The incommensurability of one’s belief in horrors and one’s disbelief in wonders. Everyday wonders. Like friendship. Like acceptance, like Vinod actually returning your interest.
No, the time for that was past, many years ago. Many years ago beyond count.
You were quite sure that being descended from a penanggalan meant that you were also an erotomaniac. That was how it always started. You fall in love, you are disappointed because it was all in your head. This disappointment transmutes in your head, turning into a jilting, an actionable slight. You start making unholy pacts. You are translated, you start growing claws and fangs. Drag out entrails from the husk of your body and sing your long, lonesome, ululating song at 3am, because you always, always fall in love with your prey, when you are not feasting on the afterbirth of unfortunate mothers.
This holds true even if you marry your prey, and then discover that they are on the verge of divorcing you.
This is how you became an orphan, after all.
You have two options, really. You could wait for the biopsy report, or you could give in to the imperative of your blood. To invoke, to transform, to pull, to draw in, to be consumed, and then to consume. One could say this was predestined from the moment you walked into the bedroom where your mother’s floating head was making a meal out of the remains of your father’s mutilated body.
Or, you could wait for the rejection slip from the surgeon.
You could wait to be told you were going to be given another chance to self-reject at friendship, at love, at jobs. At happiness. To have another ten or twenty years of being a reject and sad fuck-up, incapable of aspiring to more than this life by the river, and pining after a man who has barely spoken 10 sentences to you in all of the time that you have known him.
Because you belonged to the night and all of its monstrosities, because you were trash by inheritance and by circumstance, you are deemed trash, even though, like all potential penanggalans, you are excessively fastidious and use antibacterial soap on everything.
The trashcan is a metaphor, you think. There was no earthly way midwives who turn into penanggalans would sleep in trashcans.
×××
If the trashcan is a metaphor, then Vinod is a plot device.
You learned about plot devices in college, and later, during overpriced writing courses you took to compensate for the fact that you could not afford university fees. You tell yourself this to convince yourself that what you felt was not love, that it was a mere frisson. When you think about him, you can hear in your head the song the penanggalan sing when they’re trying to win you over to their camp. He will only hurt you, maim you, put his mark upon you. They sing this song every time you walk past the trash cans lining the outside of your apartment complex, the pungent smell of the refuse of multiple apartments hitting your nose as you step down from the bus that stops in front of the guardhouse at 11:45pm.
Vinod is a plot device like Jeremy before him, and Ramli before that. All of your unrequited loves, all of your potential victims, rescued from meeting the fate one meets upon falling in love with someone descended from a waking horror. You convince yourself you are doing the right thing, even if Vinod’s voice and his dark, hurt eyes follow your thoughts like a pet jaguar you never knew you had. One you would want to keep and cherish for all of the years of your joint existence. Because his eyes are as old and as wild as your soul, as the songs you hear at 3am. Because he’s been a haunting at the back of your mind for over a decade.
You’ve already started keeping bottles of vinegar in your kitchen just in case, just in case you decide one day to take that path.
Be immortal like us, the penanggalan sing to you in their nocturnal ululations. You will not die, you will fly, and when the feeding is done, there will be starsong to imbibe, there are owl-sisters who will dance with you, because the condemned will always flock together. If you learn to fly high enough and to keep your entrails untangled, if your breath remains vinegary sweet, you will be allowed to reach the floating wooden palaces of the Bunian Empire. You will enjoy the sweetness of blood and the savor of flesh, and you will be young forever. Perhaps the Empress will recruit you to her army, and you will live in the skies, transformed into an apsara. Perhaps you will even be appointed as a laksamana someday. It is a beautiful story. A far more beautiful story than the reality of medical tests, and yet more tests. It seems far more feasible in your grief, than the possibility of driving yourself to and fro from chemotherapy because your uncles are too old and frail. Everyone else who loved you has gone away. It seems more feasible than succumbing to surgery and radiation while drowning in unleavened solitude.
Love is a beautiful story too. It is one you croon to yourself as a fairytale of sorts, to keep out the darkness, to have your mind ignoring the smell of the refuse piling up behind your apartment building, of the roaches that inhabit the dark when the fluorescent lights go out. The roaches that are part of the unseen army that plagues your nights and the edges of your consciousness.
×××
You write this down two tables away from where he is laughing with his friends, insensible to your presence, for you are stealthy in your perpetual mortification caused by agonies of love-feelings. When Vinod laughs, his face is like a lamp that someone suddenly turned on. It offsets his grim sobriety on other occasions. The contrast is intoxicating. It draws you, every time you are in the same space. It makes you feel like an unwilling stalker. It makes you wonder if there is a line that normal people cross. But you are far from normal and you know that. The light that shines from his face is far more intoxicating than the promise of starsong, and of the sticky sweetness of afterbirth. You could so easily draw that light from his face with a penanggalan’s elongated tongue. That light could bring you to the singing stars. Was that why your mother made such a thorough meal of your father?
