“I meant to call. Couldn’t get a signal in the desert. Couldn’t get one on the bus either.”
“Nine months, no signal? Ano ba, your phone’s from 1977?” She folds her arms, makes no gesture to welcome him back.
It’s pointless to apologize for his months of silence; she wouldn’t accept it, he wouldn’t mean it. “I don’t have my keys,” he says. “I meant to go through my window, but it won’t open.”
“I keep it locked these days.”
“Well, could you unlock it? I would’ve gone through yours, but you were”—he pauses, unsure of the word for what Maxima does.
“Working,” she says.
“Right,” he says. “Working.”
She takes Excel’s backpack and duffel bag, brings them inside. “I’ll unlock your window, you enter through there,” she says. “Gutom kaba? There’s Panda Express in the fridge.”
“Sure,” he says, then thanks her, tells her that he’s headed to the roof for a few minutes; after eighteen hours on a stuffy, stinky bus, he could use the air. “I’ll be back,” he says, “I promise,” but before he can go, Maxima takes his wrist, her grip so tight he feels her fingers against his bones.
“It’s good that you’re home, Excel. But next time”—she squeezes harder—“don’t spy on your mother.”
What she means by next time he doesn’t know. That he’ll lurk on the fire escape tomorrow night, and nights on after? That he’ll leave again to make a life, but automatically fail and inevitably return?
“I won’t,” he says, and she lets go.
He continues up the fire escape two more flights, steps onto the roof. He hasn’t been here in over a year and everything is the same: the never-working satellite dish wrapped in ivy that somehow sprouts from rooftop gravel; the washing machine on its side, a pile of yellow rubber gloves still inside it; the pair of ripped and rusted lawn chairs. As a kid, Excel would come here without telling anyone, stay for hours, sometimes until dark and well beyond. I’m hiding and hiding, he’d tell himself.
He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. Almost twenty hours before, when Sab dropped him off in front of the El Centro bus station, she’d said no calls, not for a while. Instead of kissing him good-bye, she just touched his face, a gesture that might have been tender had it not made him feel almost ghostly, like he wasn’t really there. So before her phone rings, he hangs up and decides to text her instead, but doesn’t know the right thing to say. Maybe he’ll just let her know he made it back, that he’s safe, and that he misses her. Maybe he’ll remind her to get some rest, for her sake and the sake of the baby. Or should he say our baby? Unborn baby? He knows he shouldn’t say the word baby at all: Sab made it clear—no decisions, not yet.
He puts his phone away. No call, no text.
He walks to the edge of the roof. Of La Villa Aurelia’s three buildings, his is the tallest, four stories high. From up here, the view is the 280 freeway on one side with Old Hoy Sun Ning Yung on another, and the rest is Colma, town of seventeen cemeteries, a handful of car dealerships (Lexus, BMW, Toyota, Dodge), and a cardroom called Lucky Wishes, where old Filipinos play and never win. To the north are two Targets, one on each side of the freeway (one in Colma, one in Serramonte), their signs a nightly red and white glow. Who needs two Targets so close together? Once, out of pure boredom, Excel walked from one front entrance to the other, counting his steps along the way—1,084, just to get to a place exactly the same as where you started.
It’s June. Colma is cold, the sky hazy and gray. Excel closes his eyes, remembers the desert at night. Clean and cold air. Silence. What you saw when you looked up.
He crosses back and descends the fire escape, pauses at the bright, wide-open windows of the third-floor apartment above Maxima’s and his. He’s never met the tenants, but from the nonstop Bed Bath & Beyond coupons left atop their mailbox, he knows their last name is Sharma, and their apartment is nothing like the one directly below: Instead of cramped side-by-side bedrooms separated by a thin wall, the two windows look into a spacious living room with shiny dark wood floors, white built-in shelves, and a corner fireplace framed in marble; the space is so large it fits two sofas, one on each side of a glass coffee table.
