III

I spent the next few days recovering from jet lag, comforted by its lack of focus. I didn’t know how long I would be in Manila. I might stay until my money ran out, but as I wasn’t paying for rent and I was living in an economy where it was not unusual to make 150 dollars a month, the money would stretch.

I had proposed a follow-up article to Vice, one that focused on Gumboc’s repeated threats to reinstate martial law, but he had gone quiet on the issue. Even a Muslim uprising in the southern city of Marawi, which had resulted in a locally imposed army rule and suspension of civil rights, had failed to expand beyond the region. What money I possessed was the result of a book proposal that Ann, my longtime editor, had felt moved to fund because my marriage had fallen apart, even though she was concerned that the book might not sell. I had won a National Book Award ten years ago and Ann’s constant hope was that my next book might perform equally. The advance was small but adequate. I had been able to let go of my teaching appointment at Columbia, one class, where the students asked questions like: “Are there still jobs for journalists?” To which I’d thought: This job, teaching journalism to people who will never find work.

For my book, I was researching the plight of Timicheg, a chief of the Bontoc tribe of Northern Luzon. Timicheg had lived his short life in the early part of the twentieth century, first among the fierce peaks and diving ravines of the Ifugao region. He and his tribespeople had been discovered by an American businessman, Richard Schneidewind, and brought to America to entertain the throngs of visitors that flocked to Coney Island, visitors in search of something new. The Bontoc were novel, naked but for loincloths and wraps and intricate tattoos. They formed their village in an enclosure in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel, on display for whoever might stop by. At precise times throughout the day, they would perform a ritual slaughter on an unfortunate dog procured from the local pound, butcher it, cook it in a pot over an open fire, and eat it. The Bontoc took their sleep on mats in the chilly air. The next day, they would awake and begin it all again. They could no longer stalk deer through the forests and mists of the Cordilleras, but, as they were promised money and safe passage home after a time, they consented to the yapping dog, the banal ogling of the tourists, and this strange diet. At home, dog was rarely on the menu. The Bontoc were headhunters, although this practice—the most intriguing—was only ever described. Schneidewind provided each bloody detail with a booming voice that competed with the organ-grinders and carousel music and reveling crowds. Timicheg’s tribe was not the only one on display in the United States. Other headhunting groups were touring in the Midwest and California. This was to illustrate the colorful ways of the backward Filipinos and justify America’s occupation of the islands. Why exterminate all the brutes when you could display them and make a profit?

The Philippines was not the perfect place for me to research the story. Timicheg and his people had merely been of ethnographic interest until they’d left, and it would have made more sense to be in Ghent, where they were abandoned by Schneidewind and where the Bontoc chief had died from pneumonia. If I’d stayed in the States, I would have had access to extensive archives. But I wasn’t yet sure what shape the book would take. I wasn’t sure of anything, other than the fact that I’d wanted to get out of New York.

I again slept late, and when I reached the dining room, all the breakfast offerings had already been cleared. Beng was nowhere in sight. I made myself a cup of instant coffee from the packets and thermos on the side table and cast a cursory glance at the book proposal. The sections seemed to flow naturally. There would be a chapter on the Bontoc Igorot, region, hunting practices—­Rousseauian tripe necessary to get the piece going. And then a chapter on Schneidewind and where he’d come from. The next chapter would segue into the Coney Island midway, followed by a chapter on the world’s fair in Ghent. I had written the proposal as an exercise and was now faced with writing the book. It was a sort of joke. The opening sentence seemed an impossibility. I checked my phone to see if there was Wi-Fi, which there was not, and stood from the dining table to take the broad steps that led upstairs.

The second floor had largely been abandoned not only because of my aunt’s compromised mobility but also because the space was not needed. Half of the floor plan was taken up with an immense master bedroom, now filled with boxes. I suspected that they belonged to my cousin Jim, because he often stored things in his mother’s house. I could hear the cook snapping at Beng in the kitchen, but the sound reached me through a filter of silence. My uncle had died in this room, but I felt that his spirit had never left and was hovering in the high corners of the ceiling or maybe behind the oval mirror, framed in heavy wood, that had startled me before I realized the other presence in the room was actually my reflection.

There was a verandah off to the side, and I crossed to the door passing the canopied bed, covered with stacks of paper, to go outside. What had once been an impressive view was now largely obscured by high-rises, but I could still look into the garden, where a houseboy was trimming the lawn with a set of shears. The traffic passing on nearby E. Rodriguez created a cacophony of blaring horns and occasional spurts of music. It had rained all morning and now that it had stopped, the heat was generating a cloud of steam that the city was steeping in.

