BURN
* * *
THE AMERICAN BASE AT CAVITE, ALONG THE SHORE of Manila Bay, burns real good once the Nips have set it on fire. Bobby Shaftoe and the rest of the Fourth Marines get a good long look at it as they cruise by, sneaking out of Manila like thieves in the night. He has never felt more personally disgraced in his life, and the same thing goes for the other Marines. The Nips have already landed in Malaya and are headed for Singapore like a runaway train, they are besieging Guam and Wake and Hong Kong and God knows what else, and it should be obvious to anyone that they are going to hit the Philippines next. Seems like a regiment of hardened China Marines might actually come in handy around here.
But MacArthur seems to think he can defend Luzon all by himself, standing on the walls of Intramuros with his Colt .45. So they are shipping out. They have no idea where to. Most of them would rather hit the beaches of Nippon itself than stay here in Army territory.
The night the war began, Bobby Shaftoe had first gotten Glory back into the bosom of her family.
The Altamiras live in the neighborhood of Malate, a couple of miles south of Intramuros, and not too far from the place where Shaftoe has just had his half hour of Glory along the seawall. The city has gone mad, and it’s impossible to get a car. Sailors, marines, and soldiers are spewing from bars, nightclubs, and ballrooms and commandeering taxis in groups of four and six—it’s as crazy as Shanghai on Saturday night—like the war’s already here. Shaftoe ends up carrying Glory halfway home, because her shoes aren’t made for walking.
The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building—practically in the same room. Once or twice, Glory had begun to explain to Bobby Shaftoe how they are all related. Now there are many Shaftoes—mostly in Tennessee—but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler. The family Shaftoe is to the Altamira clan as a single, alienated sapling is to a jungle. Filipino families, in addition to being gigantic and Catholic, are massively crosslinked by godparent/godchild relationships, like lianas stretched from branch to branch and tree to tree. If asked, Glory is happy, even eager, to talk for six hours nonstop about how the Altamiras are related to one another, and that is just to give a general overview. Shaftoe’s brain always shuts off after the first thirty seconds.
He gets her to the apartment, which is usually in a state of hysterical uproar even when the nation is not under military assault by the Empire of Nippon. Despite this, the appearance of Glory, shortly after the outbreak of war, borne in the arms of a United States Marine, is received by the Altamiras in much the same way as if Christ were to materialize in the center of their living room with the Virgin Mary slung over his back. All around him, middle-aged women are thudding down onto their knees, as if the place has just been mustard-gassed. But they are just doing it to shout hallelujah! Glory alights nimbly upon her high heels, tears exploring the exceptional geometry of her cheeks, and kisses everyone in the entire clan. All of the kids are wide awake, though it is three in the morning. Shaftoe happens to catch the eye of a squad of boys, aged maybe three to ten, all brandishing wooden rifles and swords. They are all staring at Bobby Shaftoe, replendent in his uniform, and they are perfectly thunderstruck; he could throw a baseball into the mouth of each one from across the room. In his peripheral vision, he sees a middle-aged woman who is related to Glory by some impossibly complex chain of relationships, and who already has one of Glory’s lipstick marks on her cheek, vectoring toward him on a collision course, grimly determined to kiss him. He knows that he must get out of this place now or he will never leave it. So, ignoring the woman, and holding the gaze of those stunned boys, he rises to attention and snaps out a perfect salute.
The boys salute back, raggedly, but with fantastic bravado. Bobby Shaftoe turns on his heel and marches out of the room, moving like a bayonet thrust. He reckons that he will come back to Malate tomorrow, when things are calmer, and check up on Glory and the rest of the Altamiras.
He does not see her again.
