I peer over the edge; the city itself has become a grid. Black streets and white sidewalks crisscross, framing city blocks like tiny pictures, a page of panels with too many scenes. But somewhere in all of this I know my enemy lurks, waiting for me to strike, daring me to cross the white borders and enter the battle. I will wait for him every night if I have to.
I take out the slingshot. I load the ammunition and pull back the sling. I aim, ready at any moment to let go.
Help
In our battle against the Beatles, it was my Uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue.
We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila. They were scheduled to leave two days later, and as executive director of VIP Travel at Manila International Airport, it was Uncle Willie’s job to make sure the Beatles’ travel went smoothly, that no press or paparazzi detain them. But the morning after their concert, Imelda Marcos demanded one more show: a Royal Command Performance for the First Lady. When reporters asked the Beatles for their reply, they said, supposedly, “If the First Lady wants to see us, why doesn’t she come up to our room for a special exhibition?” Then they walked away, all the newspapers wrote, laughing.
Uncle Willie took it hard.
He called me that night. “It’s an emergency,” he said, “come quick!” He hung up before I could speak, so I snuck two San Miguel beers from the refrigerator and headed out. “I’m leaving,” I told my father, who was on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, staring at an episode of Bonanza dubbed in Tagalog. He nodded and gave me an A-OK with his fingers. There was a bag of pork rinds on his lap and empty soda cans at his feet, and the whole room was littered with dirty plates and unwashed laundry. I even caught a glimpse of a bright pink bra that belonged to some woman he’d brought home earlier that week. We had lived like this ever since my mother left for what she called her “Vacation USA,” which was going on its fourth year, despite occasional postcards promising her return. Uncle Willie was the one who watched over me, but I was sixteen now, too old to be cared for. Still, if he needed me, I was there.
I met up with my cousins, JohnJohn and Googi—they’d been summoned too—and together we headed to Uncle Willie’s apartment. When we arrived, we found him at the kitchen table, fists clenched like he was ready for a fight, and he only grew angrier as he recounted the story. “Those Beatles insulted the essence of Filipina womanhood,” he said. “Special exhibition. Scoundrels!” I told him to calm down, that the Beatles were just making a joke, but Uncle Willie said nothing was funny about Imelda Marcos. He pointed to a framed black-and-white photograph of her on top of the TV, then brought it over and made us look. “She is the face of our country. Can you see?” In the picture, Imelda Marcos was seated in a high-backed wicker chair frilled with ribbons and flowers, staring out into the distance, her queenly face shaded beneath a parasol held by an anonymous hand. The photo was a famous publicity shot—you’d see it at the mall or in schools, even some churches—but I always imagined that it was Uncle Willie holding that parasol, protecting her from a scorching sun while he did his best to endure it. He wasn’t alone in his admiration for Imelda Marcos—the country still loved her back then—but Uncle Willie didn’t have much else. His last girlfriend left before I was born, and the demands of his work, he said, allowed no time for another. Coordinating flights with Imelda Marcos’s schedule was the closest thing he had to romance, and instead of treating his devotion with admiration and respect, our family laughed it off as a joke.
I took the picture frame from his hands and set it facedown on the table. “Yeah,” I said, “I can see.”
“Okay,” he said, “good. Then the Beatles will pay for their insolence.” He dimmed the lights and drew the curtains as though someone might be watching from afar, then sat down to reveal his plan: the next day, just before the Beatles boarded their plane, Uncle Willie would divert the Beatles’ security guards and send the group to their gate, where we would be waiting, disguised as airport personnel, ready to attack. “I don’t wish to maim them seriously,” he said, “but we must teach them a lesson.” He mapped out the scene on the table with his finger, drawing invisible X’s and arrows, showing who would stand where and who would do what when it was time to strike. But where he saw battle plans I saw fingerprints streaked over a glass tabletop.
“And that,” he said, “is how we will defeat the Beatles.”
I looked at my cousins. They looked at me. We all looked at Uncle Willie.
“So what you’re saying”—Googi leaned forward, like he was trying to make sure he heard correctly—“is that we get to meet the Beatles.”