I lit a cigarette and checked that the Wi-Fi on my phone was on. The news was full of shootings and the investigation of the slaughtered Korean, but Gumboc took no responsibility. Instead, he had assembled an assortment of police officers for an orchestrated dressing down. He had placed the blame for all the killings on their corruption, instructing them that should they not improve their behavior, he would have them cleaning the Pasig River—the polluted waterway that bisected the city—or send them to fight the Muslim insurgents in the south, who had gained notoriety for beheading more than one unlucky tourist. I thought, These are dangerous times. And then: It is always dangerous here. In the street, a passing vendor was calling, “mais, mais,” as he circuited the neighborhood. The wall surrounding my aunt’s house was topped with broken glass to discourage thieves, and, looking past this glittering menace, I was following the vendor as he pushed his cart of steamed corn when my phone pinged with a message.

You’re back.

It was Inchoy, sending a text through WhatsApp. I had requested a library pass from the University of Santo Tomas, where Inchoy taught philosophy, and it was only a matter of time before he learned that I was in Manila.

You’re still here, I replied.

Pick you up 7. Dinner in Tondo. Bibo wants to see you.

Inchoy had hired a GrabCar, a treat for me as he most often took jeepneys. We were lucky that the rain had taken a hiatus because the streets were clear, although still glutted with the traffic that would not let up until deep into the night. Inchoy taught five classes at the university and was always short on time. He had brought a shopping bag of papers to grade on the ride to Bibo’s house, but just his presence, even if he was preoccupied, settled me. I hadn’t seen him in a year, but our friendship always picked up where it left off, with little ceremony, a friendship cemented in a shared sense of what was interesting—of what deserved attention—although we often disagreed on why. In the street, a pair of children was weaving through the cars with garlands of sampaguita. Two of these garlands, no doubt purchased from a similar pair of children, hung on the rearview mirror of the car, scenting the air. Inchoy watched me watching the children, and I felt my perspective slowly shift from mine to his: from my joy at the beauty of the children to Inchoy’s perception of forced child labor. He flicked his eyebrows at me to drive home the point. And maybe I was reading too much into his gesture, but after many years of similar exchanges—we had been friends since college—the words did not seem necessary.

Inchoy was a staunch socialist and quietly active in gay circles but still lived with his mother, who knew about neither aspect of his identity. His house was around the corner from Tita Dom’s, although Bibo—the great love of his life after Lacan—lived in Tondo. I did not know all the particulars of their financial situation, but Inchoy must have been paying for Bibo’s tiny apartment and had likely set Bibo up in the sari sari store that sold cigarettes, snacks, and Coke.

Inchoy delivered a frank look in my direction and sighed heavily. “So you’re leaving your husband,” he said. “I never understood this marriage of yours. No kids? Why bother?”

I considered. I knew he would give me time to respond because he wanted the truth, but I wasn’t sure how to present that. In reality, I was having difficulty believing that I had actually been a wife. It was my Manila mindset. It was as if, as the time theorists proposed, the ordering of things only happened in one’s consciousness and without this ordering, the matter of life floated around as event signatures simultaneously. From where I sat, in this GrabCar with the street flashing by, it seemed possible that I never had married my husband. He could just have been one destiny, one option that, if I chose to ignore it, would simply go away. Maybe my husband was in the future or in some other present and not in the past. Maybe I could decide to not have been married.

“Well?” Inchoy asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“When you say that,” Inchoy said, “it usually means that you don’t understand.”

He began to grab sheaves of paper from the shopping bag, dumping them on the seat between us. “You can correct the quizzes,” he said, handing me a stack. “This one has no mistakes.” He passed me a quiz that was already graded.

There were ten questions on the quiz and I read through the responses. 1. Hobbes, 2. Free Will, 3. Head of State, 4. First Cause, 5. The Social Contract, 6. The Phenomenon of Man, 7. Spinoza, 8. Hegelian Dialectic, 9. Critique of Pure Reason, 10. The City of God. Uncertain of the questions but sure of the answers, I took the red pen and started marking.

By the time we reached Bibo’s apartment, it was almost nine. We had stopped on the way to buy some crispy pata, and Bibo was making sinigang and would have rice. Bibo’s apartment was right above the sari sari store, which was, at this hour, manned by Chok-Chok, one of Bibo’s friends. We stood in the dark, deeply hot stairwell and Inchoy knocked. The sound of three locks being opened quickly followed.

Bibo wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she had strong cheekbones and a small, well-formed mouth. Her long, straight hair was down around her shoulders despite the heat. She smiled, and the smile settled in her eyes.

