TWENTY-SEVEN
Shall I even talk about how Christmas went?
You’ve listened to all the songs. That night—Christmas Eve night—there were presents and plates of ham and cups of coffee. There were laughing children and politely appreciative adults. The tree blinked and twinkled in a dark corner of the room. I’m not going to tell you it looked like a bunch of fireflies because that’s not what it looked like. Nor did it resemble the constellations, carefully imagined, studiously cataloged, over a snowy field. Gentle Reader...it looked like a tree with lights in it. Pretty, cheerful. Pleased to be taken out of its box for these past few months (don’t forget that in the Philippines Christmas begins in September). Now let us move back to the food. The table was positively spread with everything Filipinos like to eat on Christmas Eve. This means lechon, sweet spaghetti with cut-up hot dogs (Pinoy style), pancit, leche flan, buko, lumpiang, puto bumbong. The more worldly delights existed as well. Chocolates and hard candy. Beer for the grown-ups; Coke for the kids. As I said: We had quite a spread, most of it cooked by the women. This included Setti. When I was lucky enough to infiltrate the fierce, sweeping radar of her exclusive clan, I caught her bouncing back and forth between stoves and tables, tiny arms loaded down with heaping plates. In these rare yet abiding moments Setti’s smile looked delirious as falling confetti. Her skirt fanned like a parasol on a summer picnic. And her eyes, well...they searched for nothing. Until of course they stumbled upon my presence (quite by accident, quite by accident), at which time the pink petals of her joy would fall, one by one, down toward the edge of the home’s smelly, backyard canal, there to be smothered in the muck of whatever this reality was that we shared.
We opened our gifts and said our thank-yous. Afterward some of us went to bed. Some us—kids--played with our toys. Others wandered outside to smoke. I fell into this latter bracket, albeit for company I had only a stray mongrel who had wandered over from the kape for a leg of chicken. Not for love or money could I bear to disappoint the animal. Surreptitiously as was possible, I stole him some food from the kitchen, along with a bowl of cool water. Then I went right back to smoking. My good deed made the cigarette taste much better than usual. Much better than it had any right to. The wind tore every toxic exhalation from my lungs and made off down the street with it, where other men stood smoking before other homes. From these same homes came a good deal of dreadfully off-key singing. Carols to digital videoke. Like most American expats in the Philippines, I tried my best to ignore it. Just beneath the thin veneer of my attempt, however, lay an urge to join in, to celebrate, with the oblivious abandon of a falling star. It doesn’t matter how well we sing anyway. What matters is the time—how we spend it, where, and with whom.
Not quite willing to let myself burn to death in an atmosphere of glowing, giggling humility, I resisted the urge, and instead found my mind wandering to Cleveland, where I had lived prior to all of this living, pronounced at one final flick of Pisces’ tail, one final splash, while the hooves of Aries chafed April’s close-by shores as if to say: All right you two; I’ll take it from here. The effort proved troublesome. Rather than see that life as a series of slides or photographs (the way many novelists seem to think they arrive, and thus, the way I commanded), it announced its capitulation in the form of a dream. Or rather, many dreams that I’d experienced long ago. One by one scenes from the loom of Postvorta, that goddess of yesterday, peered at me like the faces of giant statues through the fog of a city fjord. My parents were there, though not intact. Their immense, decapitated heads lay in the streets, whilst I, a breeze-blown feather, swooped past. It wasn’t quite fast enough not to notice the incredulity in their marble eyes, the tragedy, as if all of this could have been avoided through the procurement of a simple thing. A pair of binoculars, perhaps, or a more attentive ear. It wasn’t only statues in the mist. As I journeyed I could also make out the colossal ruins of a baseball career (I’d been a great contact hitter in high school), a gargantuan telescope—smashed and half-buried beneath uprooted chunks of pozzolana and lime—representing my crippled interest in astronomy, a forlorn temple of Venus, a theater, a church, a racetrack overgrown with weeds. Possibilities all of a different kind of life, alternative vistas. The seeds had been planted, yes. But they had not grown.
The following week—the final week of my living those strange and rather unsettling Manila lies—passed in much the same way. As Setti had so astutely pointed out, I just didn’t quite belong in Mark’s house. I was never quite there. Her family continued to permeate the diaphanous form of my substance, their eyes more like prying fingers and I the abandoned project of a once resourceful arachnid. I was swept aside. Cast off. Dismissed. Nothing I said seemed capable of safe landing. Words meant to in some way fortify or uphold my end in a conversation instead went sailing across the room, where the wrong people would hear them and sometimes ask: Who said that? Setti, did you hear? To which she would faultlessly reply: Hear what?
