The Tesseract (24 page)

Lito brushed a mosquito off his daughter’s leg. “Yep,” he said.

“Lito, if you want her to eat rice, you should stop trying to force it on her. If you stop trying to force it on her, she’ll come around. Take it from me.”

“No, Isabella,” said Lito tersely. “Take it from me. She won’t.”

“If you tried—”

“Isabella,” Lito interrupted. “That’s enough.”

Isabella let the matter drop. Her husband was a sweet-natured man, but he could get oddly fierce when it came to discussing their daughter’s eating habits. A blessing in some ways, that Lito’s one area of short-temper concerned something as inconsequential as rice.

“It’s hot,” said Isabella, to change the subject. “Nights like this never seem to end. So hard to sleep.”

“True,” Lito agreed after a short pause. “Maybe we should sleep outside tonight.”

Isabella nodded, pleased to hear her husband’s voice returning to a less abrasive tone. Then she walked over to the doorway of their
nipa
hut.

Through it she could see the silhouette of Lito’s boat, pulled
up on the beach past the high-tide mark. Beyond the boat, moonlight caught the swell on the sea. Beyond the sea, a strip of electric lights glowed on the mainland like a broken necklace.

The lights of Barrio Sarap, one mile distant from their small island.

Through the kitchen doorway, Raphael saw his grandmother on the floor of the kitchen, bleeding like the victim of a jeepney accident. Beyond her, framed by the broken glass of the window over the sink, he saw the head and shoulders of a boy.

The boy had a ragged clipped haircut and a filthy face. Raphael wondered who this kid was, where he had come from, and why the glass had been broken in the first place. He felt sick and cold with fright. He clenched his hands to his bare chest. Under his fingers, he felt the hard delineation of his scars and hoped that he wasn’t about to be burned again.

A man appeared over the head of the boy. At once, there was an explosion of shouting. Amid the voices, he heard his mother. Her voice was lower and quieter than the others, but more urgent. The shouting continued, strange barking words that he didn’t understand.

The shouting stopped. He heard a man talking with his mother.

Then there were three loud bangs. Raphael felt a clawing blow on his head, tugging him backward, and everything went black.

“Gotcha,” said Sonny, and stood up to admire his handiwork. Somehow, the newly replaced tire made his car look more complete than it had before the puncture. More complete and more his own.

Similarly, the grease and dirt on his shirt and hands pleased him. It had been too long, he decided, since he had scuffed himself up in such a way. Another thought quickly followed: The coming Saturday, he would take Raphael to the Megamall. They’d eat a pizza or some kind of American fast food, maybe see a film, do a little window-shopping, and then—springing the kind of surprise that earns permanent credit in the good-dad bank—they’d buy a bike.

A bike. Training wheels that eventually would have to be removed, jogging down Baluti Avenue with his palm on the small of Raffy’s back, the application of Band-Aids to small brown knees, the changing and mending of flat tires.

Sonny felt like phoning Rosa at once to tell her the plan. She could take Lita out on the same day and buy her an appropriate girl’s treat. Could be a dress, he speculated, or some jewelry.

“Lita’s first necklace,” he said. “Gold.”

For another minute, he remained gazing at the Honda—which now looked to him as if he had built it bolt by bolt, from scratch. Then he took his mobile phone from his trouser pocket and began dialing his home number.

But just as he was about to key in the last digit, Sonny changed his mind. This was the sort of plan that was best not
explained over the phone, particularly if Corazon was hanging around in the background—which she certainly would be. Better to tell Rosa later, when they were lying together in bed, her head nestled against his left arm. That would be the best time.

Sonny climbed back into his car, started it up, and waited for the chance to pull into the stream of traffic.

Teroy stood against the wall on one side of the broken window. Jojo was next to him. Between him and Jojo was the street kid.

This weird kid, chasing them around.

“You want a gun?” Teroy said.

It was a sort of joke. He wasn’t going to give a gun to the weird kid. Who knew what was going on in the kid’s head? He was probably crazy.

“You want to see stuff?”

Teroy grabbed the kid with his free hand and hauled him around so that he stood directly in front of the broken window.

