The Tesseract

by Alex Garland

  Sonny blinked at her.

  “And I want you to know that I was touched you spent the night keeping me company. You can be sure, I won’t forget it.”

  “It…was…the least I could do.”

  “It is a great source of happiness to me that my daughter has been blessed with such a husband. You are a very fine young man.”

  “Thank you,” Sonny said, as his brain struggled with its toxicity, attempting to keep pace with this endlessly twisting situation. “And you are a very fine old woman.”

  Corazon’s bleary eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

  “I said…I need some water.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Sonny replied—firmly, to compensate for the long hesitation. “I didn’t.” Then he blinked again. “About this water.”

  “It’s over there, in the clay pot.”

  “Ah yes,” he said, resting a light hand on the coffin to prevent himself from falling over. “So it is.”

  “You are a very fine old woman,” he was still muttering to himself, an hour later, sobered up on sugary black coffee and the morning air. “What was I thinking of?”

  While Leesha and Lita continued to sleep, Rosa suckled the baby and—through a slit in the nipa—watched Sonny walking around the vegetable garden. Every few steps he shuddered visibly, or tapped aggressively at his temples.

  Rosa had no idea what lay behind his odd behavior, but she didn’t particularly care. Her dreams had been as vivid and circular as Sonny’s, and as unfaithful as Leesha’s, though nothing like as coded. She was simply relieved that, on waking, she could look at her husband and feel sure that she loved him.

  5.

  The long walk to the church and the long service inside passed in a blur of nonthinking for Rosa. All morning, her mind was distracted by the smallest things. The yellowness of the dust on her black cotton dress. The length of Lita’s stride compared to her own (the ratio was almost exactly two steps to one). The drone in the priest’s voice that made it impossible to follow what he was saying.

  In fact, until the funeral procession left the church and reached the graveyard, it was the priest who had provoked Rosa’s strongest emotional response. Watching him—this fleshy, closeted, virginal man who had gone out of his way to experience as little of life as possible—Rosa felt a surge of irritation. It seemed absurd that such a lifeless person should be called upon to clarify the end of someone else’s. “I knew Tata Doming well,” he intoned, and Rosa had to stop herself from interrupting his address. “Oh, shut up,” she imagined herself saying. “You don’t know anything well, let alone anybody.” The urge caught her off guard and made her blush, afraid that her thoughts had somehow been loud enough to be heard by the mourners in the surrounding pews. And perhaps they had been. Without warning, Raphael started wailing loudly and fighting Rosa’s hold. Sonny gestured to pass the baby over, but instead Rosa took it as an opportunity to excuse herself from the service.

  “He’s probably hungry, and he’s too hot in here,” she whispered as she eased past Sonny and Corazon, perfectly aware that these were not tears of hunger or discomfort. Corazon probably knew too, but if she disapproved of Rosa’s exit, she didn’t show it. Instead she nodded and gave her daughter a vaguely awkward but sympathetic pat on the back of the leg.

  It was while Rosa was sitting in the café opposite the church, with the now docile Raphael chewing idly on a drinking straw, that she saw Lito.

  She was about sixty feet away from where he stood, sitting on a table, in the shadow cast by the café’s canvas awning. He was amazed by how much of her was so entirely familiar. Not just her features, build, posture—her mannerisms. When she tilted her head, he knew exactly how far her head would tilt. He could read the exact nature of the movement. He knew she was squinting at the sunshine and the bright road beneath his feet, and he knew that he was as recognizable to her as she had been to him. And he knew she was pleased to see him, even before she jumped up and began to run across the road.

  Knew he could stop her, dead in her tracks, with a raised hand.

  Knew everything.

  It terrified him.

  Knew that when he turned to go, she wouldn’t follow.

  The years that had changed nothing, the child in her arms, her eyes on his back, the ache in his chest, the bottle in his hands.

  Small green bottle.

  Terrified him.

  6.

  Terrified her.

