Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  “It’s Teresa,” I say.

  The next morning I find Sister Marguerite in the hospital nursery, a sleeping infant in her arms. She motions for me to enter, but I do so cautiously, and once inside I stay close to the door. “I’ve been thinking of you,” she whispers. “Your meeting went well?”

  “I brought him the food. He ate.”

  “You’re making this easier for him. I’m sure of it.”

  I picture his leather shoes, the only thing I see of him, pacing back and forth along a strip of sunlight. “Maybe.”

  She moves from crib to crib, smiling at each baby inside, and sometimes she closes her eyes for several seconds, as if praying quickly on their behalf. But babies born in Culion have one of two possible futures: if after three years they show signs of the disease, they will be reunited with their sick mothers; if no signs appear, if they are perfectly healthy, then they will be sent to a Manila orphanage, unnamed and undocumented so they can never know who or what they’ve come from.

  I don’t know which future she is praying for.

  “Sister”—I take a step forward, whispering so I won’t disturb the babies—“when you first sailed to Culion, do you remember seeing the island?”

  She nods.

  “And what did you think?”

  She glances at the floor for a moment, as though she’ll find her answer there. “It was night when we arrived. The island looked like a shadow. But I knew it was my place, that I was meant to be here.”

  “And you have no regrets? You never wanted to leave?”

  “You don’t question a calling. You obey it.”

  One of the babies cries from his crib. Sister Marguerite moves toward me, asks me to take the one in her arms. I’ve been in remission for three years. The doctors say I am of no harm to anyone. But I stand still, arms at my side.

  “Hold her,” she says. “Please.”

  I take the baby. She sleeps soundly but I can barely feel her, as though I’m carrying air.

  “Did he say anything else?” Sister Marguerite asks. “Will he join us soon? He can’t stay in that shack forever.”

  I rock the baby, just barely. She shifts, yawns without sound. “He still wants to leave.”

  Sister Marguerite sighs. “So do they all.”

  She’s wrong. Few patients ever think of leaving. Their wish for escape, their longing for a world beyond the colony gates, died long ago. But here in the nursery, the truth is undeniable. I hear it when they cry for their mothers, for where they ought to be. And now I feel the weight of it moving, waking in my arms.

  In the afternoon, a group of children waits outside my dormitory. I know them from when Sister Marguerite convinced me to give them drawing lessons, a way for me to contribute to the colony. “We drew these for the American,” one of them says. “Will you give them to him?” There are pictures of rocket ships, men with wings, children as tall as trees. One shows a family, arms linked and afloat above rooftops.

  I roll them up like a scroll. “I’ll bring them,” I say.

  I knock twice when I arrive, tell him it’s me. When I enter, I find the chair unfolded and upright. At some point, he was here on my side, the curtain drawn, and light let in.

  I slip the drawings to his side of the room. “Some of the children drew these for you.”

  I hear him unroll the pictures, going through them one by one. “They’re great. Tell them I said thanks.”

  Moments pass in silence, neither of us moving in our places. A slant of light stretches from the half-closed door, grazing the edge of my arm. Beside me, the black curtain is like a wall, so dark and solid I feel I could lean against it.

  He moves closer to the curtain. “So you lived in California. I’m from a town called Tulare. Do you know it?”

  “I don’t. Sorry.”

  “For a while I lived in Santa Monica.”

  “Santa Monica?”

  “Yeah. You’ve been?”

  I may have, once. If I’m right, it was near the ocean, with a pier on one end of the beach. “I’ve heard of it,” I tell him, and I can see myself sitting on the shore with my legs stretched out, my hands wrist-deep in the sand. I’m eight or nine years old, and I can feel the ocean current pulling me in. But I’m not afraid, because the tide always carries me back, as if it knows where I belong. “There’s a pier in Santa Monica?”

  “Yeah. With lots of rides and games, like a county fair.”

  I can picture those, too. “Then yes. I was there.”