You contemplate the painful reality of cancer versus the eternal exquisite torment of a career of murder and pickling your entrails. You would only choose the best, of course. You have splurged on bottles of apple cider vinegar, and white wine vinegar. Both types were lightly astringent and not unpleasant. For another hundred years or so you can walk upon this earth as predator, not prey. You did not have to sleep in a trashcan, not when you would be in the court of the Bunian Empress.
You write this to avoid looking at the blunt, sure lines of his face, so familiar and yet so alien. You think of all of the things you might have said to him, might have done to make it all better, to turn it all normal. You think of all of the ways you have avoided further contact, avoiding his face, avoiding his eyes, avoiding all memory of shared hopes and dreams.
Once upon a sliver of far-too-distant time, his eyes had been voluntarily on yours, and everything could have been so different had you not auto-rejected yourself from the unfamiliar, from the risk of exposure and failure.
You slap the cover of your tablet shut and pay your bill. You walk back into the dank and pungent night. You are far from normal, but you are not, you think, a murderer. You were raised by two men who loved each other very much, and who taught you that enduring love exists in this world, and that sacrifice was a part of love.
You auto-reject yourself from immortality to keep the light glowing in his eyes.
Because of course, that is what you would do. Because the metaphysical poets have taught you well.
LIFE/AFTER
FRANCIS PAOLO QUINA
So, I have to write. One of us all has to write,
if this is going to get told.
– Julio Cortázar, Blow-Up
Teodoro had heard that old saying about dying so often, the one that claims that at the moment of death a person’s entire life flashes before his eyes, that he expected it not to be true – just another piece of superstitious nonsense that had no basis in scientific fact. In a perverse way, it was good that he was jaded in that respect, for it was one less thing he was disappointed about as he was swept off his feet by the wall of loose earth and deb
ris that had once been the hills around the city. He was crushed to death immediately by what remained of a tree, whose now-dead roots had once delicately held together everything that it rode down the hill.
He was blood and sinewy muscles and veins, no longer a man, and the earth welcomed him easily that way. He seeped through the mud; he was one with it, organic and not an inert object like a rock. In just under a minute he was gone, along with half of the small city that stood at the foot of the hills for nearly twenty years.
Teodoro had gone there two years earlier to serve as a doctor in the small hospital that serviced the city. Buried in the earth, his final thoughts were not about his life. Instead, he envisioned a future-time, not far from now, when new life rose on top of the ruins of the small city.
A root – I will be one of its many roots.
Think of the world, how time makes it so predictable – order to disorder, life to trash – now imagine how it would look if time stopped moving forward toward disorder. Imagine instead, all energy remaining as it is in this moment. Raindrops, which were falling moments before, now remain suspended in the air, like a million tiny jewels shining against the sky. The last inch of earth from the hills has yet to rest and settle over the remains of the small city.
Underneath the earth, horrified faces lie frozen in that final, panic-filled moment of death. There is nothing calm and soothing about these faces of the dead and dying. Among them, Teodoro has that great notion of being a root of new lives in his mind, a snapshot of one person’s attempt to make meaning out of tragedy.
Now imagine time, that great, unnamed villain, the unimpeachable tyrant of all narrative, pulling back, moving toward order instead of chaos. The raindrops now slowly, then quickly rise to the heavens. From puddles in the ground, water separates from dirt and forms into droplets that launch upward, like a million bullets being fired by the earth to heaven.
As quickly as the hills around the small city rushed down in a tide of mud to sweep it off the face of the earth, it rushed back up to its place, holding together tenuously. Houses and vehicles, dislodged during the landslide, are thrown back to where they belonged.
People are returned to their respective lives. The school teacher is back in front of the classroom, going on and on about sine and cosine, then going off on tangents. The street vendor is back with his wares, waiting for the school to open its gate and feed the children his sweets. And the town doctor is back in his makeshift clinic, tending to a sick child.
All around the small city, life comes back. People are undoing the final moments of their lives. A mother’s hand swings away from the cheeks of her daughter, her regret disappearing with it. A pickpocket slides a wallet into a man’s back pocket, his relief disappearing with it. Teodoro picks up the mobile phone he had set down before and a conversation begins where it ended. He took back the words he had said, climbing back up to his lips and into that secret place where they came from. In another part of the country, a tide of people pulls back instead of pushes. An avalanche of bodies is undone and old ladies, who were trampled to death, get back up on their feet and wait for the time for them to come home.
In another part of the country, an oil tanker maneuvers successfully away from disaster, the breach in its hull repairs itself as if it were organic, like skin.
All over, deeds done were undone. An ungrateful son takes back a punch thrown at his elderly father. An ice pick stuck into a man’s side is pulled out, his cellular phone returned. A man is dug out of the cemetery, brought to a funeral home, displayed there and visited by friends and family. He is brought to the hospital a few days later, then rushed by ambulance and brought into a crushed car sticking out from under a ten-wheeler truck in EDSA.
Comic politicians look more ridiculous when they take back their accusations and don’t present their witnesses and evidence to ravenous reporters. Newspapers are taken out of trash cans, used to wrap tuyo, and then returned to newsstands. From there, they are taken to printing presses to be unprinted.