  One look, she had thought, would tell her what she needed to know. If he’d moved on in the way she had; if he was okay. And she had been right, because one look was enough. He wasn’t okay at all.

  “I’m not having grandchildren with bits of them missing!” Corazon had once screamed over the tail end of a typhoon.

  Seeing Lito now, Rosa recognized that it was more than a part of his anatomy that was missing. Apparent in the shadow that had stood in the sunlight, radiating blankness: His anatomy had been vacated. He was missing.

  When the priest’s interminable service drew to a close and the mourners began to file out of the church, they found Rosa where she had been stopped by Lito’s raised hand. Raphael’s hair was plastered to his head with sweat, and his breathing was heavy. When Sonny tried to take the baby from Rosa, her arms felt like iron and didn’t give an inch.

  “What is it?” he said, hating the stupidity of such a question at a funeral, feeling helpless. When Rosa didn’t answer, he almost tried to take the baby again, but decided against it when he saw her frozen expression. He had been frightened away, if he was honest with himself.

  Half a decade later, fixing a tire, he would tell Raphael that it wasn’t God who had burned his chest. Sonny would never let God take responsibilty for that moment of cowardice.

  7.

  For Raphael, there would be a chain of events that would take many years to fully explain. Certain details would be held back, according to suitability of age. In its incomplete form, the chain of events took the form of a sad story about a jealous man. But in time, he would come to think of himself as a boy with two histories: one biological, the other anatomical. One with a nine-month gap between conception and birth, and the other with a gap of nine years. Ultimately, a boy with two fathers.

  Doming died at the gates of the graveyard. Everywhere else—the house, the road to the church, the church itself—he had been alive. In the same way that nobody is about to leave until they reach the bus depot and see the bus: alive. And characteristically quiet.

  But at the gates of the graveyard he died, suddenly, and Rosa was overwhelmed by the understanding. She burst into tears. They streamed down her face as the procession walked on the stone pathways between the tombs, and when the seal of the miniature family mausoleum was broken open, she started to sob.

  This, Sonny felt, was acceptable for Lita to see. Her mother’s sorrow obviously distressed the little girl. But witnessing the grief seemed important, as much about life as death, and his instincts told him he shouldn’t hide her from it.

  When Doming’s body was removed from the coffin to be slid into the tomb, however, he changed his mind. It wasn’t the corpse. It was that Rosa, with Corazon, became hysterical.

  Sonny felt he had three priorities: to deal with Lita, then Raphael, then Rosa, in that order. Lita first, because she happened to be with him. He would take her back out of the crowd, as far away from the shrieking as possible, and give her to one of the people he recognized from the night before. Hopefully Leesha. Back into the crowd to grab Raphael, whether Rosa was willing to give him up or not. And back again for Rosa, whom he would simply hold.

  In none of this was politeness a priority, and Sonny made his route through Doming’s relatives, neighbors, and friends with force. Their reluctance to step aside was confusing, but not a concern. If they didn’t step aside, they were pushed.

  Once out, he called Leesha’s name. But Turing appeared instead, wordlessly scooping up Lita in one arm and pushing on Sonny’s shoulders to prope
l him back into the crowd. For that, Sonny’s memory of Turing would always be accompanied by a rush of undiluted affection. A rush he had felt at the time, equally undiluted, and an important memory to retain. Part of the truth, the concentration of events, the contradictions that sat side by side.

  It was a voice, Rosa would tell Raphael, that cut through her hysteria and made itself heard. She didn’t think about why the voice could do this so easily. She did what the voice told her to do.

  “The baby. Give him to me.”

  Perhaps half a minute later, Raphael’s cry filled Sonny with pain. A grip like gravity, a horror like the surface of the sun, a suck like a riptide—it effortlessly and continuously transcended itself. It marked something terrible.

  More memories to sit side by side, the mystery of the crowd. Sonny’s path was still blocked by people who were reluctant to move out of his way.

