Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Read online

  The first time I saw Magenta, I was being pumped with enough cell regenerative chemicals that I was virtually immortal. The Gestapo Clone Warriors could have struck me with lightning and I would have fully recovered in five seconds.

  It was through the open door of the interrogation room that I saw her and found out why we call them The Luminescent. She was the first one I saw who gave justice to the name. Magenta was led in by the arm by a Clone Warrior of the presumably female type—square jawed and stern faced, big breasted and made up, no vagina, no nipples, no uterus, no clitoris. No belly button.

  Magenta’s hair was fiery bronze, her eyes her namesake color. She was angry, defiant towards her sexless abductors who bound her to a chair but could not hurt her. She waited for the truant officer—an Attack Clone programmed to scare kids—while her skin glowed like a dying firefly, tapping her fingers on the desk beside her, but making no sound.

  She noticed the open door, the screams coming from inside. Her pupils disappeared in shock. She didn’t move, but she watched me die a dozen times.

  The Clone Warriors were programmed with enough medical know-how to serve as paramedics if ever a resident meets an accident. In the meantime, they used their skills on me. They slit my throat, punctured my lungs, blowtorched my face, stabbed my gut, and snapped my femur, with the precision of surgeons. Five seconds later, I was good as new.

  Nothing pissed off the Luminescent more than some outsider crashing their party. The Gestapo Clone Warriors injected me with hallucinogens, truth serums, speech inducers, things that felt like engine grease and kerosene mucked up my blood vessels. They wanted to know how I got hold of a pair of gravity disruptors, how I got them to work.

  I vaguely remember somebody once telling me—I think it was a veteran from the Great Sino War—that the height of a civilization’s medical technology is also the height of its ability to inflict pain. He said the Red Army used to keep their prisoners awake for weeks, only to install specially prepared nightmare simulations in their brains when they dozed off. He said death was a doubly terrifying process in the camps. Torture hasn’t gained any sophistication since then. You’re better off being done-in by malaria.

  Through short windows of chemical numbness and mental clarity, I felt diamond-laced eyes watching me. When one of the Gestapo Clones moved enough to his left for me to peek out the door, I saw Magenta trying not to stare, her skin losing its glow, fading into a mortified transparency.

  When the mind drugs kicked in, I saw her grow angel wings. When the torture started, the apparition grew horns from her nostrils as her body burst into flame.

  I told them where I found the gravity disruptors after they crushed my pelvis with a sledgehammer. I told them about my get-rich scheme while blood gurgled from my nose. My head struck the concrete wall more times than I could remember before they accepted I didn’t know exactly how we got them to work. There were no cameras, no records. As long as nothing was amputated, no evidence of this would survive. No evidence detectable by primitive tech at least. Fanged butterflies were everywhere and the world was spinning when they pried from my mouth Jethro Dong’s name and address.

  For all the wonders the space monarchy adorned their homes with, their jails were pigsties: grey concrete, iron oxide, vermin, feces, cages instead of cells, stainless steel cots, five-foot low cage ceilings, no bedding, shadows for space.

  My body was healthier than ever, but the memory of the past hours lurched at me whenever I let my eyes rest or my guard down. The clone warrior on duty stood still in the middle of the room, piercing the whole place with night vision eyes.

  Keeping me company was Magenta’s dim glow from the far end of the cage beside mine. With the hallucinogens out of my system, she was reduced to a slight girl whose skin had a mellow glow, whose hair was like the soft glowing tentacles of a cuttlefish. Her dress was a simple white, dirtied from an earlier adventure which got her locked up. Above vintage stiletto heels were the gravity disruptors, deactivated, fashioned to look like charming gold ankle bracelets. From what I gathered, she was to spend the night: the worst punishment short of exile they could have given someone of her status.

  She picked and destroyed a security lock at the Scorpio wing emergency fire exit. She was caught just outside the parking lot wearing a lead helmet of her own making. Her plan was to escape to the outside, jam the signal of her security chip with lead until she found a surgeon willing to remove it. Then she would have disappeared. But lead didn’t work. This was her 7th offence of a similar nature.

