Cyan Abad-Jugo

Thunderstorm

WHEN ALLAN WILDERMAN has had a particularly tiring day, it’s natural for him to go sleepwalking. Normally, he wakes before he is able to open his gate, since it’s heavily barred with a rusty kind of iron. Once, he woke because he had stepped into his neighbor’s kiddie pool.

But tonight, there’s a particularly booming, banging thunderstorm. And curiously enough, the noise of rumbling and grinding overhead, the water pouring and drenching him in seconds, the wind whipping him this way and that doesn’t wake him. A girl running into him does.

HER NAME IS Marcia Orinion. She has just come from the drugstore, carrying a paper bag filled with the week’s medicines for her grandmother and a small plastic cup of instant noodles. From her point of view, it was the lunch hour, and she had walked two blocks to get to the store, when the thunderstorm crashed down. She thought it would pass quickly, but instead, the torrents turned into whirlpools on the streets. The streets looked empty, except for fallen tree branches, like roadkill or reptiles that played dead.

She imagined crocodiles swimming in urban floods, then debated whether to buy an umbrella, but that would mean an expense she was not ready to make – she was on a strict budget these days. She decided to wait it out, until she was down to her last ten minutes of the lunch hour. Her stomach grumbled, but she had been too shy about asking for hot water so that she could eat her noodles there, along with all the stranded. Finally, dreading the thought of being late to work, she elbowed her way to the store front and out the door.

Nothing to do but run for it. Thank goodness she had worn her flats, having sworn off high heels no matter what anybody thought of it. No one had said that was part of the uniform anyway – just any closed shoes would do. Briefly, she thought of her trainers at home, but then maybe the uniform code had said leather. She couldn’t remember.

She thought the rain was letting up, but quickly revised that thought the moment she was in it, drenched in seconds, whipped to the middle of the road. There was some kind of numbing in her ears, after a particularly fierce rumble just above her head.

And then her ears popped, and she found herself running into the arms of a man, and briefly saw where he had come from – he was walking under some trees in the nighttime – before they both went elsewhere.

THE TWO OF them stop and stare into one another’s eyes, before they each hop back away from the arms of the other. He loses his balance and falls unceremoniously on his behind, and she drops her package of medicines, the instant noodle soup popping out before the bag hits the ground and rips.

They are both drenched, but are, as far as they can now tell, on rather dry land, surrounded by what appear to be reddish-gray walls, crumbling here and there under heavy vines.

They find themselves shocked speechless, the girl noting the man is foreign, wearing nothing but pajamas and slippers, and the man observing the dotted spatter of mud and one long rip in her stockings. Self-consciously, the girl smooths back her hair, while he picks himself up and laughs a little, at the sight of his worn-out bedroom slippers.

“Sleep-walking again!” he says, as much explanation as exasperation. “But – I’ve walked rather too far this time.” He considers that he might still be dreaming, and slaps himself on both cheeks.

The girl watches him warily, though she understands what he is doing, because she has also just silently pinched herself. She sees the spots of red appear on both sides of his face, then studies the nail marks on the inside of her arm. She had pinched rather desperately, fearing to be any later than she already was, anticipating the kind of red-spluttering curses her boss would now aim at her, if only he could.

“But I’m not there,” she says, and gives in to the wonder around her at last. “We are in some other place.”

THE MAN AGREES. They look at the ruins around them, the clearing they’re in, the jungle encroaching. He stands nearer her, then says, “But how?”

They can hear all sorts of bird calls, a rustling in the bushes, and, ever so faintly, running water. She doesn’t answer right away. They take their time, speaking and answering – one line, a pause, the answer, another pause – as if afraid to startle the other, and afraid to be left alone.

Finally, she offers, “I was walking – no, running – in the street. I was late for work –lunch hour was almost over. Then you were there.”

“But I wasn’t crossing the street, I was sleeping.”

“The street was clear, I was the only one making a run for it, and then you were suddenly – in my way.”

“I’m very glad I am not a truck then!”

They look at each other, and then she laughs. Her laughter transforms her, and is infectious. He finds himself laughing too. He’s hoping, though, that they do not quickly graduate to hysterics. She’s thinking, His eyes are very blue, but also almost green! They look away.

“It was raining, where you were?” he asks.

She nods. There’s some kind of creature howling mournfully in the jungle. Small birds shoot out of a thicket and fly just over their heads. They both duck down instinctively.

He decides to sit down. “There was a thunderstorm that cut the power,” he says, patting the ground beside him. Dry ground – there’s no sign it has rained here. “I decided I had no choice but to go to bed.”

She looks for the nearest rock big enough to sit on; it is too difficult to sit on the ground with a pencil skirt on. She takes off her shoes for good measure – they come off with a soft sucking sound. When she leans back, her cell phone falls out of her skirt’s shallow pocket.

