TWENTY-THREE
Typhoon Durian did cause problems.
It arrived early Thursday morning of the following week. Wednesday had been quiet and hot. We’d gone about business as usual. The new dramedy shared much in common with American programming in that much of it took place in some coffee shop or other. So we shot in a coffee shop. The sun screamed at the window. Its injustice seemed in relation to a refusal on our part to allow it the murder of a dark, air conditioned environment. It also remained unkeen toward our excitement over the coming storm. In between takes there was talk—amidst an indefectible scent of ginger spice and imitation oak—about where we intended to hunker down, and with whom. I of course looked forward to an exiled weekend with Setti, though to mention as much triggered only vague nods from my peers. Perhaps they were envious. Frustrated as the very sun itself over this coming, joyous interlude. I paid them no mind.
It set upon Manila—the storm—like a jungle platoon, so quiet until the blitz that would free some two thousand souls. At midnight the city was calm. When I went to the balcony for a cigarette, however, I could sense it. A cacophony on approach. The night was silent, the streets deserted. The tiny trees that lined my boulevard would occasionally ripple with cool, moisture-scented breezes. I watched their shadows on the walk and for some reason thought of Christmas Eve in Ohio. A snowy evening downtown. A man walking alone. Where I’m from the seasons change, most prominently in November. A wind from the north overtakes the town, sending conifer fairy lights into a midnight dance that nobody sees. No one, that is, but for the man walking alone.
I went for a walk at midnight,
Under trees bare and dry as bone;
Into the downtown Christmas lights,
I went for a walk alone.
I walked by windows of gold,
I passed under awnings fluttered;
Through the ghosts of stories untold,
In alleys of old doors shuttered.
I walked for want to be listless,
And the streets were as cold as stone;
One windy night near Christmas,
I went for a walk alone.
It struck—the storm—around 3AM. I lay awake with Setti in my arms, feeling the condo tower sway. Durian’s fists beat at the window until the lights flickered and went out. I rose to open the window a crack. In rushed the typhoon. A stack of papers (some screenplay or other) flew apart like birds before the bark of a hunting hound. The curtain rod fell, awakening Setti. I offered profuse apologies whilst resetting the window, and was about to shoo out the storm—punishment for its bastos pag-uugali of my hospitality—when the girl in the bed bade me let it stay. I turned to see her peering, cat-like, from beneath the covers. Her eyes had caught the light from some back-up generator across the way. They shined as the look of something evil captured, by chance, in an old photograph dug out from the box of a dead woman’s treasure. And there was a smile on her face, and a music in the way she breathed.
Leaving the window open, I went to her. We made love on the stormy wind, to which Setti insisted on full exposure. She commanded that I throw the bed-covers on the floor, then leered from the mattress as I grabbed her behind the knees and opened her legs wide. Somehow I could see everything. The short, soft hairs of her tightly shut sex. The stretched, smooth crevice of her groin. The fragile, defenseless little pucker of the prohibited.
“Come on, baby,” she said between cold, shrieking ghosts of wind that made her hair wild. “Come on now.”
And I ran my hands through her hair and plunged with all the force there was. Setti’s head flew back in a breathless scream. Always happy to have her low on air, I thrust again, and again, and again, keeping her tiny chest on the brink of exquisite despair. Her nails clawed my back. I liked that so I let it be. She bit my shoulder. I liked that, too. And we loved in the pique of the typhoon’s stay, our hearts a rune written in blood; and she whispered to me, in her typhoon way, that all would soon be as it should. We loved on the edge of the typhoon’s rage, each other a safe harbor place; and she gave to me from the typhoon’s stage, hope and forgiveness, a saving grace. In the eye of the storm we rested, though more fruit hung from the boughs; in the eye of the storm, bare-chested, we recouped drowned, forgotten vows.