In short, I was a ghost. I did my best to haunt the premises accordingly, hovering beneath archways or watching from behind the tree as Setti’s family ate dinner. Sometimes the children jumped when they saw me, albeit this was not my intention. One of the boys got a toy truck for Christmas. On Wednesday he was playing with it in the upstairs hall. Smiling, I approached him. “Having fun?” I asked. The boy’s face took on an homogeneous appearance of terror and disbelief I had never beheld outside the reel of a Sam Peckinpah movie. Leaving his truck on the floor, he tore downstairs like a shot.
And then there was Setti. Small and slender. Soft and delicate. A mist of sprayed perfume. A desperate breath of air. A glint of moonlight in a wine glass. Lysette Roxas. In the evenings I liked to watch her bathe. She always preferred to do this rather than shower, especially during that week before the gun of 2007—a gun which, in the Philippines, blasted flame rather than cold lead alloy. Likely it was due to an awareness of my admiration, which I took to casting as if my love were a net and her heart one of those elusive labyrinth fish that used to inhabit the flood plains of southern Davao. First came the water. If I wasn’t with her when she turned it on, I always heard it, and made it a point to be in her room while she undressed. Setti knew how to bare her chest with a flourish, using the cross-lift in accompaniment of the very deepest breath. Her ribs would rise firm through an Ahhh! of mellifluent air. It made me think of a girl before the challenge of a deep dive. A girl preparing to hold her breath for a long, long time. Setti only waited a moment, though. Then she was back at the surface, expertly unhooking her brassier. The straps slipped down her arms to that point where a man is just about driven mad with what purred beneath the cups. Here Setti liked to hesitate again, smiling to herself. Pretty ladies adore the vulnerability of a tender secret, especially when it’s about to be laid bare. To draw it out even further—permitting, as it were, one final breath of its own—she showed me her back before letting the brassiere fall. Now she’d become fully topless. The slight crescents of her naked breasts were quite visible past the frolicking eddies of ribs dainty as toothpicks. Once more I confess a certain, smoldering proximity to madness at this stage. Yet Setti played her role as if before a studio audience, locked within an insistent demesne of polished, poetic rendition.
The dear girl. When at last she deigned to turn around (I watched her every night that week, and every night it was the same), her hands flew to cover the breasts, allowing me nothing sans cost. She never even smiled as she floated to the mirror—every night, every night—here to let her hands fall. The glass showed me the bareness I knew so well. The breasts I had touched and kissed. The ribs that rose with all of those breaths I’d seen her hold. Hold for as long as a petite Filipina could. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. I like to see her brow tic at the first little twist of pain. And I like how Setti always, even when it hurts, keeps right on waiting. The dear girl.
She never stood long at the mirror before unbuttoning her skirt, or shorts, or whatever the day’s wardrobe had commanded. Nor did she pull everything down at once. Setti always undressed one layer at a time, a trait which I could not help but relish. As with her brassiere, she took her panties down (I refer to the garment thus whether today’s post-modern liberal approves of it or no) with backside to me, freeing the cleft of her tiny buttocks in one slow, sibilant tug. The crevice was tight, the banks on either side soft as terracotta petals come to rest upon the balcony of a princess’s boudoir. Though we’d made love many times since March, I had breached the seal of this most private, most taboo part of Setti only once. There’d been a monsoon that night. Silver drapes of cold rain in the trees, weighing down their limbs until many dared scratch the roofs of passing cars. Lying naked with me under the covers, Setti asked if I was curious. I answered, quite truthfully, with a yes. And so she had rolled over. Look first, she told me. I don’t mind. And with what little light there’d been in the room, I spread back the tightness of her buttocks, exposing the shut asterisk in between. As if to beckon me inside, Setti gave a little push. The asterisk went taught, relaxed, went taught again. There’s Vaseline on the table, a voice purred. It was Setti’s of course. I put some of it on. The shaft of my penis felt burned and frozen at the same time, as if some mad scientist of cryogenics had demanded it be preserved for future generations of chartless deviants. Deep breath, I told her. Setti’s lungs rushed with air and waited. Leaning over her, I began a slow, exquisite search between her legs, indulging the softness, the warmth, the held breath. I could make out Setti’s face in the headboard mirror. She blinked. Her brow twitched. Either her air had been running low, or she felt me at the gate, stressing it, bending it. I stressed it a little more and then, cupping a hand over her mouth, broke inside. MM-MM! She winced. Shh, I whispered. Relax.
