Richard Calayeg Cornelio

Oblation

TWICE HE’D CALLED me the Virgin Mary, and the first time he said it, I laughed like my life depended on it, an almost hysterical horselaugh that was more just air out my nose, till tears welled up and smarted my eyes, and in a minute we were laughing again, then I was both crying and laughing into his palm, and he said, matter-of-factly, “I can’t help you.”

The second time, today, I didn’t feel quite as loony; it was a fine weekday, and we were sitting under a giant, gnarly acacia tree at the Sunken Garden, watching joggers make their 2.2-kilometer rounds, and students saunter in herds or shove past, running late for a class, in the state university where we’d both hailed from and met.

Joaquin and I, we were a picture cut out of a seventies magazine, back when lovers spent a whole day lounging in the green grass and reading poems aloud and talking about love, till twilight fell, and the shadows of trees around them lengthened.

Only we weren’t lovers, though more than a couple of times people thought we were, and so had I. Joaquin was in love with a married woman named Andrea, with whom he had a tradition of sorts: once every month since last year, they would meet in some obscure nightspot in Quezon City at exactly ten, then head back to some seedy motel near Timog Avenue where they would, in his words, “do things you can’t even begin to pronounce.” She was ten years older than he, and those ten years gaped like a wide chasm he’d very much like to fall into, if only because he’d always wanted to be wise and believed wisdom came with age – just as he’d thought dropping out of college and doing pornography was a heady choice in life.

“How many among them do you think recognize you?” I asked, gesturing to three giggling girls who’d ambled by in their micro-mini-shorts. Back in LA, Joaquin was quite a name in the adult film industry, though he believed it was due only to the novelty of his being an Asian, a Filipino at that. In just four years, he’d fucked a hundred twenty-four women and thirty-one men.

“Only that one in the cropped top,” Joaquin said. “I saw her checking me out a while ago.”

“I’ve always wondered where you get your confidence,” I said.

“You mean my cocksureness?” he said, a gleam in his eyes.

“You’re such a dick.”

“You know you love me.”

He was neither a man nor boy, but a displaced person who couldn’t figure himself out, and nobody could quite figure out. Sometimes he spoke with fervor about things a five-year old might notice: a march of ants carrying off bits of rice, a cockroach on the sidewalk scurrying into a crack in the wall, or the funny way I talked with a lisp and walked with a limp. Other times he said things I needed to process for a minute before I could respond to, things a frail doddering grandpa would say, to random strangers in the park or to his children on his deathbed.

In college, he’d sported a beard and reeked of marijuana in classes. He guzzled beer like a fish. He bought his own bike at seventeen and rode it at a breakneck speed. He composed songs and played his guitar, well into the wee hours of the morning, much to his roommates’ annoyance.

In my journal, he waxed poetic and wrote, in characteristic dense handwriting, line after line of random musings, which I’d initially thought were culled from poems, some pretty morbid or just downright depressing, like ‘Things lost never find their way back.’ In some fit of ardor, just out of the blue, he’d quote Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs or sometimes even Buddha, or he’d lapse into a long meditative silence, and the hundred thoughts swirling in his head would be an alive thing between us, unreadable and out of reach.

As well as being ridiculously, head-turningly good-looking and dreamy, Joaquin always carried himself with a studied nonchalance, which worked wonders with girls and sent them giggling nervously and babbling despite themselves. Two mousy girls sitting on the grass near us, for instance, had been giving him weird kittenish looks this entire time, and before I knew it, they were all over him, and he was being interviewed for some project they had in Art Stud 2 or something.

“What are the qualities you most like in a woman?” asked one of them, chewing her pen. Seriously, what did that have to do with art studies?

“Perky breasts, clean ears, sexy mind,” he said. “And loyalty.”

“What else?” asked the other one with the long girlish braids, clearly disappointed.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe good skin. Good skin I can bite.”

“Bite?”

Joaquin unbuttoned the first three buttons on his shirt, pulled it back, and asked the girl to bite him on his shoulder. “Here, bite me here,” he said, pointing at a spot above his tanned pectoral. “You’ll know what I mean.”