The weekend passed in a kind of sitcom dream from that American decade after the war. The decade of aluminum trees and bedtime stories; of Ginny dolls and pop-cap guns; of Captain Black pipes, clutch bags, and parades in the snow. The condo unit had surrendered its colors. All I could see arrived in black and white. Setti wore a print dress. Her heels clicked pertly as she served me coffee. I left the TV off, yet still the rabbit ears, rising half-way to the ceiling, drew my eye. And then came the hand-painted post cards. A stack of them lay on the side table, so fastidious, their creation a true sacrifice of time and skill. A mistletoe blossom adorned the kitchen archway. I approached it tactfully while Setti washed dishes at the sink. Pretending to find a spot on my sleeve, I waved her over. She came willingly, and there we shared a slow kiss that might have warmed the snow perched, like a fluffy white cat, past the housewife frills of the kitchen curtain.
I remembered Setti’s rage at my suggestion that Giselle Chavez’s death had been anything other than accidental. She seemed so set against this notion that on Monday I shared our disagreement with Allen Bautista. We were at lunch in the network basement. I’d gone light—skinless chicken under a blanket of lettuce. Bautista, in turn, had challenged two tacos in a duel to the death, to which he’d come out the esteemed victor but for a dab of sauce on the chin. To his ever enduring credit, even this last failed to sour the victory. He wiped the dab off without my betraying its existence, then raised a distinguished brow when I mentioned, tactfully as possible, the accident which had deprived PTN of its stunt-woman.
“Accident,” Bautista repeated. “Yes. Yes, it was terrible.”
“But it was an accident?” I lured.
The other man gave a vague nod. “I suppose so. I’ve seen the footage myself and it certainly looked like she wanted out of that car. Have you seen it?”
“I have.” In fact the VCD was upstairs in my office. My intention was to return it that very day. “It looked like she was trying to open the cuffs with some kind of hidden switch.”
“Yes. When the official report came out, it mentioned that the cuffs had jammed. Final verdict: Accidental drowning.”
I took out a cigarette and lit it. A report. Here was something hitherto unconsidered. “Was there any liability on the network’s part?”
“Of course,” Bautista replied. “Some legal rambling occurred between Giselle’s family and ours. Eventually the parties agreed on a financial settlement.”
I grunted at this. In books there is still such a thing as true love and high adventure; both take wing on a summer breeze and disappear into the white, puffy clouds of romantic musing. Here in the real world, however, everything always comes down to money.
“Who got what?” I asked.
Bautista shrugged. “I don’t know. It was none of my business, Fredo.”
“But you reported it on the news.”
“The incident, Fredo, the incident. Which we sensationalized, by the way.”
“Really? You had to sensationalize a real death on camera?”
“Yeah. Don’t look so surprised. The media plays everything up. Do you think Rosa Parks really refused to sit in back of the bus? That whole thing was a staged event. They actually wanted someone younger to play Rosa, but the girl had a filthy mouth. Do you think that godawful red flag over Berlin was a real flag? Nope. It was a tablecloth. Just over the weekend we had one of our own women give a report on Typhoon Durian, with the water up over her knees.” Bautista leaned forward to look at me closely. “There was no flooding in the village we sent her to. Zero. The water was poured into a ditch by one of our cameramen. Then the girl stood in the water.”
“But Allen...how did PTN sensationalize Selli’s death?” I had never referred to Giselle as “Selli” before. At that moment the nickname felt quite natural.
“Well,” the other sighed, “we didn’t air the actual footage of her drowning. For obvious reasons. What we did do was play up some of her older stunts. Made the danger seem a little more real. Higher jumps. Sped up car chases. That sort of stuff.”
“But her death was an accident? It’s one hundred percent certain?”
Bautista looked at me like I was stupid. “Nothing is certain, Fredo. Not even the stars. But maybe it’s only drunken old men who realize these things.”
I had one more question for the anchorman. It came into my head as I asked the previous. It concerned the stunt prop—the cuffs that Selli had used. Did Bautista happen to know if the cuffs were still around?
“Yes, Fredo,” he answered, in a way that made me feel he regretted the fact. “They are.”
PTN’s old prop department was actually located in the same building as the video vault. That evening Bautista presented the 6 o’clock news (the storm death toll had hit something like 6,000; boxer Manny Pacquiao had beaten the Mexican champion, Erik “El Terrible” Morales, in a third round knockout), then accompanied me across town to Gateway Mall. Why he’d chosen to do so was—and still is—difficult for me to ascertain. Perhaps Giselle Chavez had been haunting his mind along with my own. In such a case she would be yet another of his ghosts, joining his beloved wife, and the twin sister of his college friend.
