I took the boy’s hand, pulled him gently toward his mother, and saw them out. Then I gathered the day’s cash, grabbed my things. Papa Felix was about to say something—I heard him call my name—but I left without saying goodbye: it was the best way, I decided, to go.
I arrived at Buhay Bulaklak at 6 P.M. exactly. I was about to step in when a family stepped out, a Filipino couple and their baby. They looked tremendously pleased; even the baby seemed to smile. I moved aside to let them pass, watched them until they turned the corner.
Inside, Flora Ramirez was alone. She was sitting at the table behind the cash register, a thick, long-stemmed tropical flower in each hand, staring at a vase. “Birds-of-paradise,” she said. “Beautiful, eh?” I nodded, but I felt anxious, thinking about the family I saw and the ways she might have helped them.
“I have the money.” I could feel my heart speeding up. “I want to stay here and I have the money.”
She put down her flowers. She pulled a wooden stool from beneath the table and told me to sit. I joined her at the table, handed her the envelope of cash. She slipped it into the pocket of her blazer without counting it.
She reviewed the terms of our agreement, the obligations met so far. I’d made the first two payments (“Nonrefundable,” she said, in both English and Tagalog) and would bring the remaining twenty thousand dollars two days from now, plus an extra thousand to cover unexpected costs. This would guarantee a California ID, a Social Security card, various documents like school diplomas, recent utility bills, a birth certificate. “What you need to start a life. And you’re ready for it? If not, you’re wasting my time.” She was speaking Tagalog now, her voice louder than before. “Like the old people who come to me,” she said. “They want to stay, to be with their children, collect Social Security. Then what: they’re suddenly scared to spend their last years away from home. They say, ‘We are old, we cannot die away from home, blah blah blah.’ What’s wrong with dying here? The cemeteries aren’t good enough?” She reached into a pile of random flowers, grabbed a handful and jammed them into the vase. “In the end, your land is just the dirt you’re buried in.”
I looked at Flora Ramirez. “I don’t care where I’m buried,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, and I knew she believed me.
“You need a picture,” she said. She got up from her stool and stepped into a tiny office, pointed at a bare, blue wall, and had me stand against it. Then she reached into her desk for a digital camera and told me to be still.
She took my picture. “Why did you come?”
She had never asked the question before. Our months of correspondence were all business; she’d needed to know only my age and gender.
“For a happy life.” That was my answer.
She took a second picture, then the last. “Then it’s good you came to me.”
We stepped out of the office. We arranged to meet two days later, this time at her home. On the back of a business card she wrote La Playa @ Lincoln, but not her actual address. “Count seventeen houses down,” she said. “I live there.” Then she took some flowers, wrapped them in cellophane, tied them with black ribbon.
I thanked her, exited the shop. People on the street seemed to watch me again; I told myself it was the flowers. But sweat was dripping down my neck, soaking my collar, and my heart was beating so fast I swore I could hear it—if Felix Starro powers were real, I would have reached inside myself and pulled it out.
On the ride back to the hotel, I couldn’t get hold of Charma. My signal faded in and out, even stuck in traffic. A text message that said ALL PERFECT was the best I could do.
The driver let me off two blocks from the hotel. I walked the rest of the way, and when I crossed the street I spotted the Filipino maid sitting at a crowded bus stop. I didn’t intend eye contact, but it was the first time in America that I knew a face among the hundreds of strangers I passed every day.
She smiled meekly. “Beautiful flowers,” she said.
I’d almost forgotten the bouquet in my hand—I’d meant to leave them on a trash can again—so I offered them to her, but she was shy to accept. “They’ll die in that room,” I said.
She took the bouquet, sniffed the single rose.
Then she grabbed my hand. “Your grandfather,” she said, “he helps people?” She’d noticed all our come-and-go visitors, how despondent they looked when they arrived, how peaceful when they left. “I have money. I can pay.” I told her she was mistaking us for other people, but she said there was no need for me to lie. “I know he can help me,” she whispered in Tagalog. “I know who Felix Starro is.” Her grip tightened, her thumb pressing on my inner wrist like she was desperate to find a pulse.