The girl looked weirded out for a second, then she shrugged her shoulders, leaned over, and very quickly bit him lightly. Then she laughed, and he laughed, too, and I didn’t know what just happened. There was a manic edge to the girl’s laughter I couldn’t identify, like all of a sudden she just lost it upstairs, and somehow it was Joaquin’s fault. After they’d left, I turned to him and asked, “Is there anyone who is in the least impervious to your charm?”

“There’s this cashier at 7-Eleven who never once looks up at or greets me, probably even if I buy the whole store and lay it before her to ring up,” he said. “And of course, there’s you. A little.”

Joaquin went on to read me Neruda’s Oda a la Tormenta, while I sat rigid against the tree, elbows on my knees, shoulders rounded. I rocked slightly and bent my head till it touched the tops of my knees, but I wasn’t crying, at least not yet. He stopped reading, and I could see him sitting frozen, thinking of his next move. We went on like this for a good half-hour. I was sure either he or I would speak, hesitantly at first, then in a minute we’d talk as if nothing had just happened, about everything under the sun other than what was wrong, or what had gone wrong.

“There was a time in college when I thought I could live only on taho,” he said. “Now I can eat even the most disgusting food on the planet.”

“I don’t think any food is ever disgusting,” I said. “Maybe for you it is disgusting. Maybe you don’t want it, but some people do. And to call it disgusting is just immature.”

“You know it’s not mine.”

“I’ve never said it is.”

“Then why are you putting this on me?”

“I’m not putting anything on anyone, Joaquin.”

“Shouldn’t you be heading back to class now?”

“You know, and I know,” I said, “that even if it’s yours, you still won’t want it.”

“I might not want it,” he said, “but I would ask you to keep it.”

“I will keep it.”

“We just scheduled an appointment.”

“I won’t go through with it.”

“You saw the test. It’s not mine. It can never be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I cannot ever knock a girl up.”

“Suppose the tests were wrong –”

“Wrong thrice? Different labs? Are you serious?”

“I never slept with anyone else, if that’s what you’re asking. Even with James.”

“You’re the Virgin Mary. Maybe the second coming of Christ will be through your womb, and we’ll all be saved. Maybe it’s the right thing to do, keeping it.”

“I’m not a virgin.”

“Yes, I had you.”

“You never had me. Not that night, not ever.”

“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I never slept with other guys after that,” I said. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

In the harsh light of the afternoon, everything seemed distinctly lit, and I knew I could tilt my head up and read stories woven into the leaves’ filigreed shadows, or look at the silhouette of the two-headed thing on the grass before us and fool myself into thinking our story would be one with a happy ending, or I could walk away now and see wherever it would take me. Or I could stay here and gamble that he’d make the right decision this time.

Across us, a mongrel was peeing and sniffing madly at the tree’s twisted, knobbed roots. Joaquin was smiling, like a proud daddy, because he liked dogs, and because they were only the babies he could ever have.

THE ONLY INEXPLICABLE experience I’d had happened three years ago, in the university chapel shaped like a circle when viewed from the top, where I’d built from scratch my own personal altar of begging and worship back in my undergraduate years, praying I’d get a 3.0 or live through a hellish semester without losing my marbles.

I was finishing my master’s then and had come to think of going to the chapel as anyone might think of playing cards or going to the movies on any given wearisome day. By then I had seen one too many happy relationships break up in catastrophic proportions, friends and friends of friends, and I worried mine would end the same. Not that he would leave me, I reasoned with myself, but still.

The chapel didn’t have the rose-scented serenity that many such places have, but as always, being there, sitting in one of the back pews, I was glad to be alone with my thoughts, yet feeling not that far removed from reality, for just several feet away you could still hear the distant, ubiquitous din of titters and conversation, of jeepneys trundling away. Here I didn’t pray the rosary, but I could still trot out in one breath the Hail Mary and Our Father, and remember a few responses that ought to be recited following a versicle by the priest. Years of lapsed Catholicism felt to me like riding a ferry across troubled seas and knowing there would be no anchor, nothing to keep me safely afloat, and that I’d only be washed ashore when the storm came.

