The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  Not bad, he had told the three, for half a year’s work, ’no? They were at the Jollibee near the emerald skyscraper where their office was located, where for years they had breakfast every morning after shift. That time they had enough start-up capital for a Jollibee franchise.

  “Does this mean,” ventured Philip, looking around the table, “that we did it?”

  Eric, their supervisor, gave him the briefest of glances.

  Karen looked at Alvin on her side. “They’re having a moment.”

  Eric glared at Karen, who stared back, right eyebrow raised, a challenge. Eric blinked first, and Karen, smug and triumphant, turned toward Jollibee’s doors. She gasped. “Oh my god,” she whispered gravely. “Is that Chris Martin?”

  The other three turned to look.

  “It’s some random white guy,” Philip said, deflated.

  Karen broke out in laughter, big eyes flickering with the guileless charm that had entrapped so many men, to Philip and Alvin’s casual, if slightly murderous, resentment.

  “I hate her sometimes,” Philip told Alvin, who nodded solemnly. “Why did we include her?”

  Their operation had been simple, as most elaborate things were in hindsight. (Even Philip, Eric once pointed out, got the hang of it after a few tries, which meant any ape with opposable thumbs could fucking do it.) Their account in Magellan Solutions was a telecom giant, which catered to everyone from illegal Guatemalan immigrants in ghetto Queens to fifteenth-generation Republicans in Iowan maize country. One of their tasks was to process and approve credits to customers, and one day Alvin just realized that he had absolute control over this idle, boundless pool of dollars; if he could only rechannel it. Like having a credit card with a limit that replenished every fortnight, as the Inside Edition sound bite would put it months later, when news of the heist finally leaked to US media.

  It was unclear now how the modus came to Alvin, but at around the time it hatched in his mind, he had received a call on his mobile phone. A soft, professional voice. A name he didn’t catch except the “doctor” that preceded it. “Is Aurora Estrada your mother?” the man asked, or did he say “louder,” “quiver,” “feed her.” “No, no, it’s not a bother,” Alvin said, waving goodbye to his dispersing co-workers and mouthing “Wait!” to Philip and Karen. The man on the phone asked if he could speak to him in person. “Sure,” Alvin said, unsure. “When?” “As soon as possible,” the man said, giving him his office address.

  From the passenger seat of the humid taxi, Manila’s usual triumvirate of violence—traffic, heat, people—looked benign, muted by glass. He had reached Padre Faura when Alvin found the taxi driver looking at him expectantly, mouth agape, a story freshly ended. “What do you think, boy?”

  “Well,” Alvin said, “life’s like that, I guess.” The driver laughed, but the next moment, eyes transfixed in the distance, his smile disappeared. They passed by a church, and the driver caressed the neon rosary beads dangling from the rearview mirror and made the sign of the cross. Without thinking, Alvin followed suit. Rituals, he thought, in his eyes a rogue smile.

  The nice guard at the hospital compound directed him to the decrepit structure behind the main building. He crossed the lobby of the Cancer Institute to a cavernous side corridor, trying to ignore the unpainted ceiling, the yellowish pall from the bulbs, the parade of gaunt faces like statues perched on improvised Monobloc wheelchairs. He was averse to asking for directions, and it took a while before he found the right wing. At his office, the doctor told Alvin to sit down, in his voice no hint of alarm, always a bad sign. The doctor cleared his throat. Sit down, he repeated.

  “Are you working, hijo?” the doctor asked. Alvin told him what he did, blinking fast, as if presenting proof. “Is that right?” the doctor asked. “Many young people into that, ’no? I heard you can’t just leave your desk so sometimes people pee in bottles? Is that true? My goodness. That’s bad for your bladder, ha. Anyway, is that really what you want to do, hijo?” The last question sounded familiar, and Alvin was thinking hard when the all-important Anyway came. “You look really tired so I’ll go straight to the point.” A pause. “It’s not really as bad it sounds, and we’ll walk you through the process.”

  Page 12 under “Assurance.”

  At hearing the news, Alvin imagined his mother’s many clandestine trips to this place in the afternoons when she’d disappeared. Seeing her in the charity ward with other fading souls moments later, he was paralyzed in the way of proud, rowdy children suddenly lost in crowded markets. Calm and collected Alvin, whose tendency for sangfroid friends and lovers mistook for indifference, whose reaction to a ten-wheeler careening into his jeepney once was to close his eyes and hold his breath. Fatalist Alvin. Effort-is-futile Alvin.

