The doorbell rings and it’s Peter, whom she’s expecting, but not until nine. Peter who has agreed to four thousand pesos, starting with some wine and oil massage and ending with him in her mouth. No penetration. He’d agreed to a high fee because being turned down by Charmaine in the past made him want her even more. This is no tactic. Peter visits every month from sterile Singapore, and each time he’d requested Charmaine through the circle, she was always booked. Tonight will be the culmination of many months of trying and hoping. Charmaine puts herself in Peter’s shoes; and in touch with his excitement, she gets very excited herself as she walks to the door. She is going to be very stern with him. Pretend stern. Who knows, he may agree to another thousand pesos as punishment for being too early. Thank God she is naturally pretty and doesn’t need much preparation on her face.
She opens the door but doesn’t get the chance to say much. It’s Peter, but it can’t be Peter, because she has seen this Peter before, here in Manila, a Filipino, not Singaporean. All this happens in an instant. Because this Peter doesn’t stay still long enough for her to ask him who he really is. He moves and, by moving, becomes the world. All the rage in the world, all those quick-glancing, suspicious eyes on the streets of Manila— especially when she’s in full makeup and despite the fact that she is known as the most convincing girl in the whole circle; all those judgmental looks of a lifetime betraying fear of sex and of difference that can only be described as Catholic—all of it is contained in the four-point star of Peter’s knuckles as they meet her face, quickly turning the room sunset-orange, then black.
Catholic. Catholic. Yes, she knows who he is.
She can’t feel her face but she knows work was done while she was unconscious. There, finally—sensation in her left eye. She blinks once but the pain stops her. Tears cloud her vision. Tears not from emotion but from her eyes’ irritation at some foreign substance. Maybe blood. Maybe bits from not-Peter’s knuckles. She is more afraid of encountering her face in a mirror than she is of him. Where is he?
It’s as if she’s called him back into the room. He is so young. No more than thirty, she would guess. He sees that she’s awake. She sees the knife in his hands. The blade is glistening. She thinks to inspect herself down there but stops herself. If she can’t feel anything, then it’s not real. Not yet.
Then she sees his left arm. He has rolled both shirtsleeves up and on his left arm he has made knife notches. Maybe the blood on the knife is his and not hers.
He starts to recite the Our Father.
Catholic. Catholic.
He is looking at her with fervor—as if she’s Our Father and it’s she who he’s praying to.
Benjamin. That’s his name. Son of Esmeralda, one of the Catholic matrons she’s patronized. Esmeralda of Sampaloc. The son does not look like the mother. The mother has an ascetic face, very little makeup, which is unusual for someone of her class and of her Spanish mestizo background—above all else, for that type of woman, vanity and appearances. But Esmeralda has the certitude of God’s approval and she wears this in the rigid stance of her shoulders, in the many disapproving lines on her forehead, the only blemish on her highborn face. Highborn, but fallen from grace, which explains why she’d resorted to reading God’s wishes from a deck of playing cards for paying customers, most of them sinners like Charmaine. The son, on the other hand, has cheeks to which clings baby fat, even at thirty. There is something spoiled, something inbred in his appearance; the eyes too close together, the nose not so much aquiline like his mother’s, but pinched, as if he’s sniffing out something rotten.
Something rotten: that’s her, face beaten to a pulp, oozing the garbage of a lifetime of sin. Now on to the Hail Mary. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.
He kicks her. Pray, he orders.
She moves her lips, and a miracle: they cause her no pain! Though no sound comes from them, for the moment he’s appeased. She keeps her lips in motion, pronouncing: Fuck you, fuck you. So strong is her will to live. Should this be a surprise? Her ticket to Bangkok, paid for in cash, sits under two layers of underclothing in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser. She can taste her new life in her rotting mouth, her tongue running into gum where teeth had previously been. She hadn’t been entirely unconscious before, for flashes come at her now, fast and furious: Repent! he’d said at one point, before she blacked out. And then, she remembers waking up to see him crying, kneeling in front of her.
