“Maybe,” Ben said, shifting the conversation back where it should have stayed, “Naya knows awesome people because she is one, herself.”
“You shouldn’t throw that word around so casually. We just met,” she told him.
“I’m going on evidence,” Ben insisted. “And what seem to be sincere testimonials from at least three people here whom I’ve known for years and trust. It’s rare to see this kind of passion and...care. For what this city has to offer.”
“Naya’s tour is highly recommended,” the guy named Anil said. “It was on the list of things to do in the city given to me by my employer when I relocated to Manila.”
“Really?” Both Naya and Melly said that, but Melly pulled out her phone and started taking notes. “When was this, Anil?”
“I moved eight months ago,” he said. “There’s an orientation we have to go through, about the culture, life in Manila, where to buy stuff, things to do. This was on the list.”
“We didn’t know that. We don’t have a regular tour sked with your company. If I had known that, we would have created one for you instead of slotting you into this one.” Melly was talking. It was the business side of the operation, and Melly was doing the talking. Ben found this interesting, and glanced over at Naya to see if this was affecting her at all. She was eating, eyes down at her plate.
Were they partners because Melly handled the business side of things? Did Naya care about any other side? How much help did she need, to get this off the ground and keep it running? How long could she keep working like this, running a tour out of a van?
He was about to suggest something, but nah. Who was the jobless one? Him. No moral authority to suggest things.
“What’s the coolest thing you saw Naya feature on her videos?” he asked Rochelle instead.
“Oh God, I can’t name just one thing,” Rochelle said. “But the dugong sighting would be in my top three!”
“Palawan,” Naya added.
“That Manila on rooftops series,” Rochelle continued. “She did a series of videos from different building rooftops around the city. Best rooftops and the best sunsets! That was so unexpected.”
“Where’s the best sunset?” Ben asked. “Or is it all the same? Anything by the bay, right?”
“Not necessarily,” Naya said.
“Where then?”
Naya blinked at him. “You really want to know?”
“Of course.”
“There’s this hotel in Intramuros,” she said. “I mention it in one of my videos. When you look out from the roof, you see old and new, everything really, and when it’s orange and red and pink, it’s extraordinary.”
“Are we going there today?”
She shook her head. “Dinner is somewhere else.”
Rochelle frowned at him. “You don’t know where we’re going today? You didn’t go through the itinerary?”
Naya’s smile tightened. “Ben wanted to be surprised. And I thought you just wanted to do half of the day.”
“Don’t waste it!” Rochelle said. “You don’t do just half of a See This Manila tour! What’s the point?”
“He doesn’t have to do the whole thing, Rochelle. He might have other things to do.”
“It’s not easy to get on a tour, though!” Rochelle piped in. “The itinerary changes every time. And as soon as she announces one, the slots are filled up in like ten seconds. If you’re already here you should stay the whole day, Kuya Ben. I mean, what else are you going to do today?”
Good question, Kuya Ben. If he went home he would mope. God forbid a friend from work might visit to check up on him, and he wanted none of their concern or good intentions.
“I’m staying,” Ben said.
“You are?” Naya was surprised.
“I can’t leave now,” he said. “Since you’re so highly recommended.”
“You were lucky to get into this one, Ben,” Tita Mari told him.
There was something about the way Naya looked at him. He felt it now, her face holding a slight smirk at him, sure. His brain was in a fog when he was changing his shirt, apparently in front of her, but he felt it too. That wasn’t just the fog. She was in charge, but she wasn’t uncaring. She didn’t tell him to pack up and go home. He was lucky, he knew that now, and he had decided to stay where the luck was.
7
Taguig, 2:45 p.m.
* * *
“So I was talking to Anil and Jana, about that relocation package that our tour was mentioned in.”
“Right. I mean yeah, I should have asked earlier. I lost track of things.”
Melly shrugged. “No big. That’s what I’m here for. Anyway, we could be contracted to do regular tours for them. They have budgets for team building and cultural immersion of international hires, stuff like that. But we need to be accredited.”
Of course they did. Naya winced, and her cousin saw it.
“We should do it.”
“I know we should. It’s just...ugh.”
“We talked about this, Naya. Next level.”
“I know, I know.”
“I have a deadline.”
Melly was being nice about this, but Naya knew what it all meant. Next level, deadline, everything to do with taking this more seriously than the “income-generating hobby” it started out as. Melly was a business major, entrepreneurial by nature, and while super supportive, also kept reminding Naya that there should be a future to this or she would move on to other things. For the past year or so, Naya was able to hold her off by claiming paperwork aversion, residual pains from working with the government. It worked for a while.
Was it so bad, hanging on to freedom for a little while longer? Naya was lucky enough to be considered good at anything, and for people to agree to pay this kind of money for something she was passionate about…
It wasn’t going to last, said everyone in her life who ever had a career and knew a thing about money. The real world would come calling eventually. This was a “business” that relied on Naya being alert and healthy otherwise no money got made.