  It blinked to gray, like a switched-off TV set, the future he had long imagined: his mother old and gray-haired, pleasantly journeying through old age, pursuing a hobby like gardening or baking in between bouts of unavoidable arthritis; him, the perfect son who gave her all that she wished. For a time, Alvin, Aurora, and his sister Marie’s two-year-old daughter Sophia had formed what for him passed off as a family. Complete. Occasionally tender. At night, when he was away answering phone calls from Americans, he had taken comfort in imagining his mother and niece both spread-eagled on the queen size in their bedroom, periodically stirring, at peace. Now, Sophia had to be entrusted to their next-door neighbor while Alvin was at work, barely able to function, sneaking unanswered phone calls to his sister during breaks.

  Regret: it felt rhythmic, like a mild but endless asthma attack. Regret rippled from core to the fringes. The freshest trespass to his mother Alvin regretted first: telling her off last week for hearing mass at Quiapo without telling him. Then, last month, complaining about the regular remittance to the relatives in Zambales. What else? His occasional, profound rage at her for the constant hovering, her motherly need to know. He regretted not relishing her presence when it was profuse, energetic, cancer-free; when it was a hand reheating the leftover adobo from the day’s lunch; a voice calling from outside his room. Alvin? a knock, Wake up, anak, you’ll be late , then, much louder, I-told-you-to-go-straight-home-so-you-can-get-enough-sleep-don’t-start-complaining-now. In college, he lied to her about his tuition and she had to borrow money from an obnoxious sister in Vallejo. Once, he lectured her on the contrivances of her favorite soap operas, rehashing his sociology professor’s lecture on Althusser.

  But he regretted, most of all, the jump into the call center bandwagon, surrendering his nights to eleven-hour shifts, his days to fitful sleep, his life to the crumbs that were left. For years his routine hid behind his increasing disposable income, burrowing under new clothes, new shoes, new books, eclipsed by the 42-inch flat screen that replaced the old Sony in their living room, where as a kid he watched Sesame Street and Batibot while outside Marie played tumbang preso and taguan with the neighborhood boys. Hidden until it was broken, the routine only revealed itself upon the discovery of malevolent cells rapidly metastasizing in the brittle underside of his mother’s pancreas.

  This was sometimes called distraction.

  When Alvin was six, the driver of the tricycle service that took him and Marie to and from school was stabbed by his kumpare during a heated altercation at the neighborhood cockpit—something about a slight on the latter’s manhood by way of a less-than-flattering fowl metaphor. Alvin and this man had shared many silent moments together, waiting for Marie in the morning as she looked for her assignment, after class as she wrapped up a round of patintero. Bravely he trooped behind Aurora and Marie to the multipurpose hall beside the church. He stood on tiptoes to peek into the open casket. Smells like Johnsons powder, Marie said, button nose wrinkled; that, and a dead rat. Aurora glared at her. Long after they had gone home, Alvin could still see his Kuya Lito’s bony, chalky face everywhere, and which followed him in his sleep and refused to vanish despite ten sets of fervently mumbled Our Fathers and Hail Marys.

  “Nightmare?” Aur
ora asked that night, rolling to Alvin’s side on the king size where mother and two children slept, a space on the rightmost unconsciously apportioned to the man then lifting boxes at a grocery in Dammam. Alvin nodded. That night was especially heinous. Power was out—it was during the daily ten-hour-blackout years under Ramos—and Rosing was battering the western seaboard of Luzon. Thirteen-year-old Marie, already with the mysterious fortitude that would shield her from almost everything, was snoring with a James Earl Jones tremolo, like dead Mufassa in Lion King , which they had seen on a rented VHS tape a few days earlier. “Listen,” Aurora told her son, the rain like unending gunfire on the GI roof. “I’m going to tell you what to do in case of nightmares, OK? Are you listening? OK. Here it goes. Ready? Blink.” She exhaled. “OK, now sleep.”

  “Blink?” Alvin looked at his mother, face intermittently lit by lightning.