“Stay away from him,” I said. I stepped back, slipped into the crowd, and hurried off.
In the hotel room, I found Papa Felix staring out the window. “You were talking to the maid.”
I locked the door behind me. “You were watching me?”
“Does she know who we are?” I told him no, but he rambled on with paranoid scenarios of the police discovering us, confiscating our client list, robbing us of our hard-earned money. “One mistake and we’re finished.”
“She was just talking about home,” I said, and made up a story about distant relatives she had in Batangas City, former teachers at my old elementary school. Then I poured him a cup of Cutty Sark and assured him once more: “She doesn’t know anything.”
“She’d better not. Because if she does, and if she talks, then our time here means nothing.” He picked up the fading, wrinkled ATM receipt and held it to my face. “This is our future. Don’t forget that.”
I gave him the whiskey and stepped toward the window, looked down at the street. The bus stop was at least two long blocks west of the hotel—I had to press against the glass just to see it. From where I was, the people standing there were faceless, blurry bodies. How Papa Felix could spot me with his old, bad eyes was beyond me, and a familiar feeling returned: that he possessed a real kind of power after all, some extra sense that could lead him to me, wherever I was.
He was standing over me when I woke the next morning. “I’m going with you,” he said.
He meant the butcher shop in Chinatown. The chicken livers I bought were too fresh, he said, therefore fake-looking. With one day left, there was no time for my mistakes.
He set a Snickers bar and a banana next to my pillow. “Eat breakfast and let’s go.”
On my own, the walk to Chinatown took seventeen minutes; with Papa Felix, it was twice as long. But I stayed ahead, by half a block sometimes, and when he caught up at the butcher shop he was out of breath, and he accused me of trying to lose him in the crowd. He took a seat on a bench outside the Chinese bakery next door, then gave me a fifty-dollar bill. “Just get it done,” he said.
I entered the shop, pushed my way through the crowd to take a number. They called me twenty minutes later; I paid for the livers and left. But outside, the bench was empty; Papa Felix was inside the bakery now, sitting at a corner table with three silver-haired Chinese women. They leaned in as he spoke, nodding despite the quizzical looks on their faces. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d solicited business like this, but his method was the same—he tapped their foreheads with his thumb, shut his eyes, and mouthed secret prayers to himself. It was always a bogus-looking act, but at some point I just assumed that Filipinos were somehow predisposed to believing anyone who claimed to understand their pain. And yet I could imagine these Chinese women making appointments with Papa Felix, who would insist they pay up front, then arrange for them to meet us long after we’d gone; he’d done it before. I pictured these women knocking on our hotel door, awaiting help that would never come.
I went inside, walked up to Papa Felix. “I’m ready to go,” I said. His eyes were still closed and he kept on praying, so I shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes. Let’s go.”
He turned to me, gave a mean look that I gave right back. “I’m working,�
�� he said.
“I’m not.” I slammed the bag of livers on the table. The Chinese women glared at me with scolding faces.
I walked to the end of the block. I tried to cross, but the light was red, and Papa Felix caught up with me. “What were you trying to do in there?” he asked.
I pressed the button for the crosswalk. “Nothing.”
“The maid yesterday. Those women today. You’re trying to tell them about us?”
I pressed the button again and again.
“You think I’m stupid.” He grabbed my arm, squeezed it tight. “I know about you, Felix.”
He was stronger than I thought. “Let me go,” I said, then finally pushed him off. He stumbled back, almost fell, and the bag of livers slipped from his hands, everything inside spilling onto the sidewalk.
