by Glenn Diaz
Outside, the busy sidewalk was lit by new street lamps, strange amid the row of ancient sooty wooden apartments, the now-empty roadside fruit carts, the usual snarl of overhead cables, from which dangled bulbous years-old Chinese lanterns. The lamps’ steel curlicues, if one looked close enough, formed the outline of the sea lion in Manila’s coat of arms, a nice subtle touch, except emblazoned on the tiny roofs were the fast food triumvirate. The bee, the clown, the jolly-looking colonel in the red apron.
“Funny idea, the Kilometer Zero in Luneta,” Scott said, chopsticks busy at work, “how they keep the vicinity pristine, manicured lawns, freshly painted zebra lanes, and such, then around it, whew, those new hotels? Absolutely criminal how they ruin the beautifully decrepit landscape.”
Some would call it progress, I thought.
“But that’s the city for you, isn’t it?” he said. “Some things get museum-like care, others are bulldozed to the ground to make way for an ugly parking lot. I kind of like how random it is, actually, don’t you? How it functions like an archive, almost, wouldn’t you say? A repository, a distillation.” He paused, rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s Benjamin again, I know. Don’t give me that look.” We laughed. “But it’s true, see,” he went on, “just around us, here, no matter how chaotic it looks, there’s something from the seventeenth century in that church, that Art Deco movie house is from early twentieth, that dirty waterway is definitely post-war—”
“Nothing precolonial?”
He thought about it. “Well, that Malay docility of yours, I suppose.”
“I’m docile?”
“Or that aboriginal libido.”
A tremor below my tummy made me sit up, and I told Scott I liked these discussions most of the time except when they’d force me to reconsider things I was perfectly fine with. He smiled. I had always found my pronunciation clumsy when talking to him, so when he nodded, supposedly comprehending, I rejoiced and forgot what I just said.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “You know, if you unpack the thinking behind that tree in the Garden of Eden, the fruit is not so much of the knowledge of good and evil but something more banal: defamiliarization.”
I winced at the proffered insight, but his tongue confidently luxuriated over the many syllables, which made me nod. In the lull, his free hand shifted across the crowded table and turned to rest ever so slightly on mine, which twitched at contact. I shook my head, mouthing, no, a word I found myself saying a lot lately, to Scott but also to myself. His hand, ashamed, retreated.
“You’re just enjoying this, aren’t you?” he asked.
“You made your bed—”
“And there’s room for you in it.”
“And Ian?”
He hesitated. “It’s a king.” I laughed; he continued. “It’s huge , more than enough room for three—” His laughter transitioned into a coughing fit.
“This monogamy business of yours,” he said, still smiling but also serious, “Jesus—”
“Scott,” I said.
He raised his hand again. You win, it said. His shy smile was his sweetest, his most naked, and I was almost pulled back, again, except the reliable alarm bells rang, the cautionary shortness of breath. Must be how tortoises developed a carapace.
There was now something forbidding about everything that Scott and I would share. When we ended things, what made things bearable after the initial hurt was my decision to look at him as an experience, an education, from which I could learn a thing or two. My own way of defamiliarization (as it were). Whenever I’d overstep this pedagogical boundary, I would take a deep breath, scold myself, in a sing-song: Oh, Alvin, you’re going there again, bahala ka .
“Anyway,” I said, eyebrows creased, “I’ve been thinking, all this talk about location and sense of place. What’s the opposite of Kilometer Zero? Like the city’s outskirts? Or beyond—”
“Wait, wait, no,” Scott said. “You clearly haven’t been listening, Alvin. Jesus.” He took a gulp of the house tea and swallowed hard. “What I have been telling you is, the real Kilometer Zero of contemporary Manila has nothing to do with distance anymore. That requires order and all around us is, well, Manila. Of course, the official Kilometer Zero is marked as the basis of all manners of distances, but really, the city’s center is by no means a static point.”
“OK—” I said.