  Aurora smiled. “When you’re asleep,” she explained, “and you force yourself to blink, you’ll remember that you’re asleep and you’ll wake up.” She paused. “When you’re awake, you can pray, watch TV, read your books, walk outside, do whatever you want. OK, maybe not walk outside. Don’t walk outside. There’s a bumbay, bahala ka. But you don’t have to go back to sleep, OK?” She herself blinked quickly, as if in demonstration, and Alvin dug deeper into the concave of her torso, which curled to cocoon the returning child. “When you wake up,” she whispered, “wake me up, too. Chances are I am also having a bad dream.”

  It was only after his father was impaled by a warehouse forklift when Alvin connected his mother’s melancholy to the middling poverty that poor children mistook for the natural, if inconvenient, state of things. He never quite forgot that stormy night, although Aurora swore that what Alvin had was a very vivid, if banal, dream. Of course we blink, we’re not fish. He would remember the instruction when, already awake, he wanted desperately to wake up further: when he was held up at gunpoint in Cubao, when he was seized by police at a mobilization near the US Embassy, when floodwater began rushing through the gap under the door and Aurora was frantically shoving clothes and documents into a bag while cursing his father for being born in a place that used to be marshland, a stone’s throw away from Pasig.

  At the airport, Alvin now blinked and blinked, trying to invoke the reality-altering power of his eyelids, to wake up from this. A brawny German shepherd, led by a man with ELITE emblazoned on his vest, was trawling the haphazard queue of bags in his row. Alvin sank into his chair. The Supreme Exhaustion returned. The loud, indistinct fury of whys and desperate hows. He felt vitality desert his legs, then his shoulders, his chest, and for a moment it felt like his heart was going to collapse. The dog wasn’t sparing anything, not an invalid’s cowhide purse dangling from her wheelchair’s armrest, not a family’s half-empty box of Krispy Kreme. Didn’t the bribe cover this one? Reynaldo had told him to watch out for the currency dogs. PNP’s elite Aviation Security Group had recently imported a dozen from the US, mandated by the new law on money laundering. “Just don’t move around,” Rey had said. “The dogs get tired easily from the heat. Stateside.”

  In the sluggish frame-by-frame manner in which all dreadful things in life transpired, the dog was one bulging backpack away from Alvin’s knapsack when he heard his name over the PA system—“Passenger Alvin Estrada, passenger Alvin,” a smoker’s cough, “sorry, Estrada, please proceed to Gate 134, thank you.” Avoiding the dog’s eyes, Alvin grabbed his bag and shouted that that was him being summoned. He stood up and walked off, his feet heavy and light at once. He had taken a few steps when he stopped. What fresh hell awaited him at the gate? But when he looked back to his seat, he caught the dog’s eyes. Alvin blinked and ordered his legs to move. Right one first. Then left.

  3

  A t the call center, Alvin had been trying in vain to apologize for a goddamned bill that did not arrive, when listening to the Guttural Lecture on the importance of prin -ci-ples gave him the idea. He realized he could create a dummy account to which he could pour several hundred dollars’ worth of credits every day, and their company, a Fortune 500 mainstay since 1983 and really quite a scammer in its own FCC-sanctioned way, would be none the poorer.

  When the scheme actually worked, the exhilaration came with a fear that he suspected time would only cultivate, like the stench of something overly powdered. When the first giddiness subsided, he began to think of arrest, the geography of a jail cell, the prospect of shame. Was he not unlike those dishonest people? That anonymous mass lumped together as the Rotten System. On his next shift at work, he awaited the email, IM, or tap on the shoulder that would bear the news of the discovery of his misdeed. Whenever Eric would stand up from his station at the far end of the spine, Alvin was sure his supervisor had finally uncovered the irregularity and would now be escorting him, head bowed in expected shame, to a plush conference room, the same one where his final interview was conducted three years earlier. There (as in the interview), Eric would offer him a cup of freshly brewed barako. Karen brought him a kilo, he would say, she was in Tagaytay last weekend with Brock, in Antonio’s. Oh you didn’t know? She wouldn’t fucking shut up about it. The shop talk would end with a deep sigh, Eric’s eyes tightly shut for effect, and with that height-compensating bravura, he’d ask, Alvin, why are we here, hmm? Then, without waiting for an answer, go off: What’s wrong with you? I didn’t expect this from you, you of all people, Alvin, we trusted you, you’re one of the best agents we have, you could’ve just applied yourself, you know. Sharon’s accent is as thick as her eyebrows, but look where she is now, don’t talk to me about cancer. You’re fired—

