Smaller and Smaller Circles

by F. H. Batacan

  Jerome turns to Saenz, confused. “What was that all about?”

  “I have no clue,” Saenz says, frowning. “But it’s certainly the most surreal visit I’ve had in this office in a long time.”

  Jerome steps back out into the corridor briefly, checking to see if Rommel has indeed left. Then he reenters the office and closes the door, locking it. “Did he threaten you?”

  “Not really. But he was behaving quite oddly.” Saenz sits down. Rommel’s visit has left him more than a bit shaken. Jerome scans the desk, finds a glass of water beside a small dish holding a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich and hands Saenz the glass. The older priest takes a few sips and sets it back down on the desk.

  “You think he might know something about the killings?” Jerome asks.

  “Even if I did, we don’t have anything on him but the fact that he’s involved in the meal deliveries. And with the NBI satisfied that they have the right man—”

  “Not the entire NBI. Just Arcinas and his allies.”

  Saenz nods. “Right. Still, I don’t think we’ll be able to do much at the moment but keep Rommel in mind for future questioning.”

  23

  Dodong has had a tooth out earlier today, and now the empty space in his gum is throbbing.

  Maybe I should get some ice, he thinks; at one peso per plastic bag, it is Payatas’s pain reliever of choice. The boy fishes in his pockets for some loose change and counts out his money as he walks down the empty street, to the only sari-sari store he knows will still be open at this time of the night.

  He is small for fourteen, but his legs are starting to gain some muscle. They carry him quickly now over the dust and the pebbles and the puddles of oily water to Aling Pepang’s.

  He stops suddenly and turns around. “Sssst,” he hisses, “who’s there?” No answer but the barking of the neighborhood’s mangy strays. The shanties, with their rusty corrugated-metal roofs and their walls of cheap plyboard and scrap wood, are some twenty meters away. The narrow, unpaved path that passes for a street is deserted. The ooze and stench of the landfill seeps through the ground, weaves through the air, a constant phantom presence.

  Dodong stands completely still for a moment, listening, waiting. There’s been talk of boys disappearing, hushed whispers about someone, man or monster, who steals them away from the streets and the storefronts and the safety of their homes and discards what is left of them in the dump.

  Dodong doesn’t want to believe any of it, the idle talk of the old ladies with their mouths full of pins, of the young women sitting on the steps of their houses picking lice out of each other’s hair, of the men steeped in their gin and spouting nonsense.

  Now, thinking about the talk and the friends who have gone missing and the dark empty street before him, something—some cold foreboding—sweeps over the crests and ridges of his brain, and he shivers.

  He keeps walking, but as he walks, he again notices the dull pain of something no longer there in his mouth, and the tip of his tongue flicking again and again, curious and unaccustomed, to that pulpy emptiness.

  A few moments later, Aling Pepang’s store is in plain sight. But it is closed; none of the men had money for the usual beer revels tonight.

  The fear sweeps over him again like wings, coming quickly, gliding away, swooping back down.

  He turns back hurriedly and stuffs his coins down the right pocket of his shorts. But there is a hole at the bottom of the pocket, and the coins slide out. He stoops with a muttered curse to pick them up one by one from the dirt and the pebbles.

  He looks up too late. He sees the rock, descending as if from the night sky, but not the hand that holds it.

  Waking up breathless and in terror as if from a bad dream.

  He does not know where he is. His left eye feels very strange, the lid thick and heavy, even though his right eye seems to be open.

  He tries to touch it but he cannot move his hands.

  Something in his mouth. He whimpers. A rag of some kind, smelling foully of gasoline and old blood.

  Where is he? Lying on his back on the floor of a dark room?

  He tries to calm down, tries to orient himself with his surroundings, with his own body, which feels curiously heavy and unresponsive. Yellow light, then blackness. Yellow light, then blackness. The pain in his left eye, intensifying as he becomes more aware.

  Yellow light, then blackness.

  Is the room moving?

  He tries to sit up, but the pain in his left eye, in the whole left side of his head, is unbearable. He starts to panic. No, no, no.

  Yellow light, then blackness.

  Then blackness.

  Okay, it’s okay, sssshhhhh. Yes, I know it’s dark. Isn’t it better? It’s always better when it’s dark because nobody can see you, nobody can watch you. No, don’t cry. It’s your fault. See, all I wanted was to be left alone, but you kept looking at me, following me with your eyes, watching me.

  See, I wouldn’t have to do this if you had just ignored me.

  You were there too, anyway. So what made you different? What made you better than me? What gave you the right to look at me and talk about me and laugh at me?

  Anyway, it’s too late now. Ssshh, this won’t hurt. Well, maybe a little, but not for long.

  24

  Joanna gets the call at three thirty in the morning. Her contact at the Quezon City Police Department was about to come off his shift when the discovery was radioed in.

  A few minutes later she is on the line with Leo, who has been roused from sleep by his young wife. Whispered instructions, where to meet, what equipment to bring. Then Joanna replaces the receiver in its cradle.

  The man lying beside her stirs, then turns to her in the semidarkness.

