“Hello, Bernadette. Hey, Eliza,” he said fondly, scratching the ear of one dog while patting the head of the other. He walked into the house, swinging the screen door shut behind him and shouting, “Lola! I’m home!”
A small, wizened old woman came scuttling out from a side door and admonished him, “Shhh! Your lola is sleeping already.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Everything okay, Manang Baby?” he asked the household help, dropping his bag on the wooden sofa.
“Yes, but Mang Bal was troubling the hens in the backyard again,” Manang Baby replied, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Hah. Okay, I’ll talk to him about that—again,” he said and headed for the refrigerator. Opening it, he grabbed the nearest pair of bottles of San Miguel beer.
“Drinking again? Not too much, I will still cook dinner for you.”
“Alright, Manang,” Danny said. He closed the fridge door and headed outside to the backyard. Standing at the veranda, he looked around and saw the ancient balete tree looming at the edge of the backyard lights.
“Mang Bal! I’m home!” Danny said, feeling happy for the first time today.
At the sound of his voice, two eyes blinked open in the middle of the balete tree, shining blood-red in the eaves’ shadows.
ANGELO R . LACUESTA
NEW WAVE DAYS
Angelo R. Lacuesta was born in 1970. His first book, Life Before X and Other Stories, won the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award as well as the National Book Award. A Don Carlos Palanca Awardee, his fiction has appeared in the Philippines Free Press, The Best Philippine Short Stories and Future Shock: Prose, an edition of Sands and Coral.
“New Wave Days” is from his second collection of short fiction, White Elephant: Stories.
SHE ENTERS THE cigarette bar, parting the crowd, and my first thought is, haven’t I seen her before, somewhere? She takes a seat at a corner table. A waiter whisks away her reservation card, opens a glass cabinet and plucks a pack from a stack of Marlboros. Her name is on a brass plate on the shelf. She doesn’t speak, and doesn’t appear to be waiting for someone. She is dressed in a silver top and pants.
The music at the bar is strictly New Wave. A Flock of Seagulls is playing “Wishing.” The walls flash videos of the Cure, Kraftwerk, New Order, other bands I don’t know or can’t remember from stories from my father. It’s after hours. The bar is packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The ionizers are working overtime to clear the smoke.
Why does she make such an impression on me? Let us say that I feel an impulse, a tiny electric prick of instinct that triggers in me a mild curiosity, a gentle push toward something I can’t figure out. Sure, she is beautiful. In this part of town, gentle genetic tweaking makes all the women beautiful. But it isn’t that. I can’t quite put a finger on it.
The music seems to mean nothing to her, not even when they play a U2 anthem and the smoky, sweaty crowd goes wild. But when she lights up her Marl light I see a breath of pleasure flit over her face. When was the last time I was witness to such pleasure on a woman?
How odd, I think, as I light up a moderately priced filterless, that our kinship, our courtship, our long and hopeless relationship begins around such vice.
*
FROM MY TINY flat in the uplevels, morning skies are the texture of brushed steel. My window looks out into the cleft between beds of clouds, a westward view, with the spires of other residential buildings faintly visible in the distance.
I call Paula’s number. The beep comes on and I announce that I am coming over in two weeks to see our children. I’m not coming over this week because I’m doing something this weekend. “Message sent,” a voice recites. It is a female voice, warm and synthesized.
Boredom pushes me to do something, to go somewhere, and I go to Thailand, where the worn-out wats await, rotting and sinking silently, their walls and towers half-buried in the hot earth. On my way to Ayutthaya, there are crowds of people at every bus stop. I try to take solace in the shade of broken stupas and at the feet of idols of dying religions, but even here there are hordes of students, honeymooners and backpackers. At the Wat Phra Mahathat there survives a celebrated row of fifteen stone buddhas, all with severed heads, but in the face of such violence posed so calmly and quietly, with joined hands, as though they had expected this to happen, hundreds of years after their creation.
