NINETEEN
I went back to PTN the following Monday with just one mission: Find that footage from Tropical Tyranny.
I expected trouble with the deed. For starters, if the network did in fact have a vault I had no idea where it might be. Nor did I feel it wise to poke around in the halls asking questions. Since the failure of Lester’s Ghosts my reputation with peers had not been healthy. Once a groom who’d shown great promise for his bride, I had become a disappointment to her. Weekday mornings found her distant and brooding. She served me warm coffee with a cool nod. Curt acknowledgment from skittish eyes. She no longer trusted me, and spent more time with her friends, all the while mimicking—with just enough effort—the mannerisms of a happy wife. That the relationship might one day heal, as things between Setti and me had healed, did not escape my tender hopes. Until that day in November, 2006, when I plotted theft from her—her being PTN, not Setti. I was out to steal company property. It made for a kind of rape. And gentlemen, once you rape your wife, the marriage is over.
The first week of my investigation bore no fruit. That may seem strange to hear, considering the network’s basement rooms were set tight along a single straight hallway with a low ceiling. The challenge, per se, should not have been in finding the vault (if one even existed), but getting inside without arousing suspicion. Yet Friday morning’s weather arrived sunny and vaultless. Rays of cruel ultraviolet torture blasted through my office window, threatening to fry the drapes. I looked out across Manila Bay, hoping to see some clouds of promise. There were none. The fact came as no surprise. If I was a poor producer, I was a downright lousy detective.
“Setti?” I asked that night at dinner. “Are you certain PTN has a vault?”
“Nope,” she answered. “I actually have no idea about the vault. But the footage? Yeah, it’s real.”
I dropped my fork. “But your words, try the network vault, sort of stuck with me all week. So I looked for the vault.”
“Sorry about that. I made an assumption. I mean what kind of a television network doesn’t have a vault?”
“PTN.”
She blushed a little. “Maybe. But don’t give up hope.”
“I haven’t.”
This wasn’t a lie. At the start of week two I redoubled my efforts. They began with Sammy, my favorite waitress of the Marlboro brigade. I stood at the counter of the basement cafe and asked if I could have a sandwich and a soda. Sammy said that was fine, so long as I agreed to pay for them.
“Of course,” I told her, reaching for my wallet. My fingers found a 100 peso bill and pulled it free. Now I needed to pretend like the money reminded me of places locked up for safekeeping. The tact was shrewd and cunning. I made to give Sammy the money, then put on a mock display of hesitation at the foot of a sudden thought. “Sammy? Do you know if this network has a vault?”
The waitress’ brow furled. “What are you up to, Fredo?”
“Nothing,” I retreated hastily. “Nothing. I was just curious.”
Sammy took my money. “Go sit down and wait for your lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
So much for Sammy the waitress.
The work-week continued in routine fashion. There were meetings and phone calls. A mountain of email. A molehill of good ideas. Episodes for our new program were being released almost as fast as we could make them. That week’s Tuesday installment aired still warm from the can. The pace was frantic. With such tight deadlines for every script, we barely had time to make changes, or probe the aesthetic nuances of a quality story. Every week was just type and shoot, type and shoot. More often than not, new scenes were hacked into being right on set. Yet this no-huddle style of moving the ball downfield proved effective. Our audience continued to love what it saw. That month, AGB Nielsen Media had PTN’s newest show—our little romantic dramedy that could—in the ratings top ten. It was six years since the network kept such company. In the Live Plus Seven category we were doing even better: number four overall. We had a hit. Finally and at long last, we had a hit.
Thursday night saw me run into Allen Bautista in the parking garage. It must have been close to eleven o’clock. That was late for me. Long hours in courtship with the beatitude of success. As for Bautista, he had completed his nightly news segment. His jacket was open. He had removed his red tie and draped it around his shoulders like an honor cord.
“Fredo!” he bellowed.
His voice was like one of the parked cars: large and friendly to anyone who carried the proper set of keys. Smiling, he stepped over a dried oil patch to shake my hand.
“It’s been too long, my friend. Where have you been hiding?”
“In a corner with a dunce cap on my head.”
He laughed at that. “Been there, been there. Care for a drink?”
“Hell yes, I’d care for a drink.”
Leaving our vehicles behind, we went up to the street. The day had long passed, but there were still plenty of people out and about, chatting beneath the twinkling fairy lights of well-trimmed trees. Cigarettes and funny stories passed between friends like songs on the wind. I heard the honk of a cabbie’s horn, the click of a lady’s shoe. Allen and I made our way down to a local bar of old, crooked picnic tables set haphazardly under a canopy of puno ng saging. Bare bulbs hung from the boughs, illuminating the menus, though we didn’t order food. That night it was beer lang. Cheap, ice-cold, delicious beer.