That particular day I was nonchalantly trying to press my nose against the left sleeve of my shirt, because I’d forgotten to slather on antiperspirant and was afraid my armpits smacked of garlic. I was in that awkward position when I sensed someone was behind me, and like a fourth-grader caught by her teacher doing something particularly nasty, I looked up with a smile I hoped didn’t look quite as guilty and moronic as I suddenly felt.

It was a guy, and he was also smiling, as though he understood my struggle and judged me not one bit. I explained to him the whole thing, beginning with how I’d left my boyfriend’s apartment in a huff and forgotten to roll on deodorant, how perfume couldn’t mask the smell in your underarms, how it was my boyfriend’s fault anyway in the first place that I was now feeling self-conscious, how he was so jealous he’d threatened to lock me up in his apartment the night before, how he’d called up all the guys I used to date and threatened to fucking beat the fucking hell out of them if they fucking so much as fucking talked to me again. And the next minute I was crying in front of this stranger who looked so compassionate, so sincere, I could spill all my secrets right that instant, like frothing beer from a tipped bottle.

In retrospect, it should’ve occurred to me then that he looked a little out of place, what with his tawny-brown skin, deep-set eyes and aquiline nose, more Greek than Castilian. A courier bag was slung across his chest, which made him look more like a professor than a student. He was wearing a leather jacket and a tweed hat pulled low on his head – a tweed hat! – but it was a peculiarly hot day, and nobody in his right mind would dare don something one would later miserably move around in like a worm pelted with salt. But I was a train wreck then and somehow I cast off my brain cells the second I shed my tears, and so I ignored all this.

“The Lord has a plan for you,” he said.

“I know. But he’s just an asshole, you know,” I said. “Not God – I mean, my boyfriend, his name’s James. He’s just a phenomenal asshole. But you have to admit, sometimes God’s a jerk, too.”

“Fran,” he said, “you’ll be His vessel.”

“I know,” I said, not knowing what else to reply, feeling like I’d walked into an AA meeting. Then something just hit me. “Wait, how did you know my name?”

“You will have a blessed baby,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, my voice squeaking up a couple of registers; I may not be that pretty, but I’d had my fair share of creepy stalkers and weirdos in the past.

“It will save us,” he said, and this time there was a crazy glint in his eyes. “It will save you.”

“I don’t need saving!”

“But you do. It’s all written down. You’ve got to give yourself up,”

“I have to – I have to go,” I stammered. “I’m sorry.”

Outside, the ordinary chatter and blare died almost to silence. I didn’t look back lest he’d followed me with a machete and would just hack me into pieces, like in Friday the 13^th, until I was at least a hundred steps away. I stood by the roadside, in front of the infirmary, watched people stream by like so much traffic till I decided to board an Ikot jeepney, where I stayed stock-still in my seat near the entrance, as it just went round and round and round, until the driver, irked, told me at last that I had to get off somewhere.

After the incident, I told my friends about it, made a status update about it on Facebook and in my blog, and suddenly I’d become strangely interesting to myself.

“And you never once bothered to wonder why he came over to you to begin with,” Joaquin said, when I first told him about it.

“Because he was a weirdo,” I said, “and because he saw right through me and knew there was a hidden weirdo in me, too.”

“You’re staying in a relationship that doesn’t fulfill you in any way anymore,” he said. “That to me doesn’t sound like you’re a weirdo. But stupid, yes. Just plain old stupid.”

JOAQUIN AND I shared our theories on how I’d look pregnant and bloated, in a baggy duster two sizes too large for me. I tried to conjure a reasonable image, but all I could think of was our dumpy next-door neighbor in Pasay when I was six, who seemed pregnant all year round and had to support her lower back with her hands all the time, her humongous belly sticking out a mile. She didn’t wear a bra and the fact that her sixth child, then five years old and a notorious hellion, would never be weaned off her milk made it all the harder to talk to her without staring at her mountainous bosom.

“You should be happy you won’t have to worry about that,” he said, looking meaningfully at my bust.

“Stop objectifying me,” I said, jabbing him in the middle of his ribcage.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing much to objectify,” he said, and that earned him a kick this time.

“Do I have to start buying maternity clothes now?”

“Good question.”

“Seriously, is it even right that I’m still not putting on weight?”

“How should I freaking know?”

