“I’m asleep, Mom.”
“I know. I’m not going to keep you. But you know that I love you, right?”
“Sure. Me too.” There was a long pause. “Okay. Good night?”
Monique heard some more shifting and Joseph’s tiny voice saying; “Of course she is.” Then more footsteps. The creaky door to Shawn’s room opening. “Hey, it’s your mother. Yes, she wants to.”
“Monique!” Shawn sounded like he’d already been awake. “I need to talk to you. You need to tell Joseph about the pipe you found under my bed. It was clean, right? I didn’t ever use that stupid thing.” Oh well. This was at least a step up from his refusing to talk at all.
“Honey,” she said, “I love you. A lot.”
“He doesn’t believe me about not smoking it. I mean, I did smoke pot, but only at her house, and only twice, ever. She just kept giving me the stuff. What was I supposed to do, turn it down? I know I shouldn’t have kept it but—”
“Are you listening, Shawn? I love you.”
“He won’t let me do anything!” Shawn shouted. “You guys made me come back here and now you’re fucking up my vacation by keeping me stuck in this damn house!”
“That’s enough,” Joseph said. He must have snatched the phone back and returned to the corridor. She heard the sharp clap of Shawn’s door slamming behind him. Then the sound of Joseph knocking it back open and saying, “Do it again and I take off the hinges.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” she said. “He’s had a tough year.”
“If we’re not hard enough he’ll have a tough decade. Or more.” Joseph’s footfalls were heavier as he walked back to their bedroom. “Are you sure you are all right, darling? You have got me worried. This sounds a little too much like a call someone makes before doing something stupid.”
He was almost right. She was making this call after doing something stupid. A lot of something stupid. But at least she was done now. Her battery beeped again. She told him not to worry. She was just overtired, and lonely. He said good night. She said good morning. They laughed at this.
MONIQUE RETURNED TO HER TINY ROOM at the BOQ motel and took a cool, rusty shower. She’d packed some comfy sweats in one of Shawn’s backpacks and reached her hand inside to get them. A sudden shock ran up her arm, followed by pain. Something in the backpack had bitten her, hard. She yanked her hand out and about a foot of polka-dotted flesh trailed after. It was the gecko, its mouth closed over her middle and index fingers at the second knuckle. The animal whipped its head from side to side, breaking the skin and sending horrible jolts up her arm. She shook her hand and the gecko shook with her, not letting go. She swung her whole arm and it stayed fastened tight, the gashes in her fingers widening with the pressure. It was unbelievable, even from a documentary point of view, how much this hurt. Finally Monique hopped toward one of the walls and slammed her hand against it. The gecko released her fingers and fell down onto the carpet. It wriggled there for a moment and then stopped wriggling.
Monique stood in a haze above the limp animal. She had no doubt it was Shawn’s tokay. It must have been hiding in his backpack when she’d thrown her things in and zipped up. It had been trapped since then, getting hungry and mean. Blood trickled down from the bite on her fingers, pooling at the tips and falling to the carpet in fat drops. She went into the bathroom to clean up. It wasn’t the cuts so much as the thought of the animal’s spit inside her that was awful. She washed thoroughly, wincing as she worked hand soap right into the wound, shaking from the sting. She wrapped her two fingers in a half roll of toilet paper—the first few layers turning red—and finished the bandage with a dry washcloth and safety pin. Then she sat on the covered toilet, giving the animal time to die if it hadn’t already.
When she emerged from the bathroom she saw that the gecko had managed to right itself and move a few inches in the direction of the bed. It was in bad shape. The sharp, snake-like jaw looked like a busted clasp, unhinged from the skull. Both eyes had burst. The three legs that still moved did so in disagreement, as though trying to lead it on three divergent escapes. Monique knew she had to kill it. She considered what method would be easiest for them both.