  A breeze comes through the door, an unexpected chill. I get up to shut it, and when I look back, his hand appears just beneath the curtain, holding an orange. One half in shadow, one half in light. Like a distant sun, in the midst of eclipse.

  “I saved one of them. We can split it.”

  “Those were meant for you.”

  “It’s a piece of fruit. No big deal. Besides, my nails aren’t so strong. Maybe you could peel it for me.”

  I return to my chair, pick the fruit up from the floor. I dig my thumbnail into the rind, peel it back, the scent of orange rising like mist. In California, my mother would peel them for me, removing the rind in a single spiral. I’d wind it around my wrist like a bracelet, which would always make her laugh.

  I pass the fruit beneath the curtain. “Take half,” he says, and without argument, I separate the fruit with my thumbs and pass him his share. Then I peel off a segment, take a small bite. It’s sour and sweet and acidic, a taste so strong it overwhelms me; my eyes begin to water and I wipe them dry.

  “Thank you, Jack,” I say.

  We say very little as we eat, but the sound of his voice—his clear and perfect American English—returns me to that moment on the shore. In my years on Culion, I’ve thought of it before, but I never knew if it was a memory or a dream, something conjured up in the fever from my first days in the colony. But now I know it was true, and I’m remembering other things too: the city traffic that once lulled me to sleep, the shouts of kids on a playground, the taste and feel of ice. And when the American says nothing, it’s almost enough just to hear him breathe on the other side of the curtain.

  The following morning, I bring him a bowl of guavas, then slices of mango in the afternoon. I do the same thing the next day, and my afternoon visit goes well into the dinner hour. It’s dark by the time I start down the hill, but I find my way back; that’s how well I know the path between us.

  He tells me there are things he needs. A razor. Cigarettes. A newspaper in English, if I can find one. I tell him about our general store, and he sets down several bills on the floor beneath the curtain—some American, some Philippine, all of it worthless. He doesn’t know that the colony has its own currency, a way of preventing anything we might touch from escaping into the world. The first time I saw a Culion coin, I kept staring at the words Bureau of Health spelled out along the edge. It looked like play money from a board game.

  I take the money, and tell him I’ll do what I can.

  In the plaza, several men are building what looks like a small stage, and a few young girls are kneeling on the ground, making a large banner and smaller signs. Sister Marguerite is supervising, and as I approach her, I see the children’s message: Welcome. Peace Corps volunteers are visiting in a week, she explains, and the colony wants to celebrate their arrival. They come once every few years, bearing gifts of medicine, bandages, crates of canned meat that barely last us a week, and they are always eager to fix broken things—faulty pipes in the kitchen, power lines knocked down by storms. And every time we honor them like heroes, but, even in their protective clothing, they keep their distance from us.

  “Will we tell them about the American?” I ask.

  “For what? So they can return him to the States, send him back to the Navy? He needs to be cared for, not punished.” She says the doctors, even the colony administrators, agree on this. “For better or worse, he’s one of us.” I nod and turn to leave, but she takes my wrist and asks about the cash in my hand, plucks a bi
ll from between my fingers and holds it up to the light, staring at it like it’s a postcard from a faraway and wondrous place. “Real money,” she says. “There’s so much the American still doesn’t know.” She gives back the bill. “But he has you, Teresa. You’re the best person to teach him about this life.” Behind her, one girl finishes a sign and begins another. Her fingers are merely nubs now, the marker trembling as she spells out Thank You.

  “I hope the volunteers have a lovely visit,” I tell her. As if I won’t be here.

  He knows my footsteps; before I knock or speak he calls my name and tells me to come in. The curtain is swaying when I enter, as if he was on my side of the room only moments ago, then crossed over to his when he heard me approach.

  I sit in my chair, set a paper bag on the floor and he reaches out, takes it. He asks how I was able to get everything he needed, so I tell him about the merchant boats that occasionally come to the colony, supplying our store with American products. “But the boats won’t have you,” I tell him, before he can become hopeful. “You would never be allowed on board.”