  “Again?” he asks sleepily. She kisses him on the forehead, strokes the soft, light-brown hair cut close to the scalp and caresses the broad barrel chest by way of an apology.

  In his line of work, nobody ever calls in the dead of night. Still he forgives her for her sudden departures.

  His large, powerful body is always invincibly warm in this freezing room; he likes to turn up the air conditioning and have her burrow into his warmth. For a few moments she considers staying here, her cheek against his chest, letting his heartbeat lull her back into warm, safe sleep. Then, very reluctantly, she sits up.

  She watches the outline of his body under the covers, and out of habit she reaches out and runs the soft, fleshy pad of her right thumb across the long, brown lashes of his left eye. The eye shuts tighter as the other one opens. Green flecked with gold, catching what little light there is in the room.

  “Give me one good reason.”

  She cannot think of anything to say.

  “Thought not.”

  The huge hands with their thick fingers come up behind her head and pull it against his chest. She breathes him in, the smell of soap and warm skin and cigarette smoke. She loves the smell of him, even if she is allergic to secondhand smoke. He cannot, will not stop smoking, and she has to take antihistamines before she sees him. Small sacrifices, like not being able to go out with him in broad daylight, the slight twinge of envy she feels seeing lovers walk through malls and parks with their arms locked around each other. His daylight hours do not belong to her, and neither do these nights; she steals them like a common thief from a wife and children whose faces and names she does not want to know.

  Someday soon these sacrifices will not seem so small, and these nights will not be enough. She cannot bear the thought of that day coming, and yet somehow she cannot wait for it to come.

  His arms tighten around her so quickly and so intensely that she has to suppress a gasp. Then he relaxes his hold and pats her bare bottom. All right, he is saying. Get going if you must.

  She lingers a few seconds more, then unwillingly leaves the bed, heads for the bathroom
and steps into the shower. She stands under the hot spray for a long time, wondering how she came to be here, why all her choices have led to this exact circumstance, leaving the married man in her bed in the middle of the night to rush to where a child lies dead.

  She closes her eyes and musters all her will not to think this particular thought anymore.

  Still a bit groggy after her shower, she returns to the bedroom. She gropes in the dark for her jeans, pulls them on, snaps on her bra. Throws on a shirt and finds her shoes.

  “It’ll be wet and miserable out there, buddy,” he mumbles reproachfully.

  Sometimes he talks to her like she is a man. It does not matter. He does not touch her like she is one.

  “I know,” she answers so quietly he cannot have heard.

  She closes the bedroom door behind her. Her wallet and keys are on the side table in the hall, and she sweeps them up with one hand. She yanks her raincoat off the hook on the front door and leaves the apartment.

  The police have already arrived by the time she and Leo get there. A small crowd of about fifteen, twenty people from the neighborhood has formed not far from the line of police cars. After a few questions, Joanna learns that the body has not been recovered yet, that the crime scene has not even been cordoned off. The policemen themselves are in a tight huddle around their vehicles, drinking coffee, talking to the trash picker who found the body. Clearly, they are waiting for something—crime scene personnel, most likely.

  She turns to Leo. “You think we can get up there?”

  “Dangerous in the dark,” Leo answers, but he’s already hoisting his heavy camera up onto his shoulder.

  “We might not get another chance.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  They quickly discover how difficult it is to get up the mound of trash. Every foothold is precarious, every step a struggle for balance atop the shifting garbage and sliding mud. And yet they’re only at the fringes of the landfill. At the very center, the mass will, in theory, be even more unstable: loose garbage on the surface, layers and layers of compacted, rotting garbage in the middle and, at the bottom, a pool of filthy leachate. Now Joanna understands why the most effective trash pickers are children and small teenagers: the lightness of their bodies allows them to tread nimbly over this treacherous landscape.

  After what feels like hours, she is standing bareheaded in the drizzle, looking down at what is left of a young boy of about twelve or thirteen years old after two or three nights out in the dump.

  Leo is stepping carefully around the body according to her instructions. Nothing must be disturbed. The porta-light shines dull yellow on the ruin of the boy.

  The rats have gotten to the body.

  There is neither face nor heart, the latter removed through a gaping hole in the chest. She bends forward to examine the body more closely, hands thrust deep in the pockets of her jeans, taking care not to pitch forward.

  Same technique, same timing.

  So many wounds, but so little blood. Was he killed here, in the dump? Was he hunted, running in the dark, through the garbage?

  The moment of falling. She remembers a Jacopo Pontormo drawing in black chalk, the strokes so faint that the figure is hardly visible. What was it called? Il giocatore che inciampa, “Player Tripping Up”: the terrible dismay in the wide eyes, in the open mouth. The helplessness in the outstretched arm. Is that how you looked when he finally caught up with you? she asks the dead boy, then straightens up.

  Suddenly it seems very cold.

  A large black rat is caught in the beam of the porta-light. Leo says, “Shoo!”

  The rat stands on its hind legs and raises itself up higher, sniffing the air. Studying the light with bright, black, curious eyes, unafraid.