At any rate, the anchorman was with me when I returned the VCD. Next he led down a long hallway that curved around back of the game show stage, where we found another vault of sorts, this one stacked with old props. It was less organized than the video vault. Less ceremonial. Cardboard boxes, many of them torn, lay haphazardly about the concrete floor of a poorly lit room. About that light: a naked bulb in a rusty ceiling cage, flicking and buzzing as if set upon by wasps. It wasn’t wasps. The wiring was bad. When Bautista entered the room his portly figure became black. Ambiguous. A shuffling charcoal sketch upon a canvas of mixed memories. It was doubtless I looked the same to him, except that he never so much as glanced over his shoulder to find out. He walked straight to the back of the room, pulled the flap of a crooked box, and began to rummage.
“PTN doesn’t care much for this place, does it?” I mused, spying a tipped-over crate of mannequin parts. There was a head, a torso. Half a leg.
Bautista paid me no mind. He’d gotten deep into his search for the cuffs. I could hear junk banging around inside the box. Plastic and metal. The music of fired ceramic.
It all stopped at once. There came a moment’s silence. Then the anchorman was standing. Face flickering in the musty, unkempt gloom, he raised his hand. From it dangled a short chain attached to a sickle. No, not a sickle. An open cuff. The cuff that had over-stressed the lungs of young Miss Giselle Chavez.
I wasn’t sure what to think. “That’s it?” I asked, almost reverential. “The actual prop?”
“Yes,” was all the other would say.
We went back to the more properly lit video vault for a closer look. Here I was able to see that only one of the cuffs was open. The other remained locked. Bautista found the hidden catch for it, pressed it. Nothing happened. Next, he grabbed the ring in both hands and tugged. Still nothing. I thought that Bautista, or any other male of medium to large build, could break the cuffs by force if need be. But Giselle had been a small woman. Upon deciding that they liked her better underwater than above it, the cuffs had withstood her fussed, frantic objections with ease.
Bautista did not break the cuffs open. Instead he closed the other link. A series of crisp, dry clicks—the single-strand teeth engaging the pawl pins—echoed across the room. He thumb found the hidden release knob. It too failed to open the link.
“I’ll be damned,” Bautista said, shaking his head. “I will be damned.”
“Maybe they’re just old,” I suggested. “Rusted on the inside.”
Sighing, Bautista admitted the possibility. He handed me the cuffs. The metal had gotten warm from the other’s touch. I could also tell that they weren’t as heavy as a real set of cuffs. The metal was thinner, cheaper. Movie prop material. All the same, it had been strong enough for Giselle.
The release knobs were no more cooperative with me. They were tiny little studs disguised to look like pawl pins. Each moved down easily enough under pressure. Neither did anything else.
What would Oliver think if he knew about this? I wondered. Would he shrug as if it no longer mattered? Had he moved on from the accident? Or would he rage? Storm into Rodrigo Reyes’ office with tears in his eyes, demanding an explanation? I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know. But maybe he deserved to. The girl who’d died had been his fiancee. They were in the middle of planning a life together when the waters rose, drowning their dreams. Should a secret like this, I reasoned, be withheld from the one who’d been left behind?
We went back to the props room and returned the cuffs. Minutes later we were parting ways at the LRT’s K-Pointe station. Bautista still needed to do the 11 o’clock segment; he would take the a return train to the studio. My day was over. I needed to get back to Salcedo Village before Setti started to worry. I said goodbye to Bautista on the platform and wished him luck with the broadcast. A horn blared, announcing the arrival of the train. As it whisked into the station, Allen said to me:
“Oliver. I think it well that you let this go. Whatever you manage to find out, it won’t bring Selli back.”
“You’re right,” I answered, hoping he’d not see through the lie. As he stepped onto the train I manufactured the most innocent smile in my repertoire. The door slid shut. The train purred off.
It was only as I made my way back down to the street, all intent on returning to the games building to retrieve the cuffs, that I realized how the tipsy anchorman had addressed me. The name he’d used.
Oliver. He’d called me Oliver.