“Whoa!” the anchorman exclaimed as I chugged a bottle of San Miguel Light. “Somebody’s dry this evening!”
My gluttony may have served as a method of communicating how good it was to see this man again. I realized it had been far too long since I’d seen Bautista’s happy smile. In its stead existed a tiresome series of austere visages not accustomed to life’s difficult twists and turns. The twists and turns that most of us—Bautista included—have come to expect as a matter of course, and are skilled at making the necessary adjustments to oppose their impact. I’d been down of late. My new production had been canceled in disgrace, with nothing to show for the efforts of its cast and crew. Bautista understood low ebbs like this. Over his many years at PTN he’d been suspended and reinstated a number of times. He kept coming back because it was his audience that cared about him the most. His following of those who rode the serpentine rails, hanging on for dear life with a hope almost too faint to see.
I asked him how things were in the news department.
“Every month,” he told me, pulling the cap off another beer, “we have a meeting to decide if we’re going to stay or we’re going to go.”
Our life in the doldrums may have been commonplace, but the anchorman’s answer still managed to surprise me a little. Lighting a cigarette, I reminded him that we now had a hit program on the air. Had its ratings not been something of a boon for the newsroom?
“We are seeing...marginally better numbers of late,” the other admitted.
“And you’re not pleased?”
“I’m in my sixties, Fredo. Soon I’ll be canceled whether we do well or not.”
“Are they grooming somebody else?”
Bautista grabbed a handful of peanuts and nodded. “Some cutie in a tight skirt. She knows nothing about reporting the news, but she’s got legs. Very nice legs.”
“No one will see her legs while they’re under a desk.”
“This little sampaguita won’t be sitting at a desk. They’re making sure of that.” The anchorman tossed the peanuts into his mouth. Some of them missed, bouncing away on the floor. “Jeeshuth!” his gob worked around the food. “I’vth sheen bashketballs that don’t roll like that!”
“Maybe they should use one for the PBA.”
Bautista took a long swig of beer. “That reminds me,” he laughed, “of a basketball my brother used to own when we were kids. A big, brown MacGregor. He got it for his tenth birthday, something like that. Got it and loved it. We shot baskets down behind an old church in Antique. Haunting ground of the flesh-eating aswang.” He paused here to show me a jack-o-lantern grin. “On the day he turned twenty we were still using the thing. It was bald. All of the little dimples were gone. There were patches of black where the leather had worn off. But Fredo? That ball still bounced like new. It wanted more games, more fun. Time had other ideas. It does for all of us.”
I understood what he meant, if only from a great distance. Antique may have been a speck of shining glass upon a far away hill—the broken glass of a haunted home—whilst I occupied cleaner, newer streets lain by young minds.
“Did your brother get another ball?” I felt compelled to ask.
Bautista’s head gave an absent shake. “No, Fredo. My brother died of leukemia when he was twenty-five.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry.”
“Why? Was it your fault?”
“I didn’t mean to be tactless.”
“Ah. Well. Natututo tayo sa pamamagitan ng paggawa. We learn by doing. We do by what we learn.”
“If only I could better remember life’s lessons. Maybe then I wouldn’t keep floundering.”
There wasn’t much to be said about basketball after that. We each ordered another beer. Tonight the bar was only about half busy. Happy chatter from young call center agents fluttered over the tables. I could just make out their faces in the gloom. The brown faces of men and women who’d been taking tech support calls from Europe all day. Candles shined beside ice-cold oases of beer buckets, sometimes betraying their expressions, sometimes not. I thought of Setti then, back home at the condo all by herself. Once she was well again (and she was getting ever so much better by the day) her laughter would harmonize with this crowd easily as any key struck on its fitting scale.
“Allen,” I said, “do you know if PTN has a vault? A place where it keeps reels of old footage?”
I’d been seeking an opportunity for the question since back at the parking garage. None had come up, and the hour was late.
To my relief the other didn’t appear put off. He merely shrugged and said that of course it did, but not at the main headquarters. No, the vault actually existed just a few blocks down from Baleta Drive, at a studio where PTN recorded game shows.
“Oh,” I marveled, after swallowing the last of my beer. “I see.”
The reaction seemed to amuse my friend. “Were you curious about something?”
I found no reason to deny him the truth, so long as tact was employed. “Well. Setti mentioned that Oliver once had a girlfriend who died on camera.”
“Who’s Setti?”
“The girl you met at the wrap party for Lester’s Ghosts. I introduced you.”
“Oh, goodness Fredo, I was so drunk that night. But a girl who died on camera? That would have to be Giselle Chavez.”
“Correct.”
“A lot of people at the station know about her. Almost everybody.” Bautista tilted his head. “Why would you ever wish to see such a thing?”
