by Glenn Diaz
The man looked at him. “A bit stuffy in here, no?” he said, standing up and walking to the Condura above a moveable table. On it sat a coffeemaker surrounded by Department of Tourism mugs. Behind it, the wall was crowded with stained posters of the Banaue Rice Terraces, the limestone cliffs of El Nido, and the Chocolate Hills. Especially battered was a ripped calendar page with a close-up of the MacArthur Landing Memorial in Palo, the faces of the seven bronze statues bestowed with mustaches. Returning to his chair, the man took out his phone and typed a message. He then resumed reading the piece of paper.
“What else, let’s see,” Alvin went on. “There are some receipts in another pocket, an inhaler, condoms—”
The same policeman from earlier came into the room as overhead thundered the deafening roar of aircraft engine. “Whoa,” the cop said, mock-shielding his head.
“Sir,” saluted the airport employee, too sprightly, Alvin thought, for a casual workplace encounter. The cop waved him off. He sat on the vacant chair next to the airline employee, who whispered something to his ear while showing him the same piece of paper.
“Didn’t know that that air-con still worked,” the cop said, wiping his brows with a neatly folded hanky. “It’s so hot outside. So many people here today. It is never this hot in Ormoc, you know? They say it’s because of all the spirits of the dead just loitering around. At least they’re good for something, right? Ha-ha-ha.” From his pocket he retrieved a small bottle of ammonia, which he uncapped and brought to his nose. He took a long sniff.
He turned to the airport employee. “You’re from where again? (Carigara, the man said) Ah yes, Carigara. Seaside also. There’s a nice old house there. The pillars are outside instead of inside. A unique design, they said. Right by the market. Now a day care or a pharmacy, I don’t remember. The owners are really nice, too. Wait, the woman is a doctor, so maybe they had turned it into a pharmacy—”
“That’s my bag,” Alvin said. “If there’s a supervisor I could talk to so we can expedite the process—”
The cop looked at the airline employee, as if Alvin was his fault. “Expe-what?” he asked, brows furrowed. Anyway, he said, since everyone’s so important for small talk, might as well get this over with. “First of all, I want to clarify that this is not some evil operation to rob you blind.” Besides, he must have some serious connections up there; how else did he go through NAIA without a hitch? That’s impressive. The problem is, and it’s only a problem from a certain perspective actually, around a dozen people came to know of the bag’s existence, the fault of the overeager FA who shrieked when she opened it, like she hadn’t seen a bag of money all her life. Fortunately, all of these witnesses had affixed their most ornate signatures on the only document—the employee held up the piece of paper—that linked Alvin to the “prohibited item.” Lucky for him, it was up for sale. “So the choice is yours,” he said. “Share your blessings or get arrested and get nothing at all. Seems easy enough to me—”
“Wait,” the airline employee said. “I’m curious. Is it drugs?”
The cop shrugged. “Maybe Ecstasy. But definitely not shabu.” The two laughed.
“Fucking imbeciles,” Alvin murmured.
The two looked at him.
He expected something along the lines of an amused, triumphant chuckle from his gentle blackmailers, so when the cop stood up, pulled out his revolver, and seized the collar of his shirt, Alvin closed his eyes just in time to shut off the next moments. “You son of a bitch,” he heard, a burst of warm air on his ear, “what did you say? Ha? You fucking son of a bitch. You think just because we don’t understand you, you can call us names? Mock us? Who do you think you are? We can kill you now and no one will ever know, not your family, not your friends. Fucking animal.”
Alvin slinked back, unaccustomed to force. He slinked away from the unseen yanking, the cold metal pressing onto his bare temple. The minutes burst fitfully into eternity then dived into a standstill. The announcements over the PA system arrived garbled, as if the holding area was cut off from the rest of the airport. He willed for his body to disintegrate and appear elsewhere, in the window seat on the plane, in the balcony of his hotel room, in his cubicle at Magellan Solutions, in bed at home, when all these lay impotent in the future.