“Remember, modern Manila has no real center. Blame the Japs. And, fine, MacArthur’s boys. Anyway, it’s happened before. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. Name any major American city in the early nineteenth century. The arrival of immigrants en masse, from Eastern Europe or the Visayas, doesn’t matter. The fluid population. Contrast and inequality. Shrinking private spaces. It’s what’s happening to Manila. There’s a vacuum. And no administrative footprint is going to change that.”
“Interesting,” I said. At the next table, a famous comedienne whose main shtick was her hilarious Imelda impressions, was eating in silence, her hair for a change flat against her scalp.
“She looks familiar,” Scott whispered when he saw me looking at her. His plate of rice was almost empty; in its wake, dark-brown swirls of the asado sauce.
I leaned toward him. “Yeah, she impersonates—”
Scott’s green eyes widened. He parked his chopsticks on his plate.
I stopped eating. “What now?”
He sank back into his chair, then leaned forward, hands making strange gestures. He began to chuckle, with the heartfelt shaking of the shoulders that supposedly intimated his carefree man-of-the-world aplomb. I looked around our table. To the customers within earshot, it must have been creepy, this Dracula laugh. He swept his unruly blonde hair with one palm. “We are the city!”
“What?”
“What is a city without inhabitants? You see? Nothing but plains and hills and rivers. Or flood plains and esteros. But look at me. I’ve been living in Manila for, what, three years? I won’t feel at home in Seattle if I return. I will probably not return, to be perfectly honest. You see? The city is not a place. It is a social,” he paused, “arrangement. Defined by concession. By consensus. It is us. A city ends when there are no longer people to define it.”
I tried hard to share in the joy of the discovery. “There are ten million people in Manila, Scott—”
“Yes, exactly! A city is not its avenues or its waterways. Not race tracks or oceanfront duplexes or malls. Not those Auschwitz-inspired condos sprouting everywhere. People breathe life into the city. You, and I, and the,” he swallowed a piece of hakaw dipped in chili-spiked soy sauce, “the lovely guy who made this remarkable plate of dimsum. Very good, by the way.”
“The best in town.”
He smiled. “But think about it. Long after you die, long after I die, or she”—he pointed at Imelda; I glared at him—“the MRT’s going to keep running. It will continue to ferry passengers from North Avenue to William Howard Taft day in and day out. They will replace the coaches, the tickets, the rails, the signages, the guards, the drivers. Is it a different organism then? Not really. That operation, that anonymous, well, life form, it will persist. It will outlive you and me, brother.”
Great, I’m “brother” again, I thought.
Oh, Alvin.
Satisfied, Scott crossed his arms, waiting, I surmised, for applause. Just then it started to rain, which explained the unbearable humidity. This always happened, but there were groans nonetheless. Many turned to look toward the glass wall, suddenly obscured by a blurry curtain. It was almost night. Thirty minutes of this, and the water would begin to accumulate, first in annoying puddles then ankle-deep floods, concealing pavement and caked trash and manhole, the city’s centuries-old drain age system suddenly useless, industrial innards overwhelmed by its own wastes: plastic bottles, diapers, Styrofoam, disposable chopsticks.
Scott crossed his skinny legs, hiking up his shorts. I could see the trails of hair on the side of his propped up leg, the shine on his knee. I imagined them wading through murky wat
ers.
“You obviously have not been to Divisoria during Christmas season,” I told him.
He took another sip of the house tea. “Excuse me?”
“Baclaran on a Wednesday after mass. Megamall during a midnight sale. The bus terminals in Cubao on Holy Week. The Nazarene procession in Quiapo.”
He put down his cup, then, again, raised his hand. “I know, I know. I have to go out there. Experience the city. Go beyond theory. Sure. I accept that, but I told you—”
“That’s not what I said,” I told him. Once, he took the MRT and nearly fell when the train made an abrupt stop. He took it out on the guy who was leaning on the pole. “Look,” he told him, “if you hog the pole like that, it’s only you who will benefit from it, right? But if you will just hold on to it as you should, six, seven, eight people will. It’s called the common good, and maybe if you’re not so self-involved, you would have noticed that. If you do this in New York, oh trust me—” Maybe unleashing Scott to Manila wasn’t good advice.
