Feeling inauthentic and hollow, I ran back into the cave, which for some reason I knew would lead me to hell. I fell endlessly, surrounded by an iridescent rain of burning dreams, until I realized that I was not falling but flying. I was the Matanglawin, the great hawk of Philippine legend, whose eyes could see the ley lines of every possible future.
The voice of God boomed across the skies like a volley of cannon, and I discovered that God’s voice was my own. I was the Christian God, I was the indio Christ, and I was Bathala, the ancient God of the islands. I as God roared, and sent lightning and thunder through the Heavens. I shouted: “Mene, Thecel, Phares,” and then I finally understood the writing on the wall.
Do not touch me, I told Destiny. I shall choose my own Eternity.
“ANY LIFE IS made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1774)
JOSEPH WOKE UP at the crack of dawn. He dressed and went to the main house for an early breakfast. The housekeeper told him she’d collected and washed the clothes he had so hastily discarded on the pathway. She also returned his abandoned hat, but the wind-up mechanism was now broken, and needed replacement.
After borrowing an axe, Joseph walked back to his cottage. As soon as he got inside, he stripped off his clothes and folded them neatly on the bed. He took his Stenhouse mask from his luggage and put it on tightly.
He stood by the door, his hand on the knob, working up the courage to open it. After a few minutes, he decided to brave the outside world.
Joseph’s first sensation was that of swimming, as if his body was slicing through the sea instead of the crisp mountain air. The feeling was heady and liberating, and he could not help but leap about like a child.
The young man walked over to where the pile of logs were kept, and started chopping them into smaller pieces. All morning and afternoon he worked, until everything was reduced to firewood. When he was done, he ran to the lake, threw his mask by the shore, and dove into the clear, lustral waters.
When he returned to land, a small crowd had gathered to see him – the professor and his housekeeper, the schoolmistress and her children, the Hanoverian poet and his English friends. Klara was there too, along with the two Nordic-looking youths.
Joseph hid behind a thin fringe of reeds. He lifted his eyebrows shyly at his curious onlookers. It was an unspoken greeting peculiar to his homeland, deep and pregnant with meaning. Unfortunately, it was completely lost on his European audience.
Klara handed him his mask. He put it back on and returned to his cabin. He wondered if any of them felt fremdschämen – that uniquely German word for the awkwardness one felt for another’s embarrassment.
At dinner, he announced that he would be leaving the very next day.
DEAREST READER, DEPENDING on who you are and what you read into this story, there are three possible endings.
Mene: God hath numbered thy kingdom, and hath finished it.
THE NEXT DAY, Joseph boarded the Locomotive Aerostatique to Berlin. His short stay at the sanitarium had somehow swept the fear and doubt from his deeply-troubled mind. Having steeled his heart, the young man quietly accepted his destiny.
As soon as he reached the city, he headed to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie and messaged Professor Blumenttrit: “I wish to show those who deny us patriotism that we know how to die for our duty and our convictions.”
With great sadness his friend responded with just a single line: “Consumatum est.” It was finished.
A week later Joseph Mercado was on a clipper-steamer back to Manila, resolved to meet the immensity of his fate.
Thecel: Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.
AFTER RECEIVING A secret report from Joseph’s landlady, Frau von Kusiemski, the Count of Benomar sent his best spy to the Wolpertinger Luftbad sanitarium.
The erstwhile ‘Uranian poet from Hanover’ had hidden a small dictaphone in Professor Lebenskünstler’s study. Its wax cylinder produced the proof that the Reino de España had been seeking – that the foreign student, Joseph Alonso y Mercado, was Señor Laong Laan, the seditious author they had long been looking for.
That evening, the false poet sat next to Joseph, and spiked his drink with laudanum. In the middle of the night, the count’s top agent crept into his room, and silently broke the young man’s neck. Afterward, he burned the old cabin to ashes.
Joseph’s name became a footnote in history. His books were all destroyed, save for a single set of copies in the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Phares: Thy kingdom is divided and is given to the Medes and Persians.
KLARA STOLE INTO his room that night, and the two made noisy, passionate love. In Joseph’s fevered imagination, she was made of fire, and he was made of water. Water drowned fire, he reflected, and fire dried water. He knew that something in him had been irrevocably changed.
When they were done, she pointed to a trunk she had left by the washstand, before disappearing into the darkness. In the nearby lake, the body of a tall, bearded Hanoverian quietly drifted toward the silty gray bottom, a trail of crimson flowing from a single bullet wound to the head.
Joseph opened the trunk. Inside were a Mashinengewehr recoilless machinegun and the plans for a small, steam-powered Babbage Engine. On the handle of the weapon was an inscription carved in Latin: “Bene legere saecla vincere” – to read well is to master the ages.
Joseph blew out his lamp and stared into the blackness, unable to sleep. He abhorred violence, yet he could not deny that this kind of gun was power. It could be reverse-engineered, evening the odds for the ‘savage insurrectionists’ who were already fighting in his name. The Babbage engine could coordinate a military response, and spread his words to the world.
However Joseph worried that, even if his people succeeded in lifting the yoke of the white man, it would only be because white men themselves allowed it. What debt would he owe his mysterious benefactors? When would they collect?
The next day, he boarded the Locomotive Aerostatique to Berlin. As soon as he reached the city, he headed to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, and sent a curt message to Professor Blumenttrit: “Thank you?”
He signed off with the new name he had given himself, ‘Matanglawin’. (Joseph Alonso y Mercado, Jose Rizal, and Crisostomo Ibarra, as he knew them, were all dead.)
A week later, Matanglawin was on a clipper-steamer back to Manila – resolved to fight his Kastila masters, but deeply troubled by what the future could bring.
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based writer. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Apex Magazine, Bahamut Journal, Likhaan, The Philippines Free Press, Strange Horizons, Science Fiction World, and The Quarterly Literature Review of Singapore, as well as anthologies like The Best New Singapore Short Stories, Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction series. His story, ‘Here Be Dragons’, won first prize at the 2012 Romeo Forbes Children’s Literature competition. Visit his blog at vrocampo.com or follow him on Twitter @VictorOcampo.
About the Editors
Dean Francis Alfar heroically endures his wife’s loud breathing while he’s trying to write. Despite her selfish insistence on respiration, he’s managed to earn the Philippines Free Press Literary Award, two National Book Awards, and ten Palanca Awards for Literature, including the Grand Prize for his novel Salamanca, which also won the Gintong Aklat Award. His fiction has been collected in The Kite of Stars and Other Stories (Anvil), How to Traverse Terra Incognita (Visprint), and A Field Guide to the Roads of Manila (Anvil). He’s a member of the Manila Critics’ Circle and numerous prestigious literary award panels.
Nikki Alfar has fought fire 7,000 feet in midair and killed a snake with a flip-flop. Confoundingly, she finds writing much harder, but has nevertheless managed to
cadge occasional recognition out of the Palanca, Nick Joaquin, and international Mariner literary awards. She’s a back-to-back winner of the National Book Award, for her short story collections WonderLust (Anvil Publishing) and Now, Then, and Elsewhen (UST Publishing). (You can check out her complete bibliography on her Facebook timeline.) She also smokes like a chimney, dances the tango with her husband Dean, and invents whimsical origami for their daughters Sage and Rowan.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 10 Copyright © 2016 Dean Francis Alfar & Nikki Alfar
Individual stories Copyright © of their respective authors
Cover art by Eden Sarmiento
ePub design and production by Flipside team
eISBN 978-6-21410-079-8
This e-book edition published 2016
by Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.
Quezon City, Philippines
flipside.ph
Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10 Page 29