  “I wasn’t thinking it,” he says. But when I see his silhouette rise from the bed and move toward the window, he looks like a man attempting escape. And if I turned away for just a moment he could be gone, leaving me alone with the black curtain and the empty space behind it.

  “You always leave,” I say. “The Navy. California. All those cities in the Philippines.”

  He paces the length of the curtain, as if trying to figure out a response. “I guess it’s a habit. One I’ll have to break in Culion. But you’ve made it your home.”

  He has no right to say that, and for a moment I’m tempted to lift the curtain, flood the room with light, and tell him so. But where else would home be? California? Olongapo City? Wherever in the world my mother is? Even if I could somehow find my way back, those places would be closed off to me, and then where would I go?

  “I’ve done what I’ve had to do,” I say.

  “What’s your story?” he asks. “You know mine now.”

  I say nothing.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “You can tell me.” He moves closer to the curtain, his voice drawing me into the blackness, and yet I think I might be safe, that there is no danger in the deep.

  I give him what he wants.

  I begin with what I remember first: how my mother and I survived in the Olongapo slums, doing whatever we could for money, even when it meant hiding lepers in our tenement apartment for whatever they could pay her. Don’t touch them, she said, don’t even look at them, and you’ll be all right. Later, when she met my stepfather, an American soldier stationed in the Philippines, she saw him as a rescue from our life, a guarantee for citizenship, and we left with him for California. My mother promised we would never go back, but one afternoon, less than two years later, she noticed wrinkled patches of skin on my forearms, purple sores on my legs. It was then, I’m sure of it, that my mother began planning the journey to Culion, knowing she would let me go, that she would never return.

  “What was the last thing she said to you?” he asks.

  I answer but he doesn’t hear me. So I say it again. “She said she hoped that I would die quickly.”

  He doesn’t speak, and I feel I should be ashamed by what I’ve just told him, for cheating him out of what could have been an exchange of happy-ending stories from home. But I don’t apologize. Instead we sit, Jack and me, the only Americans in the colony. And when he hears me weep, he offers me a handkerchief beneath the curtain, his initials embroidered in the corner.

  “You’re the only one who’d offer me this,” I say.

  “You’re the only one who’d take it.” And when I do, his fingers curl up around my hand, and he raises it, lifting the curtain just a bit. Light from his side pours into mine. He fits his fingers in between my own, explores the curve of my wrist, the deep lines of my palm. I press my thumb into his hand, feel his skin move over bone. Then the darkness takes his form as he leans into the curtain and into me, his forehead resting against mine, and I think that maybe this is the warmth of flesh; long since forgotten, perhaps something I never, ever knew.

  Today, in preparation for the Peace Corps visit, the colony cleans. Patients and staff alike move through the plaza with dustpans and brooms. Children polish the knobs and hinges of every door. But I don’t help. Instead, I stay in my room and draw, beginning with a faint line for what will be the shore, a trace of waves for what will become the sea. I feel the sand of that beach again, I feel the way Jack’s hand held mine, and I draw for hours.

  Later, I show him. “Is that the place? Did I get it right?”

  “The Santa Monica Pier. That’s how I remember it.”

  “I worried the pier was on the wrong side of the beach.”

  “It’s perfect. Really.” He flips through my sketchbook, looking at my drawings, impressed with every one. Then he sets it down on the floor, and turns to a blank page. “Draw yourself,” he says.

  I have never done a self-portrait. Except by doctors, I haven’t been photographed since arriving in the colony. There is no mirror in my room, and I turn away from any window I pass to avoid my reflection.

  “Come on,” he says, “I want to see you.”

  I look down at the page, at all that empty space, imagining the movement of the pencil, the ways it will travel along the paper to arrive at a face. “If I do it,” I say, “will you describe yourself, and let me draw your picture too?”

  I stare into the curtain, waiting for an answer. Finally, he says, “Deal.”