“To defeat them, yes,” Uncle Willie answered.
“But again,” JohnJohn said, his face suddenly serious, “we get to meet the Beatles.”
Uncle Willie nodded slowly, as if they were the ones who didn’t understand what was really being said.
My cousins looked at each other, then at me. “I’m in,” Googi said with a clap of his hands. “I’ll help you.”
“Me too,” JohnJohn said. “Let’s beat the Beatles.”
Uncle Willie turned to me. Even in the weak light, I could see the strands of his thinning gray hair, hard and slick with pomade, and the deepening folds of wrinkled skin around his eyes. He was in his late fifties then, but he looked older than he ever had before, as if I’d been away for years and was suddenly back. “You’re my uncle,” I said, “of course I’ll help you.” My cousins rolled their eyes, like I was trying to kiss up, to be a better nephew than they were.
Uncle Willie looked at each of us, took a deep and slow breath, as if this was a history-making moment to remember forever. “My men,” he said, smiling proudly.
Uncle Willie cooked us a late dinner of Spam and egg fried rice, which we washed down with a case of San Miguel (he kept a supply on hand, should any of us drop by). Then he went into his bedroom and came out with a stack of pillows and sheets. We’d need a good night’s rest, he said, if we were to defeat the Beatles the next day.
But only Uncle Willie went to bed; my cousins and I stayed up, gambling away what little pocket money we had in our own version of poker. “I’m going to ask Paul for an autograph,” Googi said, shuffling the deck, “and I want it to say, To Guggenheim, citizen of the world. With deepest admiration, Paul McCartney.” My cousin changed his name from Mervin to Guggenheim when he turned thirteen, believing that if you were named after someone great, you might become someone great, too. But our grandparents couldn’t pronounce it, so he got stuck with Googi instead, and he used Guggenheim only for special occasions like graduation or confirmation, any moment he believed would change his life.
“So you’re going to punch Paul McCartney, then ask him for an autograph,” I said.
Googi gave me a look like I was the slow one. “We want to meet them, not beat them,” he whispered.
“This is the Beatles we’re talking about,” JohnJohn said. “Don’t act like you’re on Uncle Willie’s side.”
Googi nodded. “Do you think John would sing ‘It’s Only Love’ to me if I asked?” he asked.
JohnJohn socked him in the arm. “Don’t be a queer.”
“You can’t ask for autographs, you can’t ask for songs,” I told them. “That isn’t why we’re doing this. We have a job to do, right?”
“For who?” JohnJohn said. “Imelda Marcos?” He lit the last cigarette from his pack, then took a long, deep drag like he was trying to breathe in and contain his anger. He was a copy editor at his school newspaper; the week before he’d worked on an article about the workers who died from heatstroke while building a Mount Rushmore–sized monument of the President, which the First Lady demanded be finished despite the record heat. He showed me another article about a peasant village she had bulldozed in order to clear space for a nightclub that was never built, and when they protested, two villagers were shot. “Signs of things to come,” he’d said.
He turned
the framed picture of Imelda Marcos over, then mashed his cigarette against it, leaving glowing ashes on the glass. They looked like fireflies dancing around her, which made her look like some sort of fairy-tale queen, friend to all creatures great and small. I flicked them off with my finger.
“Filipina womanhood, my ass,” he said, shuffling the cards.
“Just one song, that’s all,” Googi whispered to himself, still rubbing his arm where JohnJohn had hit him.
A light was still on in Uncle Willie’s room. “Just deal,” I said.
In less than an hour JohnJohn and Googi were giggling drunks, and they had all my money. I was tired of letting them cheat, so I finished my beer and got up from the table, a little more than tipsy, and went to check on my uncle.
