Ilustrado (23 page)

We’re all listening so intently we don’t notice that the bathroom is free. Some guy behind us says something. The group of us go in, like teenage boys slipping into the adult section of a video rental shop. As I close the door, the guy behind us looks at us funny. For a second, I’m a bit uncomfortable. For a second. Then I remember. This is Manila. It’s nice being home.

In the bathroom, a couple of baggies are passed around, and we do bumps off the ends of our keys. I hide my own baggie in my pocket. A bag reaches me, I bump, then pass it to Mitch. He uses the nail of his pinky finger, which he’s grown for this purpose.

“It’s that fucking Nuredin Bansamoro,” E.V. says, tapping his baggie to gauge how much he’s got left. “I’m telling you. He’s messing with the government. It’s all smoke and mirrors with him. It’s like we learned in lit class: ‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman.’”

“Fligga, no fucking way,” Markus says. “It’s the Muslims. The Abu Sayyaf.”

“Bansamoro and the Abu Sayyaf,” E.V. says, “aren’t they like fuck-buddies?”

“Dude, that’s knee-jerk bigotry,” Markus says. “Just ’cause they worship Allah doesn’t mean they’re in cahoots.”

“They say,” Edward offers, “it’s got something to do with a
love triangle with fricking President Estrogen and that Vita Nova chick.”

“Fucking funny, dude. President
Estrogen
!” says Mitch, cracking up.

“At the heart of every story,” I say, “is a love triangle.”

“It’s Estrogen’s man-boobs, pare.” Edward says. “A fear of manboobs is at the heart of what drives every man.”

“Vita Nova,” Mitch says, gyrating his hips. “Aw yeah! I hope that sex tape gets released. This soldier dude I play B-ball with, Marine Sergeant Joey Smith, he likes to say: Well corn my porn, that’s one mighty fine LBFM. Dude, Vita’s gots the launch codes for
my
intercontinental ballistic missile.”

“What’s an LBFM?” I say.

“Little brown fuck machine,” E.V. explains.

“Fligga, please,” Markus insists. “It’s totally the Abu Sayyaf. Can I get another bump?”

“What’s a fligga anyway?” I say.

“Filipino nigga,” E.V. says.

“So what happened?” Markus says.

“To what?” says E.V.

“To the guy’s head,” I say.

“
So
, what happened is,” Mitch continues, “we call the houseboy over. Now
that
dude’s surprised. The fucking guy steps back, turns around, and hurls his breakfast. Like fucking five yards away. An
Exorcist
-worthy blow-by. But Mel and I are weirded out by him, right? ’cause we thought he was fucking with our heads about the pool. We’re convinced he left the head there for us to find. So we tell him to clean it up. He just
looks
at us. Then he goes away and comes back with our driver. The houseboy’s carrying a pool net, the driver has a shoebox. They try to get the head into the shoebox, but the fucking thing won’t fit. They’re just like rolling it around, and it’s like staring up at them like what the fuck? So they go back into the house. When they come back, a group of maids follows, but they like wait on the steps, not wanting to get closer. The houseboy’s carrying one of my mom’s hatboxes. They use the pool net to push the head into it. And fucking-A, it’s a perfect fit. Then Mel and I go to our room and crash. Dude, the funniest thing . . . later that
afternoon, my ma comes into our room to wake us up for church. Mel told me later he was like totally giving it to Palmela Handerson and was about nut when our mom walked in. Anyway, Ma’s all pissed and shit, going off on us in the dark. She’s like: Why didn’t you use a plastic bag or something? That hatbox was from Bergdorf’s! Me and Mel just like hid under our blankets, giggling. My mom switches on the lights and just splits, leaving the door wide open so that the air-con could escape. Fucking bitch.”

*

In the music and darkness and lights, our long-faced protagonist stands flanked by familiar voices. When his friends smile or laugh, he does the same, even if he didn’t hear the joke. He raises his glass at their every exhortation. He finishes his drink quickly, to create an excuse to leave the group. That habitual tactic always makes him the first to get drunk. Tonight, it works even faster. He goes again to the bar.

The bartender brings our tipsy protagonist a glass of Lagavulin single malt. A woman with a butch cut, an old friend from his college days, approaches him warmly. “Hello, Sara,” he says, his voice welcoming like a hand held out. They speak quietly for a while. When she leaves, he abandons his Lagavulin, untouched on the bar, and slips away unnoticed. He barges through the crowd by the door, pushing them aside like curtains. They look back in puzzlement.

