Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10 Read online

  “It’s all right. I have pictures,” she said.

  The memory tasted far better than the others. In fact, it was one of the best memories he had ever eaten. The Baguio air was a wonderful palate cleanser, crisp and pristine, like melon balls. The pine needles gave off a whole, wooden flavor, as if the earth herself were playing in his mouth. Caroline’s childhood happiness was the best part. It was sweet, but not cloying-sweet. It was a sweetness that spread itself, that lingered in his mouth, as good memories often did.

  After the experiments, Caroline made him swear a promise to never needlessly take any memories. For fun or pleasure. And she did all she could to quell his hunger, giving him her failed exams, forgotten words in public speeches, overflowing toilets, and other, embarrassing things she kept tucked under the back of her mind.

  They often tasted raw, or undercooked, or half-rotten, as in the case of most bad memories. But beggars can’t be choosers. Shortly after Seb discovered his unusual cravings, he had tried subsisting on his own memories, but he found them far from satisfactory. They were deep-fried, fast-food junk, with the consistency of baby-puke and the taste of expired milk.

  “That hair,” he said. “God, I wouldn’t mind putting my fingers through it.”

  “It looks like it hasn’t been washed in days. You’ll probably find an ecosystem in there.”

  “Watch over my bag, while I ask him what the Biology assignment was.”

  When he asked Gabriel, Seb didn’t hear his reply; he was controlling himself, trying not to give in to the temptation of sifting through his thoughts.

  Gabriel got his bag, his long fingers clasping the front zipper and opening, before he began rummaging through a pile of papers. Seb imagined himself, probably slobbering like a dog, eyes wide open, mouth even more so. He bowed his head, trying to avoid his eyes.

  So he did the only thing he could think of to distract himself.

  I swear I won’t eat anything. Just browse and return.

  Seb found a memory. It was a beach trip that Gabriel had taken a few months ago, with family. He was on a grainy shoreline, playing with a candy-swirled beach-ball, with his younger cousins. It was a memory Seb wouldn’t mind eating. But he remembered his promise to Caroline.

  So he just nibbled on the memory, eating at the edges of the beach-ball, the bread-crumb shoreline and sand. Most delectable was the few bites he got out of Gabriel. He could detect sweetness, with a sprinkling of annoyance, softened by affection for his cousins.

  He let go of the memory, reluctantly.

  “Hey, when is the exam again? It’s not tomorrow, right?” Gabriel asked, prompting him back to situation at hand.

  “Next week, Tuesday,” he said. “We’ve panicked about this for the past three Tuesdays in a row. Tomorrow, we’re just finishing that documentary on gene drift.”

  Gabriel laughed, and he wanted to eat that laughter.

  “Is it all right if I review with you, after class tomorrow?” he asked. “My notes are shit.”

  Manna. Food from the gods. He could subsist on this for a lifetime.

  August, second to third Week

  THE FIRST TIME they reviewed together, he could not look Gabriel in the eyes. He kept his head down, like a schoolboy afraid of his teacher.

  Seb would not speak unless spoken to, and when he did speak, he would give the most perfunctory answers. These were his guards, so that he did not have to look at Gabriel: texting someone, looking at his notes, writing on a pad of paper.

  Once, when he let his guard down and looked at him, Seb caught Gabriel smiling, which caused him to gulp, very loudly, as if he had swallowed something challenging.

  “Are you okay?” Gabriel asked him.

  “Yup, yup,” he said, flustered. “Trying to remember the answer for question four.”

  “It’s marsupials,” he replied.

  “Marsupials, putang ina,” Caroline told him, after he told her what happened. “Did you talk about nothing else?”

  “We talked about gene flow and Mendel’s laws of inheritance,” he said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Well it’s just Bio 1, Caroline. What else did you expect us to talk about?”

  “Fuck off, you know what I mean.”

  “You know how I am with the guys I like.”

  “And you know you’ll never get anywhere, if you keep waiting for him to make the first move,” she said. “What was his memory like?”

  “His what?”

  “Don’t act so coy,” she said. “I know you nibbled on some of his memories of you, just to see what he thought.”

