by Alex Garland
“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.
3.
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.
4.
“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 applyi
ng 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—”
Vincente interrupted the priest again. “If God has put my dad in hell, the only way I’ll ever get to see him again is if I go to hell too.”
“Ah,” said the Father. “It seems I’m being slow on the up-take. Now I see where this is going.”
“You think hell has visiting days?”
“Son, a moment—”
“I doubt it does.”
“Son—”
“So if I do nothing wrong in life, I don’t get to see him again. And if I do something bad, I get to see him, but I also go to hell forever.”
“Son! Would you listen a moment!”
“Does that sound fair to you?”
“As I have already said, to find fairness in life you would need to know the—”
“Jesus Christ!” Vincente exploded. “I’m not asking about the mind of God or your fucking leg! I’m asking you if it sounds fair!”
The Father looked stunned. “I—” he said.
“Don’t ban us from the soup kitchen!” said Totoy.
“Yes or no would do it, padre!” Vincente shouted furiously, getting to his feet. “How fucking hard can that be?”
The Father was an understanding and merciful man, so neither boy was banned from the soup kitchen, despite the swearing and the food fight that Vincente’s hurled bowl precipitated.
“Don’t worry, son,” the Father said when Totoy went to see him the next day, full of profuse apologies on his friend’s behalf. “Of course you can both come back. You can come back anytime, and you’ll be made welcome. In the grand scheme of things, a food fight isn’t too bad…though I’d be very grateful if it didn’t happen again.”
He then added, “And, just so you know, I had a word with the Lord late last night. You aren’t going to hell, Vincente isn’t going to hell, and his dad isn’t either. You tell Vincente that. I don’t want you boys fretting about devils and the like, you hear?”
Totoy assured him that he wouldn’t fret about devils. And he didn’t.
Vincente, however, did. Every night for two weeks. What could you do? That was his nature.
Totoy sprang up off the pavement.
“I’m telling you right now, Cente, I’m not going to spend the next month talking about how that cat got plugged. Okay?”
Vincente paused. “Let’s find a Seven-Eleven,” he eventually said. “I could use a Coke after all that running.”
5.
There were no 7-Elevens. There was nothing. And walking seemed to lead nowhere, though there was no sense of retracing footsteps. Each boy privately wondered how they’d found their way to these streets in the first place. Particularly Totoy, who hadn’t been lost in the city for as long as he could remember. Getting lost was as unexpected as forgetting how to swim, mid-dive into the Pasig.
Vincente, for his part, was more bothered by the area itself. It was confusing to have stumbled across such uninhabited desolation in Manila. Not that desolation was a rarity, but you would find people living in it. Equally confusing, it was clear that the area had once—perhaps even recently—been full of life. The evidence was everywhere, in filth-blackened shop fronts, peeling fly-posters, and busted neon signs. Moreover, when they peered inside the buildings, bizarre details appeared. Through broken windows, restaurant tables with place mats and beer bottles could be dimly made out. One derelict bar even had a jukebox. It lay on its side, dusty but apparently intact, surrounded by crumpled drink cans and torn newspaper, like a Japanese treasure chest in a sea of cursed banknotes. It was hard to imagine why such reusable and recyclable assets had been abandoned rather than expertly stripped. It seemed as if, in the space of one bad hour, the nightlife had been chased away.
A similar thought had obviously occurred to Totoy, embellished with a characteristic spin.
“I’m keeping an eye out,” he said quietly, after they had gone the entire length of a street without conversation.
Vincente raised his eyebrows. “For?”
“The clown.”
“What clown?”
“The burger clown. I’m thinking he might be the reason this district is so deserted. Could be his hunting grounds.”
Vincente was content to let the oblique reference pass un-explained. He was feeling uneasy enough and didn’t need a grim Totoy fantasy to help him on his way.
The stretch of wasteground came as a relief. It was illuminated by a few scattered refuse fires and the moon, and beyond it an outline of low shanty buildings was visible. Some had lights burning, electric and oil.
“Looks promising,” said Totoy. “The squatter camp…”
“Uh-huh.”
“We could ask someone the way back to Ermita.”
“Nothing to lose.”
“So…”
“We might as well try it out.”
6.
Halfway across, Totoy said, “It’s pistols.”
Vincente nodded.
“Loud.”
“Near.”
“Coming from inside a building.”
“One of those ones behind us.”
“Yep.”
The boys stood still and listened. The shooting came in rich volleys, and its echoes bounced off the buildings around the wasteground, snapping through their chests.
“That shot was louder.”
“Somebody’s screaming.”
“We should go.”
“Yeah. We should.”
Rescuing Girls
1.
Like walking from the living room to the study, and switching on the computer.
Like walking from the desk to the window, and frowning at pinpricks of old light.
Underneath “Stop procrastinating” he had typed: “Imagine an atom of hydrogen.”
Imagine an atom of hydrogen, Cente. The most basic atom: a nucleus with a single electron revolving around it. Then imagine that you have enlarged the nucleus by five million million, bringing it up to about the size of a one-peso coin. To scale, the electron would now be nearly two-thirds of a mile away.
Two-thirds of a mile between nucleus and electron, if the nucleus was the size of a one-peso coin. In an atom, almost nothing to see, even if you could see it. Mainly a void. So much room to move around.
So much room that if you fired a neutrino into a light-year-thick block of lead, there’d be even-odds that the neutrino would collide with nothing and pop out the other side.
Good odds of survival, if you are a light-year-thick block of lead, trying to blow your brains out with a neutrino gun.
Good odds of survival too, if you are a suicidal neutrino, jumping off the thirtieth floor o
f Legaspi Towers. You’d hit the pavement and pass straight through it. Pass through the pavement, earth, rock layers, the whole planet, and keep right on going.
Good odds of suicide survival for the unthinkably big and the unthinkably small.
You might hope that the same would be true for a girl jumping off the thirtieth floor of Legaspi Towers. With all that space, with all that void and room to move around, you might hope the girl’s atoms and the atoms of the pavement might conspire to let her safely through.
It seems reasonable enough. But it turns out that, for the thinkable, the odds are bad.
Alfredo wiped sweat from his upper lip. “Stop,” he said, and hit delete.
2.
Alfredo decided to ignore today’s Totoy tape. At some point, he would have to go through it more carefully, when he was dealing with the conscious narratives of breakdown and change rather than the unconscious ones. But for the moment, he couldn’t be bothered. Instead, as usual, he chose to concentrate on his star pupil.
To the extent that Vincente was the pupil, at any rate.
In neat capitals, he labeled Vincente’s tape, #43, DYING/ DEAD BABY, CARELESS FATHER.
The conversation was still quite fresh in his mind, so rather than listen to it immediately, he thought it might be better to go over some previous father-related material.
“Father, father,” he muttered, squatting by the shelves, running his finger down the Vincente recordings. Out of forty-three taped conversations, there was a lot of father-related material to choose from. At #4, his finger dithered, and at numbers 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 36, and 37 it dithered again. Finally it backtracked, and settled on number 29.
#29, RUNNING MAN (VERSION 2)/ FATHER-HELL.
“It’s not the first time you’ve brought me this dream.”