No Time Zone, the screen reads. She shows it to him.

The man laughs ruefully. “Ha. I thought you had GPS, or someone we could call to orient us.”

“It’s strange, anyway.”

“Yes, strange, curious, and a little bit insane, don’t you think?” He moves closer to her, to look at the phone again.

“So how do we go back?”

He shrugs, thinking, We simply wake up. He is not sure he wants to, at the moment. He jumps up suddenly and sprints toward the ruins. He touches the rock, warm and crumbling on his fingers – no moisture here, either. He looks back to where she is still sitting, looking rather bedraggled and forlorn. He almost wishes she had better company than himself. But then there could have been worse.

“Hear that?”

She stands up and cocks an ear toward the sound, the lowing of some disconsolate animal.

“Let’s look for the river,” he suggests, and offers her an elbow. She looks as if it were something alien, or as if it has never happened to her before. He feels another wave of fellow feeling for her. He tries offering her his hand.

To his surprise, she takes it, and even gives it an experimental swing. Her hands are damp and rather rough, hands that obviously work a lot of different chores, hardworking hands. He swings their linked hands again, making her laugh, and they both energetically and cheerfully forge ahead. He realizes he likes to hear her laugh.

LATER ON, WHEN they find the river and discover that it’s getting dark, not just under trees but even around wide spaces, he asks, “What are we going to do about food?”

“If you can heat water, we can share this cup of noodles.” She shows him the lunch she had just bought. She normally ate the whole thing and longed hopelessly for another bowl, but now she was okay about sharing it with him.

“Ah.” He nods. “All the wilderness around us, and we have a cup of noodles. Very well. In any case, I don’t know how to hunt.”

He looks at the river – endless water supply, but not as warm as he would hope. How did one start a fire again? And then, out of habit, he sticks his hand into his pajama pocket, where he had slipped the box of matches after he lit a candle that very night.

“We’re all set!” he says, and does a little dance in his slippers. She laughs as she begins to gather twigs, rather a lot too, from all around them. One would think someone had planned this, had planned their meeting, that this would mean something in the end.

They at least get to share a cup of noodles. He leans back on the trunk of the tree and lets the warmth fill his belly, and by this time, she feels comfortable enough to lean into his shoulder, as if she had fit there since time began. Even by the river, there are ruins, rubble – signs of an ancient civilization, sometime, somewhere.

When the sky starts to change color from blue to gold, something stirs in the rubble. It’s as if the ruins build themselves into an outline of what they once were, a gossamer tracing of what the structures used to be.

A beautiful woman opens a ghostly door, and with light steps runs toward the edge of the riverbank. The river responds, and from its depths, something the size of a tree trunk rises, a whiskery creature made of bark and weed that the woman calls to, and embraces, and lets go again. She sings a song in a language they do not know, and the creature listens, suspended, then sinks slowly to the bottom, while the hearts of those watching ache. They recognize this: the inevitable passing of long centuries, as well as mere seconds.

IT IS WHEN the sun is setting that it begins to drizzle again. And then Marcia’s phone rings.

Allan’s arm tightens around her, and he gives her a kiss, the last gesture he can make before they are sucked back into time again, returned at the end of their thunderstorm, into their different time zones.

FOR A WHILE they wonder – at different hours on different days – where in the world the other one might be. For a time, they chase after glimpses of the other, in other people. She thinks of him when she sees foreigners at the mall, and invariably looks for him in each face. He browses the faces of Asians in airports. They stare out windows when it rains, and wonder, what if? What if what? And even, one crazy, long, and stormy season: what if they had ended up in each other’s time zones?

But they never do find each other again.

In time, each becomes a tale to tell the other’s grandchildren, usually during rain, when the kids are forced to stay indoors. They sit around the fire lighting candles (He always makes sure there are matches in his pockets), or in the dark (She always has an unopened pack of noodles on hand), and talk about the time strange weather reset their hearts and made them more sensitive to the world they had, so that they could never look at thunderstorms the same way again.

 

 

Cyan Abad-Jugo took her master's in Children's Literature at Simmons College, Boston, and her PhD in English Studies: Creative Writing and Anglo-American Literature at UP Diliman. Her books include Father and Daughter, with Gémino H. Abad; Sweet Summer and Other Stories; Salingkit: A 1986 Diary; and Leaf and Shadow, featuring her Palanca-Award-winning children's story, ‘Behind The Old Aparador’. On leave from teaching Literature and Creative Writing at Ateneo, she lives in Quezon City with her husband and two hobbits, who she chaperones to school and extra-curricular obligations. She loves to read, doodle, watch movies, and attend calligraphy and similar workshops.