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome, welcome.”

The local term for people like Bibo was binabae, or “womanly.” There was also the broader term bakla, which just meant gay. Regardless, gender here was simplified by siya, Tagalog’s gender-neutral third-person pronoun.

I had been in the States when Bibo and Inchoy got together, and Inchoy had never shared how, exactly, they had become romantically involved. What I did know was that there had been a hole in Inchoy, an anger that Bibo had settled. Or maybe Inchoy had just mellowed with age. Or maybe it was a combination of the two. Inchoy had rescued Bibo when she was just a teenager and still dressing as a boy. Bibo had been a small-time drug dealer and a distant relative of one of the maids at Inchoy’s house. There was secrecy around the relationship. Not even Inchoy’s mother knew of Bibo, although the two had been together for a decade. Only three of Inchoy’s friends were aware of the relationship, which I felt was excessive, but Inchoy was a private person, private for the sake of being private.

The apartment was just one room with a kitchenette and a small sink. The walls were crowded with wood carvings from the mountain provinces, Bontoc masks and shields, and Kalinga woven drapes. Inchoy was enamored with Ifugao culture, although his family was from Cebu in the Visayas. A small table was set by the window, which gave a view to the street. The other window was filled with an air conditioner that was working hard. The room felt deliciously cold, although it couldn’t have been cooler than eighty degrees. Inchoy set the crispy pata on the counter and Bibo waved me over to the table. Bibo said little and performed all her tasks with an exquisite sense of purpose. Even the ladling of sinigang into bowls seemed a performance in Bibo’s hands. Bibo was from Negros and her first language was Cebuano. She spoke some English and her Tagalog was fluent, but she and Inchoy seldom used these languages with each other. They spoke in Cebuano, even with me there. Cebuano was not a secret language, but they used it with each other as some kind of affectionate code, translating what they thought I should know. The food now served, I began to eat, but Bibo and Inchoy were gossiping. Bibo said something, then hid a knowing smile behind her manicured hand.

“She wants to know if you really left your husband,” said Inchoy.

“Yes, I did, Bibo, but don’t get any ideas. Inchoy would be destroyed if you ever left him.”

Bibo gave Inchoy a frank look and waved a cautioning finger at him. We talked about the weather and the business at the sari sari store, which was doing well, as the other store around the corner had closed. The owner had been killed by the police and the family had moved back to the province. This was not a safe area, but Bibo’s family were close by and if Bibo could not live with Inchoy, this is where she wanted to be. Inchoy broke into a pleading tone. I couldn’t follow all of what was said, but the word “baril” was repeated several times. Inchoy must have been urging Bibo to keep a gun, but Bibo waved him off.

After we had finished eating and the plates were cleared and washed, Inchoy and I moved to the small couch. Bibo sat on the mattress on the floor, her legs swung gracefully to the side, and began to pack a pipe with marijuana. This was one of Inchoy’s few vices, and he indulged only when he was with Bibo. There was a seventies turntable on the lone bookshelf, and Bibo, still sitting, reached for an old record and put it on. It was a recording of Kalinga tribal music. I gestured for Bibo to hand me the battered sleeve with its image of naked tribesmen in sleek bowl cuts holding spears. A three-column explanation of its cultural significance remained alien because I couldn’t read it without my glasses and was too lazy to reach for them.

Inchoy was moved by this northern music, the gongs and drums and fright of it. It was the music playing near the end of Apocalypse Now and had seemed well suited for that. But it also seemed to fit this: the cool air, the slowing time, the heavy perfumed smoke entering my lungs. Bibo held the pipe and took a small, birdlike drag. She then got up and began to dance in the Kalinga way, flicking her wrists outward and stiffening her shoulders, moving in a small circle around the apartment. I watched her through the long minutes, my mind wandering. I thought of Timicheg, whose tribe was neighbor to the Kalinga, hearing the drums coming over the rib of mountains as he and his warriors left to hunt heads.

Suddenly there were two loud bangs. They sounded like bawang firecrackers, but maybe gunshots. The lights were dim inside and the sounds were muted by the air conditioner. Outside a siren went off and then another. Flashing lights danced around the walls of the apartment. There was shouting on the street, but Bibo kept dancing, her palms now flat and open, arms wide to the sky, the gongs answering each other, each ring echoed by a softer response, the cacophony rising in a sharp crescendo of tempo and volume. Inchoy lazily raised his eyes to me and I knew he was wondering, as was I, if someone had just been murdered.

An hour later, when we made our way back down the stairs and into the car that would take us back to Quezon City, the police had already left, and if someone was indeed dead, it was as if they had never lived.