“Didn’t you make a short film or something about pregnant women when you were in film school?” I asked. Joaquin had enrolled in a film school in California, while he was still grinding away in porn and receiving a decent enough paycheck to keep up a bourgeois lifestyle.

“Not really,” he said. “It was about a pregnant woman who got hit by a truck and had half her spine paralyzed and her legs maimed beyond recognition. Like corned beef. Prosthetics.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“It died.”

I remembered when I was in high school, we girls were given a sack of rice the exact weight of an average-sized year-old baby, as a part of a class project on child rearing. A lot of schools then were doing the same thing, except that they had authentic-looking baby dolls that wailed on for minutes on end at specific intervals, and whose diapers had to be changed regularly, too, else you’d have to wake up late at night to the sound of its unceasing bawling. Public schools never bothered with any stuff they’d have to spend a centavo on, and so for a week we carried that small sack of rice, cuddled it, rocked it to its imaginary sleep, and even made a show of swathing it in multiple layers of cotton blankets when our Home Ec teacher was around.

Women are born to love and nurture, was what she’d always said, from day one, like a mantra. I wondered aloud why our male classmates didn’t have to do this project, and she said, Why, of course, they don’t need to, they’ll be at work! When I got home I gave my mother that sack of rice, which we later gleefully partook of, and though the rice was more than what we’d usually eaten, it dawned on me, I’m now eating my baby.

I made it out of high school with high grades and honors to my name. But I failed miserably as a university student. I was sixteen, learning the ins and outs of a university that seemed more like a world of its own, and not just geographically.

My classmates spoke English, seldom Filipino, but the way the words rolled off their tongue sounded as if it were an altogether different language. Either my professors were as cobwebby as living fossils, or they were only a year older than the oldest student in class. The readings were a kilometric ton, and the exams were purgatory on earth, equivalent to a week in the lake of fire. In corridors and lobbies, mere whisperings wouldn’t do; you had to holler over the cacophony and skirt, duck, or nudge aside all the warm bodies that shrieked and walked and cackled together. Every year, girls and gays and guys screeched at fever pitch at the sight of naked men running in the traditional Oblation Run, dicks of all sizes, shapes, and orientations dangling.

My roommate in those days was a sports science major named Pamela Diva. Her mother, who was half-Spanish, half-German, had married a Thai, who claimed that an eighth of his blood was Italian and a quarter was African-American. We were staying in an old dark boarding house – owned by a Mr. Gomez, a vinegary old man who spent his afternoons sitting in front of his grand piano in the parlor and just staring at it – across the university hotel. Pamela kept, in a wicker basket which she hung from the rafters, a large pickle bottle, in which were stored the dried rose petals from the wrist corsage she’d worn to the senior prom with her boyfriend, a creative writing student at a nearby university along Katipunan. I saw him only once, and all I could recall was how tall he was, and how his teeth were so white it hurt my eyes just to look at them.

One night, it was a Friday, I was roused from sleep by a distraught Pamela, who was telling me in an urgent tone, in between snivels and sighs, that she had to get rid of it. Get rid of what? I asked, sleep-clogged and pissed. I’m expecting, she said. Expecting what?

An hour later, I found myself in the back seat of a beat-up Pajero, and beside me Pamela kept saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, holding her precious pickle bottle, while in the driver’s seat a man with two livid cicatrices across his right cheek was muttering, Shit, shit, shit, all along the way, like a song playing in a nonsensical loop. He dropped us off at a featureless, apartment-type house in Cubao, and said to Pamela, You’re on your own now, before roaring away; I would later learn that he was her brother, who had flown in from Australia at her behest.

I waited for at least another hour in a cramped sala which was painted green, like puke, and had one of those textured ceilings with a lot of cracks in it and straggly brown maps where water had seeped in. A chipper teenager went out of the room Pamela had been taken to, holding in her hands a clutch of dried rose petals, which she blithely tossed out into a trash bin.

Afterward, we decided to stop by a Jollibee branch nearby. I fell in line to make our order, while Pamela, sick and blanched as a bone, excused herself to go to the restroom, gripping her pickle bottle that reeked oppressively of formalin and was now wrapped in broadsheet pages. At our table, she only picked at her spaghetti, gazed wearily at the muted scene of the cutthroat traffic outside, cars and buses barreling down the asphalt as if they owned the street, then at her spaghetti, but always her eyes would inevitably flick back to the empty pickle bottle before her.