He takes a cab to his hotel and lies down on his bed, deep in thought. The baggie of cocaine sits on the table. He’d once told his therapist that the reason he wanted to clean up was for Madison. But that wasn’t exactly true. He never told Dr. Goldman about his being a father. He thinks of what Sara told him. And of all the things he should have said in return. He remembers one time watching Crispin at his typewriter, the letters collecting into words—
l’esprit de l’escalier
. A phrase he often thinks about. The spirit, summoned by the texture of the knob, the tinkle of keys, the shock of a dead bolt, the snap of his heel echoing down the stairwell, like laughter, ha, ha, ha, ha. All the unsaid answers, reassurances, apologies, retorts. He’s afraid that when the time comes to make amends, he won’t know what to say.

He goes to the baggie, holds it over the toilet, but says aloud, “What’s the point?” He cuts himself a few rough lines on the tabletop. They sit there like arrows pointing in different directions.

Later, he has a feeling that he is being watched. Talked about. Judged. A distant cock crows and the sky begins to lighten. His heart keeps time with the cheap clock on the bedside table. It slows until it’s normal. Time, too, seems to lessen its pace. The light in the world diminishes.

He is sitting at an Underwood, typing away. Then it becomes a laptop, and he is researching crucifixions for a short story when he comes across a strange name. Archbishop Joachim of Nizhny-Novgorod, found crucified upside down on the Royal Doors of the Sebastopol Cathedral in 1920. Intrigued by its recentness, he checks Wikipedia, only to find the entry reads, “He was a big fat guy who was the best friwnd of Satanand he easts babys, so he was crucified by monkeys.” Further research proves this inaccurate. It was Bolsheviks who did him in. Leaving the study, he walks down the hall to discover the blue door wide open. Outside, Jane Street is sandy and blindingly bright. A man is dragging a body across the floor as if it were trash for Monday morning pickup. “You’re late,” the man says, dropping the wrist of Crispin’s corpse. The man pushes him into the crowd. They tear off his clothes. He sees that he has an erection and is filled with deep shame. A security guard in a blue uniform thrusts a heavy beam upon his shoulders. “This is called a patibulum,” a woman whispers in his ear. “If you can get free of it, you’ll find your child.” He is pushed to join the procession. He reaches the top of the hill. Somebody in the crowd is playing Air Supply on a tinny transistor radio. This is a dream. I can control it if I try. He is pushed onto his back and seven-inch spikes are driven between his radii and carpals. His patibulum is lifted onto an upright stipe. Another spike is banged through the intermetatarsal spaces of his feet. Only when he sees the disgust and pity on the faces in the crowd does he feel any pain. It is nearly impossible to breathe. He pulls himself up by his impaled wrists to draw air. I can escape. Fire flashes down his arms, up his legs. He wilts. He pulls himself up to breathe out. I can step down from this thing. The pain is even more horrendous for its new familiarity. The sun grows hotter. Women pass by. They flutter plastic fans with his grandfather’s face on them. “Look at his wrinkled peepee,” says Anais. “Check out his chicken legs,” says Madison. Dr. Goldman, checking her watch, reminds, “Stay away from situations that will lead you to fail.” Robert De Niro playing Al Capone comes to stand before him, wearing a tuxedo and brandishing a Louisville Slugger. Capone is suddenly President Estregan, wearing a green satin boxing robe. The bat is swung twice, elegantly. His legs are broken. Unable to hold himself up, he cannot breathe. There’s still so much I need to do. The crowd sounds like the
recursive sea. To either side, two thieves are nailed to their patibula. He hears the bang, bang, bang, like keystrokes of a typewriter in the next room.

Sitting up suddenly in bed, he looks at the TV, the window looking onto windows, and the teas beside the electric kettle on the counter. For a few seconds, he has no idea where he is. The fall of rain outside reminds him.

*

It’s afternoon and my taxi travels north, through the rain. I’m going to a poetry reading and book launch, where I hope some of the literati will tell me more about Crispin. In the deluge, men in yellow plastic cloaks stand on ladders, stringing Christmas lights and wreaths to streetlamps on the road. The torrent is like gravel on the taxi’s roof, and I wonder how the men don’t fall. The taxi driver curses, opens his door to spit heftily.