And she had relaxed, and we’d made it work. It was just the one time. That week prior to New Year’s, Setti never lingered at the mirror for long enough to let me remember the details. At right around the same moment I was telling her to relax, she would float into the bathroom, where by now the tub was full. And into the tub she would lower herself, until the sudsy water closed about her neck, threatening to drown her. I never offered to help her bathe. Indeed, to judge by Setti’s refusal to acknowledge anyone but herself in the room, I never even felt obliged to sit by the tub. Happy to keep my distance, I let her wash. Perhaps as a method to reward my abstinence, I seem to recall her performing half a dozen or so breath-holds that week, never quite reaching a full minute but so close, so close, drawing back the peak of the blade just before it could puncture her lungs.
∞
As the week aged the sound of fireworks became more and more persistent. At the end of each year, Setti once told me, the Philippines became a kind of story torn from a diary—the diary of a battlefield soldier writing home to his girl. There were explosions over the trees, and deep within the trees. Blasting rockets that screeched like birds of prey. Low, hollow booms that made me think of shells impacting the surface of a military strike zone. Ear-splintering, staccato discharges as if the street kids had all received automatic weapons for Christmas. Hissing, sizzling sparks from the wheels of supernova stars. Exploding cherry bombs. All of these and more grew in both intensity and frequency as the days got dangerously close to the boundary of 2007.
It was to be my first New Year’s in the Philippines. It was to be my last. Setti made certain I knew as much by reminding me of the former on Friday and, on Saturday night, intoning the latter in such a matter of fact way it made me instantly believe her.
“You won’t be here next year,” she said.
“I know,” I replied, before the words could even sink in.
We were on the back balcony. On the other side of the canal a group of young men were lighting fireworks. Trails of smoke occasionally drifted over to us, helping to impede the smell of dirty water. My answer had not surprised Setti. Rather, she seemed disappointed in that I’d accepted defeat so easily. I felt her head come to rest on my shoulder. I heard her heave a deep sigh.
“Any idea where you’re going next?” she asked.
“Some.” I put my arm around her. “In fact, I’d like you to come with me.”
A bottle rocket screamed into the sky. Some kids who’d been watching the men cheered.
“Okay,” Setti said. It was either that or no way. Her response coincided with the rocket’s apogee, where it exploded in a flash.
“You don’t care where we go?”
“No,” she said, never once lifting her head. “No.”
A gigantic feast took place the next night. It was much the same as Christmas Eve. The dining room table was spread end to end with food. We grabbed at it like patrons at a buffet, slopping up our plates while outside the bombs and bangs and blasts just kept getting closer, as if Mark’s house had turned into a final bastion against the grim tide of that two-faced god of January, who had once been confused with another, and who held no equivalent to the adversary of his worshipers.
I wasn’t supposed to know anything about Detective Lopez. That I found out later, long after leaving Manila. The plan was to have him come to the door, be invited in, and make his way among the family comfortably as anyone who shared its surname. He was to drift toward his prey like a shark, there to snap down the jaws of vindication and righteousness. I also had no idea—until later—that the coup had not been arranged by Setti. It belonged to Rodrigo Reyes. Apparently he’d slipped Lopez some extra cash under the table to have me arrested on a holiday. This after the guilty party could no longer be put in question. Since Christmas I’d been a sitting duck, no less vulnerable than the myriad kitchen feasts put out all over the village. They were coming for me. Reyes and Lopez. The rope was ready.
Lopez timed his attack carefully. His knock at the door coincided with the nearness of midnight. Chaos was his ally. One of the children answered, delighted to have an excuse for seeing the street, where so many things were exploding it was a wonder nobody went deaf. Smiling, the detective greeted the child a happy new year. He bore gifts. In one hand was a bottle of champagne; in the other, a wheel of cheese. Saan mo gusto ang mga ito? I heard him ask.
How did I know all of this? How did I see? The chaos was a double agent. The throng of Setti’s family aptly concealed my presence on the half-landing, where I just so happened to be at that moment. I was on my way down to fetch Setti a glass of champagne for her bath, but once I recognized the detective’s face I retreated to the nearest convenient shadow, there to watch the shark glide past as if the ocean belonged to him alone.