  Sonny punched them until they fell. Harder, flatter fist, no restraint when he saw their faces. With Raphael’s cries driving him insane, their stunned outrage was a lifeline to the comprehensible.

  8.

  Sonny saw the fiercely smoking bundle laid out on the ground and thought his baby was on fire. But tearing at Raphael’s clothes, he found no fire. Yet the baby was burning, and his own hands were now burning too.

  Then he felt the manner in which they were burning, and realized that the smoke was from acid. The burning was chemical, not as penetrating as heat. Aggressive, like tear gas in Luneta Park from his undergraduate days.

  “Water,” he shouted at the static circle of people around him. They stared back, indignant and mute, holding their bruises.

  If only there had been flames. He could have smothered flames. Instead of pawing uselessly at an invisible corrosive liquid, he would have been able to do something.

  “God, help me,” he screamed.

  Able to do nothing, nothing would stop the acid from burning through his baby’s tiny chest and delicate ribs. The acid would burn through to its heart.

  “Help me!”

  Raphael stopped crying and started gasping. Between Sonny’s own cries were pockets of numb silence.

  “Somebody, get some water!”

  The third time he shouted it, somebody did: a young man, dressed unusually for a funeral—ragged shorts, sandals, and a bright white T-shirt. He pulled a bucket of water from behind a tombstone, as if a bucket were always kept there in event of acid attack. He walked over, calm and unrushed but with an air of pragmatic concentration. Sonny might have imagined that he was a doctor approaching with his bag. In this way, the young man made Sonny think of his wife.

  He made Sonny feel as if he didn’t exist. He squatted down beside Raphael, and Sonny was excluded. First relegated to position of watcher, then erased.

  Cupping water from the bucket in his hands, pouring it over the baby, using the pads of his thumbs to rub at the baby’s skin. Talking to the baby. In his soft Quezon accent, the young man was saying, “There, there.”

  As he poured more water: “There, there, little guy. There, there, sunshine. You’re okay now.”

  Almost cooing, bent over as if he was doing little more than gazing into a cot.

  “Dad’s here.”

  Sonny saw the small green bottle stuck into the waistband of the young man’s shorts. He obviously had thrust it there in a hurry, because the cap hadn’t been twisted properly and a single drip had escaped. It had run down the bottle’s neck and had begun eating into the shorts’ material. Eating like a pinprick of light eats a dry leaf under a magnifying glass.

  Sonny thought about the ready bucket of water behind the tombstone and gave up trying to make sense of the senseless.

  He was pulled off Lito by several of the other mourners, none of whom had the slightest idea what was going on. But they had been given enough pause to be snapped out of their previous passive stupor. And though Sonny was a stranger to all of them, they knew that he was obviously a violent man, given to lashing out at whoever was close at hand, and that it would be best if he were contained before his violence got out of control.

  9.

  Sense from the senseless. The weeks following the funeral passed, and Rosa spoke more, and Raphael began healing—as much as he ever would. And, as much as he ever would, Sonny reached a point of understanding.

  When it happened, he said in all seriousness, “I’m going to kill him. That sick fucker. I’m going to go back to Sarap and kill him.”

  Rosa, who saw Sonny’s understanding only in terms of its limits, kept her reply precise, honest, and unelaborated. “Sonny, if you hurt Lito in any way, at any time, I will stop loving you. You will lose me and never get me back.”

  So Sonny left Lito alone, because he believed her. These are the things, he decided, that we learn we can live with.

  The Conquistador

  Closes His Eyes

  Too confused to understand their mother’s shouts, Raphael and Lita had crept down the stairs and huddled in the hallway. They stood halfway between the kitchen and the sitting room, pressed against the frayed Last Supper wall hanging. Through the kitchen doorway, they could see where Corazon lay dying. Her arms were bent over her ears, and her legs were bunched up to her body. She had pulled them there a few moments before being shot, to shield herself from the broken glass that had skidded across the floor.

