The Tesseract (20 page)

Alfredo tapped the keyboard, clearing the Mobius screensaver, and discovered that not only had he switched on his computer without realizing it, he had opened a file: C:\docs\PHD\c1.doc.

At the top of the page, in underlined bold type, was the dissertation’s title: “Social Structures in Filipino Urban Juveniles: Conscious and Unconscious Narratives of Breakdown and Change.”

Beneath the title, italicized, were more personal words.

“Don’t just look at me, Fredo! Write me!”

Alfredo frowned. “Repetition,” he muttered. A few seconds later he changed the sentence to:
“Stop procrastinating, Fredo! Write me!”

“The only way I know to disable the tanks is with this specially constructed grenade.”

Vincente looked into Totoy’s outstretched palms and saw a collection of nails. Then he looked over at the sluggish stream of cars turning into United Nations Avenue.

“We should choose our target carefully,” Totoy continued. “There’s no point in picking off troop transporters.”

“You don’t want to hit a jeepney.”

“Troop transporter.”

“Right.”

“Yes, forget about the troop transporters. We’ve got to go for one of their latest breed of attack vehicles.”

“An expensive car.”

“Tank.”

“Tank. Okay.” Vincente scanned the traffic jam for a suitable model. “What about a Toyota make of tank?”

“Mmm…No.”

“Daewoo?”

“Unh-uh.”

“BMW?”

“BMW? Jesus, Cente. How often do you see a fucking BMW? We’d be here all night.” Totoy stood on tiptoe, biting his lower lip with stern concentration. Then he jabbed a finger toward a red sedan. “No. There’s the target. Honda.”

The guy was deep
in conversation on a mobile phone. He was in his early thirties. He had a pleasant, healthy, father’s face, and was wearing the kind of shirt that suggested he spent most of his waking hours in air-conditioning.

And yet he wasn’t using the car’s air-conditioning now. He had the window rolled down and his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his forehead was bright with sweat. A cigarette hung from his mouth. Judging by his relaxed posture and his expression of easy affection, he was talking either to his wife or to one of his children.

“Why him?” said Vincente.

Totoy shrugged. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. Just…why him?”

“You need to have a reason for everything?”

“Not everything.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“I told you, I don’t know. It’s like, this guy…he’s on his way home. He’s phoning home now, saying he’s stuck in traffic. He’s on his way back to his family.”

Totoy studied the Honda and its driver. “
Paré
,” he said. “The guy is driving a tank, he’s radioing for battalions of reinforcements, and if we don’t take him out then his army will capture Manila.”

Vincente started laughing.

“You think that’s funny?”

“Uh…”

“You think Manila being invaded is funny, Cente! Thousands dead? You want that kind of blood on your hands? Because I can tell you right now…” Totoy’s eyes widened at the prospect of such terrible carnage. “I don’t.”

“You little bastards! Sons of fucking whores! Get back here, you little…”

“Your family ma—” Totoy panted, limbs pumping furiously, fists balled, chin and chest jutting out.

A few moments later he attempted the sentence a second time. “Your family man has some temper on him.”

“Yep,” Vincente agreed. His longer legs meant that he didn’t find the sprint pace such an effort. “He’s pretty angry, all right.”

Vincente enjoyed
running fast in Manila at night. It felt like the exercise of a skill worth having. Potholes, cracked pavement, open sewers, slippery canal banks, shanty side streets that shifted and rearranged themselves according to the spread or destruction of slums. Broken glass. Bits of sharp metal with rusted edges. Trip at speed and you could fall anywhere, be cut by anything. You didn’t run fast down dark Manila streets unless you were an expert or had no choice.

A couple of years ago, Vincente had been hanging around near Quiapo bridge, not doing much, when a man ran past. The type with a job and a briefcase, not unlike the driver of the Honda they had just nailed. For reasons that were not apparent, he was being chased down by a seven-strong gang. There was a gap of about thirty feet between the pursuers and their quarry.

Vincente hadn’t needed to witness the end of the chase to be sure that the guy hadn’t escaped. The uncertainty was whether he’d been killed or not. You had to feel bad for him.