  Seb had taken a teaspoonful of Gabriel’s memory of their time together. He stole the few seconds before he said goodbye. When he chewed the memory, he could detect the spiciness of stress, and the satisfaction from a good meal. There was also something in the memory he could not identify, which he soon realized could be bubble-gum affection.

  “See, he does like you!” Caroline said, after he told her this.

  “I don’t want to assume things.”

  “Gago,” she said. “You literally went in his mind. Which is a super-problematic thing by the way, which we will discuss when I get back. But you’re not assuming anything.”

  “Wait, what?” he asked. “‘When I get back’? What does that mean?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I’m going to Quezon for a week, for field work.”

  “Oh,” he said, just so he could say something.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, as if she had chewed on what he was thinking. “It’s not like I’m your only friend.”

  In truth, he often felt that Caroline was his only friend. He had batch-mates, he had org-mates, but he had frequently felt that they were only friends of convenience, that, in different circumstances, they would not have even gotten along. He felt that if he had fallen sick, Caroline would be the only one to drop by his house, with a thermos of hot soup.

  After Caroline left, Seb found himself eating more memories than he was used to. He ate an applicant’s anxiety during his final interview. He ate his classmate’s most frequent case of diarrhea, which had a remarkable consistency, akin to some very floury bibingka. He even ate his professor’s memory of an exam, so she ended up remarking how forgetful she was that day, and dismissed them early. He ate and ate and ate, until he burped, and smelled the odor of chocolate syrup and cinnamon rolls, no doubt from a six-year-old’s weekend trip to the mall, which he had consumed earlier that day.

  When he saw Gabriel later that day, he found himself talking more openly. He talked about his last bout of field work, when he went to Sorsogon, and accidentally fell out of a boat, to be saved by one of those tall, muscular boatmen, which almost made the experience worthwhile. He talked about his latest trip to Cebu, where he ate the crispiest and brownest lechon in the world. He talked about how he’d gotten food poisoning, from the last time he tried to cook himself a meal.

  “The last time I got food poisoning,” Gabriel said. “I ate around – eight Jollibee Yumburgers? Anyway, at around the fifth, my stomach was crying, but I was too sad and hungry to notice.”

  “Why were you too sad and hungry to notice?” he ventured, half-worried he was crossing a boundary.

  “I found out my boyfriend was seeing someone else,” he said. “He told me through text, that fucker. The bastard wouldn’t let me have Jollibee for the year that we were dating, said it would ruin my figure. So I thought, well fuck him, and went to the nearest Jollibee to make up for a year’s lost time. I must have thrown up half of it the next morning.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry,” he replied.

  “Why are you saying sorry?” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Seb blushed. That was the only proper response.

  The next day, Seb was asked a question that tasted like fresh-squeezed calamansi juice.

  “Can you help me review?” Gabriel asked. “For another class, I mean. God, I feel like such a clingy classmate, but I remember you mentio
ning something about folkloristics, and I thought, hey, you’ll probably understand this material more than me.”

  He thought of deep-fried tempura, crackling in the mouth. He thought of ube sorbetes, on a hot summer's day. He thought of kare-kare, bursting with peanut sauce. He thought of dinuguan, simmering in pig’s blood and spices, dancing and lapping on his tongue.

  “And you also mentioned that you needed help with your linguistics paper,” he said. “So, do you want to sleep over? We could have a paper party, which is far more fun than it sounds.”

  Chicken wrapped in papaya leaves. Rice-cakes like little clouds of dream.

  “When?” he managed to ask.

  “First week of September.”

  Seb felt something warm in his pants.

  Did I just shit myself? Did he just make me shit my pants?

  He excused himself, and scurried to the Shopping Center’s grime-infested bathroom.

  Inside one of the stalls, he lowered his pants, and looked at the bottom of his white briefs. He found Caroline staring back at him. Only she wasn’t looking directly at him. She was looking at a mirror, as she washed her face, flushed red. This was a hangover memory. It was one of the more disagreeable ones. When he’d swallowed it, the taste of lime and vermouth hit him hard, curled up his stomach like a cup of bad milk. It was no surprise that it was the first one to go.