The traffic light was still red, but I crossed the street. Papa Felix would be close behind me, so I walked faster, zigzagging through the tourist crowds. Police blocked the next intersection—a moving truck had rear-ended a minivan—and I couldn’t continue. So I turned around, ready to face him, to say whatever needed to be said. But he wasn’t there. I started back through the crowds and finally found him still on the corner, head bowed like a mourner at a grave. He was bent down, picking up the livers from the sidewalk, one by one; a true believer might have thought he was extracting Negativities from the Earth itself. To me, he looked like a penniless man gathering coins.
“Just leave them,” I said. “Let’s go.” Standing over him, I could see the silver in his roots, all that I’d missed.
What else could I do? I joined Papa Felix on the ground and helped him clean up. People who passed us looked curious, then repulsed by the livers in our hands. Some shook their heads, like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
That whole day his focus was off. Twice he palmed a liver but not a blood bag, which made for oddly bloodless Extractions. Then he did the opposite with the last patient, extracting nothing but blood. He tried to explain: “Nothing is there. Nothing is wrong with you.” The patient got up and refused to pay, then peeled a plastic crucifix from the wall and dropped it on the ground. He slammed the door on his way out, so hard the walls shook. And I realized I was done.
I began cleaning up, one last time, and made no ceremony of it: I simply put things away. All the while Papa Felix just stood by the window, staring straight ahead at the vacant building across the street. Only when I took the day’s cash from the ice bucket did he finally speak. “Don’t deposit the money,” he said. “You keep it. Belated birthday gift.”
Birthday. I had turned nineteen three weeks before, on the plane to America. But I didn’t know exactly when it happened—that whole time in the sky I wasn’t sure if it was today or tomorrow, which country was ahead or behind and by how many hours or days—not until Papa Felix leaned over, in the moment before he fell asleep, to whisper, “Happy Birthday.”
I put the cash in my pocket. “I’ll take it to the bank.”
“I know what you think of me, Felix. But it’s the best I could do.” He was still staring out the window, but squinting now, as if the evening moon were unbearably bright. “Can you tell me the name of a man who would do any different?”
I didn’t answer. I grabbed my windbreaker and backpack. I checked the peephole before leaving, but as I stepped into the hall I noticed a small, white envelope on the floor. I picked it up. Inside was a picture of Papa Felix, and on the back was a note that read Felix Starro and Felix Starro. Regards, Mrs. Celica Delgado. It was the photo she’d taken two days before, and when I looked closer I saw part of me within it, the very edge of my face. But what struck me was Papa Felix’s graying eyes and the sinking skin beneath, his knobby shoulders, the fading color of his old hands.
That night, Papa Felix slept even more deeply, and I took the cash from the inner lining in my luggage and packed it into a large, padded envelope, then put it inside my backpack. I slipped into bed but stayed awake. It was morning by the time I finally closed my eyes, noon when I woke.
Papa Felix was dressed, packing his clothes. “Last full day in America,” he said.
I got out of bed. “You didn’t wake me.”
“It’s a long plane ride back,” he said. “Best to sleep now, as much as you can.”
I showered, dressed. My meeting with Flora Ramirez was at 3 P.M.; I told Papa Felix I would spend the day souvenir shopping. “Souvenirs,” he said. “Waste of money, waste of time. What’s to remember about this place?” He looked at me expectantly, as though he wouldn’t move or speak until I answered.
I gathered my things, promised to be back before dark.
The taxicab driver said that Flora Ramirez lived on the edge of the continent. “If the big one hits,” he said, “you’re out to sea.”
We turned onto La Playa, stopped in front of the seventeenth house. Metal bars covered the windows, and dried-up ivy spread over the walls, hiding the address.
I stepped out of the cab, walked to the door. I meant to knock but she opened first, as though she’d been watching me through the peephole. I followed her in, up a flight of carpeted stairs to the living room. This was my first time in an American house, but it wasn’t so different from any house back home—there was a two-person couch and a white wicker rocking chair, a small glass table in between. I’d expected flowers, but there were none that I could see, not even a vase.
