Age of Blight (4 page)

The Playground

N
o one goes there anymore, except for the curious out-of-town folks who overhear the stories and read the back pages of tabloids where the articles about fertility beads, UFO sightings, weeping Virgin Marys, and the latest cures for cancer are splayed. They come in groups—families mostly, with screaming babies, toothless grandfathers, pimply teenagers, grim-faced parents bored with the usual vacation trips to Jamaica and Cancun. Rarely does anyone come alone. During summertime when activity in the playground is at its peak, an occasional group of well-dressed university people and self-proclaimed experts gawk in small groups from a respectful distance.

The moment they arrive at that sinkhole of a town in eastern Utah, they rush out of their idling cars and nervously point fingers to the playground for their companions' benefit. They call attention to the lonely wire-enclosed playground as if the obvious movement on swings is somehow too obvious to
notice. Enthralled, they watch how the swings creak and arch up in the absence of wind. The chains rattle the only sound.

“Is this for real?” one asks.

“No special effects or nothing?” another adds, laughing uneasily.

“Shit, will you look at that!”

“Mommy, why can't we get inside and play?”

“Not here, baby, we can't get inside. We are only supposed to look.”

“Look at what? I wanna go home.”

This is what they say.

Always with worried glances from behind the barbed wire enclosures that line the isolated playground, they wonder at how the candy bar wrappers, the leftover chocolate still fresh on the edges of the licked foil, collect on the uncut grass. They notice the slides which remain shiny as if recently used. Years from now, none of them will ever forget the yellow-painted seesaws that bob on their own. And when they return to their cars, they will never know what gets into the car with them until they get home.

Sometimes, an unseen tiny hand switches the television to the cartoon channel.

Sometimes, cold maternal lips kiss the forehead of the toddler who is throwing a fit on the high chair.

An invisible weight jumps up and down on the white couch. The bouncing sound never fails to make them scream or resort to futile measures like
calling a priest or the psychic hotline. But what is there to say, really?

Someone rides the long-forgotten horse rocker stashed in the attic.

Someone steps on the loose floorboard.

The clatter of scurrying little feet trying on plastic funny shoes echoes across the empty hallway.

Something cold snuggles under the covers with them after they turn off the bedside lamp.

Happens all the time.

Those Almost Perfect Hands

T
he last time Martin Strang checked his hands, they were twitching on his lap. His mother was boiling rice in the kitchen, and every time she banged something in there, Martin jumped up with the noise. Then immediately, as if by impulse, he would look down at his hands to see if they were, once again, acting up.

Two days ago, Martin's Grampa Des was buried in his best suit and a blue silk tie with the paisley print, the same delicate pattern on the vintage wallpaper of the plantation houses in the country's colonized northern region where landowners, resplendent in their very brown skin and jet black hair, cultivated European affectations. Good old Desmond Strang, who died of a heart attack in the middle of lighting a cigarette in front of his television, had managed to plant the seed of doubt in Martin's nine-year-old brain:
“…but the moment you finally discover a way to part from your hands, they will crack their knuckles, pick up the scent of your trail, and find you!”

It had upset Martin ever since. One night, long before Gramps died, he woke up screaming with his right hand curled tightly around the neck of Chief, his favorite toy. It was a plastic shaman, with headdress included. It looked as if his hands were trying to choke Chief, and he would never ever do that in a million years.

“You must have put your fingers there by mistake, Marty,” his father said. He had risen from bed quickly, expecting a burglar. “And why in God's name should your hands have a life of their own?” He tucked Martin back to bed and told him that his Grandpa Des was only joking. His father's face was serious, though, and Martin cursed himself for not keeping his mouth shut and getting Gramps into trouble.

His guilt was overwhelmed with fear, then anger, the kind of boyish anger that sometimes resurfaced in the later years. He could never forget how Gramps smiled as if to taunt him forever:
Once you recognize what your hands can do, boy, you will never be left alone. Your hands will know what you know, and they will try to outsmart you. Until you can't take it anymore and you do things you're not supposed to do
.

Don't tell anyone, boy. Don't you dare
.

After hiding Chief under his pillow, Martin drifted to sleep and dreamed of running down a well-lit corridor. The floor was lined with clear plastic to keep it from getting wet. From what, he did not know then. Only he was sure that the plastic outer surface that crackled while he stepped on it was supposed to protect the floor from getting soaked. At the end of
the corridor was the majestic sight of the mountain turned upside down, its cross-section exposed. It looked like a page from a geology book that Grampa Des had shown him once. He could make out the stratigraphic layers: a section for conglomerate rocks, a dull metamorphic layer, a layer of greenish mass that was supposed to be decomposed trees turning into peat, and impossibly, a layer of solid gold. Not in its ore form, the gold shone. He did not know what to make of the dream when he woke up, and he did not try hard to make up meanings for it. But then, like clockwork, a dream became its own interpretation.

The next morning, he overhead his mother talking to Grampa Des downstairs in the breakfast table. Although he could not hear the words, Martin knew that his mother was angry. She talked slowly and emphasized every word when she was upset. “If my husband sees you in here, he'll kill you,” she said. “Don't you ever think of coming back here. But just tell me, you piece of shit, because I can't wrap my head around what you supposedly did. Tell me the truth, okay. What did you do?”