“I told you I’m more concerned with consciousness and thought formation than blue-collar ethnography. I don’t know why you’re being so combative today.”
“No one’s being combative, Scott,” I said. “How’s Ian?”
“Really?”
I smiled.
He let out a lungful. “Oh, you know, still in Min-de-nao saving the world from cavities or something.”
Ian was in the Peace Corps. I had always wondered how that worked, if there was a bed big enough for Scott’s smirking cynicism and Ian’s messianic complex. Maybe I didn’t know him that well. Or maybe that they were born in the same country—the same coast even, Seattle just “a scenic train ride away” from Flagstaff—overrode some of the differences. Their situation certainly made it easy for Scott to forget about Ian’s existence for two years, until Ian barged into his apartment while we were in the middle of watching Hable con Ella .
“When were you planning to tell me?” I had asked him, when Ian went to the bathroom.
“Oh, Alvin,” Scott had said.
We finished the film together, we three. Scott sat in the middle, probably an inch or two closer to Ian. Curiously, Almodovar to me had seemed too gimmicky, overrated since.
Imelda signaled for her bill now. She looked over at our table and smiled at Scott, who smiled back, long comfortable playing the role of Nice Foreigner. She then looked at me, in her face remnants of the for-Caucasians-only grin.
“People always look at me like I’m a victim of human trafficking when I’m with you,” I told him.
“You’re not that thin,” Scott said, before letting out the Dracula laugh.
Oh, Alvin.
The rain outside subsided. The staccato of a horse’s hooves clattered loudly then faded, followed by the far-away blare of a fire truck, a balut vendor’s hoarse invitation.
8
I found anti-Kilometer Zero days later.
Here, it was always dim. Even at the height of noon, like now, when the city’s corrugated iron roofs smoldered and the asphalt in EDSA heaved desert-like, it unfolded in shadows. At night, when 500-watt yellow spotlights were turned on to light the way of passing buses, it remained, at best, enveloped in a sallow hue, unable to fight the night’s relentless diminishing.
From the unmoving bus, I looked out the window and found the same monochrome of dreary survival. Maybe Scott was right, maybe Manila was uninhabitable. This spot in particular, the intersection of Shaw Boulevard and EDSA, it had always reminded me of suffocating concrete, the city’s dregs. Pitiless round-the-clock traffic. The crisscross of flyovers overhead. The trees that seemed to have gained an industrial quality. Especially hell-like was that shadowy underside of the MRT station, the neglected space amid the giant pillars, which quivered at every train’s approach.
I could almost hear his harangue. “Ah, but you see that’s a spot rarely touched by humans. The warmth there is the heat of engines, of Saudi fuel. Of Machine! It is not human warmth. That’s not the city. The city is us. It is a harried worker commuting home after eleven hours in a two-square-meter cubicle in Makati. God, you’re so overworked. Jesus—”
At least in my mind I could shut him up. Scott: like Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual . A seductive idea but ultimately inscrutable, infuriating, which you’d labor to finish out of a queer sense of duty. One moment, you’re convinced he was brilliant, the next, you wondered if it was all just eloquent bullshit. Scott, who unfortunately was also a leading scholar on urban placelessness—if that was even a real area of study—who now subsisted on American taxpayers’ money. Conference papers for rent, I supposed that was a fair exchange. Lectures and talks for Chinese food.
We had seen less and less of each other since I started working the graveyard shift at a call center two years ago. I used to work for a fledgling Village Voice -type broadsheet. My office then, to which I’d report every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to put the weekend issue to bed, was on Padre Faura, about a five-minute walk from Scott’s apartment in Mabini. We would have a drink at least twice a week, mostly in dank Providence in Vito Cruz, where we met.
The light turned green now; with some effort, the bus escaped the gridlock, maneuvering in between the other buses that refused to heed the traffic light. A short honk. Then a longer one. The cacophony, on cue. I exhaled as the bus sped off to the open highway, the sky finally visible. We stopped by the fenced loading area in front of Megamall, where people under umbrellas ambled toward the door that hissed open. One by one, they appeared on the bus’s aisle, heads turning in search of a vacant seat. Someone in a white uniform with Middle Eastern features took the empty half of my two-seater. I scooted an inch or two closer to the window, rearranged the black knapsack on my lap, and tried to a have a quick look. He was old; maybe in his 50s. I peeled my eyes back outside, relieved.