The gecko had stopped twitching by the time she picked it up by the tail, but she could tell it was still breathing. She left the bungalow-style room and walked out on the moonlit gravel. She remembered some amateur landscaping accented with large stones by the old administration building and headed in that direction. Most of the stones were too big, but she found one roughly the size of a toaster. She laid the gecko on the gravel and worked the stone out of its spot, squatting and lifting. She held the stone over the animal, closed her eyes, and dropped it. She opened her eyes and saw she’d missed—only the tip of its tail had been crushed. She lifted the stone again and made herself look when she dropped it.
It felt wrong to just leave the animal there, crushed beneath a stone, so she dug it a shallow grave in the landscaping. That also felt wrong. The animal was plump in her hands, skin surprisingly warm for a reptile, legs resting on her fingers lightly. On their first day in Manila they’d held a funeral for the cat—the one who arrived from the trans-Pacific flight dead in her carrier. The one who was replaced by Leila’s lovebird and Shawn’s gecko, now both, oddly, in Monique’s hands. Joseph had said some words at the cat’s funeral, and Shawn had mocked him for it, and he’d been really hurt. He’d said that the cat was a good cat and that she hadn’t suffered. Monique couldn’t say either thing about the gecko, so instead of speaking she just looked up. Mount Pinatubo was a dark shape against dark clouds. The moon was fullish and had a ring around it. At first she thought the ring was just normal moonlight, refracted through her tears. But no. It was a ring.
Monique laid the gecko beside the hole and dug deeper, working her good fingers through the mulch and gravel. She was sobbing. She didn’t want to be here, alone in a strange place that wasn’t—had never been—home. She didn’t want to be burying her son’s pet. She didn’t want Joseph to leave her, which would likely happen, when he found out. He was proud. She didn’t want the kids to find out. She didn’t want Shawn to be so angry or Leila to be so sad. She didn’t want this feeling. This sudden tightness around her lungs.
Monique dug madly. She felt strings running down her arms, out her fingertips and into the soil. Right into the hot, dark planet. Something tugged on her; something that would pull her into the gecko’s grave. She tugged back, and the parking lot beneath her trembled. She was causing it—of this she had no doubt. She was causing an eruption. She was causing Mount Pinatubo to go from dark to light.
Chapter 29
ASHES
There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of yelling down on the beach. The police—Howard doesn’t know if they’re really police who act like criminals or criminals impersonating police, and in the end, what’s the difference?—fall flat on their asses in the earthquake, guns popping off at the sky. That gets the bandits shooting back. Bullets hit the trembling ground with smacks and splashes. The men holding Howard loosen their grips. One takes a shot to the face, collapsing backward, leaving a specter of red vapor where he’d stood. Howard dives into the wet sand with his hands over his head. Then, when the ground stops moving, he breaks into a jagged, limping run.
He hits the hill beyond the beach and momentum carries him a few paces up, but it’s tough going after that. The loamy soil sinks under him and the bramble he grabs at either gives way or is covered in spines. The beach below crackles with cursing and gunfire, and when he glances back he sees muzzle flares sawing through the dark. He also sees a shape, following him. It’s the policeman with the gnarly skin—the monster made of scars. His gleaming little revolver bobs in the air and lets out a sound as big as a falling tree when it goes off. Howard feels a pinch in his shoulder, first cold, and then very, very hot.
He keeps climbing. The monster below empties his revolver and Howard feels two more pinches. One of the bullets goes all the way through, pulverizin
g a little flower in front of him—a pink mimosa. Up ahead he sees a bluish granite outcropping, and he pushes up toward it, hoping for maybe some high leap to safety. Some route that no one without a few bullets in them would follow him on. But the monster catches up to him. He gets in front of Howard and sits down, blocking his path. Slowly, he turns the cylinder of his little revolver, fingering six new slugs home. Howard crawls up toward him.
The next gunshot sounds completely different—like a bullwhip slicing air. The scarred man gasps, his voice coming straight out of his throat, where there’s a new hole. He and Howard look up the hill and see a man standing atop the granite outcropping with a long, elaborate rifle in his hands. He’s a policeman as well—Howard recognizes him from the beach this morning. The monster skews up his ground-beef face in anger, and charges him. This strange, squat, dark policeman unloads on him, making a butcher’s mess of his ribs. A hole opens up in the monster’s torso so wide that Howard sees palm tops dancing in the wind on the other side but he keeps going. He tackles the man on the rock, and together they roll in a nightmare tangle of arms and legs down to the fray below.