“IF YOUR BABY turns out to be a self-absorbed asshole who takes for granted that it has a wonderful mother,” Joaquin said, “then we’ll know for sure James raped you in your sleep.”

“If it turns out to be a dick,” I said, “then I’ll know you’re the father.”

There were students tossing a frisbee in the Sunken Garden, and a few feet off, two grinning boys, one of them dragging a begrimed sock full of empty polyethylene bottles, were begging for any change the prissy passersby could spare. Incredibly, they were what the university had an inexhaustible supply of; they grew like mushrooms and were as ubiquitous as the trees on the campus. You’d think their mothers would’ve sent them to school, but that obviously wasn’t on the short list.

Just this morning, I rode a jeepney bound for the mall, when from out of nowhere a girl, no older than six, began mincing down the incommodious space between pairs of knees, distributing yellowing envelopes to each passenger. Always in these situations nobody moved, as if we were all held at gunpoint; we let the envelopes float off and away, as the jeepney lurched and snorted over potholes, and the girl, seeing nothing inside the envelopes, expertly hopped down onto the searing highway, then scampered off before the next jeepney swept her up. In Syria, pregnant women were raped, and children were killed in the ongoing war – at least, according to the newspapers, anyway. It was a lousy time to be born, sure, but then again, when was the timing ever perfect?

I figured my child would either love me the way I loved my mother, or resent me the way Joaquin resented his. He was an only child, and his rebellious streak and poor wounded rich-kid ego were as vicious as an assault rifle and H-bomb combined. I’d talked to his mother a couple of times and known at once that she was one of those women who, instead of shutting you up outright, would say, “I see,” rather cryptically. Her hair didn’t move and appeared as if it were superglued to her head. You’d know she smiled if her thin rouged lips stretched a millimeter from their usual stoic position. At fifty-five, she was shiny and svelte as a mannequin, and monitored her calorie intake with the religious gusto of a dietician. Joaquin hated the bizarre way she laughed, a series of calculated notes out her tiny stiff mouth, like the tinkle of chimes on a windless day.

In college, Joaquin joined the school paper and participated in student protests over tuition fee increases, the murder of student activists, and the plight of tenant farmers, partly to spite his father, who was a haciendero and owned hectares of land in Tarlac. He even got detained a fortnight because he refused his mother’s help to post his bail; he’d thrown a crumpled flyer at a police officer, though he said he’d intended it to land on the back of the mayor’s head. He slashed the tires of his father’s limousine, and the morning after, he flew to California, left his thesis buddies at a loss, and submitted a résumé to a known porn film company in LA. His disconsolate mother was quick to send him money, and in those first weeks, Joaquin would walk the streets for hours, drink the city in as he would a bottle of lambanog, traipse in and out of bars and stores, and, for the first time, intoxicated, he’d spend, to the last cent, the money he’d vowed never to use all his life.

WHEN I WAS twenty-two, I met a man whose mother hanged herself with a heavy-duty extension cord, after she’d attempted suicide using her brassiere. He was smallish, but cocky and a little breathtaking, and had a marvelous large nose that always got in the way when we kissed. On our first date, he took me to a club where he’d said there would be a poetry reading, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, we stumbled into a ruckus.

Our stay at the university prepared us for that exact kind of thing; vainly at first, but unfalteringly, we wound our way through the crowd of sweaty bare backs and writhing arms that seemed to pull us back, bumping and pushing and squeezing, till at last we got to the bar where he ordered a beer for himself and a questionable pink drink, perhaps a juice-gin mixture of sorts, for me. Then, like a connoisseur, he said something to the bartender I can’t now recall, and obligingly, the latter squirted some syrupy purple liquid into my drink, followed by another half-pint of what I assumed was pineapple juice. What’s this? I asked, sniffing the now-purplish drink suspiciously. Grinning, he yelled over the noise, Try it, it’ll give you the kick!