He pokes his head through the window, hears no sounds of movement, climbs in. He walks over to the shelves, notices that the books are leather bound but have no titles or authors, and the framed black-and-white photographs are all of the same scene—floral-patterned tapestries flapping in the wind beside a river. He goes to the mirror above the fireplace, thinks of what the man at the Greyhound station said—You look the same to me—takes out his high school ID. He was fifteen, small for his age (he’s caught up a bit, just shy of five feet six now), his face back then as round as a dinner plate. But in the mirror, he can see how nine months in the desert have hollowed out his cheeks and narrowed his face, and how almost forty-eight hours without real sleep has made his eyes bloodshot and murky.
There is another face in the mirror. Excel turns around, sees a small boy in striped pajamas standing in the living room doorway, holding a toy airplane in his hand. The Sharmas’ son, he guesses.
The boy stares at Excel, oddly calm, as though the sudden appearance of a stranger in his home happens every day.
Excel moves quietly to the window, a finger to his lips. “I’m not here,” he whispers, and just like that, he’s not.
2
When he was gone, Excel thought Maxima might turn his room into something else—storage space or a home gym, maybe a sewing room, though as far as he knew, she’d never sewn a thing in her life. It’s what you did when someone left, he thought, made use of the space left behind. But the room is still the same—the gray army blanket spread over the twin mattress, the milk crate nightstand, the top two drawers of the dresser half-open and empty. The place feels like a crime scene, everything untouched and kept in place.
He removes his shoes, sets them by the bedroom door. He pulls out a roll of T-shirts from his backpack, suddenly fears the implications of unpacking. Does it mean he’s back for good? That he’ll stay longer than he intends?
He thinks: ten thousand dollars. That’s how much he needs to leave Colma, to get back to Sab.
He crams the shirts into his backpack, zips it up.
EXCEL FLIPS ON THE LIVING ROOM LIGHT AND SEES MAXIMA EVERYwhere.
Above the couch on the wall: two eight-by-ten photographs, one of Maxima in midair and midkick, a sword in each hand; the other of her in a shimmering gold gown, holding a rocket launcher.
On the cinder block bookshelf: a Polaroid of Maxima knee-deep in jungle water, flanked by men in army fatigues, wielding machetes; another where she sits on an overturned jeep, blowing a kiss to the camera, wearing a wedding gown spattered with blood.
Atop the TV, on a stack of old IKEA catalogues (why does Maxima save them? She never buys furniture), sits a gold statuette of a stick of dynamite, a star at the end of its fuse, with an engraving on its marble base that reads:
MOST PROMISING ACTION HEROINE
STAR OF TOMORROW
DYNAMITE-STAR! MANILA MOVIE AWARDS
He picks the trophy up, surprised by how light it is—the whole thing is plastic, the marble too—sets it back down.
He goes to the kitchen. On the wall above the table is a framed movie poster of Malakas Strike Force 3: Panalo Ako, Talaga! Excel translates: “Strong Strike Force 3: I Win, Really!” Something like that. The poster is an illustrated collage of the movie’s big-drama moments—jeep explosions, big-muscled thugs firing machine guns, and curvy ladies in tattered blouses, desperate and on the run. Maxima’s role in the film was small and uncredited—an assassin disguised as a nurse, her one scene a death scene—but she’s there at the bottom of the poster, staring straight ahead, swaddled baby in one arm and a pistol in her hand, aimed right at you.
Before he left, the walls were blank; it was a way, Maxima said, to make the dinky box of their two-bedroom apartment look less small, which, to Exc
el, sounded like they were living in an optical illusion. But maybe his absence made the walls too blank, the apartment too big, so that she had to crowd it with pictures from a former life. Years before (pre-Excel, pre-America), Maxima had starred in a handful of action flicks made for cheap in Manila; “lowest of the low-budget, talaga,” one critic called them. But Maxima was always proud. “I could have been the Michelle Yeoh of the Philippines, believe me,” she used to say, and in darker moods, she’d watch her bootleg VHS copy of Malakas Strike Force 3: Panalo Ako, Talaga! on an all-night loop, hunched forward on the couch like the story meant something new with each viewing. Once, when Excel was watching a TV show about the world’s deadliest birds, Maxima stormed into the room, grabbed the remote and put in the tape, said she needed to check something in Strike Force 3. “Check what?” Excel said, but Maxima brushed him off, muttered things in Tagalog that Excel couldn’t keep up with. “You’re barely in the movie,” he said. She turned, shot him a look of instant anger or genuine hurt. He apologized immediately, left the room and went to the roof, where he decided he wasn’t really sorry, not at all.