HOWARD STAYS where he is for a while, slipping in and out. A quiet stretches down on the beach, and soon all the gunshots and voices have faded. The sky darkens, and through his clouded lens Howard sees the moon swallowed up in blackness. Something lands on him. Cement-gray flakes flutter down. It’s ash, thick with the sulfur-stink of a burned-down world.
After a while he tries sitting, and can. He tries standing, and he can stand as well. He climbs the last stretch of hill, up past the granite outcropping, and comes out into a concrete pavilion. He finds himself surrounded by old guns from the war, each as big as a lightning-struck oak trunk. Some lie on their sides, a tight cluster of gears rusting at the base of their stems, while others remain aimed straight up, their shocked mouths gulping ash. There’s something up here, moving among the guns. He hears footsteps, and heavy breathing. It’s a dog. A black Alsatian, big as a pony, dusted with pale flakes.
The dog eyes Howard with ears back and tail swishing. It pants and blood dribbles thickly from its loose lips and large, velvety nostrils. Howard makes to leave the ruined pavilion, and the dog follows him. “Get,” he says, but the dog does not get. It matches him step for step.
Together they walk into another patch of jungle, onto a trail marked with yellow blazes for the tourists. The Alsatian rushes when Howard rushes and slows when he slows, always just a step behind in the thickening ash. He feels sorry for the animal. It’s hurt, very badly, like he is. It looks a mess, like he’s sure he does. He makes a kissing noise. “It’s all right,” he says, “I won’t hurt you.” He steps toward it but the dog gives out a shrill whimper and backs away. “That’s fine,” Howard says. “That’s fine.”
Together they come to a clearing and the ground beneath Howard’s feet changes. He kicks some ash away and sees he’s standing on fresh asphalt. A road. That means that somebody will be along. Maybe not in time, but they’ll find him, at least. He sits in the middle of the road, and then when sitting gets tiring he lies down. The dog remains standing. It puffs, and shakes its coat to loosen the ash, and then becomes still, and quiet. The dog looks a mess, but it’s a beautiful dog, isn’t it? It looks so odd, so wonderful standing there in the slowly falling ash. Howard has an urge to call Benny—like he did with the ringed moon and the glowing plankton. Like he always does when he sees something wonderful. He even reaches for his belt loop, but there’s no phone there, of course.
Howard closes his eyes, enjoying this feeling of wonder. It pulses inside him. It pours. It trickles out into the ash, into the dark silence, into everything falling.
Chapter 30
MAKATI MEDICAL
The water in Manila Bay tasted foul, so Benicio backstroked. He swam about a hundred yards along the seawall and bumped lightly into the outrigger of a moored fishing bangka. Calling out twice and finding it empty, he climbed aboard, shimmied out along the pointed bow and hoisted his soggy self over the wall and back onto the promenade. Electricity along Roxas was still out and the falling ash had thickened. The crowd in front of the club had dispersed, and those who remained stood under the tacky awning for cover. Edilberto was still parked in the same spot, but all the doors were locked. Inside he saw Berto’s feet propped up on the dash and he rapped hard on the glass to wake him.
Edilberto cracked the window open and squinted out groggily. “You’re wet.”
“Open the door.”
“And dirty, too.” He pressed his tongue against the backs of his teeth and drew in three little snaps of breath. “Dirty upholstery is trouble for me.”
“I’ll tell them I made you.”
Edilberto leaned across the gearshift and opened the door for him. Benicio’s clothes squelched as he got inside and sat. Enough ash had settled on his wet skin that he was caked with grime.
“Bring me back to the hotel. Please.”
“Maybe first to hospital?” Edilberto gestured with his chin at Benicio’s temple.