He reports back to his ship, and is not granted any more shore leave. He does manage to have a conversation with Uncle Jack, who pulls up alongside in a small motorboat long enough for them to shout a few sentences back and forth. Uncle Jack is the last of the Manila Shaftoes, a branch of the family spawned by Nimrod Shaftoe of the Tennessee Volunteers. Nimrod took a bullet in his right arm somewhere around Quingua, courtesy of some rebellious Filipino riflemen. Recovering in a Manila hospital, old Nimrod, or “Lefty” as he was called by that point, decided that he liked the pluck of these Filipino men, in order to kill whom a whole new class of ridiculously powerful sidearm (the Colt .45) had had to be invented. Not only that, he liked the looks of their women. Promptly discharged from the service, he found that full disability pay would go a long way on the local economy. He set up an export business along the Pasig riverfront, married a half-Spanish woman, and sired a son (Jack) and two daughters. The daughters ended up in the States, back in the Tennessee mountains that have been the ancestral wellspring of all Shaftoes ever since they broke out of the indentured servitude racket back in the 1700s. Jack stayed in Manila and inherited Nimrod’s business, but never married. By Manila standards he makes a decent amount of money. He has always been an odd combination of salty waterfront trader and perfumed dandy. He and Mr. Pascual have been in business together forever, which is how Bobby Shaftoe knows Mr. Pascual, and which is how he originally met Glory.
When Bobby Shaftoe repeats the latest rumors, Uncle Jack’s face collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about to be besieged by Nips. His next words ought to be, “Shit then, I’m getting the hell out of here, I’ll send you a postcard from Australia.” But instead he says something like “I’ll come by in a few days to check up on you.”
Bobby Shaftoe bites his tongue and does not say what he’s thinking, which is that he is a Marine, and he is on a ship, and this is a war, and Marines on ships in wars are not known for staying put. He just stands there and watches as Uncle Jack putt-putts away on his little boat, turning back every so often to wave at him with his fine Panama hat. The sailors around Bobby Shaftoe watch with amusement, and a bit of admiration. The waterfront is churning insanely as every piece of military gear that’s not set in concrete gets thrown onto ships and sent to Bata’an or Corregidor, and Uncle Jack, standing upright in his boat, in his good cream-colored suit and Panama hat, weaves through the traffic with aplomb. Bobby Shaftoe watches him until he disappears around the bend into the Pasig River, knowing that he is probably the last member of his family who will ever see Uncle Jack alive.
Despite all of those premonitions, he’s surprised when they ship out after only a few days of war, pulling out of their slip in the middle of the night without any of the traditional farewell ceremonies. Manila is supposedly lousy with Nip spies, and there’s nothing the Nips would like better than to sink a transport ship stuffed with experienced Marines.
Manila disappears behind them into the darkness. The awareness that he hasn’t seen Glory since that night is like a slow hot dentist’s drill. He wonders how she’s doing. Maybe, once the war settles down a little bit, and the battle lines firm up, he can figure out a way to get stationed in this part of the world. MacArthur’s a tough old bastard who will put up a hell of a fight when the Nips come. And even if the Philippines fall, FDR won’t let them remain in enemy hands for very long. With any luck, inside of six months, Bobby Shaftoe will be marching up Manila’s Taft Avenue, in full dress uniform, behind a Marine Band, perhaps nursing a minor war wound or two. The parade will come to a section of the avenue that is lined, for a distance of about a mile, with Altamiras. About halfway along, the crowd will part, and Glory will run out and jump into his arms and smother him with kisses. He’ll carry the girl straight up the steps of some nice little church where a priest in a white cassock is waiting with a big grin on his face—
That dream-image dissolves in a mushroom c
loud of orange fire rising up from the American base at Cavite. The place has been burning all day, and another fuel dump has just gone up. He can feel the heat on his face from miles away. Bobby Shaftoe is on the deck of the ship, all bundled up in a life vest in case they get torpedoed. He takes advantage of the flaring light to look down a long line of other Marines in life vests, staring at the flame with stunned expressions on their tired, sweaty faces.
Manila is only half an hour behind them, but it might as well be a million miles away.
He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the women.
Once, long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there. Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby Shaftoe starts forgetting just as fast as he can.