  In the dungeon was the only time I remember seeing her eyes dark. In the shadows, Magenta’s sockets were hollow black. She was looking at me; I felt it through my skin. I knew she wanted to talk to me. Tell me some secret. Tell me how terrible things are. She saw me beaten to a pulp, faceless, half-dead, whole-dead for seconds at a time, screaming when I wasn’t. I wanted to talk to her. My mother didn’t know me as Magenta did that night. In that dungeon, we were quiet. I wanted to tell her she was beautiful.

  The clone warrior was watching me, his medical kit readily hanging from his belt. He would jump at me if I so much as whisper a word to Magenta. We weren’t allowed to talk.

  From a section of my thesis: “The social situation of the country has steadily devolved over the last century into something comparable to that of millennial Indian society, wherein people tamely accepted their degenerate standings in society, believing it is the will of a higher power that the concept of equality be unheard of. Contact with lower classes was as unspeakable then during those savage times as it is here and now.”

  Scared shitless of a Gestapo encore and shivering, I rubbed the spot on my chest from where a rusty dagger was pulled once upon a time, leaving a scar that vanished as fast as water on Mercury’s surface. Magenta clicked her tongue, the sound a hot dagger through tension. She got my full attention.

  The clone warrior stirred as Magenta produced a silver pin from her hair and held it up for her audience of two to see. I imagined how hard the circuitry was working up in the clone warrior’s Neanderthal skull, processing how to act upon this.

  From the intro of my thesis: “An 18th century Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once stated you could dissect a culture by observing its deviants: the lowlifes, the criminals, the outcasts. In light of this, the truest testaments of cultural identity would come from the people who wish to relinquish themselves of it.”

  Magenta’s criminal record boasts fourteen arrests for various offenses, most of which involved attempts to elude the mall’s and her father’s strict policies regarding time spent on the outside. This made her the mall’s most notorious resident on record.

  Magenta finished first in her space flight class, majoring in atmospheric aviation—something her father forbade her to take up.

  She once cut off half the mall’s power supply just to get out unnoticed.

  She once hospitalized a clone warrior with a civilian stun ring. Her father gave her the ring in case she was attacked by an outsider.

  Magenta was voted the prettiest girl of her floor three years in a row. She was the only recipient who rejected a modeling job in Venus.

  When Magenta spoke, everybody listened; when she passed, everybody watched.

  She once hacked into the mall’s security files in an attempt to erase records of her existence.

  She had the most expensive eyes on earth.

  Before I knew any of this, I watched her pick at her deactivated gravity disruptors with a silver hairpin, in the dungeon where we first met without talking. The clone warrior had an inkling as to what she was doing, and ordered her to cease her activities immediately. She kept on it. There was nothing else he could do.

  When her gravity disruptors lit up and started warming up, the clone warrior, confused and upset, called for backup. Seven other clone warriors quickly entered the room, every one of them an exact copy of the other, down to the socks under their boots. They huddled around Magenta’s cage, scratching their h
eads, tinkering with the shockwave emitter that was supposed to keep her grounded.

  It was protocol that her gravity disruptors be rendered dysfunctional during her sentence, but it was also a strict rule that residents were not to be harmed even when detained. It was a peripheral but equally important rule to refrain from touching her while she was in her cage, and to only apply minimum force if she tried to escape. The only way they could have stopped her from doing what she was doing without breaking regulations was throw her cage out a window. Only the mall had no windows.

  Magenta wasn’t trying to escape, she was just turning her disruptors on. She was just pissing the clone warriors off. I watched her in awe.

  She gave me a look: This one’s for you.

  The clone warriors were going crazy—she was untouchable. They were close to banging their heads at each other. They slammed their fists at the bars, they jumped up and down and screamed. Their fists were clenched, sweat rolled down their hardened cheeks like beads, they grit their teeth. They were close to tears.