He touched his cheek and traced a tickle of drying blood up to the gash that Solita had left in his high-cropped sideburn. It wasn’t that deep, but the cut stung, and it was filthy. “Yeah, take me to the hospital.” They sat for two minutes in near silence, the only sound being the dry rub of Edilberto’s middle and index fingers against his thumb. Benicio understood now that trying to bribe him was a mistake. He’d insulted him, and Edilberto was getting even. But he was pushing it. “I don’t have any more money,” he said. “I was robbed.”
“Robbed? In this kind of place?” Edilberto aped shock. He reached across Benicio’s lap and opened the glove compartment, producing a little pad of blank invoices and carbon paper. “You can write a tip-slip, and bill to your room. I get them all the time. No one ever asks why.”
Benicio wrote out a tip-slip for another four thousand pesos, tore it out of the booklet and handed it over. Glancing down at the figure, Edilberto balled up the tip-slip and discarded it in the backseat. Benicio took a breath. He signed the bottom of a fresh tip-slip, left the peso amount blank and threw the pad at Edilberto so that it struck him in the chest.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Edilberto drove with the wipers on and took Benicio to a gleaming white hospital in Makati where a nurse cleaned his face, swabbed out his little cut with alcohol and closed it with a single stitch. There was some commotion in the hospital—people ran about with worried and intense expressions and the sounds of helicopters carried to and fro through the ceiling—but Benicio thought little of it. He negotiated to have the bill sent to his hotel and went back outside to meet Edilberto.
It was almost dawn when they returned to the Shangri-La. Alice was fully dressed and waiting in the lobby. She saw the car pull up through the big glass doors and raced toward them before Benicio had both feet out. She didn’t ask where the hell he’d been. She didn’t ask why he was wet and dirty and bandaged. She told him that they’d found his father, that he’d been shot, and they were bringing him to Makati Medical now to try and save him.
HOWARD WAS ALREADY IN SURGERY when they returned to the hospital, and he underwent two more operations before Sunday was over. The doctors said he was disoriented but conscious during the helicopter ride from Corregidor, but he hadn’t come back since the first operation. Benicio and Alice made makeshift beds out of plastic chairs in the waiting lounge, and on Monday, when Howard was moved into his own room with a spare cot, they joined him. They napped in shifts all day—or rather Alice did while Benicio tried his best to stay awake all the time. He never left his father’s bedside, and spoke only to the nurses who came to change his IV and write things on his chart. The night nurse was especially chatty. She pronounced Miracle like it was three words. Her hair was braided so tight it looked synthetic, her forearms were slightly furry and she signed the cross as a kind of punctuation for life—she would have fit in perfectly among his aunts.
“The best thing you can d
o is take it day by day,” she said as he gazed dully at the green peaks of his father’s heartbeat. Benicio guessed that measuring things in days meant a week was unrealistic. The nurse tapped her pen precisely on the rigid edge of his father’s chart and glanced at the beeping monitors. “How is your wife holding up?” she asked, gesturing to Alice sleeping lightly on the cot.
“We’re not married,” he said. The nurse replaced the clipboard and made to go. “My father’s dying,” he said.
“His body may be.” She touched the collar of her uniform and he guessed that under the fabric was a dangling crucifix.
“The doctors wouldn’t tell me how long.”
“That’s because they don’t know.”
“Will they? I mean, when he starts to?”
“It could be sudden,” the nurse said. “Or they could know. Nothing is certain. Put your faith in God’s hands.”
Benicio shifted in his seat beside the hospital bed. He’d released his father’s hand when the nurse came in, but now he took it again. “Can he hear us?”
“He hears us all.”
“I mean my father.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I like to think he can.” She placed her hand on his and Howard’s. They were like a team, getting ready for a game.
“You like to think?”
The nurse paused, not quite sure how to take him but embarrassed all the same. She opened her mouth and closed it. She pulled her hand from their modest stack, capped her pen and left. He listened to her footsteps in the empty hall, fading beneath the beep and hiss of life support. Alice sat up on the cot behind him.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” Alice said.
He was quiet for a while. “No. She doesn’t.”
The cot squeaked as Alice got up. She crossed to him and draped her arms lightly around his shoulders. She kissed his neck and his ear.
“What do you want to say to him?” she asked.
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