He always called it the second floor, but his bedroom was just three steps up from the back of the kitchen. Despite his good pay, he lived modestly—he never bought a house, and he’d rented that small one-bedroom apartment for as long as I’d been alive. “I like my things to be close together,” he once said. I stood at the bottom step, watching him through the hanging strands of beads in the doorway as he ironed his work clothes for the next day. Behind him, Imelda Marcos was everywhere—pictures and articles tacked and taped on the wall, headlines that read IMELDA TAKES PARIS BY STORM and IMELDA LOVES AMERICA, AMERICA LOVES IMELDA. It was like a page from a giant scrapbook, full of airbrushed eight-by-tens and photos carefully torn from glossy magazines. But the wall was only half-covered, as though the other half was a reserved plot for the rest of Imelda’s life. I imagined the empty space covered over with articles about Uncle Willie’s victory against the Beatles, and an accompanying photo of him, arm in a sling and face bruised black and blue. A soldier smiling after the battle, despite the hurt.
“Still awake?” I said, to let him know I was there.
“You should be in bed.”
“So should you.”
“I’m old. I don’t need sleep. But you’re still growing.” He warned me about staying up too late, that nighttime drinking and gambling weren’t the habits of an admirable man. “My sister would not approve,” he said, and I suddenly pictured my mother on her Vacation USA, lying on a chaise lounge with cucumbers over her eyes and a towel turbaned on her head. I wondered what she pictured when she thought of me back here, if the image made her long for me, or simply feel relieved that she was gone.
“I’m not a kid,” I said. “I don’t need her approval.”
Uncle Willie shook his head and sighed, then told me to come in.
I sat at the foot of his bed. Uncle Willie unplugged the iron, then slipped the shirt into an armor-gray blazer hanging on the closet door. Instead of the black tie he normally wore for work, he pulled from the top drawer a handful of ties I never knew he owned, and one by one he held them to the collar of his shirt, waiting for the right match. “Tomorrow is a special day,” he said, “we must look our best.” I’d never seen Uncle Willie fuss over his appearance like this, and he’d been a bachelor all his life. But as I watched him testing tie after tie, when I saw a newly opened bottle of cologne on top of his dresser, I wondered if he was trying to end that. I could smell Uncle Willie, the change in his scent. It was on his clothes, his skin, the air around us. I was only sixteen, but I thought that this might be love, that if something could change you so much, then maybe, in the end, it was worth fighting for, even if you weren’t going to be loved back.
He reached for another tie but set it down, laughed at himself like he was being silly. “Simple is best,” he decided. He looped the black tie around the collar.
“No. This one works better.” I got up and took it away, replaced it with a turquoise tie patterned with silver paisley. “It goes with the gray.”
Uncle Willie took a step back, sat on the edge of his bed and bent over, wiping away a bit of dust from his shoe. He stayed that way for a moment, then sat up and looked straight at me. “Do you think I’m crazy?” he asked.
It was the kind of question you ask only to see if the answer you get is the one you’re hoping for. But Uncle Willie’s face was blank; I really don’t think he knew what the answer was at all, and whatever I said he would take as the truth.
“I think you’re dutiful” was what I finally told him. He didn’t know what the word meant. “Dutiful,” I repeated. “It’s like the knight who enters a battle without asking why.” This was the best definition I could give. The answer seemed to please him.
“I’m honored to enter the battle,” he said, “after all she has done for our country.” Because of Imelda Marcos, he said, the world looked at us differently. “She dazzles and inspires. Who of us is able to do that?” He said that no matter how famous Imelda Marcos became, no matter how many times she flew off into the world, she always returned, always grateful to touch native ground. “She belongs to us.” His voice was breaking; I could hear it. “It is our duty as men to protect her good name.”
I looked past him, at an autographed photo of Imelda beside his bed. For Willy, she misspelled, Love and Beauty, Imelda. “It’s getting late,” I said. I told him good night and left through the hanging beads. At the bottom step I turned around, and I saw him kiss his finger, then press it against her picture; not on the lips or on the cheek—that wouldn’t be appropriate for someone of his station—but on a spot near her shoulder, just above her heart. That part of her was sore, Uncle Willie once read, from all the corsages that had been pinned there during her travels abroad. “You see what she does for us?” he’d said. “It aches her to leave us, even for just a short while.”
Then from behind me a clumsy two-part harmony started up. “You’re gonna lose that girl,” my drunk cousins crooned to Uncle Willie, “yes, yes, you’re gonna loooose that giiiirrl.”