Gentle Reader, do allow me to answer his question with one of my own: Have you ever lied to a friend? My money says no. We just can’t do it. We’re too human. Too humane. Still, at that moment I came very close to proffering Allen Bautista a pure canard. An entire spiel opened in my head about this new show I wanted to produce. The show would involve underwater stunt-work. Allen, please, I need to see the footage so we can avoid making the same mistake twice. What a horrible lie. Stupid and clumsy. And worst of all, offensive.
“Allen,” I said, “I just want to see it. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s Setti. Maybe I worry about losing her the way Oliver lost Giselle.”
“Unlikely,” the other came in, “unless your Setti likes to perform feats of breath-holding with a cuff around her wrist.”
“I know,” I said. “But this...this bothers me. I don’t know what happened between Oliver and Giselle.”
“By ‘Oliver’ I assume you mean Oliver Madilim?”
“Yes.”
“Look at the python behind you, Fredo.”
I had time to show him an expression of surprise before turning my head. Sure enough, there was a long aquarium behind me that contained a number of jagged rocks. Coiled between the rocks was a brooding, hissing python which hitherto had escaped my notice.
“Wow,” I muttered, before turning back to Allen.
“His name’s Plisskin,” the anchorman told me. “If you really like movies then you know why. The owner keeps him here as a novelty to attract customers.”
“I—“
“But Plisskin doesn’t belong here, trapped behind glass walls. He belongs in the jungle. And every once in a while he realizes this and manages to escape. Sometimes it’s only for a few hours. Sometimes it’s for days. The owner always has him caught and brought back to his prison. For Oliver that’s the way things are when he remembers Giselle, which is quite often. He gets free of the tragedy. The pain that it causes. Because he knows it’s unhealthy to tote around forever. But Giselle always manages to pull him back to the aquarium. And there he lies coiled. And there he broods. Until the next opportunity to escape presents itself.”
The anchorman leaned back a little, waiting to hear my thoughts on the matter. I couldn’t do much at first. I picked up my beer bottle, saw that it was empty, put it back down. How well exactly did Bautista know Oliver? Better than I’d thought, it seemed. They way he’d spoken of him just now, it was as if they’d been friends for years.
“So the things you know about Giselle,” I began, “they come from Oliver himself?”
“Mostly,” the other admitted. “We still go out drinking sometimes. Same as you and me.”
At this my state of nonplus deepened. Bautista and Madilim, drinking together behind my back? It shouldn’t have bothered me. It wasn’t like Allen and I were a gay couple at the mercy of one another’s infidelity. But to picture him drinking back and forth between producers, one night in Quezon City, another in Muntinlupa, or wherever... Had Bautista’s fraternization ever been disclosed to my adversary? Did my name ever come up between them?
“What I’m saying, Fredo,” Allen spoke, as if he in some way could read these thoughts, “is you should probably leave Giselle where she is. In a car. At the bottom of a cold, dark lake.”
“You’ve never been curious about seeing the footage? Not once?”
“Not once. And Oliver can’t. It would kill him.” He sighed. “But if for whatever reason you feel you must, no one’s going to stop you. The vault is open to producers. You’ll find a guard at the entrance. Show him your badge and indulge.”
Bautista’s tone was that of a man resigned to the cravings of morbid men. Or in other words...he knew I would go to the vault. And he was right.
Quite right indeed.
∞
It was around 1AM when I got back to the condo. The living room was silent and dark. Setti had left one small table lamp on to glow like a firefly through the twigs of a fake tree. I glided past it to the bedroom door. It was open a crack. Pushing it wider, I was surprised to find our bed empty and unruffled. At some point during the day Setti must have encountered a need to return to Greenheights. From here I proceeded to take a long shower, wondering what that need might have been. I brushed my teeth and slipped into a pair of pajamas. Then I returned to the bedroom.
And there she lay, fast asleep. She’d been there all along of course. In my half-drunk fatigue I’d simply failed to notice her presence. Setti’s dainty outline disturbed the counterpane just barely enough, the way a child’s would on the eve of Christmas, full of wrapping paper dreams. Quietly as I knew how, I eased into bed beside her. It woke her up, as it would have any good lady devoted to her man.
“Everything okay at work?” she asked sleepily.
“Perfect, sweetheart. We’re at a reckless pace with the new show. Then I went out for a couple of beers with Allen.”
“Bautista.”
“The very man.”
Laughing, she snuggled close to my shoulder. “The very man.”
“Sorry. I’m starting to talk like some of PTN’s dialogue.”
“Poetic, Fredo. Keep it up.”
I kissed her and told her goodnight. She was there, she wasn’t there, and then she was there again. A winter bird on a cool, rainy canvas of wishful thinking.
Goodnight, darling.
Sweet dreams.