The waters were dark; hiding places were abundant. He checked the dining room first. The gifts were placed on the table. Then, methodically as a little boy playing hide and seek, he conducted his search. In one room he opened all the cupboards and drawers. In another he tugged back the curtains. He checked behind the couch. He peered under the Christmas tree. Nobody seemed to mind. Setti’s family treated Detective Lopez they way they’d been treating me. He was a man who didn’t seem real to them. A dry, clean brush bereft of ability to alter their world. No one watched him rifle through the contents of Mark’s desk, looking for who knows what. No one noticed him kneel to dump a box of VCDs onto the floor. And when at last he gave up and called my name, no one heard.
I held my position. Lopez had appeared at the bottom of the stairs. His eyes searched the ceiling like a contractor checking for leaks. There were no leaks. I wasn’t going to move until I had to.
Suddenly the entire half-landing turned ice cold. A shiver wracked my bones; my teeth began to chatter. Had a front moved in from the east? The first chill winds of January?
I was beginning to wonder if I were ill when suddenly a voice from behind whispered: “Enjoying yourself?”
I turned, careful not to make the boards creak underfoot, and there stood Mark. Setti’s dead father. His skin was white as the ghost of a Pawnee warrior. His eyes glowed in the dark.
“You’re reprehensible,” the old man moaned. “I would ask you to die, but I don’t wish to see you ever again.”
I shook my head. To speak would have drawn the attention of Lopez, who was still at the bottom of the stairs. Mark never acknowledged the presence of anyone else. He glimmered before me the way some projections do upon a bank of fog.
“Leave,” he said, with an expression of profound, inescapable sadness. “Quickly as you can. And never come back.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. Before Lopez could decide it was time to check the second floor of the house, I slipped upstairs and into Setti’s bedroom. From the window lay a drop of about fifteen feet. It was one of those sliding picture windows that squeaked every time you opened it. This time its complaint reached Lopez. I heard him shout my name. Then his feet were pounding up the steps. I straddled the ledge. A bottle rocket exploded in one of the curb-side duhat trees. From the corner of my eye I saw one of its smaller limbs break and fall into a defeated list, just as I jumped to the ground. Soon as my feet hit I was running. Where to I hadn’t the slightest idea—not on the surface of lucidity that is, where the flotsam of pretend importance undulates endlessly, polluting the mind, stinking up its thoughts until we’re cornered into a series of solipsistic prayers for the end of the world.
My own world came to an end that night. One of them at least. The one were I worked as a producer for a television network. I ran down the street like a madman fleeing his asylum. Above and below fireworks were exploding. I saw a dozen giant flowers of fire—what that British author who collected fantasy awards the way many of us like to collect books or cufflinks preferred to call Fleur de Feu—open up in the sky. I jumped past the rat-a-tat-tat-tat from some kid’s box of lady-fingers. Huge blasts and blinding flashes of light surrounded me, until I knew not which way was up, nor could scarcely care. All I wanted was to be away from Detective Lopez, whose pursuant voice I could somehow hear, growing ever more menacing. Worse, Lopez no longer seemed concerned about office building vandalism. Mingling with the fireworks was a slew of accusations much more dire—accusations cruel and sharp and drenched in blood—along with grease-slicked bribes of measured amnesty if—and only if—I would stop running right now.
No way in hell was I about to stop. I reached the guardhouse intersection Setti and I had so often crossed, hand in hand, on our way home from an evening’s walk. Chest heaving for breath, I looked left, then right. Left led up a gentle slope that hooked around in a huge circle back to Mark’s house. Right went up and out of the village. Neither felt like sane choices. But there was a third route, one that went straight down the middle—diretso sa gitna. Only in this case the little deserted road went up, not down, through a dreary canopy of colorless trees. This was the way I chose. The canopy would conceal me from Lopez. I could hide in the dark and collect my thoughts.
Up the hill I fled. The soles of my shoes must have resembled the flicking silver scales of a panicked fish, but I most certainly wasn’t thinking about stuff like that at the time. I was terrified of the law. What happens if you get arrested in the Philippines? What do they do to you? Under no circumstances do I consider myself an intrepid explorer of such things. I prefer to take my chances with the night, along with a not quite lethal dose of frantic desperation, and a gun.
I had no gun but the rest remained loyal. The street eased its way up the bank at first, then hooked 90 degrees straight to the top. I paused at the corner to catch my breath. Before me stood a one-level house I’d never noticed before. It looked shabby and abandoned. Broken windows formed silent screams in the dark. The roof sagged. Had it been here last spring, when I’d first walked Setti up this very same road? The question seemed ludicrous. The house’s dilapidated condition testified its age. Yet I hadn’t seen it, nor any of the trees around it, gathered like soldiers mourning a flown soul.