“I found that poster online,” Maxima says, entering the kitchen. “Ten bucks. And for a collector’s item like that? On that Antiques Sideshow, it’s ten times that amount, believe me.”
The poster is slightly tilted; Excel straightens it out. “It looks nice,” he says, “the living room, too. The pictures, the trophy. You’ve never displayed this stuff before.”
She shrugs, opens the refrigerator, rummages through. “I thought it was time to decorate, ‘make a house a home.’ And it’s better to look at pictures of me than of other people. You can’t miss somebody who’s still here, di ba?”
“Guess not,” he says. But on the refrigerator, held up by a Domino’s Pizza magnet, is a photograph of Joker, Maxima, and himself. They’re standing in the sun at Evergreen Lawn Cemetery, a pair of concrete sphinxes in the background. Joker waves hello, his silver hair slicked back into a stubby ponytail; Maxima stands beside him, arm around his shoulder. They’re both smiling, but Excel looks removed and a bit oblivious, slightly smaller, even dimmer, like he’s standing in shade two steps behind them, an accidental bystander in the background. Excel hasn’t seen the photo before, can’t remember when it was taken or, even more puzzling, who took it. But he knows from the hunch in Joker’s shoulders and the knockoff Louis Vuitton fanny pack at his waist that it’s a few months before he died, just shy of his seventy-fifth birthday, almost two years before, when Excel was seventeen. Heart attack, out of nowhere.
A stranger might call it a family portrait, three generations in a single moment, and though Joker could pass as a grandfather, he wasn’t. “Grandmaster Joker,” was what they called him instead, a term Excel was embarrassed to say aloud (“It’s like we’re living in a kung fu movie,” he’d complained), though Maxima had insisted it was the correct one. “That’s who he is,” she said. Back in the Philippines, long before Excel was born, Joker had been Maxima’s grandmaster in the Filipino martial art of escrima. She was his top pupil, a village girl who he believed could one day become a grandmaster herself. But when she was nineteen, a Manila movie talent scout with an eye patch (a fashion statement, not a necessity) who’d seen Maxima perform a hand-to-knife demonstration approached her with an offer. “Stunt work today, action star tomorrow” was his promise; Maxima fell for it, then for him. For Joker, there was zero chance of compromise; low-budget action movies out of Manila would cheapen everything he’d taught her. Not long after, with no other students and no family of his own, Joker moved to California to join his brother, and for almost fifteen years had no communication with Maxima, not until the day she called him from Manila, telling him she was pregnant with no job, no family, and nowhere to go. “I broke the old man’s heart, and he still took us in,” she’d said. “We owe Grandmaster everything,” which made life itself seem like one long debt they could never repay.
Maxima closes the refrigerator, a Tupperware of fried rice in one hand, a Panda Express takeout box of chow mein in the other. She dumps them into a bowl, pops it into the microwave. “I haven’t had dinner,” she says, “but there’s enough, if you want.” For ninety seconds, they stand in silence against the microwave’s hum; in someone else’s life, Excel thinks, his return would come with triumph and cheers, a home-cooked meal during which he’d tell stories of his travels, then distribute souvenir gifts thereafter. But they are not those kinds of people, not even in the photo on the refrigerator.
The microwave beeps; Excel speaks up. “I should’ve called before I came back. I meant to. Things just got busier than I expected.”
Maxima brings the food to the table, sits. “Bahala na, Excel,” she says, a phrase he’s never been able to completely understand. Oh well. Don’t worry. That’s life. Fuck it. What it means when followed by his name, he doesn’t know.
He joins Maxima at the table, is about to scoop up the mix of rice and chow mein when Maxima slaps his hand. “Pray first,” she says. They’re not Catholic—they’re not anything, really—but for all his life Maxima and Joker chanted what they called orasyones—“martial arts prayers,” was how Excel understood them. There were orasyones for heightened senses in combat, protection against sudden ambush, ways to weaken your enemy; an orasyon could even reach the dead, which Maxima said kept Joker’s spirit close by. But most seemed made up on the spot; once, right before a sparring session with Joker, Maxima recited an orasyon calling for an earned and respectful victory over her opponent, then asked that the lottery scratchers she’d bought that morning bring more than just a lousy five bucks.