  He took Caroline's face, and flushed it down the toilet.

  August, fourth week

  “HEY, BITCH,” CAROLINE said, as soon as he had arrived at her house. “I’m back!”

  She seemed brighter than ever, tanned skin the color of toast, with eyes that seemed to sparkle like spun sugar.

  “You look glowing,” he told her. “Finally found a love life in the field?”

  She told him about field work, about the hot sun boiling them, as they excavated potsherds and stone tools, and debated over whether a location was a hearth or not. She told him about the cute Australian in their trench, about how she had tried making a pass at her after too many rounds of local rum, and they ended up cuddling until sunrise. She told him about how they were going to have dinner next week.

  “You’re making me blush,” he told her.

  “Gaga, I’m sure you’ve done so much better than me,” she said. “How are you and Gabriel?'

  “We haven’t done anything,” he said, meekly

  “Liar,” she said. “What does his dick taste like?”

  “Like Pepsi-Cola, chos,” he said, laughing. “I'm going to his house next week. He offered to help me with my linguistics paper, if I helped him with his take-home folklore exam.”

  “Hey, I have a present for you.”

  “Did you wrap up one of those cute Australians for me?”

  “Nope,” she said. “C’mon, take a peek into my mind.”

  Something stirred inside him. He had already eaten six memories, and it wasn’t even midday. One of them was this particularly rich one: a middle-aged man eating an entire sugar cake by himself. When he’d swallowed it, he almost gagged at its richness, and wondered if memories could give you diabetes.

  He had no appetite for Caroline’s memory, delectable as it looked. It was of her swimming in the ocean, and he could taste the freshness of the blue sky.

  “I can’t take this,” he said. “This is too good.”

  “C’mon,” she urged him. “Your sugar-mommy’s been gone for a week. Poor you must have subsided on what must have tasted like dog food. Treat yourself!”

  He took the memory, to keep Caroline from suspecting anything. As soon as he swallowed it, he felt a rumbling in his stomach.

  “Fuck, fuck,” he blurted out. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  Before Caroline could reply, he started puking out all the undigested memories. He saw them shoot out of his mouth, thick and clumpy, and hit Caroline in the face. There were bits of a perfect exam paper, kernels of a love letter never sent, dregs of an overcrowded Boracay beach party. He heaved and heaved, a large chunk of the Kalinga countryside, a midnight inspection of UP. His stomach rumbled, and his mouth threw up memory after memory, until he saw all of them dripping from Caroline’s head and body.

  “Seb, what the fuck did you just throw up?”

  “I didn’t throw up,” he tried to reason with her. “I just had a spasm.”

  “Fuck you. You were throwing up, I know it. I know what you look like when you throw up, and you looked exactly like you were throwing up,” she said. “And while you were throwing up, I got flashes of a guard I’d never seen, wandering the campus at night, and of a letter thrown in the trash, and of a group of teens in a mountainside. And I started tasting all these things in my mouth, all sweet and sour and spicy like Lucky Me mixed with ice cream mixed with bagoong mixed with I can’t even fucking say. I just wanted to wash them all out, because they all felt so wrong.”

  “I could tell they were memories,” she continued. “But I knew they weren’t mine, and it felt just awful. It felt like I was taking something I wasn’t meant to take, and it just felt sick. I mean, I’d always wondered what the memories of other people felt like, and I guess I finally got a taste.”

  “Caroline, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fuck you, Seb,” she asked. “How the fuck do you even throw up memories? How many of them have you fucking stolen already, to make you throw up, you greedy little shit?”

  He searched through her mind, and she put her hands on her ears, as if she were trying to un-hear something.

  “No, no, no, no,” she screamed. “No! Fuck you!”

  Then, “You know what?” she said. “Go the fuck ahead. Go on, puta ka. Walang kwentang gagong hinayupak. Eat my memory of this. Eat it, so you know how much I hate you right now.”

  He ran. He ran out of her house, and hailed the first jeepney he saw, not caring where it would take him. When he turned to look at her house, he half-expected Caroline to be at her gate, watching him go.