The house was silent, and I wondered if Flora Ramirez had any family. Yet on the floor, propped against the wall, was a large picture frame full of faces and bodies cut out from photos, like a creature with a hundred different heads. Closer, I saw that they were all Filipino, some smiling, some not, and I recognized one of them, a small body in the middle. It was TonyBoy, Charma’s cousin. His hand was up like he was waving hello or goodbye at the camera. I wondered when my picture would be added, where Flora Ramirez would place it.
“Those are the ones I help,” Flora Ramirez said. There were several brown envelopes in her hand. “Do you see how happy they are?”
“I see TonyBoy.” I pointed at his picture.
She blinked.
“TonyBoy Llamas. My girlfriend’s cousin.”
She nodded, then put the envelopes on the table. “Check them.” She sat on the rocking chair.
I picked one up, took out the ID card inside. It was a driver’s license, my first ever; blue capital letters spelled out CALIFORNIA across the top. My picture was grainy and faded, as if taken years instead of two days before, and the expression on my face surprised me, how it matched what I felt now: my eyes were focused but blank, my mouth plain and straight as a minus sign.
Then I saw it.
John Arroyo Cruz was the name printed beside my face. The signature below spelled it out, unmistakably.
“Is there a problem?” Flora Ramirez asked.
“John,” I said.
“Nobody keeps a name. That’s not the process.”
I set the card down on the table.
She said it again: “Nobody keeps a name.”
The thing to do was nod and say, I understand, to accept what she had done with gratitude, without questions. But I wanted to know: “Who is he?”
She leaned back in the rocking chair, silent for a moment, like she didn’t want to answer. “A store clerk from L.A.,” she finally said. “Killed one year ago. I know the parents.” I glanced over the faces on the floor. I wondered what names Flora Ramirez had given them, and what people she had taken them from.
Suddenly my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Charma. “I need to answer,” I said. “Sorry.”
She got up from her chair, said, “Be quick,” then went into the kitchen.
I flipped open my phone, moved to the corner of the room. “I can’t talk,” I whispered, “but listen: How’s TonyBoy?”
“Who?” Static crackled over Charma’s voice. “Are you there?”
“I’m here. Have you heard from TonyBoy?”
“TonyBoy?” She paused.
“Not in months. Maybe a year. Why?”
I looked out the window. Beyond the metal bars the ocean appeared motionless, the clouds above equally still, and on the street below there was no one, just a few cars passing by. At the end of Flora Ramirez’s driveway, a trash can lay on its side, rolling back and forth with the wind. I imagined myself in the future, walking down a similar street: If someone called out John, would I answer? Would I even turn around?
I told Charma I had to go, then hung up without saying goodbye.
Flora Ramirez returned, sat in her rocking chair. I took my place on the couch. She mentioned the hour, the other appointments she had today, and I knew it was time for me to pay. I unzipped my backpack. The padded envelope was right there, plump with all the cash inside, but I pretended to search through the various compartments of my bag. “I made a mistake,” I said. I explained I had two similar bags, one for sightseeing and one for business, and I’d brought the wrong one with me. “If I could have more time”—I zipped up my backpack—“I can bring it later today.”
She stared at me for a moment; I knew she didn’t believe me. But she didn’t call me a liar, didn’t reach for my backpack. She simply rocked back and forth, like she was giving me a chance to confess the truth. “If I could have more time,” I said again, and my heart would not slow down.
“You do what you need to do.” She looked out the window, toward the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We stood up, and I followed her down the stairs. Neither of us mentioned my possible return, and neither of us said goodbye. I wondered if Flora Ramirez was her real name, and if not, who she had been before.
I walked to the end of the block and waited for a taxicab, remembering the driver’s license and the life I’d glimpsed from it: John Arroyo Cruz lived in a city called Riverside, was born two years before I was. His eyes were brown—mine were true black—and he was five feet six inches, slightly shorter than me. At the bottom of the license, I had noticed the word donor, and now I pictured myself dead, thinking, if I were not Felix Starro anymore, what would be taken from me, what would be left.
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