But I like it that way. Stubborn, still. Naya liked that this was work that she made, that required her full presence and involvement. She was proud that it was hers from end to end, and that people could try to do it but it wouldn’t be the same.
And most of all, she loved that she could walk away from it at any time.
“They like you,” Melly said. “Anil and Jana like the tour and are willing to vouch for you, and they’ve only been to half of it. I’ll email you the accreditation requirements. We should get this done as soon as we can.”
What that would mean, in real world terms, was that Naya would have to formalize this somehow. Sign papers. Make herself available when they wanted tours. Plan her calendar around them, maybe a year or two in advance.
Real work. Because this wasn’t work yet, even if she called it that, and even if it paid her bills.
“If they really needed someone to do this for them in-house, they can get someone who actually works in tourism. Already certified.” She had to say it, and it wasn’t just a deflection. She didn’t want to take work away from anyone who’d been doing this as a career, carrying all the baggage of institutional decisions and misconceptions of what people wanted or needed. She presented herself as an alternative precisely so she could do it her way, and be free from all that.
“They asked for you. Obviously they wouldn’t just take in the next applicant who can show them around the city.”
“Fine,” Naya said. “I’ll look at it later.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.” She checked her watch. “We have time to walk through the park before heading into the rink. Can you direct the guests that way?”
Melly gave her a smirk but did as she asked, knowing she was being dismissed.
This was a good group, and Naya could have asked them to cross the street and walk through the park on her own. They would have done as she asked, and they did. She sensed a floatin
g blur beside her and noticed that someone from the tour group didn’t follow instructions. Of course.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Ben said as he approached. “How long since you left PH Lens?”
“Three years.” But as she thought about it, it was a little more than three years actually.
“Did you work somewhere else, after?”
“I wasn’t doing anything for maybe eight months? Then I started making videos again, did some freelance work for prod houses.”
Wow, she just did that. She just casually summarized a chaotic time in her life in a couple of sentences, like it was no big deal.
Ben had matched her pace, was now walking beside her as they crossed the street. “Was it an end-of-contract thing?”
She could tell him to mind his own business and join the rest. But instead: “No, not an end-of-contract thing. I walked into the office and yelled ‘I fucking quit I am done with you all!’ And then...that was it.”
“Holy shit. You did?”
“Middle of a project, Ben. I’d have slammed a door except the door was heavy and one of those glass things that don’t slam.”
He laughed under his breath. “It’s the dream.”
“I don’t have my last pay from that yet. Because...well it’s hard to go back and sign the quitclaim when you’ve said you’re fucking done.”
“Now I feel I should have done that. That’s a better exit.”
Naya’s group, led now by Melly, had made it to the Six 32 Central mall’s park, and they seemed to know what to do with the sculptures on display. She turned her attention back to Ben. “Seems like you didn’t have a choice what your exit would look like. And I thought David Alano was okay, considering everyone else is a two-faced liar and-or complicit in systemic hardship and death?”
“Please, don’t sugarcoat on my behalf,” he said dryly. “And you can still believe in David Alano, if you’ve given up on everyone else. He’s a good guy.”
“How can he be one, Ben? Or if he started out that way, how can he remain one in this environment?”
“He is, I promise. If you think my promises are worth anything. It’s why everything’s so hard for him, but that he’s even gotten this far means people are beginning to hope again.”
Oh dear. An optimist had walked into her van. Naya almost couldn’t believe it; she was hanging out at a park with an optimist. How could he remain that after years of doing what he did, swimming in shark-infested waters? “Ben, that is hard to believe.”
“But it’s true. Ask me about any transaction, any committee he sat on, any position he had.”
“I won’t be doing that, because it’s useless. You’ve been fired from the staff, so it doesn’t matter if he’s a superhero. It’s either he’s a good person or he’s the jerk who threw you under the bus.”
“I offered to quit, okay?” His glasses were bothering him for some reason, and he took them off and slipped them into the pocket of his blazer. “It looked like they were going to make that feud with Buena worse before it got better, so I offered to quit. I suggested this particular storyline, like what if the person to quit would be me. I didn’t like the kind of work we were doing lately and I wanted a transfer maybe…but I also said it at two in the morning and I wasn’t sure how quickly it would get out, if we’d get to sit down and talk about the details first.”
The news websites had the resignation articles up first thing in the morning though. “I guess they...took your offer then.”
“I guess they did. Lesson: don’t send emails with incomplete sentences when you’re sleepy. Years of loyal, competent service and I end a career with this. Also, it’s fucking hot out here.” He shrugged out of his blazer all together, and then it was just the Today sucks because I suck shirt—and too-good-for-the-blazer forearms and bicep action. “I only asked about your quitting because I wanted to know how long it could take me to find another job.”
“Oh. That? Haha, it could take forever.”