But at the same time, you had to feel good for yourself. Vincente knew that if he had been in the man’s shoes, the thirty-foot gap would have given him a fighting chance
of avoiding capture, and probably allowed him to get clean away.

“Getting tired?”
asked Vincente.

Totoy shook his head, because he was too short of breath to speak.

“You mind if we keep jogging a little while?”

Totoy’s head shook again, so they kept going.

They fell
into a compromise rhythm that took into account the differences in their sizes and length of stride. While they were running, a roughly equal distance was maintained between their shoulders—or, for that matter, any chosen point on their bodies. Every time one of them looked to the side, he saw his friend in the same space he had been occupying before. In fact, relative to each other’s position, the two boys barely moved at all.

But around them, the neighborhood changed.

Who’d shoot a cat?

A wealthy college
boy, using the pocket-sized automatic his old man had given him on his eighteenth birthday. He
occasionally told a story about once having fired it in anger, but when questioned he fudged the details and pretended it was a subject he didn’t like to talk about. In truth, he had never fired his gun in anger, which, for reasons he genuinely didn’t like to talk about, was something that bothered him.

One night he was riding his motorbike, hurrying across town to meet a girl in a Makati bar. His route took him through the barren streets around the ruined Patay hotel. As he turned on to Sugat Drive, off Sayang Avenue, a cat suddenly appeared in his headlights. The shock made him brake hard, and the bike slid from under him, skidding across the road in a shower of sparks. Picking himself up, shaken and furious, he saw the cat that could have cost him his life, and that had certainly fucked up his motorbike.

Half a minute later, his story about having fired his gun in anger acquired a ring of authenticity. The details would always remain fudged, but at least his cheeks wouldn’t burn while he fudged them.

A drunk cop
in a black pit of depression, driving his squad car down what once had been a red-light area, a goldmine of drop-dead teenage whores and backhanders in his younger days. Pulling his squad car over to the side of the road, he gazed at the deserted buildings, stared down alleys that should have been neon-lit. Overwhelmed by nostalgia and beer, his eyes filled with tears. “I’m a dying breed,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m yesterday’s man.”

At that moment, a cat strolled into view. On impulse, the
cop drew his revolver and shot it. After watching the cat bleed to death, he dried his eyes with his forearm and bit the cap off another bottle of San Miguel. Then he put the car in gear, eased away from the curb, and continued his slow journey down memory lane. Before the next hour was up, he had shot himself.

A woman
whose kid died of septicemia, the result of a scratch from an ill-tempered stray. Driven insane by the loss, she walked the streets seeking revenge, marking the cleansing kills with notches on her pistol’s wooden grip.

A wired
shabu
-smoker, feeling invulnerable and punchy at the world, ready to prove it to anything that moved.

A cat hater
. A mouse lover. A rat protector. A gangster’s chauffeur.

“I don’t care who shot it,” said Totoy. He was lying spread-eagled on the pavement, and when he sat up, the perspiration from his shorts and T-shirt left a neat imprint in the curbstones. “I’m too tired to care. I never ran so far in my life.”

Vincente squatted by the bundle of blood and fur, twirling his fingers in the curls of hair that had survived the Barangay Tanod. “I care,” he said. “I think it’s strange. It’s hard to think why anyone would want to do something like that.”

“I could stay here the whole night and not move again.”

“I mean…it’s a cat. How could you get so angry with a cat that you’d want to shoot it?”

“I’m serious. I could go to sleep on this very spot. I’m that tired.”

“If there were houses around, you’d think it might be because the cat was wailing and some guy wanted to get to sleep. But nobody lives around here.”

“I’m thirsty too. I need something to drink.”

“If you touch it, it’s still pretty warm.”

“You want to find a Seven-Eleven? See if we can sneak past the guard and nick a Coke?”

“Poor cat…”

“Mmm, a Coke…Refreshing and delicious!”

“Just one of those things, I guess.”

“
Coke
,” said Totoy impatiently. Vincente cupped one of the cat’s paws in his left hand, ran his thumb over the retracted claws, and shook his head.