“There. Now you see everything. What do you see?”

No reply.

“I know you can talk. What do you see in there?”

No reply still, but the kid wasn’t getting shot or shot at.

Teroy spun around, raising his gun over the kid’s head, pushing forward so the kid was sandwiched hard. He didn’t want the kid moving or being a distraction.

Through the window was a kitchen. The Englishman was in
the kitchen. He was holding a woman against him like a shield. There was an older woman on the floor, bleeding.

Teroy didn’t shoot because he didn’t want to kill the young woman. And the Englishman didn’t shoot, maybe because he didn’t want to shoot the kid, but more likely because he didn’t have any bullets.

“Drop your gun,” Teroy shouted to the Englishman.

The Englishman shouted back in English.

“Move your fucking head,” Teroy shouted to the woman. “Move your head and I’ll kill him.”

Corazon’s body worked to keep itself alive. Making decisions that were beyond any decision-making process: Coagulants tried to stop the flow of blood from the entry and exit bullet holes in her side; muscles stiffened around the wounds.

Meanwhile, Corazon slipped in and out of consciousness. When conscious, she noticed that she was sprawled on the kitchen floor. This disconcerted her, but no more so than if she had woken to discover she had slept in a twisted position, meaning a day ahead of grumbling complaint from a stiff neck.

While unconscious, however, her mind was more troubled. She dreamed that a black dog had leapt into her daughter’s house and was preparing to eat the family. Worse yet, if anything could be worse, she had a strong feeling that she had brought the dog to them herself, either by having failed to prevent its coming or, more likely, by a past word or action. A
misjudgment, a mistake that had chased her for years and come to this.

“
Perro negro, perro mío, Dios mío,
” she prayed ardently. “
Por favor, de su protección a ésta casita y a ésta familia
.”

But the prayer was confused and as misdirected as her guilt, and it went unheard.

Mercifully, the dream was fractured. It never quite ran through to its terrible ending. If not interrupted by a few seconds of consciousness, it looped back on itself, returning Corazon to the moment she first glimpsed the dog, sitting on the road outside, about to turn its gun-barrel gaze to meet her. So she was spared all bloody conclusions, except, eventually, her own.

Don Pepe’s mouth was red and dry where a bubble of blood had popped over his lips, his eyes were rolled up in their sockets, and his fingers were curled into claws.

In the Spanish town of San Sebastián, a restaurant owner recalled a memory of the rudest customer he had ever served, an old man with an unplaceable accent and a linen suit that looked as out of its time as his silver matchstick holder. In Quezon province, the young nephew of a Manila dockworker shuddered at a story about red mists and machetes. In Negros, a cemetery caretaker shone his flashlight on the graffiti-covered walls of an old Kastila mausoleum. In an Ayala Alabang mansion, six Dobermans licked their paws and listened for the sound of a Mercedes engine.

These fragments, and others like them, were the form in which the mestizo continued to exist. Together, they represented his life as inadequately as a shoal of milkfish represented the South China Sea. In this respect, death had reduced him in precisely the way he had feared it would.

Lita knew exactly what to do. She reached around Raphael’s head, clamped her hands over his eyes, and yanked him backward. She was much bigger and stronger than Raphael, so he couldn’t resist.

She pulled Raphael so forcefully that his weight crashing into hers sent them tumbling to the hallway floor. Even as they fell, Lita kept her hands over Raphael’s eyes. When they were both on the floor, she rolled him onto his front, trapping him beneath her. Her knees held his legs and her elbows held his arms.

It was a grip that ensured Raphael was blinded, contained, and protected. Lita felt as if she had known these actions under these circumstances, this drill, for as long as she could remember. She had learned it from her parents; it had been coded into her through years of witnessing the way they watched him, the way they spoke to him, even the way they put him to bed.

Lita held Raphael tight until the shooting stopped and she heard her mother calling their names, at which point she felt that the danger had passed and it was safe to let him go.

Jojo heard Sean say “
Okay
.” Immediately, Teroy began shooting over the street kid’s head. Teroy fired three times; then he shoved the boy out of the way and began climbing through the window.

Jojo dropped his pistol.