His face fell a little. “You’re not kidding?”
“It won’t take too long to find one, if you’re willing to do anything. I don’t think you’ll be willing to do anything, Ben. You seem like a fella with principles.”
“Yeah, look where those got me. I’ll need to eat.”
Naya didn’t come from a family of civil servants, and she barely was one herself. What she had was a fierce love for the Filipino, loved what they created, wanted to make sure they got their due. She thought it was a dream, at first, getting paid to do exactly that, and for the ones in charge of taking care of the people. When she quit, all the help she got involved jobs outside tourism. She didn’t have a mentor from within, no one to tell her what the future would look like had she stayed, or how she could go somewhere else and do the same thing.
Look at her now, being all mentory. “So I quit because I was deployed to do touristy videos during one of the summits. And I wanted to be assigned to Manila, because I thought it would be a good chance to show the inequality, what life is really like even on the days when they don’t hide the shit from delegates traveling from the airport to wherever. I thought if I did it with some compassion, and with help from the communities themselves, I’d be able to create something and the summit would be the right platform for it. Because that’s what it’s for, right?”
“Oh, God,” Ben said, realizing where this was going. “You had a dream too.”
“I didn’t even think I had one until someone told me to put on makeup and show my cleavage, and just take a video of the sunset, because that was the only thing they were paying me for.” Damn. Saying it led to reliving it, and Naya felt the anger in her blood again. “The fuck, right? And sometimes I suspected that they’d only hired me to look pretty on camera, but they never said it, so I went on pretending they needed my point of view, my ideas.”
“So you got the fuck out of there.”
“Yes, I did. I don’t know what it’ll be like for you, but it’s hard to fit my head into a certain mindset now. And I know I should be saving more, and earning more, and doing all those adult things but I also can’t be bothered to kiss ass anymore. That kind of thinking leads one to this.”
“A park in the middle of the day?”
“Milking your hobbies for money.”
He might have gulped; she wouldn’t be surprised. “It’s possible I didn’t think this through, when I offered to do this.”
“Most people in government have rich families to help them out, I hear.”
He shook his head. “Not me. I wonder which hobby of mine I can milk then.”
If they took another step they’d be inside the park, and among the group, and maybe it was time to be folded back in to a happier space. “You can worry about that another day,” she said. Without thinking much of it, she took his hand and pulled him under the ivy-covered arch. “Today you’re on my clock, so you do what I say. It’s time to take selfies with the horse sculptures and watch out for butterflies.”
“Sounds amazing,” Ben said.
She wasn’t sure if he meant that, but he was just going to have to trust her. He wasn’t going to have an easy road ahead, if hers was any indication.
8
He hopped into a random van to get away. Had he known it would lead to even more personal humiliation and possible injury, would he have done it differently?
“That’s better,” his tour guide said, putting more distance between them, but still holding his hand. “Is it coming back to you now?”
It was ice skating, something he did for five consecutive weekends when he was thirteen years old, and then never again. That was long enough for him to conclude that ice hockey wouldn’t be in his future, never mind if he thought it would make him cooler. Not his first life lesson on literal and figurative, but it stuck, and he ended up working with words instead.
She didn’t have to hold his hand. There were skate aids available—they looked like smartly-dressed polar bears, and people could hang on to
one and push themselves on the ice and remain upright, if a little less dignified. But he stepped on the ice, then somehow this happened, and like no time at all they had gone around the rink once and the muscle memory was returning.
“You’re good at this,” Ben said.
Naya’s smile a second ago had probably been at his expense, but it changed to being slightly pleased, possibly proud of herself. “I totally thought I was going to be a gold medalist figure skater when I was a kid.”
“No other way to imagine it.”
“I’m happy you understand.” Naya skated with more confidence, her easy glides were likely the force that kept him upright. “It wasn’t for me, eventually, but I’ve stayed in touch with Skating HQ. I like coming back here. And one of my friends from skate school eventually became the biggest deal.”
“Calinda Valerio.” Ben remembered her; she made national news when she won several medals during her time as a competitive skater.
“She’s here. She’ll be introducing the rehearsal we’re watching.” Her laugh sounded like it was bouncing off the ice and him. “But right, you didn’t know that.”
“I did say I wanted to be surprised? Did not think I’d be back on the ice today.”
“You’re doing okay.”
Ben was doing okay. It took another couple of minutes to remember what it felt like, to use the blades to connect to the ice surface, to get comfortable with the forward motion, to go with the lack of friction instead of resist. Then it was better and he managed to correct his posture too...and then Naya let go of his hand.
“You’re fine,” she declared.
He was cold, was what he was. He wished he hadn’t left his blazer in the locker area. Naya was ready and wearing a knit sweater that looked thick and comfortable. It was soft, too; he had been able to confirm that because the sleeve went all the way to the middle of her palm, that he’d been hanging onto for dear life earlier.
What Kind of Day Page 4