He heard the airline employee whisper, “Chief, chief.”
“You going to be a smart ass or are we going to talk like adults here?” the cop asked.
Eyes still shut, Alvin willed for the moment to vanish, for the silence to be broken by gunfire, for the air to smell suddenly of gunpowder. He prepared himself. A part of his skull, he imagined, was turning soft, soft enough to welcome the bullet. The numbness spread like a caress from his temple down to his quickly numbing neck, then to his head, which wouldn’t move despite his orders.
What returned was his eight-year-old docility, a feverish chill down his back. He tried to talk, but his mouth was so parched that no more than a yelp issued from it.
“Good,” the cop said. He let go of Alvin’s collar and put the revolver on the table, where it made a loud thwack. “Here’s the deal. We will let you take as much as you can fit in your two pockets.”
Alvin stood up and reached for the bag. Halfway into zipping it open, the cop seized his hand, which Alvin took back and held close to his chest.
The cop let out a genial chuckle. “Sorry,” he said. “Come to think of it, make that one pocket. We need to divide the rest into, what, thirteen? That’s a lot of greedy motherfuckers.”
“Like the apostles,” the airline employee said.
The cop looked at him.
Alvin blinked. “I worked very hard for this,” he said. “It’s all I have now—”
“All that you have,” the cop repeated. “Well, all that you have happens to be a lot, kid.”
The airline employee walked to Alvin’s side, so close that he could smell the detergent that had nestled into the fabric of the man’s yellow and orange uniform. “You’re what, twenty-five, twenty-six?” he asked. “Don’t worry, you will still earn this money.”
“Yes,” the cop said, fingers drumming impatiently on the table, “and I’m sure God will reward you for your generosity.”
When the door opened and in came another policeman, older and trimmer, Alvin felt faint, as if the earth under him had rebelled. He held back a retch and held on to the table for support. The newcomer returned the first cop’s salute.
Routine inspection, the first cop said, suddenly soft-spoken again, while the airline employee slinked to the door. Nothing more. The officer gave Alvin a meaningless look that neither reassured nor alarmed. Alvin managed to lift an arm and point to the piece of paper on the table. The officer took a look and held out the blank page. “What’s this?” he asked then, pointing to the half-open knapsack, added, “And this?”
Alvin had watched enough crime procedurals to recognize the proffered escape hatch here, the possible pivot in the storyline, which he only needed to seize. “Oh, it’s not mine,” he said. “I fainted from the heat so they brought me here to recover.” He pointed to the bottle of ammonia on the table. “You know, it is never this hot in Ormoc. They say it’s because of all the spirits of all those who died from the landslide. If they’re going to stay around at least be useful, right?” He watched the pinched expression on his tormentor’s face. From the quiet wall stared MacArthur and his mustachioed gang.
Outside the terminal, he found the Innova at the far end of the loading area, hazard lights blinking. You’re OK, he told himself, just don’t look back. The confidence of his long strides vanished as soon as he shut the door. In the dark, frigid backseat, he collapsed into a heap of sobs. The driver, after a brief glance, grunted and returned to the dog-eared paperback open on his lap.
The night had long beguiled Alvin, an affair that came with petulant lifelong company: insomnia, a mysterious appetite for the graveyard shift, and the general pall in mood that his mother had sworn was due to prolonged bouts of sunlessne
ss.
He was six when Aurora and Marie, exhausted from cooking noche buena for contingents of visiting relatives, fell asleep after the last insufferable aunt and niece left just shy of midnight. Until then ruled by a nine o’clock bedtime, Alvin was unleashed into the night. In the quiet bungalow he trooped to the dishevelled kitchen, retrieved the leftover sans rival from the fridge, and camped in front of the 21-inch Sony in the living room. In those pre-cable days the only 24-hour stations were home shopping channels, where looped relentless reruns of VTRs and live demonstrations, extolling miracle fabrics and miracle pillows, non-stick pans and no-tangle garden hoses, speed reading packs and food processors, knives that cut through cinderblock and abdominal exercise machines that did not strain the lower back.