“Leave him alone,” I said, pushing them back into the living room. “He’s fine.”
The San Miguels hit my cousins hard; JohnJohn was passed out on the couch, snoring and wheezing with every breath, and Googi was on the recliner, mumbling as he dreamed. Above, the ceiling fan creaked slowly, and I lay on the floor with a pillow over my head, trying to drown out the noise. I didn’t know any tricks to help me fall asleep, so I tried going over Uncle Willie’s plan of attack step by step, the who-what-where-and-when of it all, but before I could hear his voice or see his face I imagined my own, and zoomed ahead to tomorrow, to that moment when I would meet the Beatles. We would stand together—John and Paul to my left, Ringo and George to my right—chatting and laughing the way new friends do. Someone would take a picture, and later I’d give copies to my classmates and teachers, mail some to the local papers, and frame one for myself, a thing I’d keep forever. But the original I’d send to my mother, with a note written on the back that said Look at me now. She hadn’t seen a picture of me since I was twelve, and my changed face would startle her, make her wonder about the life she was missing, and fill her with regret.
My moment with the Beatles was clear; I could see it perfectly. What I didn’t understand was how the battle against them would lead up to it, if the fight was meant to happen immediately after, or how we could go from being new friends to new enemies, or vice versa. And the greater mystery was where Uncle Willie would be when the picture was taken, if he was nearby and ready to strike, or somewhere else entirely, a place I didn’t know. I thought I’d lie awake forever trying to figure it out.
The next day, the parking lot of Manila International Airport looked like a political protest: high above the crowds were banners and signs, and all you could hear was the noisy overlap of shouting voices. As our taxi pulled up to the curb, I thought that maybe Uncle Willie was right, that the Beatles really had said something so unforgivable to bring all these people together. But when I stepped out I understood what they were saying: BEATLES WE LOVE YOU and BEATLES COME BACK were painted in block letters on banners and posters, and weeping teenage girls screamed the same message. A line of arm-linked policemen could barely hold them back.
JohnJ
ohn and I walked toward the entrance, but Googi turned to face the crowd. He threw his arms in the air and blew kisses, like they were gathered there for him. “I’m bigger than the Beatles!” he said. JohnJohn grabbed his arm, pulled him along.
Uncle Willie flashed his ID to security. “They are with me,” he told the guard, gesturing to the three of us. He’d given us security blazers and fake name tags before we left his apartment, and they’d seemed convincing enough when we put them on, but now, standing in the terminal, we looked like kids playing dress-up. Still, the guard let us through.
We walked past the duty-free gift shops, the airport bar, the departing gates. At the end of the terminal, Uncle Willie reached for his keys and unlocked a door that read AIRPORT SECURITY ONLY, and we stepped into a long white corridor. We walked single file, Uncle Willie, Googi, JohnJohn, then me, all of us silent. I looked back at the white emptiness behind me, and I had the feeling that the farther we went in, the more impossible it would be to get back. “Almost there,” Uncle Willie said.
He unlocked another door. We walked through and saw an escalator that led to Gate VIP, but before we went up, Uncle Willie gathered us together, and told us this was a momentous occasion, the first step in becoming truly honorable men. Then he opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy of The Quotable Imelda: Famous Quotes from Imelda Marcos. It had been required reading my freshman year in high school, an assignment I’d skipped, but Uncle Willie’s copy was full of dog-eared pages, and the cover was tattered at the edges, like it was a beloved book he’d read over and over. “Listen to this,” he said, opening to a bookmarked page, “and let her words inspire you.” He cleared his throat, and began to read. “The truth is that life is so beautiful and life is so prosperous and life is so full of potential and life has so much good in it, that I get bored and tired with ugliness, with negativism and evil and all of that. I start in the morning and I feel that we all have one thousand energy. In my case, I see a beautiful flower, a beautiful person, a beautiful smile, by that time I’m just about ready to take off! I have one million energy, no longer one thousand! This is why we are a beautiful people, a people with love, and so we must live our lives in the name of beauty and love.”
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