The sunlight makes sightseeing a nasty, unbearable affair. Hot and hungry, I call the service for a restaurant. The voice suggests the Duangporn restaurant, just around the crowded corner. I am relieved to find that it is as quiet as a temple. I cannot remember ever being alone in a restaurant. I pile my pack and solar veil on a seat and look at the menu, written completely in Thai. It gives me a secret pleasure to find other languages still living in the quiet, hidden corners. The waitress, small and brown, is mechanical with her translations and explanations. I order two kinds of noodles, a vegetable dish and a Coke.
The glass door swings and it’s the woman who walks in, fresh from the dangerous sunlight and the dry and dusty air. I know this, even before she lifts her solar veil to reveal her face, stricken with a pale, wide-eyed look, the look of a tourist, shy, inquisitive, almost stupid, all at the same time.
I am filled with a strange, liberating, paralyzing energy. Trembling as I sip my customary hot and sour soup, sweating from the long walk across ancient stone and earth, I look at her furtively, from behind my bowl. She is in a khaki-colored dress. I can see her shins, milky, shiny, vulnerable to the hot light. She seeks out the waitress, mutters something to her. She opens her pack, reaches into the bottom and retrieves two cigarettes. I imagine the kind of money or the kind of connections it would take to smuggle in two cigarettes through the airport.
She looks around, at the wide window behind me, at the hard, reddish sunlight and the lumbering crowd outside, and then locks eyes with me, very briefly. I struggle with all my might to break her gaze. Does she recognize me? Her eyes glaze over as she inhales. The cigarette end glows, she blows out a stream of smoke and a ribbon of pure satisfaction courses through her. The smoke is whitish grey, a sign that it comes from pure tobacco, made more precious by its journey through her liquid mouth, her soft lungs, the delicate chambers of her nose.
I lose my rhythm in Bangkok. It is meant to be a paradise for antiquarians like me, but as I walk the streets and brave the market crowds I am constantly visited with the feeling that I am being watched and followed. On street corners I look around furtively, searching for telltale signs, plumes of contraband cigarette smoke, or the sound of footsteps, gracefully light but with a quick, purposeful cadence. I am sleepless in my midpriced hotel. I sit stonefaced in restaurants. No spice can bring tears to my eyes, no color can move me, no lissome prostitute can charm me. I ride to the airport early, and wallow in my thoughts as I wait for my flight home.
*
I HAVE COME across such phenomena in my readings. One of the most memorable instances is chronicled by Krip Yuson, who wrote of a “doppleganger,” which is German for “double self,” that seemed to follow him wherever he went. Never mind that his double self was a religious leader of a self-made faith. Father Tropa dressed in white robes, walked barefoot and liked to sling a six-foot reticulated python over one shoulder. Krip Yuson would find himself in the same office building with him, at the same café, or even at the same bank. He would be depositing his writer’s honorarium and Father Tropa would be making similar transactions.
At the time, which was before my time, Father Tropa ran a little-known program called “Fr. Tropa’s Spaceship 2000 E.T.” airing in the late evenings over one of the weaker free channels. Father Tropa postulated that in the year 2000, an extra-terrestrial spaceship would land and carry the righteous away to the utopia of another universe, a heavenly civilization far more advanced than our own. To Father Tropa being righteous meant walking barefoot and loving the forests and the seas as much as he loved his python and the forests and hidden waterfalls of his native Dumaguete City.
&nb
sp; Father Tropa and Krip Yuson have since moved on, pythons have gone extinct, and the exploding population has crowded into every hidden place. Our dependency on forest and sea has gone, and while there are still no absolute signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, we have huge, unmanned robotic spaceships, preprogrammed to mine planets and moons. But, apparently, strange coincidences and synchronicities abound, such as the phenomenon observed by Yuson and involving him and an unsuspecting Father Tropa.
When I get home I remember the children and call Paula. Instead of a beep, her response comes, “okay,” in two syllables, followed by another voice in a warm whisper: “end of recorded response.” That synthesized female voice again. I imagine the kind of woman a voice like that would make, and if she were a real flesh-and-blood woman, what kind of messages she would hear over a day, or a month, or a lifetime. How many of the same messages would she have to listen to, over and over again, cloned across time and space?
