to watch a show that they didn’t know existed?
“Lester’s Ghosts has been canceled,” Rodrigo Reyes huffed, leaning forward in his chair. He wore a blue suit that day with a red tie. Don’t ask how I can remember. I just do. Bad news has a way of sticking in the mind. Failure. Embarrassing incidents. They play over and over on a pair of old reels that click like the glory years of Hollywood. Grainy talkies, shimmering in black and white. The hero wears a hat; the heroine holds a cigarette in a dainty quellazaire. And they enact these terrible scenes for the parents of their shameful existence, remembering every single line without the slightest provocation.
“Ohh,” I moaned. I had to. It’s often the only method of staining the film. The room cast me a worried look, as if I were choking on something. I waved it off. It was okay. Still, I was going to need some heavy alone time later on.
“Dead on arrival,” someone said. Was it Oliver? Yes, I thought that a pretty good possibility.
My head dropped into my hands. “What will we run in its place?”
“A game show,” Reyes replied. His eyes darted around the table. Looking, I thought, for a pack of cigarettes to rip open.
“A game show? What kind?”
“Don’t worry about it, Fredo.”
“But—”
Reyes looked up. “I said don’t worry about it. We made our decision last Friday.”
“The three of you here?”
“That’s right. As for this new program...”
I heard him draw a breath. What came out next probably would have sounded much better in a plume of smoke.
“Oliver will act as producer, with you, Fredo, in the executive position.”
“Ohh.” There I’d gone again. “I...I’m being marginalized?”
“I’m afraid so. For awhile. We—the three of us—feel you need some time to learn more about how a project solidifies.”
“I understand,” I said.
I did. Well, mostly. The Lester’s Ghosts pilot had been trashed by more than just the one critic who’d so rudely visited my office last week. Did I mention that? No. Okay. But it had. Its ratings were terrible, too. Much, much worse than the ones for all these bad memories in my head. Never the none the less, I could have done without the smug look on Oliver’s face that morning, or the bitter coffee stare from the director’s eyes.
“When do we begin production on the new show?” came my next question.
Reyes nodded toward Oliver. “It’ll be an emergency shoot,” Madilim answered. “We’ll use the same cast from Lester’s.” He hesitated. “It is not happy.”
“I can’t imagine it is.”
“Are you aware,” Oliver went on, “of the stipulation in its contract that states it is not to get paid for episodes that don’t air?”
Nope, I sure wasn’t. With my mouth hanging open I asked Oliver if the stipulation included the major stars. Lips smiling and eyes fierce, our new producer told me it did.
“So...the cast won’t be paid for the three lost episodes?”
“No, sir,” Reyes broke in tightly. “It will not.”
“Hope you’re proud of yourself.”
Okay, now that last wasn’t actually spoken by anyone in the room. It came off the black and white reel. Grant or Bogey. Irene Dunne. Ingrid Bergman. I don’t really know. But I heard it.
“There is something else,” Reyes said. “Something not related to the new shows. Or perhaps they are.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
We all waited for the station manager to continue. During those few seconds I remembered the giant teddy bear I’d bought Setti for her birthday. It makes no sense as to why. So far as I knew it was still at the condo. I made a mental note to go there later and pick it up. Setti hadn’t smiled for a long time.
“As everyone knows, PTN was struck by a vandal the other week. Someone made a fire in the parking garage. And one of our storage closets was...” Reyes trailed off to allow himself a disgusted wince. “Basically destroyed. The office supplies were urinated on.”
From here Reyes told us the Manila police department was about the matter of collecting urine samples from every employee PTN had. I thought that might take awhile from them to accomplish, but kept my mouth shut. Their reason for doing so couldn’t have been more plain. The department was hoping to get a match with the samples they’d collected at the crime scene. Reyes told us this in a grave voice. His hands were folded; his wide face was pale. Do you remember that old Hitchcock movie, Suspicion? Remember when Johnnie Aysgarth first told Lina that Beaky had died? That’s the way Reyes sounded—like someone had died. I think he believed that one of us in that very room was the guilty party. Turned out he was correct.
Honestly, though? I don’t wish to write about it tonight. The trite satisfaction of seeing Oliver Madilim restrained in his own office by a mortified-looking Detective Lopez does not reflect the balance—for me, at least—of autumnal stars. Of the lady of good counsel. Of divine order. There is simply too much else going on in life to weigh the opposite cup down. I cannot patronize felicity.
Come through the shade of a fickle lane,
Come to the river road,
Where the picnic table is lost again,
And tragic times unfold.
Beaches walked for religions lost,
In a silver tide’s blinding glaze,
Sift the sands’ momentous cost,
In search of a love who stays.
I said I didn’t wish to write about it. Supposition insists that it can’t be helped. So let me repeat this about what happened to Oliver: I welcome no evil pleasures through the door. My heart leaps not with victorious repute. Madilim’s actions were those of a desperate, frustrated soul. A soul who’d driven its love to death. In trying to destroy me, a needed target in difficult times, he’d destroyed himself. It wasn’t his fault. Not entirely. The guy was an angry mess.
In another life, we might have been brothers.