PEDESTRIAN
* * *
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, SAY THE STREET SIGNS OF Metro Manila. As soon as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.
For the first couple of weeks he spent in Manila, his work consisted of walking. He walked all over the city carrying a handheld GPS receiver, taking down latitudes and longitudes. He encrypted the data in his hotel room and e-mailed it to Avi. It became part of Epiphyte’s intellectual property. It became equity.
Now, they had secured some actual office space. Randy walks to it, doggedly. He knows that the first time he takes a taxi there, he’ll never walk again.
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves. Randy would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no. Every morning the taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel, leaning against their cars and smoking, shout “Taxi? Taxi?” to him. When he turns them down, they say witty things to each other in Tagalog and roar with laughter.
Just in case Randy hasn’t gotten the message yet, a new red-and-white chopper swings in low over Rizal Park, turns around once or twice like a dog preparing to lie down, and settles in, not far from some palm trees, right in front of the hotel.
Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over a no-man’s land, a vast, dangerous intersection lined with squatters’ huts (it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through the park, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But Randy’s gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day, and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.
Randy could never understand why everything smelled so bad until he came upon a large, crisp rectangular hole in the sidewalk, and stared down into a running flume of raw sewage. The sidewalks are nothing more than lids on the sewers. Access to the depths is provided by concrete slabs with rebar lifting loops protruding from them. Squatters fashion wire harnesses onto those loops so that they can pull them up and create instant public latrines. These slabs are frequently engraved with the initials, team name, or graffiti tag of the gentlemen who manufactured them, and their competence and attentiveness to detail vary, but their esprit de corps is fixed at a very high level.
There are only so many gates that lead into Intramuros. Randy must run a daily gauntlet of horse-drawn taxis, some of whom have nothing better to do than follow him down the street for a quarter of an hour muttering, “Sir? Sir? Taxi? Taxi?” One of them, in particular, is the most tenacious capitalist Randy has ever seen. Every time he draws alongside Randy, a rope of urine uncoils from his horse’s belly and cracks into the pavement and hisses and foams. Tiny comets of pee strike Randy’s pant legs. Randy always wears long pants no matter how hot it is.
Intramuros is a strangely quiet and lazy neighborhood. This is mostly because it was destroyed during the war, and hasn’t been undestroyed yet. Much of it is open weed farms still, which is very odd in the middle of a vast, crowded metropolis.
Several miles south, towards the airport, amid nice suburban developments, is Makati. This would be the logical place to base Epiphyte Corp. It’s got a couple of giant five-star luxury hotels on every block, and office towers that look clean and cool, and modern condos. But Avi, with his perverse real estate sense, has decided to forgo all of that in favor of what he described on the phone as texture. “I do not like to buy or lease real estate when it is peaking,” he said.
Understanding Avi’s motives is like peeling an onion with a single chopstick. Randy knows there is much more to it: perhaps he’s earning a favor, or repaying one, to a landlord. Perhaps he’s been reading some management guru who counsels young entrepreneurs to get deeply involved in a country’s culture. Not that Avi has ever been one for gurus. Randy’s latest theory is that it all has to do with lines of sight—the latitudes and longitudes.
Sometimes Randy walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide as a four-lane street. Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up umbrellas for privacy. Below him, to the left, is the moat, a good city block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the parts that are still submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.
To the right is Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the place, half-buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring. Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a pile of rubble smolders.
As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes give him a bright “Thank you!” in perfect American-scented shopping-mall English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously, for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can’t believe they’re doing anything so corny.
They do not understand that he is working. That’s okay.
Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now. If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider: has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in the States?
He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters’s electrical wires, which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side. Randy has never felt more trapped between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.
At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spani
ards constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it’s a business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on the pole.
All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand-tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front, its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWNOUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front of the main entrance are blocked off with hand-painted signs: RESERVED FOR ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action-figure accessories. One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it: PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
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