Where she was the night before, Maxima doesn’t say and Excel doesn’t ask. But he watches: how hard she punches The Bod and how long she lasts, how deeply she prays into her morning orasyon and what she looks like when she opens her eyes. There are no bruises or marks on her face. No anger or sadness. She’s the same.
Later, she enters the living room in her robe, towel turbaned on her head and face green as a Martian. “Avocado, coconut oil, Splenda, and lemon,” she says. “Cleans the skin, makes it smooth. I want to look good for tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“The showing of my movie. You forgot?”
He did. “Of course not.”
“Well, if you have plans, don’t worry about it.” She sits on the couch and turns on the TV. “I know you have your ‘important discoveries.’”
He wonders how long she’ll use those words against him, how long he’ll let her believe that he really was out there somewhere, excavating. Maybe it’s better that she thinks the world holds more opportunities for him than either of them thought. Maybe it’ll make it easier for her, the next time he leaves.
“No plans. Just the movie,” he says. “Can’t wait.”
“Good. I can’t wait too.”
All day, Maxima stays in her robe on the couch in front of the TV. She watches bits of random shows—a young Puerto Rican couple argues over which Brooklyn condo to buy; a pair of middle-aged white guys tries not to perish in the Alaskan wilderness; harnessed fashion models, shrieking and weeping, dangle from a crane over a canyon. But whatever she watches, she says nothing and doesn’t react, her face calm to the point of blank. She isn’t so much lounging and relaxing as she’s keeping still, as though exerting as little energy as possible, saving it all for the night ahead.
F.O.F.F.F., THE FULL-ON FILIPINO FILM FESTIVAL, IS SHOWING ANG Puso Ko VS. Ang Baril Mo at seven o’clock at Sightline Community College. It’s fifteen minutes away on the freeway, but Roxy picks them up at five, the school like a ghost town when they arrive. “Why are we here so early?” Excel says.
“This is once in lifetime,” Maxima says. “I want the best seats.”
They walk around campus, go building to building, each one like a gigantic rectangular concrete block. Nothing is scenic or lovely, but Maxima makes Roxy take her picture by anything she assumes is a campus landmark—a small terra-cotta fountain, an oak tree covered with pink ribbons, an outdoor sculpture shaped like a giant kidney bean. In each picture, Maxima poses with her hands clasped over her hip, eyes off to the side. She’s not wearing an evening gown, but her new dress—knee length and black, sleeves speckled with silver, and purchased for $54.99 at T.J. Maxx (she’s kept the tags, plans to return it for a full refund tomorrow)—gives her a real-life glamour Excel hasn’t seen before. With all the posing, she seems to know it, too. “New pictures for my online profile,” she says, “good for business.”
Still too early, they kill time with another loop around campus (“I didn’t know college was so ugly,” Maxima says), then sit on a bench to eat the sandwiches Roxy packed in her purse (canned corned beef, mayonnaise). “Opening night for Ang Puso Ko was the best,” Maxima says. “Red carpet, fans, reporters, after-party at Studio 53—ours was first, believe me. My gown looked like real gold, and the eye patch–wearing son of a bitch brought fake cocaine, just to look cool. We even got our picture in PSSSSST! magazine, swear to god.” She continues reminiscing, and if the story is even partly true, Excel knows Maxima is bound for disappointment: later, approaching the Math and Sciences auditorium where the film is being shown, he can see there are less than fifteen people gathered beneath F.O.F.F.F.’s sagging banner (it says, FILM EVENT), and the bored-looking girl sitting behind a folding table makes only a half-hearted effort to sell more tickets. “It’s still early,” Roxy says, squeezing Maxima’s shoulder, “let’s get the best seats.” Before they enter, Maxima puts on dark glasses and a baseball cap. She doesn’t want to run the risk of being recognized, of word leaking out that an ex-Philippines action star is a TNT in America.
Inside, just outside the auditorium doors, a mounted poster of Ang Puso Ko VS. Ang Baril Mo sits on an easel. Like the poster for Malakas Strike Force 3: Panalo Ako, Talaga! in the kitchen, this one is an illustrated collage of big action moments, lifelike in detail, garish in color. “It’s you!” Roxy says, pointing at the top, where Maxima, in character, stands atop a pile of rubble, feet wide apart and arms up and out, a pistol in each hand, her whole body like an X.