It was this vocabulary of nocturnal capitalism—ceviche and porte-cochère, Walmart and Plexiglas, “But wait” and “If you call now”—that galvanized for him years of nebulous English lessons, on count nouns and mass nouns, direct objects and indirect objects, the fascistly irregular verbs, Robinson Crusoe and Mother Goose and Lemuel Gulliver. Soon the punch lines on Seinfeld and Murphy Brown did not have to be cued by the laugh track; he understood them, the way he began to suddenly understand the myriad other cyphers in the city, cyphers that managed its chaos (No Loading, No Swerving, Public Utility Vehicles, No Entry), directed its commerce (Ice for Sale, Room for Rent, Wanted: GRO), and laid bare its history and contradictions (US Bases Out Now, Ramos for President, Never Again to Martial Law).
Learning English was like lifting a veil, one which would be, he’d learn, impossible to fully restore. On his way home from school one night during freshman year, his jeepney beat a red light, and he saw, framed by the bodies of the passengers across him, the headlights of a ten-wheeler frantically blinking. Eyes shut, he yelled, “Oh my god!” while the rest onboard cursed in their loudest, basest Tagalog.
Years later, Alvin was in another jeepney on his way to a job interview when in his mind he tried to articulate his life and value in English, unconsciously recalling the years of grammar lessons in the classroom, the dog-eared Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys paperbacks, the banter on Friends . He crossed the busy intersection with what could be mistaken as optimism, his résumé folded inside a small black knapsack, a birthday gift from a friend from college, the same one who a week earlier had excitedly told him of this “new thing”: the call center.
Alvin’s destination then was a cylindrical building, with emerald windows that alternated with gray concrete, stripes that in the distance blurred into a burnished monolith. Around it crowded more skyscrapers, uneven, anonymous silhouettes, no-nonsense affairs of beige and gray and sheen-less silver, fashioning the skyline that reliably accompanied the primetime business news. In the elevator, he pressed 32. On the sixth floor, across from the gym, was the Canadian embassy. On the fourteenth, the Australian. On the seventeenth, the American Chamber of Commerce. His knowledge of call centers was next to nothing, but here , as the elevator traversed continents and companies, as coffee-toting white men and turbaned Indians stepped on and off the car, he began to have a sense of it, the largeness of it, the arduous performance of it.
His hunch was confirmed when he got to his floor and the security guard, smiling behind the podium, asked for his résumé in measured English. “Hello, how are you?” he said. “Are you an applicant? (Alvin nodded) Great. Can I have a copy of your résumé?” The effort was silly, but also admirable in its stoicism, its blank earnestness. Alvin scoured his bag for his résumé and handed it to the guard. “Please take your seat,” he was told. “Someone will call you. Next?”
In the waiting area, figures sat stiffly on rows of plastic chairs. Most were dressed along the lines of his long sleeves, slacks, and leather shoes, but a few seemed plucked straight out of the city’s slums. They wore shirts and blouses that were too big for their meager frames, with a shade of indelible yellow. They clutched old Manila envelopes with fidgeting hands, their faces with eager enthusiasm that they didn’t struggle to hide. When Alvin sat down, the guy beside him leaned closer. “First time?” he asked. Alvin nodded. It was his fourth job application that week, the guy said. He’d heard about this thing from a cousin, but the tongue twisters were the absolute worst. “Fuck do I know about that sea shells, sea shells crap,” he said. Alvin forced himself to chuckle, visited by vivid memories of watching Sesame Street .
People went in and out of a heavy-looking glass door that led to what appeared to be the operations floor. Soon a petite lady emerged from one of the tiny nooks that bordered the waiting area and, flashing her HR smile, started to call out last names. The last in the string of six was Estrada, and, finding no other claimant, Alvin joined the five figures ambling to one of the nooks.
“Please take a seat,” the woman said inside, flipping through papers on a clipboard. The six applicants randomly sat around the small table. On one side of the room was a white board with some remnants of a lecture.