  Rosa was a shield. Behind her was the man who jumped through the window. He had tumbled over the sink and scrabbled on the linoleum. Pushed around on the linoleum with his bleeding hands. Slipped on his blood and the glass that had showered around him. Glittered with the glass and the wet black filth on his clothes and skin. Then he had leapt up to grab Rosa and drag her toward him.

  Rosa was the shield, dragged and held to protect this blackened, glittering man from the two other men, who were hiding outside. She had seen them briefly through the window’s frame, running from the road toward the house. They had ducked out of view as a bullet ripped over their heads. And they had shot back through the window, missing the dark man entirely and hitting Corazon instead.

  “I don’t know who you are,” said Rosa. “But I want you to let me go, and get out of my house.”

  The man squeezed her tighter. He was trembling. She could feel his jaw on her shoulder and his stubble on her neck.

  “My mother is dying. You are putting my children in danger.”

  His teeth were clicking in her ear.

  “Let me go, and run now, before they shoot again. Run down the hall.”

  “Ah,” said the man. And spoke in English. “Jesus fucking Christ. I’m dead.”

  “Let me go now, and run down the hall. Leave through the doorway at the end. You can escape.”

  “Dead,” said the man again. He panted, and growled.

  Part III

  Black Dog Is Here

  1.

  Behind the colorful oil slick on the puddle’s surface, a monochrome face gazed cautiously back at itself. A face that became increasingly troubled, its young features screwing up into an expression of disappointment and dismay.

  Dust, thought Vincente. Although he’d suspected he was dirty, his reflection had still come as a shock. Usually he managed to keep clean, but there hadn’t been any rain for at least a week and the daytime heat was dry, so there was a lot of dust blowing around the streets.

  “Boom!” he added aloud a few moments later. The night before, he had been caught in Luneta park by a Barangay Tanod patrol, and they had given him a haircut. A hygiene haircut, they called it, intended to prevent lice infestation in street-kid communities. To anyone else, it would have been a punishment haircut. A fat hand had fiercely wielded clippers, leaving a bruised and bleeding scalp, with patches of little tufts and curls. The little tufts stood bolt upright. It looked to Vincente as if his head had been frozen in mid—comic book explosion. Even more so when he raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth into an O of exploding surprise, and said boom. And even more yet when he shifted position so that the sun was al
so reflected in the puddle, burning red around him like a devil’s halo. A hard bullet of spit impressively completed the effect. Vincente broke apart into ripples and shrapnel light.

  Then he stood up. Red sun wouldn’t see out the next half hour. Before sunset, he wanted to get to Ermita, track down Totoy, and get some kind of plan together for the approaching night.

  2.

  Unlike his friend Vincente, Totoy was small for a thirteen-year-old. Or, to be more accurate, both Vincente and Totoy were small for their age—the result of a poor diet, according to the Irish priest who ran the Roxas soup kitchen—but Vincente was less small. That made Totoy absolutely tiny. He could easily have passed for an eight-year-old, should he ever have wanted to, and other kids frequently made him the butt of sizeist jokes.

  “Hey, Totoy, I’ve got an earache. You want to creep in and take a look?”

  Even his mother, whom he sometimes saw near the bus terminal, dragging around a comatose baby or two, usually greeted him by saying, “Still as small as ever, I see.”

  For this reason, if he had nothing better to do, Totoy liked to stand on walls. He felt that the world was a more interesting place when viewed from the higher perspective.

  “Get off the wall, kiddo,” said the blue-uniformed security guard outside the Ermita McDonald’s. He waved his stockless shotgun in Totoy’s general direction. “You can’t stand there.”

  Totoy hesitated before turning to face the guard. This wall was a particularly good one, giving a view directly into the restaurant’s bright windows and its hypnotically clean interior. “Can’t stand here, po?” he said. “Why the fuck not?”

  The guard smiled. “You’re way too young for that tongue, kiddo. Come on, down you get.”