Maxima stands next to the poster. “One more picture,” she says.
“For your profile?” Roxy asks.
Maxima removes the hat, the dark glasses. “For me.”
BY 6:50 P.M., PEOPLE HAVE STOPPED TRICKLING INTO THE AUDITORIUM. At best, the movie will get half an audience. But Maxima, glasses off but hat still on, can’t stop smiling, her hands clasping and unclasping on her lap.
Excel thinks they have the row to themselves, until a girl with a McDonald’s bag sits a few seats down from him. “Hey,” she says, leaning over, “was there a sign-in sheet somewhere?”
He shakes his head, unsure what she means. “Sign-in sheet?”
“For Asian American Studies 26, with Quirante? It’s for extra credit.”
“I don’t go to this school.”
“Where do you go?”
He’s unsure how to answer, if he even should. “Nowhere,” he says.
“Oh,” she says, “that’s too bad,” then takes out what looks like an entire value meal from her McDonald’s bag.
Excel turns toward the screen. The last time he saw a movie was in Hello City, when they were showing Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler for Paul Newman night at the Square (an annual thing, though no one knew why). He wasn’t into either film, but it was one of his favorite nights—sitting on a tarp holding Sab, the two of them wrapped in heavy wool blankets, whole galaxies bright in the sky.
The F.O.F.F.F. organizer, a film studies student named Jun-Jun, steps onto the stage. He welcomes the audience, holds up a DVD copy of Ang Puso Ko VS. Ang Baril Mo, and gives a brief introduction, reminds the audience to stick around for a postscreening Q&A with a panel of film studies faculty. “They’re eager to share their thoughts,” he says.
Lights go dark, screen lights up. The film opens with a panoramic sweep of Manila—smoggy skyline and clogged traffic, luxury high-rises and tin-roof shanties—then zooms to a small girl, barefoot and dressed in pink, bouncing a green ball against a cinder block wall. A jeep pulls up, and out steps a woman in a blond wig, red heels, black trench coat. The woman speaks, and subtitles flash on-screen.
—Little girl. Where is your mother?
—My mother is dead, ma’am.
—Who cares for you?
—My father, ma’am. But he is a drunk who patronizes the whores!
—What is your name, little girl?
—My name is Mercy, ma’am.
—Mercy. Take this cash. Buy yourself some shoes.
—Thank you, ma’am. But ma’am, who are you?
—Could it be you do not know? I am your sister, of course!
The woman climbs back into the jeep and, in slow motion, removes her wig. She holds it for a moment, almost pets it, then flings it out onto the street. The jeep speeds off, and the girl snatches it and runs home, goes to the bathroom and looks in the cracked mirror, puts the wig on. “Sister?” she says. The moment freezes, fades out, then fades in to the present day, where the girl, now a young woman played by Maxima, stares into the same mirror, her reflection broken up by the cracks in the glass.
Excel has seen her on-screen before, always on their small TV. But on the big screen, it’s perfectly clear how little she’s changed; Maxima will always look like Maxima.
The title flashes in bright and blocky letters, followed by the opening cast credits, all the actors’ names fading in and out against a backdrop of slow-motion explosions.
Fidencio Manalo Diaz as . . . Rico!
Petra DelMundo as . .
. Girlie!
Joey “Bing-Bong” Cacha as . . . JakeBoy!
Valentina Cruz as . . . A Nun!
and Maxima Maxino as . . . Mercy!
Maxima clenches her fists, presses them against her heart. “Okay everybody,” she whispers, “here we go.”
WHEN THE LIGHTS GO UP, MAXIMA IS ON HER FEET CLAPPING; SHE makes Roxy and Excel do the same. He scans the audience, sees fewer people than when the film began, most of them here, Excel assumes, for extra credit. Their applause is just enough to be polite, which makes their three-person standing ovation even more embarrassing.
They sit down and Jun-Jun steps back onstage, along with two film studies professors—one white woman, one Filipino man. Standing behind a podium, they discuss the film’s significance, how it could be read as a post-Marcos, post-Aquino social document, a critique of the coexistence of grotesque wealth and abject poverty within the common spaces of Manila, even a third-wave feminist manifesto. Maxima nods with every point they make, as though her work is finally being understood.
“But we should also consider,” Jun-Jun says, “that the film is—how to say this—bad. It’s bad.”