  When the gravity disruptors had warmed up, Magenta put her hands behind her head and got up on an invisible hammock, ignoring the barbarian threats and growls. Bobbing up and down, swaying in contentment on a nonexistent breeze, she had a smirk on her face more wild than subtle. She gave me a wink. I wanted to tell her I saw her grow wings. Everything else was in-between.

  The next morning, I woke to find her gone, back to her world somewhere in the mall depths. On the floor of my cage, near the corner where Magenta could have easily reached, I found nine etched digits. I memorized them because my life depended on it.

  It took the next three weeks after my release for me and Jethro Dong to figure out what to do with the numbers. We spent the time in Jethro Dong’s secret workshop in Binondo, where the clone warriors couldn’t have found him. It took thirty minutes for him to make sure I wasn’t bugged. It took three days for us to run out of brain stims.

  From my thesis: “Space monarch society is so insulated that their standard means of communication excludes everybody outside their homes. They utilize a wholly different set of com satellites, a whole different type of phone wire. Their contact numbers, when looked at by anybody unfamiliar with the system, would be meaningless. It is easier for a Luzonian mall resident to contact a Canadian than it would be to contact someone living three blocks away.”

  By the end of the three weeks, Jethro Dong felt safe enough to go home, and I had a makeshift communicator more contraband than the gravity disruptors. The only place safe for me to actually use it was the red-tiled sidewalk across the street from the mall.

  Drinking coffee in the most expensive coffee shop of the outer city, I spent hours dialing her number, listening to a 20th century waltz that I hoped was her ringtone, until it turned into a more familiar busy beep too loud for comfort.

  It was a week before she answered: she’d been grounded she said. She had an hour limited to go across the street. When she stepped out of the mall, things lit up in ways I never knew they could. Maybe that’s why she wanted to escape. She was being charitable.

  *

  I GOT A good grade for my study. I dedicated it to Magenta: “To the months we spent trying to fill the spaces in-between: the doors of her Exoscraper, the sky and the pavement, the mall and our red side-walk, our tongues and our teeth.”

  From my study’s definition of terms: “The term La Luminosa originated from the South Americas, where the social situation is similar to that of Luzon. It was first used on record by a young man who worked in a five star mountain resort in the Andes who used the word in his holonet journal. In Spanish, he wrote: ‘When I first saw them I believed everything my grandmother used to tell me, about angels and the armies of God. We men fly with our chariots like men, they fly like the shooting stars at night. They are the luminescent, and they grace our mountains with light every time they descend from their cities in the sky. When they leave, I weep at the thought of never seeing them again.’”

  KHAVN

  THE FAMILY THAT EATS SOIL

  Khavn is an internationally-awarded filmmaker whose explosive forays into fiction and poetry are not for the faint of heart. His personal anthology, Ultraviolins: This is not a book by Khavn, collects his poetry, fiction, essays, plays and screenplays, and is available from the UP Press.

  “The Family That Eats Soil,” a surreal tale, won the Carlos Palanca Award for Short Story in Filipino and became a film. It was translated by Singapore-based poet Mayo Uno Martin, the author of Babel, a volume of poetry published by High Chair, and producer of the spokenword album Uniberso: New Pinoy Poets Calling.

  1

  “SOIL AGAIN,” GROANED Baby, who was turning one on Saturday. “Soil for breakfast, soil for lunch, soil for dinner. Soil for snacks. Don’t tell me we’ll be having soil on my first birthday.” “There, there, child,” said Mother. “I promise we won’t have soil.” “What then?” “It’ll be a surprise.” The words were barely uttered as Baby’s face lit up while munching on stewed soil.

  *

  “Aaaah! Aaaah!” In a dark alley in Suburville, the eighth teenager was having his way with Sister who was as beautiful and frigid as a mannequin while being recorded on video by the next kid in line. “Aaaah! Aaaah!”

  *

  “Please pass the fish sauce,” said Father. Someone passed the fish sauce. Still, Father thought, he hadn’t gotten it. So he went to the sea and caught some fish and fermented it until it became fish sauce. Father’s finally happy. No thanks to his good-for-nothing children.