It was here that I witnessed—perhaps for the second time—the ghost of Alfredo Trentinara. It hung from one of the trees, its neck broken, its head blasted out. I’d been shot and hanged. Stamped as a victim of some random crime. Half my head had come apart. One of the eyes, I noticed in mounting horror, was still intact, hanging by the retinal nerve on a cold, pale cheekbone. It glared back at me the way reflections sometimes will through a sliver of broken glass. Indeed, this may have been how I knew the ghost was mine. Despite the damage and the dark, it was easy to see that Alfredo Trentinara had been killed. If you don’t believe me go into the bathroom now, turn off the light, and stand in front of the mirror. That shape in the glass? It’s you. Of course it is. Standing at the corner of that pitch dark street, I possessed the same kind of certainty. I was dead. Murdered. And here hanged the doleful, transparent remains.
“What’s going on?” I might have whispered.
But then Lopez appeared at the far end of the street. Calling my name, he began a brisk walk toward us—me and my ghost. I turned left and ran up the hill. At the top is a scene I’ve described once already. A windy, open field ringed with trees. An immense sky, now in bloom with holiday fireworks. A tiny lake.
I ran to the edge of the water, knelt and touched its cool surface. The blurred outline of a car down below may have been a trick of the light. Even today I don’t much like to think about it. I mean, Setti and I, we still talk sometimes. Our chats are light and musical, like with those old friends we sometimes see in our dreams. True, her smiles are distant. They are smiles better suited for bedroom doorways or railings at the top of the stairs. And yes, it’s difficult to remember the things she says. Some of her words stay; some of them go. We walk hand in hand in the dark, she once told me. You hate the sun. I like to breathe. It’s so sensible. I don’t care to think about what she meant by that, or if what we’re doing here in Trentinara is real and right and true. Oliver, Oliver! She sometimes calls. Why did you change the prop? I don’t know how to work it and this is really starting to hurt!
Oh God, what did I do to her? What did I do?
I tore off my shoes and dove into the lake. The car was a blue, ghostly sketch about ten feet down. With every kick it seemed to mock my enterprise, maintaining a mystical distance the water tried to explain was an effect of viscosity and luminescence. Ignoring the science, I kept swimming until I reached the driver’s side door. The window was down. Through it I could see a terrified Giselle Chavez. She was cuffed to the steering wheel, unable to get the prop to let go. For one split second I thought about making a show of my arrival—of signaling to her that things were going to be okay, that I was here and she was going to live. The god of time and freedom, however, beseeched swiftness. To pause here, fists at my hips, cape flying in the wind, would likely drown poor Giselle. The girl had been holding her breath for at least three minutes (I somehow knew this, though I plainly confess no source but for the opinion of Saturn himself). She needed out right now.
So I reached through the window and with my thumb found the prop’s tiny little cheek rivet. I pressed it. Out popped the ratchet, freeing Giselle’s wrist. Now from here I didn’t even give her a smile as of to say: See? Everything’s good! Instead I yanked her out by the arm. Giselle gave a frantic, convulsive kick off the roof of the car. Her body shot toward the surface. Halfway up, though, she went limp. Her arms and legs shut down the way those campy TV robots used to do when their batteries went dead. She’d run out of air and drowned. I carried her the rest of the way. Remember how small she is, and that her clothes for the day’s shoot were light. Those things were supposed to make the stunt go easier.
That night it made getting her to the surface easier. We must have broken through at the perfect strike of midnight, for we burst upon a sky kaleidoscopic with mile-wide flowers. Their immense pistils illuminated all the world, including the oaken, downward corridors between life and death through which our abandoned bodies tumble upon release of the soul. In one such corridor I could see Giselle “Selli” Chavez, sliding further from reach. I was not about to let her go without a fight. I got her to the shore, laid her back, and performed CPR as best as memory would allow.
Eventually she began to cough. Her chest heaved in breath after breath of warm night air. Giselle’s eyes flickered. She looked at me. She was back. We were both alive.
“Baby!” I whimpered, running hand over her wet hair.
Her response could barely be heard over the fireworks: “Oliver?”
“Oo, syota. Ako ito. I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
“What...what happened, Oliver?”
“You were in an underwater stunt. The prop got stuck. You...you drowned.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re okay now. Everything’s okay.