At one point he’d been shaking her awake, his face so tender and nervous, as if he hadn’t counted on her being so weak, so easily extinguishable. She’d woken up, stayed awake for as along as she could, then blacked out again.
Now her nose is working and she can smell his pomade and she wants to puke. Then, mercifully, her nose is again stoppered. By blood, by a clot of disfigurement.
Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit …
Even his hair smacks of Catholic repression. It’s been plastered tight to the skull and parted in the middle, the pomade glistening in the lights of her bathroom. Tamped down, the wildness restrained. She turns her cheek to the tiled floor and is comforted by the utter coldness.
She understands now. The young-old boy Benjamin had been such a riveted skulker during her three sessions with Esmeralda. Charmaine had always thought he was sexually attracted to her but was afraid of his mother and didn’t dare come close. Still, he’d wanted Charmaine to know of his attraction, wanted her to feel his presence as his mother had hold of Charmaine’s palm, into which would be dropped the pertinent playing card, each number its own message from God. Which was the card for the Angel of Death? Had the Angel of Death ever made an appearance in any of her readings? Not just with Esmeralda, but with seemingly every existing seer in Manila?
She thinks back to Ah-ma’s words: Everything will be fine.
What a fraud. Everyone’s a fraud. Including herself, including this bakla-hating Catholic boy with the knife, who needs only to give in to his desires to be cured, to be freed. The knife is the penis he can use, she thinks, before passing out again.
Is she still alive? Why is she still alive? This time she tries to look down between her legs. She can’t make out anything. She can’t feel anything. Maybe she’s in shock. But she’s not wet, no signal of bloodletting. Maybe he wants her to be awake as he’s doing it.
But of course it’s him. She understands even more now. The bigger picture. God’s-eye view.
Nene from Tacloban. Aurora. Saltie. They too had gone to Esmeralda. Like her, they too had wanted to stay on the right side of fate. Esmeralda the card-reader, the fortune-teller, the ex-socialite-in-hiding-in-Sampaloc, was one of God’s chosen ones, with the power to sanctify lives by pronouncing positive messages from aces and spades and kings and queens. And in their turn, Nene, Aurora, and Saltie too, like Charmaine, had probably flirted with the boy Benjamin, who skulked when Nene was around consulting with Esmeralda, who skulked when Aurora was around, who skulked when Saltie was around, irresistibly drawn and, as is clear now, repulsed. Riveted by repulsion. None of those girls were as convincingly feminine as Charmaine. Maybe that’s why it took Benjamin so long to find her. To find her out. He couldn’t be entirely sure. What was the giveaway? A few seconds passing beneath an unforgiving streetlamp to reveal a not-quite-girlish cast of the jaws, the hint of an Adam’s apple? A particularly tight pair of pants that highlighted a boy’s narrow hips? Or did his mother Esmeralda tell him that Charmaine was a friend of the murdered girls, and by friend he finally understood that they were part of the same problem? He sought them out, Nene and Aurora and Saltie. He lured them to places where he could do with them as he wanted without being seen. Hadn’t Esmeralda said that her no-good husband, the boy’s absentee father, was a manager for a real estate company? So many empty units at Benjamin’s disposal. For disposal. For his Catholic hatred and his ceremonies of proximity to the divine. Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be Thy name.
Hall
owed. Hollowed. Helloed. Fuck, it hurts to laugh. Even the rumble-beginnings of a laugh feel like a tremor in her guts, letting her know that parts of her are no longer connected to the rest.
There is a commotion at the door.
It’s his partner. But of course he has a partner. To cut up those women. To heft those corpses—she’s heard that death weighs a body down, doubling the living weight. To dump them from a moving car, as is the current police theory. All that requires two sets of hands. Maybe it’s his mother. Maybe it’s his father.
But then, silence.
No partner.
No second party.