  I pick up the sketchbook. I start with a faint oval, add a few sharp lines to show the texture of bone, then soften them to make them flesh. Below the eyes the cheeks are round, the mouth full and wide. The black hair parts in the middle, falling past the shoulders, framing the face. “Your turn,” I say.

  He describes his eyes, the right a bit sleepier than the left. His hair is brown, short but wavy, curling just above his ears. He has a square jaw and thin lips, a tiny scar that crosses the cleft in his chin. I go back and forth between us, shading in lines and erasing mistakes, his voice guiding my hand the entire time.

  It’s past dark now; I finish by candlelight. I set the picture down on the floor, my face on his side, his on mine. Two people stare back at us, together, alive on the page. “When I hear your voice,” he says, “that’s the girl I see.”

  It’s raining when I wake, all morning long, then all afternoon, so hard that everyone stays indoors. I don’t go out either, and I don’t see Jack; the path uphill would be too muddy, the steps too slick to climb. But with the plaza deserted, it’s not so difficult to imagine him walking through it, or sitting on the edge of the fountain, watching children play their games with shells and stones.

  I take my sketchbook and try to draw that scene.

  But there is no rain the next morning, and I’m eager to be out, so for once I am early for my checkup at the hospital. I sign in at the front desk, and the nurse stares at me, like I’m different from the times she has seen me before. “You’re the friend of the American?” she asks. I nod, and she tells me that he has just checked in as well, and is waiting to be seen by a doctor. “Fourth door on the left”—she points—“if you’d like to say hello.”

  I look toward the hallway, at the ceiling and floor, the walls and doors—all of it white. Somewhere down there, he sits. I could stand here, wait for him to pass me by, say nothing; he would never know it was me. Or I could go to him and open the door, and finally say hello.

  I walk slowly, counting off doorknobs until I reach the fourth. I grab hold of it but I’m not ready to enter, so I stand on my toes and peer through the small window of the door. His back is to me, but I can see his hair really is a shade of brown.

  I open the door. He turns to look at me, and now I know we lied. His left eye is swollen shut. His face, neck, and shoulders are covered with lesions, his arms purple and black with open sores. And his left hand, the one he mu
st have hidden from me, is nearly gone, the fingers curled into themselves, the remaining nails yellow and chipped.

  No smile or hello. I let him think that I am just another patient, one who has wandered in by mistake. I mean to apologize, to excuse myself and leave, but all I can do is breathe. We look at each other, at our sameness, for just a moment more.

  I long for the black curtain, for the fabric to rise like a tide and drown us both in darkness.

  I close the door, hurry down the hall to the front desk. The nurse takes me to a room filled with a dozen other patients, and when it’s my turn, two doctors examine the patches of warped and hardened flesh covering my arms and legs, the lesion scars on my chest and neck. They touch the places on my face where skin and muscle used to be. Then they look at me and tell me that I’m fine.

  A day passes without seeing him, then two. When I finally visit, he asks why I’ve been gone so long. I tell him that it’s a busy time in the colony, that I’m helping to prepare for the volunteers’ arrival. Then I excuse myself, wish him a good night.

  He didn’t mention what happened at the hospital. He never knew who that girl was.

  Before the Peace Corps volunteers pass through the colony gate, they put on gloves and surgical masks. When they enter, doctors and nurses shake their hands, and a group of nuns led by Sister Marguerite bow their heads in thanks as they walk by. The smallest children run toward them with welcome banners and signs, but this time the volunteers don’t back away. They bend down, pat their heads, offer toothbrushes and small bars of soap as presents.

  I don’t know if the American can see us down here, what his view from his side of the shack might be like. But one day soon he will draw the curtain and step out of that room, take the path downhill. It won’t be long before we’re face-to-face, and when he hears my voice, he will know exactly who I am.

  One more person approaches the gate, the military escort for the volunteers, a big, dark-haired man with eyebrows so thick his eyes are like shadows. He puts on a mask and gloves too, but with the holster at his side he looks more like a criminal, and no one approaches him.