  Suddenly, a voice booms out at them. “Hey, you’re not supposed to be here.” It’s a burly plainclothes policeman, panting from the exertion of getting up the mound. He lumbers toward her, grabs her by the arm.

  The rat scurries off, squealing, squealing.

  Joanna yanks her arm away, and the policeman grabs it again. Leo keeps the camera rolling.

  “Stop it,” she snarls. “Stop touching me.”

  The cop glowers at her in return. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he repeats, louder this time, as though he thinks she is either deaf or stupid, or both.

  “I got you the first time,” she mutters, then turns to Leo. “It’s okay. Let’s get out of here.”

  They start down the muddy slope strewn with garbage, and Leo keeps the porta-light turned on so they can pick their way through the darkness. She struggles to maintain her balance, her natural revulsion for dirt forcing her to concentrate intensely on her path.

  When she gets to the pavement, near the line of police cars, she picks up her pace.

  “Ah, Ben,” she says aloud once the police are out of earshot. “You’ve really stepped in it now.”

  25

  Ben Arcinas arrives at headquarters, out of breath, disheveled, his hair and jacket wet with rain. He was so preoccupied on the drive over, so distracted as he parked and emerged from his car, that he has failed to notice that he is in fact holding an umbrella in one hand, his briefcase in the other. He is only reminded of it when he gets to the glass doors, where he fumbles with the door handle and drops the umbrella.

  “Leche,” he swears under his breath. He picks up the umbrella, fumbles with the door again, and is surprised when someone holds it open for him. He looks up into the stony face of Jake Valdes.

  “Good morning, Ben,” Valdes says. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Of course I could make it,” he snaps. “It’s my goddamned case, isn’t it?”

  Valdes wisely refrains from meeting his crossness head-on. Instead, he turns around and says, “Come upstairs with me.”

  “I don’t have time to chitchat with you. I’ve got work to do. I have to—”

  “You have to come upstairs with me.” Valdes says it firmly; there’s no room for argument.

  Still, Arcinas is defiant. “Why?”

  “Because the director wants to see you.”

  He brushes past Valdes, knocking against the deputy director’s left shoulder in his haste. “I just spoke with him on the phone on the way here. He knows where to find me.”

  “I’m not talking about Director Mapa, Attorney Arcinas.”

  It registers dimly in Arcinas’s mind that Valdes has addressed him by a formal title and not his first name. When Valdes walks down the corridor, Arcinas remains rooted where he stands, the knuckles on both his hands pale from gripping the umbrella.

  Valdes turns around, his face impassive. “You’d better hurry. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

  All his life, Benjamin Arcinas has fought against his circumstances. The youngest son in a brood of nine, he was not going to be like his brothers and sisters, who accepted who they were and did little to better themselves. Not for Ben Arcinas the prospect of a dead-end life in a hovel in Tondo similar to the one where he was born to poor parents. Not for him the eking out of a living selling balut and garlic-fried peanuts like his mother and father.

  From early childhood, Ben Arcinas showed an unusual fastidiousness in the care of his person and his surroundings. Meticulously sweeping their tiny shack and the even tinier yard outside. Chiding his older brothers and sisters if they left dirty dishes in the sink or came in from work or school smelling less than pleasant.

  He scraped up enough money from odd jobs for his first manicure at thirteen. The pleasure of having money and of being attended to as though he were someone important—ah, even after many years he can still remember what that first time was like.

  In school Ben Arcinas envied the more well-off students who would come to class in cars driven by their office-worker parents. He wanted to have his own car someday. Perhaps even his own driver.


  Young Arcinas knew school was the only weapon at his disposal in a tough world, and he worked hard and long at it. Not brilliant, but with a plodding intelligence that was sufficient to get him through high school with honors and eventually into a third-rate law school. Passed the bar after three tries. Took his family to Ma Mon Luk in Cubao for an obligatory comida China celebration from which he excused himself a tad too early.

  He went off afterward to his own private celebration with himself and a bottle of imported, ridiculously overpriced beer in the lobby of a swank hotel. He nursed that beer for hours, ignoring repeated attempts by waitresses to interest him in another one, gazing up at the trompe l’oeil ceilings, watching well-heeled patrons and observing their manners. It was the first of many such celebrations.

  Entering the civil service, Ben Arcinas had a way about him that made government employees of lesser aptitude think they were in the presence of someone who was too good for grunt work.

  In a politely unbending manner, he would decline to do general tasks like photocopying and filling out forms, assigning them regally to the nearest female, even though certain such females may have outranked him in the plantilla. He perfected a smile that was both tolerant and condescending, as he had seen on so many of his bosses, believing that if he acted the part, he would eventually get the part. He devoted his energies to attaching himself to team leaders and supervisors who could further his career, and often they did.

  Early in his career, he made a conscious decision to get involved in any capacity in prominent cases that drew the attention of media and of more powerful officials. He learned, quickly and well, how to project and promote himself, how to make each small achievement seem much bigger than it really was, how to grab credit and deflect blame.

  In the few government offices where he has worked, he has always managed to vault over his former superiors, always taken great pleasure in referring to them years later as his “men.”