Conversations with Vincente
were not always easy. He was likely to talk about weird stuff, and he also had a habit of getting stuck on a subject, so that for a fortnight or more he could hardly talk about anything else. A few months ago, the subject had been hell.

It wasn’t official, not a rule, but the deal was that if you took the food from the soup kitchen, you got a sermon. The Irish priest would limp over to where you sat in the canvas-tent canteen, dragging behind him the leg that had been damaged in his Mindanao missionary days. For a short while he’d watch you chew your rice, and if you glanced up to catch his eye, he’d give you a wink and a small smile. Then, when you were about three or four mouthfuls from the bottom of the bowl, he’d clear his throat and—in his accented but extremely fluent Tagalog—begin.

A typical opening line would be: “I’ll tell you a thing, boys. Sit tight and listen to this thing. I was lying awake in bed the other night, as I sometimes do, when a peculiar idea struck me. Only God knows where paradise is. To us, to you and me, the location of paradise is an eternal mystery. And yet, with equal mystery, we know exactly how to find paradise. We don’t know where it is…and yet we can find it. It’s an interesting thought, is it not? Perhaps we could dwell on that a short while.”

But this evening, the normal chain of events took a different turn. Just as the Father was about to hit the throat-clearing stage, Vincente cleared his.

He said, “I’m in trouble. I’m going to go to hell, padre.”

“Oh,” the Father replied, apparently more surprised by Vincente’s readiness to chat than by the words themselves. Silence was usually the reception he got from his soup beneficiaries. “Well, I’d say you are altogether too young to have come to such a conclusion. Perhaps you could tell me how you reached it.”

“It’s an idea I have.”

“A foolish idea. I’ve known you long enough, and you’re a good boy. Much too good for the devil.”

“I still think I’m going to hell.”

“I see.” The Father knotted his fingers together, presenting an archway of chewed nails. “Vincente…is there something you’ve done? Perhaps it would be something you’d rather talk about in private, just the two of us. We could go for a walk, or…”

“It’s something I’m
going
to do. Not something I’ve done.”

“You plan to sin?”

“I don’t see how I’ll avoid it.”

“But son, this is why the church is here for you. To provide the means and guidance by which—”

“Hell,” Vincente said, “goes on forever. It never stops. And once you’re in, you can’t get out.”

Judging by his expression, the Father didn’t appreciate the interruption, but he took it in stride. “That is correct, Vincente. The torments of hell are never ending.”

“If my dad is dead, do you think he’s in hell?”

“Your dad?”

“Is it a possibility?”

“I…”

“Does anyone go to hell?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s a possibility.”

“If he’s no longer with us, you could say it’s a possibility. But…”

“I think he might be there because he abandoned me. I think he might be being tortured by devils.”

“If I go to hell, I’m going to become a devil,” Totoy cut in abruptly. He’d noticed something in Vincente’s voice, a sudden cold flatness, and knew it was the precursor to trouble. Potentially the precursor to being banned from the soup kitchen. “I’m applying for the job as soon as I arrive.”

“Now, Totoy,” the Father chided. “You wouldn’t want to be a devil for a minute. Devils are barred from the gates of heaven, and therefore suffer the same torment as damned souls.”

“I think he might be being tortured by devils, padre,” Vincente repeated, completely undeterred by Totoy’s attempt to move the discussion to less volatile ground. He put his bowl down, even though the rice wasn’t finished yet. “He’s in hell, and he can’t get out. I don’t think it’s fair.”

“There must be quite a lot of devils,” said Totoy, his anxiousness increasing. “Hell must be huge.”

But now the Father was as undeterrable as Vincente. “Fair is not something you worry yourself about,” he said with the authority of personal experience. “To find fairness in life, you would have to know the mind of God.” Then, as if for proof, he tapped his knuckles on his bad leg.

“I’m not trying to find fairness in life. Hell is afterlife. And I don’t think it’s fair that God decided to put my dad there.”

“Vincente, if your dad is in hell, which is something neither one of us could know, it wouldn’t be because God put him there. Quite the opposite. By deciding on our actions in life, we decide the nature of our afterlife.”

“Nobody would
decide
to go to hell.”

“You might say that nobody would
want
to go to hell, but—”