The bus climbed Ortigas flyover. To my right was the bronze Virgin Mary monument undergoing a repaint, surrounded by a crisscross of bamboo scaffolding. Behind her, like a halo, the giant R of Robinsons Galleria. Farther still the Sierra Madre tapered off, green-speckled, visible on clear days, an always surprising frame to the city’s panorama. We’d been speeding downhill on the flyover when I realized I had gotten on the wrong bus, again. Normally I’d get off in front of the mall, then take a G-Liner bus to my street Pureza (“purity”—obviously for the quality of shabu our polite elderly neigbor Tatay Nestor sold by the gram). Some buses, differentiated by “Ibabaw” on the signage, took the flyover, skipping the stop altogether. The recourse, if this happened, was to get off at Cubao then take the LRT. Most days I would be too sleepy to mind the detour, even if the mistake meant a fifteen-minute walk through a mangy mall and a crowded footpath around the coliseum. I sometimes even suspected that I’d take the wrong bus intentionally, bored with the routine that for the past two years had dictated my way home. In any case, I would arrive to the same comforting scene at home: the smell of lunch in the air and my mother arranging plates and silverware on the table, while on her shoulder clung two-year-old Sophia, my older sister Marie’s firstborn.
That afternoon I came home to an empty house.
“Sophia at Tita Fe’s,” said the beautiful cursive on the note atop the dining table. My mother had worked as a court stenographer before I was born, before she quit and, in her words, devoted all her remaining energy and youth to raising two good-for-nothing kids (she was given to sarcasm). I uncovered a bowl of still-warm sinigang, tamarind-spiked stew with pork and gabi and greens. My tummy grumbled; there were terribly long days, or nights, and there were days when a bowl of pork sinigang awaited at home.
Our next-door neighbor Tita Fe, a widow in her fifties, arrived while I was waiting for the rice cooker’s red light to turn green. Sophia was in her arms, asleep. I whispered my thanks and offered her some soup, which she refused. Gently, she put Pia down on the sofa and motioned to leave, but not before asking if anything was wrong with Mama. She seemed a little out of sorts lately, she sa
id, not her usual vigorous self. She didn’t haggle till kingdom come with the vegetable lady this morning.
I told Tita Fe I wasn’t sure and would ask.
My mother’s arrival was announced by the creak of the gate minutes later.
“Tita Fe said you’re acting strange,” I said.
“Did she say that?” Mama asked.
“What’s wrong?”
“That woman, ha. We ask her one favor—” She went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of chamomile.
“Isn’t it too hot for tea?”
She looked at me.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I went ahead and started to eat. The pork was chewy, the cubes of fat jelly-like, although the string beans were a fraction undercooked. The sour soup, thickened with tenderized gabi, was laced with a piquant layer from the long green chillies soaking in the broth. She took a seat opposite from mine.
There was an explosion of sour-spicy warmth in my throat, which descended to my chest, my tummy. “Sarap,” I told her.
She looked confused. Well, of course . “Go easy on the fat. Remember Mang Carding.”
Mang Carding from three doors down died of cardiac arrest last week. A skeletal man, had never known the taste of sisig or lechon, his children said, and his death occasioned a lively neighborhood debate on the curious overlap between tuberculosis and heart disease, mostly along the lines of “Is there?”
Sophia purred and stirred, rustling the cotton seat covers, summoning Mama and me. We watched her stretch out her tiny arms before returning to a supine position. We walked back to the dining area, bathed then in artificial yellow light from the fabric-lined mini-chandelier cum ceiling fan. Its humming blades turned with some effort, burdened by age. We resumed lunch, which proceeded quietly. I had always thought, whenever I’d witness the noisy banter of friends with their families, that there was something wrong about our silence, until I came to appreciate the lack of pressure, the peace, how this peace relied on mere presence.