  *

  “So? Are you gonna confess or not?” Whoever Brother was asking couldn’t answer, confession or not. Because his eyes were bulging, his mouth gagged and his head was in a vise-grip. “Motherfucker! You’re really bullheaded!” Brother whipped a metal pipe and crushed his chest.

  *

  Mother cut herself on a chipped plate while washing the dishes. Blood mixed with water in the sink. Mother’s fingers continued to bleed as she remained oblivious to the war between blood and water.

  2

  “YOUR COOKING’S REALLY great, Mother! You’re the best!” said Brother, even as he stopped himself from puking out the latest dish of soil. He felt it wasn’t cooked enough. And too salty. But he couldn’t find the strength to say anything to hurt his mother. Not even during that one time when she kicked him hard. However much bad the cooking was. Because it was clear that he wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for his mother. Brother knew how to be grateful. Exemplary child of an exemplary mother in an exemplary family.

  *

  Father was mixing up a new medicine concoction from the dextrose bottles he had taken from the children’s ward of Troma Hospital. During their break, the nurses and doctors were whispering conspiratorially in the canteen. Father had just come up with his new brew in his basement lab early that morning and named it “Gardener.” Once it enters the bloodstream, all the red blood cells turn red and plants will sprout from every orifice: eyes, mouth, nose, ears, asshole, etc. In other words, you’re dead meat. The children’s ward of Troma Hospital smells lovely.

  *

  Sister still doesn’t have an appetite. Is it because she’s on a diet. Is it because she’s stoned. Is it because she doesn’t like stewed soil. Is it because she’s had too much spunk. Is it because she’s deliberately starving herself for her date later with Prince Charming. Is it because Father always gets mad at her for coming home after her midnight curfew. It is because she had a tiff with Mother about the new curtain’s color in the sala. It is because she thinks Brother stinks to the high heavens. It is because she’s grossed out by Baby who refuses to wear diapers or any underwear, walking around in all his fresh glory. It is because her soul is in another dimension and food tastes better there. It is because her soul is next door where the new tenant is a hot-looking bachelor. It is because she has no more will to live. It is because she doesn’t like eating with her family anymore and doesn’t believe in the saying “The Fami
ly That Eats Together Stays Together”. It is because she really has no appetite.

  *

  When Mother wasn’t looking, Baby slipped out of the house, went to the bus stop, headed straight for Aparri, passed by Tawi-Tawi, stopped over at Libangon, then went back home, all this before Mother looked at the crib and cooed, “Kuchi-kuchi coo, I love you!”

  *

  Mother still doesn’t want to sit down. Hands over the rice here. Gets a glass of water there. Since Father forbade Mother to get a maid, Mother became the maid. Father’s a real class act. Imagine, your maid has a PhD in Economics, president and founder of Arkweist, graduated summa and valedictorian from grade school until post-grad, aside from the fact that she’s your mother.

  3

  SISTER’S THE BEST. Every hole in her body has a “Welcome” sign. Be it a wound. Be it her navel. Be it infected. Be it gets worse. Then again, what are her doctor-clients for? She’s a real pro.

  *

  “Please pass the soy sauce,” said Father. He doesn’t really need soy sauce to complete his dinner. In fact, just a drop would be enough to turn his stuffed soil dish into a culinary delight and make him puke when he sleeps. He just has his crazy fits. And he wants you to have it, too.

  *

  The police are once more chasing Brother and his gang. It doesn’t seem to matter how much you pay them off, their pockets are really deep. Ester got hit. He’s down. Brother can’t stop to help even if they got circumcised at the same time, de-virginized at the same time at Bad Luck Club by a whore with FDT, killed their first Chinese at the same time. Because he knows a bullet is a bullet is a bullet. Because he knows, the Chinese guy had paid the cops double. Because he knows, things like this happen in war. Us versus You. To hell with dead friends.

  *

  Baby’s sleeping on Mother’s bosom. Hungry as hell. A bottle of powdered milk’s stuck up in his nose, a mixture of cow and goat’s milk is running IV through his veins, while he’s suckling poor Mother’s teats.