If that night were a movie, it would’ve been a series of disjointed images, or a Warholesque montage of shattered fragments, smoky blue and red lights dissolving into a kaleidoscopic, woozy pattern. I remember making out with a scuzzy stranger with a beatnik beard on the dance floor, and wandering giddily into the unisex washroom and there I retched, retched, retched into a pristine purple porcelain throne, as some good soul held my hair for me. Hunched over wretchedly, I watched the ground bits of hotdog I’d eaten for lunch and some unrecognizable green-gray gobs muck up the toilet water. Then I walked back into the club, into the horde of flailing topless bodies, and watched my date, in jockstraps all of a sudden, perform some crazy trick on the dance floor.

There were things I couldn’t yet know that night. How the next morning I’d wake groggily in a blaze of white sun, still in my sweaty, stinking clothes from the night before, next to a woman who definitely hadn’t been my date, on a creaky, lumpy bed in a room I couldn’t recognize. How I wouldn’t even bring up this topic the next time I met the smallish, but cocky and a little breathtaking man with a marvelous large nose at the university one Saturday. How he wouldn’t mention that night either, and how it would never be mentioned in the next four years that we’d be together. How in those four years I’d guard my virginity like a dog with her bone. How things ended between me and this man, whose mother hanged herself with a heavy-duty extension cord, one pea-soupy night in an alley somewhere in downtown London, when he told me I was a whore for loving my best friend, and when I said I couldn’t love him because he was such a phenomenal asshole that all he’d loved, and could ever love, was himself.

How, contented, I’d walk away.

I couldn’t yet know how that night would figure in the grand scheme of things. And yet as I stood there, transfixed, watching him bring his enormous hands behind his taut back, maneuver his more enormous right leg towards a loop with the other, ease his head through the complicated hoop of his arms and lock it in place, draw his arms and legs through, the beauty of his sculpted body poignant and majestic, watching him disappear with no poof or some sudden burst of light – I knew, or held on to that sliver of hope anyway, that after years of giving up on finding the right one, maybe, just maybe, I’d for once in my life found him already.

BY MID-AFTERNOON, JOAQUIN and I had tired of Neruda’s poetry and the snippets of inane conversation we’d overheard for the last three hours, and sluggishly we drifted down and around the Academic Oval, like a real couple, under a drizzly shower of milk-white cotton bolls that fell off their rotund pods with little plops.

I put my arm through his as we strolled along together – though the air wasn’t cold anymore, I was feeling impossibly cold. For a second, I pressed my head against the side of his arm, but quickly pulled away, probably with more force than I intended, so that Joaquin looked down at me quizzically. He had legs astronomically longer than mine, and after every few steps I had to skip and trot and quicken my gait to match his. Around us, the footfalls of joggers deadened to a hum, in the way you imagine most things do, when in your head you’re in a music video, and a certain song is playing in the background to set just the right, emotive atmosphere.

Two years ago, I was twenty-four, I enjoyed a seven-month writer’s residency in Michigan. I took a semester off my PhD classes and packed up basically my whole life, minus James who, I thought, was excess baggage more than anything. Joaquin took some time off work, too, and made Chicago a couple of nights later, faster than I’d expected. In the mornings up till afternoons, except on some weekdays, we’d go to this posh restaurant or the other, until winter came, and we had nothing to do but freeze in his friend’s voguish butch flat that had burnished oak floors and large floor-to-ceiling glass windows, affording a picturesque view of Lake Michigan. We’d nibble macadamia nuts fresh off the roaster, and huddle close together, biting the insides of our cheeks, backs against the radiator, a frayed rug snug and warm about our legs. We’d turn the heat on full-blast, and talk endlessly, just like we’d done over the last four years through email and over the phone.

There were days we’d brave the blizzard, like idiots. With chapped lips and flaky skin, we’d step out into the blustery gray world, I in a bloody-red parka, a long cranberry scarf wound twice around my neck and a kerchief tied daintily about my head like a wimple, he in a navy peacoat and a muffler and a gray hoodie I’d given him the Christmas before. Lining the roads sheathed in glass, the bald elm trees were shivery; above, the brumous sky seemed to thrum like a slumbering beast.