  But she wasn’t there.

  At least he would see Gabriel soon.

  September, first week

  HE WOKE UP, on Gabriel’s bed, in Gabriel’s room, after telling Gabriel that he would just take a quick nap, because one more morsel of sociolinguistics would make him throw up theory in Gabriel’s nice clean room. He remembered Gabriel, sweet boy with the sweet mind, offering him his bed, and his refusal, saying that he’d be all right on the floor. He remembered making a joke about sleeping anywhere and with anyone, which made Gabriel laugh, awful as it was.

  There was a sickly taste in his mouth, which told him that he’d been asleep for much longer than he intended. He felt his back, and discovered that his t-shirt was soaked with sweat. He felt like he was being dried on a wooden rack, left out in midday sun. He got up, and groped around the dark for a light switch, and when he found one, he found that the electricity had gone out. He stumbled his way to Gabriel's desk and found his cell phone, on its last bar of battery. Again, he checked whether Caroline replied to any of his messages; she finally had, but it was a quick, tart “We’ll talk about this next week”.

  He checked the time. It was three in the morning, and he accomplished nothing of his paper. He looked at Gabriel, and saw his memories suspended on a nearby moonbeam.

  There was Gabriel, thirteen, masturbating for the first time, experiencing his first orgasm, and his first post-orgasmic bout of Catholic schoolboy guilt. His climax tasted like sea salt and coconut juice.

  There was Gabriel, sixteen, having sex with a girl for the first time. He came too quickly, and his embarrassment was lollipop-sweet.

  He was thinking that there was a common thread to these memories, when he saw Gabriel waking up. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, scratched the back of his black-forest hair, and looked at him, like he was looking at someone he was fond of seeing.

  He gulped, and Gabriel seemed to notice.

  “Power’s out,” he said.

  “Usually happens at this time of year,�
� Gabriel said. His voice sounded garbled, as if he were chewing on something.

  “Did I fall asleep?” Seb asked. Stupid question, he knew. But he was afraid of the quiet.

  “For a bit, yes,” Gabriel replied. “You fell asleep around midnight. You said that Boroditsky could kiss your ass, and collapsed on my bed.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, because he could say nothing else.

  “Not your fault,” he said. “You told me to wake you up after an hour, but you looked so peaceful, sleeping.”

  Gabriel sat on the bed, next to him, and he felt the hunger throb in his belly, felt it clamor and scream and smash its fists against his stomach walls.

  Gabriel put his hand on his thigh, and Seb put his hand on top of his. For a moment, he was worried that Gabriel’s hand would fall apart, like bits of overcooked bread. But it didn’t, and Seb laced his fingers through his.

  He could not remember who leaned in first, but he could remember them kissing, mouth on mouth, tasting each other’s lips, tongue, and teeth. He grabbed a clump of licorice hair, and Gabriel bit his lower lip, softly and cautiously, as if it were goblin fruit.

  Seb pushed him away, pushed him against the wall, took off his shirt, as if he were unwrapping a package from the butcher. Gabriel complied quickly, guiding him to lower regions. Seb kissed his bare chest, consumed the memory of a faint scar above his left nipple, an unfortunate encounter with a broken bottle at a beach in Palawan. He went down, to his flat stomach, took the fading flavor-images of his breakfast meal that day, skinless longganisa and orange juice, greasy and citrus-fresh.

  He was at his thighs, and he kissed out his first blowjob, swallowed his phantom cum, tasting vaguely of pineapple bits. Gabriel shuddered, but he couldn’t tell whether it was part of the memory. Seb undressed Gabriel so quickly it could have been a magic trick.

  He traced the flesh to the tip of the head, down the shaft, to its base. Seb ran his tongue down the side, and heard him moan. He could taste Gabriel’s quick tryst with his ex-boyfriend, in the first-floor Palma Hall bathroom. The cubicle stalls were bitter gourd. But when he began eating Gabriel’s ex-boyfriend, on his knees, making Gabriel’s moans echo on the vandalized walls, he felt overpowered, felt an ice-creaminess trickle down his throat, felt a strawberry milkshake form in his mouth.