No new pair of footsteps. Just Benjamin’s, pacing, accompaniment to his never-ending prayers. Oh Lord show me the strength to show my love for You, Oh Lord show me the strength to show my love for You, Oh Lord …
No. This boy has the strength to do the killing, cutting, dumping all by himself. He has fervor. And it’s fervor that got the pyramids built, all those stones made light and put into place by nothing more than fervor.
Fuck. Now she knows. The man at the door. It’s Peter. The real Peter from Singapore. Benjamin sent him away. Peter frustrated by Charmaine’s eternal unavailability. Poor Peter. Maybe next time he’ll be willing to pay ten thousand pesos, so huge has his appetite for Charmaine become, so constant his frustration. If there is a next time.
Benjamin comes to her. Are you sorry? he asks. But if he’d only given her time to respond, she would’ve said yes, played along to satisfy him. Instead, no sooner had the question been fired than the right hand bunches into a fist, and if she has any teeth left, she is sure they have been sacrificed too in this new attack.
Albino python.
Python handbag.
Oscar. Like that fish, she too is barely alive. If she keeps to within a centimeter on both sides of her, like that fish in its selected spot, she can live on in the state she is for years, for decades. No teeth, no problem. Busted face, flies laying eggs in the crevices of her exposed flesh, no problem. She has heard of maggots eating away putrefaction, curing disease.
She is sure her eyes are as orbed and as dead as the bayawak’s.
She hears him come back into the room. Why isn’t she dead? What is he keeping her alive for? She pretends to lie lifeless. Now she remembers: an alligator has a longer, thinner snout of a face than a crocodile.
She feels him drag her body into the living room.
Nene was formerly Nestor.
Aurora, Esteban.
Saltie, Orville.
And she? She was once Norma. Norma from Norman, a longdespised name from an ill-fitting childhood. Catholic school, check. Catholic Mass every Sunday, check. Parents ashamed of his self-revelation, check. Self-revelation turned to self-disgust, check. Not until he was Norma did he feel even half-alive. And then that pleasure was taken from her by the club sobriquet: Normal Norma. Who’d started calling her that, intending it as a tribute, intending to make her feel comfortable in her new life? No, not normal, that’s not the way she felt. Extraordinary, not normal at all. So she changed her name once more. Moving up from normal. Charmaine from a magazine. A model’s name. A model, with that bounce, that self-confidence, that earning capacity. Charmaine.
She tastes blood in her mouth. She lets it pool, then opens her lips to let the whole thing, saliva and all, dribble away. She feels something hard slide along with it. Her teeth.
The ticket to Bangkok is made out to Norman. To match her passport. Her application form to Dr. Srichapan: Norman.
Norman. Norma. Charmaine.
Charmaine still.
On and on he is dragging her. Does he think she is dead? She can’t feel the area between her legs. At least, she no longer has to go to Bangkok. If he’s already done it. Like he did to Saltie. Saltie’s “thing” never found.
He probably threw it into the Pasig River, let the fish have it.
She lets her hands relax and open, surrendering to her fate. The fight has gone out of her finally, after how many hours? Her arms are bumped along by the motion of his dragging. And her hands acquaint themselves, floor-level, with the objects of her well-curated home: the base of a lamp, a leg of her leather couch, the felt-covered base of one of the chrome legs of her glass-topped coffee table. It’s her place of business, after all, not just her home, and has been furnished according to some idea of a bachelor’s private space, she being the prime decor in this gentleman’s haven. Nobody stepping off the streets of Binondo could imagine this plush, private room waiting for them. This room and Charmaine.
A flash. Of. What is it? Survival instinct? Anger? A delayed neurological twitch begun by her not-quite-laugh, that tug in the gut? It spreads from her midsection, fanning upward as a wave of heat, to her breasts, to her neck, and outward toward her arms and hands, which flex and test their still-aliveness. Her right hand grabs at the nearest object, a large stone she uses to rest her phone on. It’s smooth, there’s nothing really to hold on to, but she does, a sliver of an edge, and to do so, she uses all her upperbody strength, everything in resistance to his force on her legs, which, in the same instant as her hand finds the rock, kick free.