On one of those days, on a deserted snow-clad street, I heard a familiar song, which I initially couldn’t put my finger on, break out all of a sudden, but I looked around and there were only the two of us, treading down the street, trembling. He didn’t hear it, but it was getting louder and louder.

Years later, walking around the oval under a niggardly shower of cotton, I’d hear in my head this song and its cheesy line – “I’m as nowhere as I can be, could you add some somewhere to me?” – and remember that one wintry day two summers ago, how the snowflakes sailed down and melted onto his wind-tossed hair, on the strong bridge of his nose, and how I wanted so much to reach up and touch them but I didn’t.

A PROFESSOR OF mine in my freshman composition class, now my colleague at the department, was fond of recalling how the university’s Shopping Center had once been called Dili-mall, though really it was a far cry from a mall, and its restrooms were better reserved for the desperate and wretched. By late afternoon, I found myself belonging to this sorry camp, but whether I was more desperate or more wretched, I didn’t know.

Afterward, though it was only five p.m., Joaquin and I agreed to have dinner at Rodic’s, a tapsihan I could only dream of eating at back when I was an undergrad, and had to scrimp and scratch here and there to fit the ballooning expenses into my meager allowance. Outside, the bleached-out sun shone feebly, and the streets were awash with the orange-to-purple light of dusk, the leaves knifing out of the trees as they waved in the nascent evening breeze.

“What I dread,” I said, “is this child growing up and asking me who his/her/its father is.”

“How about piano lessons or math homework?” he said. “Aren’t they more dreadful?”

“He/she/it will kill me in my sleep,” I said, “my last coherent thought being, ‘I could’ve killed you, you know.’”

“My father killed my grandma in her sleep,” he said, “smothered her with a pillow.”

“Is that metaphorical or what?”

“I was five then. I didn’t see him do it, but my mother did. I was already sixteen, seventeen, when she told me about it. But I do remember I got up late that night, parched. It was 3:43 a.m. I had a digital clock, see. So I went straight to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and there she was, standing near the fridge. It was crazy, you know, she’d been in a wheelchair ever since I could remember. So I asked, ‘Are you okay, Lola?’ but I swear to God, I felt so cold, the words came out only a raspy whisper. Then she smiled at me! At me! She was a cantankerous old woman, and to see her smile like that – it was like seeing the devil smile or something. Plus, she hated my guts all her life because I was her son’s son. Anyway, that was the only time I ever saw her smile. I went back to my room shortly after that, dazed. I was too young and too dumb, and the next morning my father told me what the doctors said, that she died of cardiac arrest at around midnight.”

“Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

“Just eat your egg.”

“I know your father’s capable of a lot of things. But murder? To murder his own mother?”

“We’re all capable of it. We all have moments of desperation.”

“Was she floating in the air?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking if she had blood smeared on her clothes or an axe in her back?”

“I wish sometimes I could just lose it for an entire day and lash out at people, tear the wallpaper off the walls, murder my friends, my parents, my boyfriend, and get away with it.”

“I don’t know. At times I feel I can do just that. It’s a mammalian urge, a curiosity, on some level, I guess. It’s natural, feeling it, believing you can do it, but to actually do it you must be really desperate.”

“You’re the only person I know who’d rather be murdered than murder someone.”

“You read books, that’s what you do for a living. You write. Teach classes. Have an MA in an obscure subject. I fuck. Or used to fuck, anyway. I could’ve been working in a lab, mixing chemicals or building something. But I chose not to. I’ve made demented decisions in life, but I’m still lucky. We’re both middle-class and better off than those runty kids in the streets looking for plastic bottles and scraps of iron, and that’s more than enough to be thankful for. Still, we’re so caught up in our petty bourgeois problems that we’re fundamentally unhappy – that if there’d be a day I could screw up my life in the worst way I could, without fear of anyone or anything or any supernatural force from above judging us, I’d do it. I’d slit my throat and end my existential angst once and for all.”

“Then that defeats the purpose.”

“Well, we have only a lifetime to waste.”

I said, “I want to know if you’re staying or going.”

“I love you,” he said, looking me hard in the eye. “But either way, you’re on your own now.”