What she prays for now she keeps to herself. Head bowed, eyes closed, she mouths her orasyon; mostly it just sounds like breathing. Excel keeps one eye open, looks at the illustration of Maxima in the bottom corner of the poster. He knows that scene well, but the first time he ever saw it—he must have been three or four years old—he thought that the baby in her arms was actually him, and that at some point early in his life, Maxima cradled him as she shot down enemies blocking their way. He remembers how let down he felt, when he finally understood it was just a movie.
Maxima takes a breath and lifts her head, eyes blinking open like she’s waking from sleep. She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it back, and Excel notices that it’s blacker now, her eyebrows too. Far as he knows, she’s never dyed her hair before. Maybe he’d just forgotten how dark it is, after all the time away.
She scoops food onto Excel’s plate. “So tell me. How was it? Did you make important discoveries?”
He smushes the rice with his fork. “Discoveries?”
“You said you were going to the desert to make”—she quotes with her fingers—“‘important discoveries.’”
Excel has lied so much in the past nine months that it takes a moment to remember the one he’d told Maxima. “Discoveries,” he says, “right.” Nine months before, he told her that he’d found a job digging for an archaeological excavation in the California desert, that evidence of a lost civilization might be recovered. Room and board covered, $2,500 a month in cash. He told her he’d be gone for two.
“That job is still going on,” he says, “but I needed a break. Guess I’m feeling a little aimless right now.”
“Aimless. Not knowing.” She shakes her head. “No purpose, then no life. Just la, la, la. So American.”
Let her talk, he thinks. It only makes leaving easier.
“And your friend?” she says, “is she still making important discoveries too?”
“Sab is not my friend. She’s my girlfriend.”
“Well, I never got to meet her.”
“She’s still out there. But we might be on a break right now, too.”
She nods, sighs. “It happens. Even when it’s true love. If I was smart, I would have broken up with that eye patch–wearing son of a bitch a lot sooner.”
Maxima almost never mentions his father, and Excel never asks. Why wonder about someone you�
��ve never met and never will? His whole life, he’s imagined the man exactly as Maxima describes him, and taken it as the truth: that he sits at some roadside cantina in the Philippines countryside, drunk and playing gin rummy all day, an underage girl on his lap.
“If you’d left him sooner,” he says, slicing through clumps of chow mein with the edge of his fork, “I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t say bad things like that, Excel.” She hits his shoulder with the back of her hand, harder than necessary. “No matter what, you’d be here”—she slaps the table twice—“one hundred percent.”
“Maybe,” he says, and hopes it isn’t true.
3
A dark morning, nine months before, September. Maxima was leaning against the arm of the couch, hands deep in the fraying pockets of her pink terry cloth robe. Excel was at the front door and down on a knee, tying the laces of his Converse high-tops. “Triple knot, triple knot,” she said, “so you don’t trip and fall.”
“Double’s enough,” he said, but he tripled it anyway, biding his time in what he knew were the last minutes before leaving home for good; he had no clue how moments like this were meant to go. He tied one shoe and started tying the other, noticed a tiny tear in the mustard-brown carpet, revealing the grain of what looked like dark hardwood. He’d never seen it before, and he felt a sudden urge to rip it further, to see what else might be hiding underneath.
Excel got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “guess I’ll be going,” and Maxima moved toward him for what he suspected was a good-bye hug, though neither of them was a hugger. But instead of reaching out to pull Excel in, she took an envelope from her pocket. “Cash,” she said, handing it to him. “Just in case.”
The gesture caught him off guard. Maxima had been silent for days and pissed off for weeks, ever since Excel told her about the job in the desert. “It’s just a couple months,” he’d said, “maybe a little longer,” and she said, “Leaving? So soon after Joker?” But Joker had been dead for a year, which seemed enough time to heal, or at least endure, and wasn’t that how he was raised? You fall, you get up. Someone hits you, you hit back. Someone dies, you still have to live.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 2