  But the day ended with no such melodrama. At eight o’clock the agents lumbered to the crowded elevator landing and said their usual heavy-eyed goodbyes. Alvin felt as if his chest was going to ignite in relief. It was consent. The money was his. Take it. The few stray bills that had always lain sheepishly in his wallet, he had always thought them enough, amusing even, signalling a poverty that was passing, never permanent. Now he realized the amusement was misery in denial.

  He celebrated by withdrawing the cash and wheeling his mother from the charity ward to the eleventh floor suite of a private hospital (with only the briefest detour to the mall to finally get a Blackberry). At the new hospital room, a complimentary fruit basket awaited on the kitchen counter. “Try the dragon fruit,” offered the private nurse standing by the guardrail of the queen-size bed. “Low cholesterol, high fiber content, good for blood sugar—” Oh dear, Alvin thought, a talker. He already pitied the nurse, soon a captive audience to his mother’s riveting storytelling, which gained power, monsoon-like, from the warm air of prodding questions. “Such fancy fruits,” Aurora began. “Do you know that the sweetest mangoes come from Zambales? (The nurse shook her head.) Yes, well, this reminds me of a story. Before they invented—”

  Alvin soon started feeling something akin to invincibility, a clement hubris, but it was his mother’s pride, in between the vomiting and the nausea and the religion-testing pain, that made him send the next hundreds of dollars to the dummy account, and the next, and then another. She was proud of him, he knew, despite the pretend unease. “Where are you getting all this money?” she once asked, bald like the special ponkan she was peeling one rare peaceful post-chemo morning. “If I go home and find people I don’t know watching TV in our living room, I’ll skin you alive so you can join your father in hell.” Sophia, whose sense of humor had always leaned toward the morbid, giggled from her high chair, her own ponkan half-peeled, beaten to a pulp. “Relax, Ma,” Alvin told her. “I have some, um, investments. What do you want for dinner? Beef mami again from Ma Mon Luk? Without the beef, yes, they tend to overcook it, your nilaga is better.”

  It was a fit of brashness that would earn censure from Alvin’s normal self, but Scott told him to not be so freaking melodramatic, Jesus, he’d be fine. He would probably not be found at all. This outsourcing business, this “strange organism,” had yet to account for all kinds of risks, including “en
terprising neo-colonials” like him. They had been in Providence, a favorite beer joint in downtown Manila and namesake to the temperate city from where Scott had flown four years earlier on a Fulbright. My god, he went on, chuckling, I knew the subaltern couldn’t speak. I didn’t know he could con you while explaining your phone bill. Alvin laughed. “Good job, phone monkey,” Scott held up his bottle. “I’m fully behind this mutinous act of yours.”

  Clink.

  A mutiny? Alvin had long been wary of Scott’s hyperbole—of Scott’s counsel, or him, in general—but on his way to work that night, he considered that Scott might be right. Maybe there was no need to worry. There had been, dare he say it, a beautiful kind of peace that accompanied his steps, a wordless satisfaction, like the payday joy, only permanent. It was as if he and the rest of the city—the home-bound and exhausted, the fish ball and siomai carts that usurped the sidewalk, the homeless looking for a hospitable stretch of pavement—were performing to a complicated choreography, the steps to which he had finally mastered. This calm had descended about him like soft mist, so unexpectedly that he knew it was here to stay.

  In a packed jeepney on his way to school one morning, 18-year-old Alvin’s arm was blocked by the flabby torso of his seatmate and he couldn’t reach into his coin purse for the three-peso fare. He got off without paying. After the jeep drove off, he stood by the curb for ten minutes, almost mad that the driver, too busy refuting every word from the radio commentator’s mouth, didn’t mount a chase around Philcoa. Alvin was upset to be so easily off the hook, and since then he could no longer look at any jeepney driver straight in the eye. The lesson of the experience was clear: all were a matter of chance, of fate; and everyone had lucky days. But guilt? Guilt came later.