IN THE DWINDLING daylight, we took to the lamplit road in Joaquin’s Montero, bright amber globes streaming by and fading away on either side, as we idled over the asphalt. Down a tree-lined avenue, we swept past the tennis court, past the Carillon tower and the university theatre, past the College of Music where, on some nights, you’d hear the euphony of the beats of drums and gongs of the gamelan, of wind instruments doing scales at different keys, of eerie chanting voices you’d mistake for ghosts’ or the bated sighs of an old lover. I made Joaquin stop near a waiting shed, under which roof a guy with fire-engine red hair was kissing an impossibly Lilliputian girl full on the mouth for all the world to see. Then I asked Joaquin to stay in the car, while I walked over to see an old friend.

There on his pedestal he stood swarthy and regal, head thrown back, arms spread to the sides in an eternal gesture of heroic sacrifice. At first all I could think about was the fatherless fetus in the pit of my stomach, swimming in amniotic fluid and oblivious to its mother’s dilemma, and the thing James had told me on our last night together, how his days felt like having a pesky little fishbone stuck in his throat and trying so hard not to choke on it, for he could neither hack it up nor swallow it.

Then my mind went blank, long enough to see the man on the pedestal had already swept down from his mighty perch, in all his dusky resplendence, naked save where a skimpy fig leaf covered his nether regions, and upon me he dropped his earnest eyes I hadn’t as yet beheld.

Reverently, he bent down on one knee, took both my hands in his, and it would be the most romantic thing this millennium, if only I could convince myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. But in a breath, the absolute shadows of the night would sequester the last strokes of the sun, the world would spin madly on with no thought for anything but its clockwork rotation, and where would you begin to go when you were pregnant and couldn’t go to the man you loved, who loved you but wanted nothing to do with you? For although at twenty-six you’d graduated with honors, and read Neruda and Burroughs and Kerouac, and talked earnestly about existential crises in a spot of sun on the green grass or over a pricy, scrumptious meal, and fervently believed you could take almost anything at this point, you might still find yourself caught in the befuddling middle, like a kid precariously balanced on the fulcrum of a teeter-totter.

You might wonder, for example, whether you’d be the type of mother who would send a fortune to her rebellious son from miles and seas away, or the type who would cram a fetus into a pickle bottle and later flush it down the toilet. You might be curious if your child would smother you to death with a pillow, or bring you home a few kilos of rice to share for the night. You might forget that one crazy afternoon you were accosted by a gibbering stranger who said you needed saving, or that crazier night you saw a man vanish into thin air, like a bubble, in a nightclub. You might find irony in the fact that a porn star couldn’t knock a girl up, or in the fact that a rich kid dropped out of college while shrimpy kids roamed the streets endlessly every day, to hunt for plastic bottles and rusty strips of iron, begged inside jeepneys with their flimsy envelopes in hope of sending themselves to school. Walking in a blizzard or under a shower of cotton, you might hear a love song playing from out of apparent nowhere, or just hear the lyrics sung gallingly in your head.

And, of course, you might ask yourself whose baby you were carrying. You might tell yourself that the man before you, offering himself up to you in all his grave gallantry, held the promise of comfort, of the certainty that, in his arms, you needn’t fear to meet headlong whatever good or harm was to come your way, in a time when comfort and certainty were not easy to be had.

Tenderly, he’d reach for your fingers and touch them to your wet cheeks. He’d stand up, still holding your hand, but before the two of you could run off together into the sunset and reach the land of forever, you’d remember how it felt to be more alone than you’d ever felt in this wide, indifferent world, and forthwith you’d pull your sweating hand out of his and turn away from him. You’d know you were alone, but on you’d walk, toward wherever the roads might take you, and weather the chartless future with a hint of a smile dancing at the corners of your lips.

 

 

Richard Calayeg Cornelio is a seventeen-year-old, majoring in BS Materials Engineering at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He loves Peggy Olson, Atticus Finch, his mommy, and has yet to read Kerouac and Burroughs. In his spare time, when he's not dozing off on the train, he reads B- or C-format paperbacks – all of which he's covered with plastic (preferably gauge 8) – or fantasizes about bumping into someone with taut calves and rounded pectorals while jogging around the Academic Oval. Last semester, he failed ES 11 and has to retake it. Please pray for him.