The last time something remotely synchronous happened to me was when I bumped into my great-grandfather at one of those low-end malls in Davao. I was young then, still working. I was there for a convention, only in and out. I decided to kill some time before checking in at the airport. I instinctively told the cab driver to head for the nearest mall.
I almost didn’t recognize my great-grandfather because he had grown so old. Perhaps also because I had forgotten what he looked like. But he recognized me, and gently collared me as I turned a busy corner, like I was a young boy. But perhaps to him I was young and feckless. I felt his weak grasp, turned, and saw that he was so old that he resembled an otherworldly creature.
Davao is a big city, but my grandfather had found me in a mall full of people. I was genuinely happy to see him—years later I recognize that some guilt was at work here. He was on his way to the bookstore. I went with him. I was curious because it was my first time to visit a bookstore. It was tiny, with space for only the shopkeeper and my grandfather and me, and it had the brown, acid smell of rotting paper. I treated him to a heap of sorry-looking pocketbooks, Westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. He loved them both, loved all their books. It amazed me that one could write so many books in a single lifetime. I couldn’t even imagine reading so much.
My great-grandfather told the children he was a cowboy in his younger days. He liked to remind us by walking in a bowlegged swagger. He wore his slacks low on his hips, and from behind he really looked like those cowboy gangsters in the movies. He would tell us stories about actual gunfights and surprise encounters, about lynchings and the law of the jungle. But when I knew him, he was already thinning out, turning into a transparent, worn-out waif. He was completely mechanical from the waist down, and the sun had degraded his skin into a stretched film. Only constant medication, organ implants and delicate nanosurgery kept him alive.
On weekends, there is no work, and what sustains me is my yearning to see my children and the memories of Paula waking me with the smells and sounds of cooking. I head for the city station, where the early crowds await the interisland train.
*
THIS TIME, IT seems that I am the one following her. As I board the train, I see the woman sitting calmly, almost directly across me, staring at the middle distance, oblivious to the Sunday rush to the provinces. She has her hands in her lap and her fingers are laced together. It seems as if she’s wary of the crowd, full of ordinary people, old men and old women, laborers in slippers, carrying sacks of merchandise, or produce. She is in a dress of what almost seems like real linen—white flowers on a field of blue.
She raises their eyebrows when she notices me and almost makes direct eye contact. The look of shock and recognition is sustained for a few moments, but I am quickly lost in the huddle of people. My own thoughts are whirling as I find my place among the standing crowd and reach for a handle. There is almost no room to breathe, no space to perch my satchel, heavy and bulging with gifts for my children.
The train makes a long stop at Bacolod, and I lose sight of the couple as the people shuffle and squirm their way out. A fresh crowd enters the train, and a few moments later, I hear the beep and that female voice calling from the ceiling speakers, in a warm whisper that cuts across the din: “Doors closing. Please mind the doors.”
It takes eight more minutes before the train reaches Cebu station. The doors open and I let myself be swept by the crowd into the hot and briny air. Umbrellas are unfurled, solar veils unrolled, and I scramble for a taxi.
Paula is an economist who works for the Central Bank. Everyone in her uplevel building works in the same office. She chose government work because it allows her a four-day workweek and gives her more time for the children.
When we were still married I worked as a technician at a statistical firm. I managed the machines that direct the flow of traffic from city to city, that drive the turbines and the engines, the same interconnected system that assigns airplane seats, plans vacations and compiles the television programs you’re most likely to like. It’s a complex, continuous, self-correcting process, perfecting itself over a number of years, adapting to an individual’s evolving tastes. On a plane the machine always assigns me to a window seat because my skin is darker than normal and my vision is 20/20. Ten years ago I would always get aisle.
We had some good times, we shared some love. She was a woman of some intelligence. She understood some of what I was doing. But soon enough, cracks and white hairs began to show. The white hairs were ours—she assiduously died hers black, while I left mine sprouting from my crown like a spreading halo of clouds.