When the villains in horror movies startle awake after having been beaten, knifed, torched, shot—she now understands this is exactly true to life. Some fight against death always remains. She joins her other hand to the rock. She lifts. She throws the heavy projectile at him. But the thing falls backward instead of flying at its intended target. He laughs. He is chuckling at her nerve. A crash behind her. It’s the coffee table. She is sobbing at the futility of her last-ditch effort. She can’t stand, her legs are like boneless things, or nerves have been severed and they are no longer commandable. Her torso collapses to the floor, she slithers away. He grabs her feet again, pulls her toward him. Where is the knife? If both hands are on her, what is he using to hold the blade? A man screams and it’s only after a moment that she realizes it’s her. Crying. Calling. In her wordless wail are contained so many prayers: Oh Bangkok. Oh new me. Oh a life anew. Oh a real girl, more real than any real girl.
Her torso shoots up, like a jack-in-the-box. It startles him. You fucking bitch! he says, involuntarily letting go of her legs, which smack the ground yet cause her no pain.
He moves around to try to take hold of her by the hair.
There is something in her right hand. A sliver of her broken coffee table. A shard. It feels so right sitting there, her grip on it so tight it draws her blood. Around he comes and up and then down goes her hand with the shard in it, into his shoes. He screams. She mumbles something, incomprehensible even to her, just air bubbles and liquid, her turn to pray.
Our Father who art in Heaven.
She takes the sliver out. She doesn’t know how far in she’s plunged. Despite his screams, she might only have broken skin. It’s always this way with people who love inflicting physical damage—they themselves can’t take even the slightest breach of their own bodies.
She slashes at his knee, then at the fist flying right at her face. She gets him in the knuckle, then in the face. Just slashes. No, actually, one of these slashes has begun to yield blood. Now she’s unappeasable, with renewed energy. She flails with the shard. She gets scream upon scream. She slithers away from the stomp of his uninjured foot. She slithers away some more.
He comes toward her. You will regret this! She picks up bits of broken glass and showers him with them. He comes toward her again, mindful of the shard, dripping his blood and hers, conjoined, in her hands.
He feints. She falls for it. His fist finds the side of her head. She is crying. His other fist comes flying but she is ready. To move so close to her, he has made his face available—the closest its evil judgment has come to her. She finds an eye with the shard. It’s luck but she has also put all her remaining concentration into that plunge. It slides in like a hot knife cutting a sliver of cake. He screams. She pulls it out and finds his open mouth, taking pieces of skin and gums and his tongue. Then she finds his throat an
d the sliver is stuck there, stopping all of his prayers, and then very quickly, his breath, and he is just another spent body lying next to her on the floor, wetted down not by semen but by blood, lots and lots of it.
How many hours? She’d blacked out, and coming to, she is surprised by the presence of his corpse, now cold. She is barely warmer than he. She spends countless minutes finding her cell phone, then countless more trying to make herself understood by post-op Alicia. Frustrated, she breaks down in sobs, and only then does the voice on the other end go, Charmaine? What’s wrong?
She doesn’t remember answering the door but how did Alicia get in? Alicia breaks down and Charmaine has to look away.
When Charmaine peers back, Alicia is taking her picture with a phone camera. The fucking bitch. But no words come out of Charmaine’s mouth, just jumbled sounds that are meant to signal anger—and her face? How can anger form itself on her throbbing, altered features? Alicia takes another picture, then another.
Alicia leaves the room. In a moment, she returns to announce that having heard what had happened to Charmaine— Alicia had used the words “street beating” and “anonymous crime”—and with the pictures as proof, Dr. Srichapan’s office would not, as is the usual policy, forfeit the security deposit for Charmaine’s cancellation.
Manila Noir Page 18