Printing press raids happen only because authorities have to return sequestered items. Emergencies come and go; coup plots materialize out of thin air and disappear into thin air. Bombs violently form in abandoned corners and are later picked up by shadowy men. Residents displaced by conflicts, who were running away from their homes, now back up and return. Soldiers and rebels both retreat to their lines, as bullets fly off bodies; skin mends and panic fast fades away.
Teodoro, had he been aware of this change in direction of time’s arrow, would have remembered entropy from a class in Physics. He would have understood that the universe was finally ending, that after trillions and trillions of years expanding out from that mysterious zero point of creation, it had reached its elastic limit and was now collapsing into itself.
The sun which had risen from the east was now setting there; dawn was now dusk, and death had become birth. Teodoro moved back through many days in the small city, looking after the sick and the forgotten. Days when he could only watch as a dead child came back to a diseased life without medication. Days when the sound of gunfire, long gone, returned; when bullets lost among trees, and disappeared bodies were found and returned to their rightful places. Days when revolutionaries he had treated in subterfuge, who had died in combat, returned; still not triumphant. Military men who terrorized the small city’s residents, who looked at him suspiciously, questioned him, left and went back to their bases. Cold empty shells jumped back into firearm chambers and filled with gunpowder and shrapnel with a spark of fire.
In the streets of the capital, dispersed rallies reformed chaotically. Militants soaked in water were dried with the aid of a fire truck. In one rally, the cut in one man’s left arm bled again, but a riot policeman’s night stick uncut him. They desisted, backed down and he and his comrades returned to campus.
Teodoro packs his things and leaves the small city. He takes back his last goodbye to his mother, and on the other end of the line, her mother’s tears slowly roll up her cheek, to the corners of her eyes and straight into her tear ducts; his father’s clenched fist relaxed at the sound of his voice, the conviction going, going, gone.
His friends took back their heartfelt expressions of fear, their warnings that moving so far away from Manila was a mistake. Not only was there no money to make, that the small city he was moving to was only a city in name, that it was still the boondocks.
As the bus, and then the ship, made its way back to Manila, hope came back to him. He came home to a silent house in the dead of night, his parents unaware that he would ever run away. He gave back his medical license. He erased his answers from his medical board examinations. He went back to school. His professors took back their lectures, confiscated answers and grades. Teodoro sat in front of his computer for hours erasing papers and reports. The official names of body parts he lost slowly with the efficiency he memorized them.
Moving farther back, lost loves returned, only to fade away into anonymity or chaste friendship. Janine, his first fuck. Anna, his first real girlfriend. Maybelle, the girl he could never have. Comforting fictions in Teodoro’s memory revealed themselves to be lies. Acts of kindness and love turn out to be abuse. A kindly, friendly old priest’s touch, which he remembers with warmth, were a pedophile’s reptilian caresses.
Even moving backward, time is unrepentant. It obliterates sadness as well as bliss, terror as well as comfort, in equal measure.
His eyesight fails him slowly, his ability to speak disappears, and he is a fragile child, incapable of doing anything until that time when he is taken to the hospital and with feet first, is sucked into his mother’s body, where for nine months, he began, like time, like the universe, to fold into himself – organ by organ, cell by cell.
A people’s peaceful revolution never happened and a dictator is reinstated into the presidency. A world war never happens and Manila is restored to it former glory. In Bagumbayan, a small man gets up from the ground, the bullets from the firing squad flying out of
his body. He returns to his cell in Intramuros. Ships from Europe sail out of the docks.
Churches were taken down, as they were built, slowly with blood and sweat. Blood shed is unshed, returned to veins from a cup of wine. The sign of the cross is undone. A Portuguese man returns to Spain from a long voyage to what is now to the world undiscovered territory, and sits alone in a tavern.
In the place where Teodoro died, four hundreds years ago, a small town flourishes.
FLOWERS FOR KK
M. SHANMUGHALINGAM
I have been dying inside for eight years. Yet my three-quarters dead body is sitting at the funeral of my formerly handsome late husband. I use my handkerchief, not to wipe away, but to hide how few tears I have left. Almost all have been used up in my eight years of marriage. Another woman beside me is wailing away. I feel betrayed twice: first, by my late husband, Kanagaretnam, alias King Kana or ‘KK’ to family and friends, and second, by my younger sister, Thangachi.
Whose treachery was worse?
The temple priest places camphor and sandalwood fragranced joss sticks in a copper incense holder. Then, on a large silver tray strewn with white jasmine and red rose petals, he sprinkles rosewater. He gestures to Thangachi to place this at the foot of the dark brown and gold-lined timber coffin. The wind coming through the main door blows the smoke from the joss sticks. Light gray ash smears the green and white mosaic floor. Some sticks to Thangachi’s hands, which are wet with her tears. The fragrance of flowers, especially the sweet scents of frangipani and white jasmine from the wreaths, pervade the house.
Thangachi continues weeping. I spread my handkerchief to hide my face even more as her wailing reaches a crescendo.
TRASH Page 15