The boy stumbled to the side, then took a few uncertain steps away from the house. He was holding his ears—Teroy’s gun had gone off only a few inches from his head—and he looked as if he was having difficulty keeping his balance.

Jojo walked over to the boy, who was now turning slow circles on a single spot on the driveway, and took one of his wrists. Jojo’s fingers closed so completely around the thin forearm that it felt as if he were making a fist.

“Sit down,” he said. The words were hard to say. His tongue felt thick in his mouth and his head felt as if it were full of smoke. When the boy gave no response, Jojo pulled the wrist downward. “Kid, sit here. You’ll feel better soon.”

The boy sat, then laid himself out flat. Inside the kitchen, Teroy’s gun fired three or four times more. With each gunshot, the boy twitched. To Jojo, it looked as if the boy were being shot himself.

“Hey, hey,” Jojo said. “Relax. You’re not hurt.”

A woman in the house cried out.

“You aren’t hurt,” Jojo repeated, and he knelt down. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here. I can’t imagine why you chased us, but I hope you had a better reason than me.”

This comment produced a response of a kind, though it was unclear what the response might mean. The boy’s eyes flicked toward Jojo’s, then at the sky.

“I don’t think I had any reason to be here at all,” Jojo continued. “If you were to ask me why I came here, I’d say I came here because I did. I’d say, that’s just the way…”

Jojo frowned.

In his smoke-filled head and out of his thick-tongued mouth, Jojo heard his father’s voice. “That’s just the way it was.”

His father, speaking like a priest. A red mist, rising like steam off cane cutters’ backs in the early morning. A stooped figure in a doorway, smelling like the split husks beneath coconut trees.

Reflexively, his thumb turned the wedding band on his left hand.

“This is over,” Jojo said, standing abruptly. “I’m alive. I’m going home.”

Then he went to help Teroy, who was clambering awkwardly out of the kitchen window.

There were more gunshots from inside the house, followed by the sounds of screaming and crying. Most of the screaming and crying was a kid, Totoy noted blankly.

A few moments later, a man—one of the two suits—climbed out the front window. As he climbed out, a part of his
clothing seemed to catch on the broken glass in the frame. Maybe it cut through the clothing to his skin, because he suddenly jerked sideways, which made him slip, and he fell to the ground.

The second of the two suits helped him stand. Then both men walked to the end of the driveway, passing Totoy without a second glance, and began jogging down the road, back in the direction of the slum.

Totoy walked up to where Cente lay in the driveway of the house.

“I tried to keep up,” he said, squatting beside his friend. “You were so fast, you left me behind. My legs are too short to keep up with you when you run so fast.”

Cente didn’t look as if he was listening. He was staring at the sky, tight-lipped and unblinking, as he had done earlier when Totoy had jumped him from the scaffolding.

“Are you winded?” Totoy asked. “Or angry?”

Cente remained impassive.

“Why are you lying down?”

The noises from inside the house distracted Totoy for a couple of moments. The crying had intensified, for no clear reason. When he returned his attention to Cente, his friend had closed his eyes.

An idea crossed Totoy’s mind. A little tentatively, he lifted Cente’s T-shirt and put a hand on his chest. Cente’s chest was warm and wet only with sweat, and under the rib cage was a heartbeat.

“Phew,” said Totoy, removing his hand. “For a moment, I was afraid you might be dead.”

He hesitated, then added, “The shooting,” by way of explanation. “With all that shooting, I was afraid you’d been killed.”

Inside the house, the crying abruptly stopped. Now the street and the night seemed very quiet.

“But you aren’t dead,” said Totoy. He lay beside Cente and folded his arms behind his head to act as a pillow. “You’re just thinking.”

Alfredo had stopped thinking. He closed the French doors to the balcony, sat down on his sofa, and picked up the phone. Then he dialed, agreed to hold, and listened patiently to Manila’s only twenty-four-hour dance-music station.

Romario didn’t leave him holding for long. “So?” he said.

“So,” Alfredo replied, “the larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown.”

“What?”

“The last words I spoke to my wife. Or at least, it was the last line of the paragraph I was reading. I couldn’t say for certain whether she heard it or not.”