The girl next to Excel dips a cold fry in ketchup and laughs.
“The dialogue, the narrative logic, or illogic, I should say, and never mind the acting,” Jun-Jun says. The lecturers nod, smiling, and admit that the film isn’t exactly aware of its awfulness, that it does possess an earnest, if not misguided, commitment to its own implausible material. Their conversation is loaded with terms Excel doesn’t know—metanarratorial, social Darwinism, post-post colonialist, Ed Wood–esque—but when he looks over at Maxima, she seems to understand them perfectly.
She removes her hat and stands.
Jun-Jun points to her. “Question?”
“It’s a good movie,” she says.
Jun-Jun nods slowly. “Given context, it has merits.”
“Ano ba, ang context? It has a heartbreaking story, top-quality stunt work, a cathedral explosion”—she’s counting the list on her fingers—“it’s drama, it’s action, it’s life.” She stays standing, waiting for a response, but no one onstage speaks, and the audience just stares at her, like she’s someone who came only to disrupt. “Maxima,” Roxy whispers, taking her wrist, “bahala na.”
She sits, puts the hat back on, the dark glasses, too. But there’s no need to wear them. Though everyone saw her taking down a group of machine gun–wielding cocaine dealers, rescuing Catholic schoolkids from a sinking canoe, and running through a collapsing church on fire, nobody knows who Maxima is.
AFTER, THEY GO TO THE F.O.F.F.F. RECEPTION IN THE FOYER. IT’S typical Filipino party fare—lumpia, pancit, banana-cue, several liters of soda. “They’re serving Pepsi?” Roxy says. “Tacky.”
“Why is that tacky?” Excel asks.
“Don’t you know? Pepsi Riots of 1992. The Number Fever Contest? A million pesos for one winning bottle cap number, and Pepsi printed eight hundred thousand of them. They refused to pay up, thousands of dirt-poor Pinoys rioted. I lost an uncle in that riot. Pepsi kills, believe me.”
“Never heard of it.” He pours himself a cup, which Roxy dumps on the ground and refills with orange Fanta. “Know your history,” she says, a line Excel remembers from the eighth grade, when his history teacher gave him a D+ on a multiple-choice Civil War test. “Know your history,” she wrote in red, underlining your twice. Even then, Excel thought, It’s not my history, one of the perks of being born neither in America nor the Philippines. The only history he needed to know was his own.
Roxy asks Maxima if she remembers the Pepsi Riots, and Maxima says, “Yeah, sure, of course,” but she’s agitated, scratching the back of her neck as she scans the small crowd. “I have to pee,” she says, then walks off.
“Does she know about the baby yet?” Roxy whispers.
Excel shakes his head.
“Ano ba? It’s still a secret? You have to tell her, Excel.”
“I will. At some point. Before the baby comes, obviously. Sab and I just need to figure out a plan.”
“Plan? She gives birth, you have a baby. There’s your plan, di ba?” She shakes her head. “Bahala na, you know best. But take this, if it helps.” She puts a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. This time, he doesn’t even try to refuse.
Roxy steps away to make a call. Excel fills a paper plate with five lumpia, walks outside to eat on a bench. Had he known the showing would be held at Sightline, he might not have come. He’d skipped senior-year field trips to local colleges, shrugged off the idea of meeting with the college counselor—why bother with a future that would never be yours? But he feels more at ease than he thought, and the students around him—most of whom, because of the F.O.F.F.F. event, are Filipino—don’t look so special, just people minding their own business, going about their day. Though Maxima had slammed a fighting stick on The Bod’s head when he told her he wasn’t even considering college, her anger faded fast, and he suspected that she was secretly relieved; now she wouldn’t have to worry about Excel being found out by new college friends or overly concerned professors. But if he’d actually enrolled at a school like this one, maybe college might’ve worked. He doubts he would’ve thrived, but what if he’d done the absolute minimum, accomplished just enough to pass? What better way to hide than to be perfectly, invisibly average?
Excel hears Maxima shout his name.