“My name is Jessie,” the woman said, “and I’ll be conducting your initial interviews. Can we go around the table and introduce ourselves?” She looked at the girl who sat next to her.
“Well, my name is Mitch,” she said. “Let’s see, I’m twenty-six—” One knew, on those tiny words alone, that she had done this before. A management graduate, she had been, not two weeks ago, with another pioneer call center, she said. “Just across the street!” She laughed. “But I heard good things about this company, so here I am. A friend from college is also applying. I saw her outside. She looks a little exhausted, if you ask me. I heard she has two kids already—”
“OK!” Jessie said. “Thank you, Mitch. Next?”
Next was the guy who had struck up a conversation with Alvin. In his head, Alvin said a prayer for it to be not that bad, although he knew that it would be. “My name is Renato,” said the man, who couldn’t be more than thirty years old. Alvin stared blankly at the scribbles on the white board to avoid wincing at every gaffe, at the P’s that should’ve been F’s, the long I’s that should’ve been short and crisp. “I studied on Meycauayan Polytechnic College,” Renato went on. “Up to second year only, commerce is my course. I am varsity also. Basketball. Point guard. Not tall.” He let out a hopeless chuckle.
Jessie began to scribble what could only be odious marks on Renato’s application as the frustrated PBA jock stammered on: “I can have training. I’m willing for training. You know free throws? Before I am not good. But I do practice. I’m ready for training, Ma’am.”
Jessie gave him an OK sign. “Great, thanks!” she said. “Next?”
The next three people were no better. Angela, Vincent, and Imaculada were a saleslady, a fast food crew member, and a new mother. When Alvin’s turn came, Jessie looked at him with the same empty grin. “My name is Alvin,” he said, only noticing his comfort in the language now that it gave him a vague sense of power, when it separated him from others. “I’m twenty-two years old. It’s my first time to apply to a call center. I enjoy watching the news, drinking, and traveling.”
“What’s the best place you’ve been to?” Jessie asked.
“Well,” Alvin said. “I really like Pagudpud. Unlike Boracay, it’s laid-back during off season. And when it’s low tide,” he looked at Renato, “you can collect seashells scattered along the seashore.”
Only he and Mitch advanced to the next stages, which consisted of a listening exam, a typing test, and, finally, a largely informal chitchat with Eric, their would-be supervisor, and a Texan named Brock, the operations manager. The two sought a guarantee of the applicants’ loyalty and dedication. Were they willing to render overtime? Amenable to an erratic schedule? Can they work on weekends? Alvin’s answers were predictable, which pleased Brock enough that he shook his clammy hands and offered him a job.
At hearing the news, he unsuccessfully tried to stop himself from being happy. He wondered how it happened that his average grades and middling job experience were somehow deemed weightier than genuine life
skills—Renato’s naked ambition, Angela’s people skills, Vincent’s quick thinking, Imaculada’s grit—only because he articulated them better, just because he had the English nouns and verbs, the necessary tongue and lip placements, to say, I have made these of myself. Listen.
But the application was only the first step, and largely useless in the frontlines. On his first night of taking calls, a truck driver from Long Beach, California was able to single out “siguro” in his empty, long-winded apology about the outage in their area. “Are you Mexican?” he asked, then, without waiting for an answer, “You know, my brother is a hard-working man. Never bothered anyone. Just worked like a motherfucking slave. Then one day, he was told a whole bunch of them’s being replaced by some Mexicans. Apparently, y’all people can fill an entire warehouse with twice as much manpower at half the cost. Isn’t that something?”
In the month-long training that included a course on American culture, they were warned about these outbursts. Outsourcing had been a “controversial” topic, and so they were bound to encounter customers who were not happy with the idea that their calls were being rerouted to Delhi and Mexico City and Manila, thousands of miles away. “Remember,” the trainer had said, “we just have to put ourselves in their shoes, try to understand their situation, OK? Don’t worry. There’s one whole lesson just on Empathy.”