They stopped talking when he entered the kitchen. Martin's left hand trembled slightly. He did not notice it in his haste to conceal how much he understood what they were arguing about. That was the last time he saw Gramps.

Sitting on the high chair, even his two-year-old sister, Lauren, stared at him before she playfully stuck out her tongue and hollered, “Maaaty, Maaaty, Maaaty.” Morsels of food flew out of her tiny mouth,
and his father, now ten minutes late for work, did his best to clean up the pieces of food and kissed her goodbye. Fascinated by the shiny cloth, Lauren grabbed his father's tie and managed to soil it with her yolk-stained hand.

When school started and the homework began to pour in, Martin Strang thankfully forgot about Grampa Des and the issue about his hands. Also, there was Sally Martinez, the new classmate. How she occupied his recess-time daydreaming. He imagined her asking for a bite from his greasy ham sandwich. He imagined showing her his gamecard collection. He imagined sharing his world with her.

Martin waved at her from the school bus. Sally saw him but she averted her gaze, looked away, pursed her pink lips.

There was a tingling in his hands. The finger pads itched. He could not make his right hand stop from curling the pointer and thumb into an O. Trying his best not to scream, Martin automatically forgot about Sally Martinez and her pink lips. When he arrived home, the first thing he did was rush straight to the bathroom. Running cold water over his hands, he prayed under his breath for Gramps' story about his hands to be a lie: “Not alive, not alive, not alive,” he whispered, chanting, willing the fear to go away. “Please, Lord, don't make them BE ALIVE.”

Just cut them off
. He thought for a moment, then he
closed his eyes and the vision of him cutting his hands disappeared. He rubbed the soap bar to make the strange itch go away. His hands, as if in revolt, maliciously flung the bar on the floor. Martin was not aware that he was already crying as he picked up the soap and threw it again and again.

When he opened the bathroom door, his mother was there.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I'm okay, Mom.”

“Are you sure?” she looked him over, trying to read whatever secrets were shielded by those young, all-knowing eyes.

“I got a cramp in my leg and dropped the soap.” He was not looking at her. He would never, in a million years, say or do anything to make his mother think that he was going crazy. Lazy or dumb, yes, but not crazy.

“You must be hungry. Come on,” his mother said gently. “Dinner's ready.”

He heard Lauren shriek happily while dancing with Winnie the Pooh. He did not have to look, but he knew that she was bopping at her self-appointed place in front of the television. Martin would give up everything so Lauren would remain like that, would never have to undergo all the crazy things that had been going on with him. He would find a way to solve this. He would, no matter what it took.
I love you, Mom. I love you, Laurie. Daddy, please be home now. Hands not alive, not alive, not alive
.

Weeping, Martin eyed his fingers as they tap-danced across his desk. His half-finished homework was a pile of mess. His tears now blotted the ink. His evil hands—they simply would not stop. Gliding and wriggling and twirling like stick marionettes dancing to an imaginary tune, his fingers paraded across the surface of the soaked notebook paper. Helplessly, he watched them move.

How did you do it, Gramps? I'm not so sure if this is your fault, but I hate you. I hate you very much. I didn't know how you managed to do it, but I'd beat you this time. You can't make me cut off my hands! Dad says I'm gonna grow up to be a doctor. I'm not going to end up dead and drunk like you and get buried in a stupid tie. You can't make me cut off my hands
.

Turning under his sheets, he thought of his cousin Jimmy, who was born with an enucleated left eye. It made that eye socket look like a fleshy hollow and deformed the left side of his face. Last summer, Martin had made fun of him behind his back. Now, he would have traded places with Jimmy anytime.

How did it start? Think, think, think
. Maybe, if he could figure it out, he could make everything go back to normal again.
The hands began doing what they're not supposed to do after Gramps said his crazy little farewell statement, right?

Gramps just said it, and that was it
.

Words
.

Just words
.

Like a curse
.

How does one break a curse?

Martin cried and became angry at the unfairness
of it all. He was only nine years old. Chief was safe inside the bottom drawer, but what about him?

He finally fell asleep an hour past midnight. Everything else in the room took on the ever familiar mottled color of darkness. In his dreams, he was in the kitchen. He was about to cut off his left hand when it tried to grab Lauren. He wondered how he could get rid of the other hand when the left one was already severed. In the living room, Lauren sang and hopped with Winnie the Pooh, whose jar of honey spilled forth to lure the ants.

How does one break a curse?

Later, in class, as Mr. Rocero droned on the different parts of a flower, Martin sheafed through his thoughts, looking for loopholes. Perhaps, he was looking at it the wrong way.

“Petal, sepal, pistil, stamen—”

Perhaps, he was not supposed to break it
.

“This, here, is called the ovary—”

Maybe, he only needed to pass it on somehow. To give it to someone else?

Martin smiled his nine-year-old smile.
Maybe, that was it, but how?

“No, Billy, that's just your tummy. You don't have an ovary.”

Laughter. The big guys at the back snickered. They would forever remember Billy Agaton as the boy with the ovary.

Martin joined in, but his laughter sounded forced. It was better than nothing.