He looks up, sees her coming, fast as a speed-walker. “Let’s go, let’s go,” she says, “Roxy’s waiting in the car.” She knocks the plate of lumpia from his lap, pulls him up, says, “Move! Move! Move!” Now she’s running and he doesn’t know why, but he imagines police or Immigration or, for some reason, the paramedics who took Joker away, coming for them. “What’s happening?” he calls after her, and someone passes him from behind. It’s Jun-Jun, chasing after Maxima. “She took my movie!” he says, gaining on her. Now Excel starts running—he doesn’t know what else to do—and just as Roxy’s car pulls up in front of the campus, Maxima stops, spins, and grabs Jun-Jun by the shoulders, twists her leg around his, sends him to the ground. A bystanding student shrieks, a few others just stand and watch, perplexed. Jun-Jun gets to his feet, looks at Maxima. “Bitch,” he says, and Excel remembers the move used against him nine months before, the morning he tried to leave forever: he kicks Jun-Jun in the back of the knee, uses all his weight, the full strength of himself, to bring him down.
SAFE ON THE FREEWAY, MAXIMA TURNS BACK TO EXCEL AND RAISES her hand for a high five. He doesn’t give her one. “What were you thinking?” he says. “What if he calls the police?”
She turns back to face front. “It’s fine.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“I could get in trouble too. I assaulted that guy.”
“And you did a good job! I just wanted you to run, but instead you took down the enemy. Joker would be proud.”
“It’s true,” Roxy says, smiling in the rearview mirror.
Maxima takes out the DVD from her purse. “And now I have this back. Do you know how long I’ve been searching for this? ‘Meta-colonialist Ed Wood.’ Bullshit. Those sons of bitches don’t deserve my movie.” She holds the disc up to the light, so that from the backseat Excel can see himself reflected in it. “How’d you learn to do that, by the way?”
“Do what,” Excel says.
“That move. What you used against Jun-Jun.”
“You know how,” he says. “It’s the Maximattack. I learned it from you.”
She nods, satisfied. “I just wanted to hear you say it,” she says.
THAT NIGHT, EXCEL WATCHES THE NEWS, SCARED THEY’LL REPORT the incident with Jun-Jun. He can barely remember the moment itself, but he imagines grainy footage caught on surveillance video or a bystander’s camera—blurry versions of Maxima running and Jun-Jun in pursuit, Excel suddenly entering the shot, his takedown of Jun-Jun klutzier than he remembers, so that instead of skilled fighters, he and Maxima look like buffoon
s. He imagines the clip going viral, airing on a show like America’s Dumbest Criminals, that Immigration or the police will see it and track them down.
“You think anybody cares?” Maxima says. “You think we’re enough to make a story?” She takes the remote, mutes the TV because she needs the apartment quiet. “I’m working tonight,” she says, then goes to her room.
But no matter what Maxima says, Excel can’t shake the fear of getting caught, the paranoia of having been seen. Between the near-accidental shoplifting from Target, stealing from and assaulting Jun-Jun, even the awkward three-person standing ovation from Maxima, Roxy, and himself, he has never been so recklessly public, so utterly the opposite of who and what he’s supposed to be.
Maxima, meanwhile, watches herself nonstop. She’s borrowed Roxy’s DVD player, and now Ang Puso Ko VS. Ang Baril Mo plays all day, and at night (on the couch, dinner plate on her lap) she watches again, rewinding favorite scenes over and over, sometimes so often that she never gets to the end. When Excel comes home late from The Pie, he’ll sit through fifteen or twenty minutes, just to be polite, then go to his room and often to the roof, until he’s tired enough to finally sleep.
Tonight, Excel returns home to find Maxima asleep on the couch, the movie on the screen, paused at a moment set in a street market—a long row of vendors on both sides of a narrow road, and tables piled high with skewered meat, fried fish, endless vegetables and fruits. He doesn’t remember this moment from the F.O.F.F.F. viewing—it seems incidental, full of extras instead of real actors, maybe a transition to a more pivotal scene. But moving closer to the screen, he finds Maxima in the crowd, standing next to a vendor selling sandals. In the movie, she is Mercy, assassin and avenger, but she doesn’t look ready to attack or defend, or burdened with a mission for revenge. She just watches the street, as though she didn’t hear the director call “Action” and was, for a moment, out of character, simply herself.
He reaches for the remote, hits Mute, hits Play. The scene resumes, and Maxima steps into the road and walks a quick, straight line down the middle, the crowds ahead parting to clear a path. The camera zooms in on her hand, and she reaches into her purse and pulls out a knife, twirls it between her fingers, ready for the next scene’s takedown.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 12