From the radio sputters the distorted jingle of the Bombo news report. A voice crackles in Tagalog: “My compatriots, stay tuned for these top stories at the hour: more flooding as rains continue; Reverend Martin, detained at Camp Crame, has his request for bail denied; international environmental activists protest outside the San Mateo munitions and fireworks factory of the Philippines First Corporation; SWAT teams have prepared a battering ram in hope of ending the Lakandula hostage siege; and our own pride and joy, Efren ‘Bata’ Reyes, wins the World 8 Ball Championship again. Full stories at three on the clock.” Then the sanctifying guitar chords of Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”

I spent yesterday evening and all of this morning recuperating from the other night’s coke binge. I didn’t want to see anyone. I just couldn’t. My link to the outside world was the dozens of text messages I kept getting from people urging me to bring food and water to the protesters outside the Changco home. I sat in bed with my books, searching Crispin’s memoir, notebooks, assorted writings, for evidence of his daughter. Nothing specific turned up, though suddenly each of his works has become freighted with meaning—every heroic protagonist is a compensation, every loss now a metaphor, every mention of a father or a child suddenly more than was ever on the page. I fanned his work out on my bed, and looked at it like pieces of a puzzle in which the picture will only be recognized
once it is solved. Miss Florentina will be my only chance to learn more. Unless any of the writers at the book launch know something.

The taxi driver turns right onto Edsa. Traffic slows. Stops. Flooding perhaps? The rains cease in an instant. The driver switches off his wipers. Wind rakes the remaining droplets, gathered beyond the wipers’ reach, horizontally across the windshield. He keeps looking at me in his rearview. He’s young, hair spiked like a sea urchin. He nods his head with feeling to the rock ballad, lips subtly mouth the words. He finally says, “No more rain,” grinning as if it were his doing. “My name is Joe,” he says, apropos of nothing.

Traffic moves through a corridor of hand-painted movie signs, which rise three stories high and block out the squatter areas like some Potemkin village of celluloid fantasies. It’s not too strained a metaphor. Someone in the industry once told me the Philippines has the world’s fourth largest film industry, next to Bollywood, Hollywood, and Nigeria’s Nollywood. Phollywood, he’d called it, laughing unkindly. These billboards are the iceberg’s tip of the melodramatic tradition that links every genre:
Rumble in Manila 4
;
Shake Rattle and Roll Part 9—Christ Have Mercy
;
I Will Wait for You in Heaven
;
Please Teacher Don’t Touch Me There
; and
High Skool Hijinks
. In garish, sun-kissed ochre acrylic, the faces of the artistas tower like egos. Gone are the clean-scrubbed teen princesas and gritty heroes of the eighties, icons of my youth—some already passed away, most simply passed on to heavenly political careers or hellish marriages with sons of tycoons.

Keeping to long-standing tradition, this new breed has taken the surnames of the country’s elite: Lisa Lupas, Ret-Ret Romualdez, Cherry-pie Changco, Pogi-boy Prieto, Heart Aquino. Others appropriate American culture: Pepsi Paloma IV, Keana Reeves, Mike Adidas. But the one who stands out, again, is the heaving-breasted Vita Nova, whose lithe looks took her from humble Pampanga roots to center stage of Classmate, the new strip club where dancers don (then remove) the uniforms of Catholic girls’ colleges. Her big break, the papers like to highlight, was as an actress in karaoke videos, the first being “Unchained Melody,” where she walked by a pond and looked rapt with hungering for her beloved’s touch.
Now—on the heels of her success with the Mr. Sexy Sexy Dance, having parlayed her sexual wares wisely—Vita’s now a megastar. According to the poster, she’s in “her most important role and big-screen breakout ever in the world.” That may not be entirely true. If the rumors are to be believed, the tape from the videocam that Nova discovered hidden in her bedroom may take that honor. That is, if it really does contain the postcoital cell-phone conversations that will lead to Estregan’s impeachment. Already people are calling it Sexysexygate.

Joe the taxi driver jerks the wheel, barely avoiding a convoy of cars. He makes the sign of the cross. Shouts: “Your mother is a whore!” The convoy (Ford Explorer, stretch BMW, open-backed Toyota Tamaraw filled with scowling goons) parts traffic with the bleeps and squeals of its siren. Cars grudgingly give way. “He thinks he’s somebody,” Joe explains, his eyes in the rearview mirror forcing me to engage with him. I smile, wrinkling my forehead in complicit exasperation. Convoys like this are a peso a dozen.

But I think I know that BMW. Or maybe it’s familiar in that arrogant way of all luxury vehicles. Or maybe I’m just being paranoid again. The beemer bolts ahead. It has a bumper sticker. “PRO-Gun: Peaceful, Responsible, Owners of Guns.” Beside it, another. “PROGod: Praise, Respect, Obey God.” I slide down in my seat, quick as an eel. I hide my face with my hands and peek out. The right rear fender is dented. Years ago, learning to park my Corolla in our tight garage, I made a dent just like that. There’s a bobble-headed figurine of President Estregan, nodding from the board behind the backseat. A gift I’d given to my grandfather years ago, for his seventieth birthday.