But the cracks, I confess, were all mine. They appeared on the delicate matrix I had formed around our love. She was always the practical one, while I had spent the last moments of our marriage rediscovering the joy of reading. I spent most of my salary buying books in tiny antique stores and brought stacks of them into our already cramped apartment. It began to smell of paper, musty and acid-soured. Paula imagined it carried ancient diseases and would make the children sick.
That was the other thing that happened during my chance encounter with my great-grandfather. It awakened an obsession for reading—not just for the tatty Westerns and archaic spy-thrillers that were once fashionable with the old and distinguished, but for classic literature, the antique arts of fiction, theatre and poetry, works that held in their depths patterns of thought, and patterns within patterns. It thrilled me to find nested meanings and well-planned coincidences.
I met Paula during a population commission seminar, where everyone was being encouraged to fall in love and marry early. At the popcom center we give blood samples and cheek scrapings and the system works it out so that our compatibility quotients are optimized, the search is narrowed down and we waste less time, less space.
They served snacks and beer. There was a New Wave band and everyone was dancing. Paula was seventeen. She spoke with a trace of Visayan she had picked up from her Cebuano mother. She knew the words to the songs because her mother was in a New Wave Band. She liked the Go-Gos, Modern English and the B-52s. I was New Wave, too. My dad turned me on to Japan and the Lotus Eaters and New Order.
They seat us beside each other because we have these things in common. By the end of the session we’re harmonizing on “Melt With You” by Modern English.
The actuarial programs were right about our affinity, my virility, her fertility. What they failed to see was our failure, our lack of bravado, our resistance to the natural flow. We quickly became an anomaly of the times, arguing under the hot sun, polluting the air with our angry noise, infecting the harmony with our unease.
“Arrival at destination, time is ten hours forty-five,” the female voice says, and the taxi’s doors open at the foot of a skyscraper, to the noise of people and the sudden heat of the sun. Crowds wait to board my taxi, and when I enter the building there are long, unruly lines at the elevator bays.
When I reach Paula’s flat the door senses me and recognizes me but remains closed. “The party you wish to visit is
away,” the voice whispers to me, and a small green light flashes in the eyehole. “You may record a message if you wish.”
On the ride back I cannot find the woman. It feels strange, I almost feel incomplete.
*
I AM THRILLED by the idea that occurs to me over the next few days. I place a call to the popcom and, at the voice prompt, request for an anonymous search. I give details from memory: the name of the cigarette bar, her last name on the brass plate, her visit to Thailand.
There is no waiting, no discernible sound of files being accessed or databases being queried. The voice answers me as easily as though I were asking one of those Thai prostitutes their name. That the woman’s name is Elena Chan, that flesh-and-blood woman whom I encounter now at almost every train, every shopping trip, every random turn I take. The voice patiently tells me her contact numbers and addresses. It breathes to me her hobbies and interests: archaeology, art, textiles and tobacco smoking. I am soothed by her cadence, her tones and her sibilance as she whispers above the crowd. Elena Chan is Filipino-Chinese, a businesswoman whose company holds interests in trading, freight forwarding and mining. The report is short but comprehensive. “Thank you for using this service.”
Elena has the complexion of a flesh-colored pearl. Her flawless body seems to have been thawed from cryogenic chambers. Her skin, synthesized from the skin of those unborn. Her flesh formed whole and new, without trauma, without memory, to become the woman that she is now, needing no words to be wise and beautiful, needing only to be silent, glimmering on the edge of my vision, visiting almost every public place I visit, perfectly by chance.
Slowly, over the repeated chance encounters, Elena has ceased to be a stranger to me. I know her backward and forward, and I know whether she is coming toward me on the sidewalk from a mile away, or sits several rows in front of me in a dark movie theater. I am now familiar with the color of her arms, the movement of her hair, the shape of her smoke. I have grown almost comfortable with my obsession.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 8