Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 7

As his friend went to answer the call, Danny stood up to stretch for a bit.

  As he did, he found his gaze drawn around the ergonomically-designed pastel-colored hall where a dozen in-bound callers like him communed in their own private worlds behind their mirror-shades. Despite the occasional muttered conversations and the muted tap-tap of black gloves on tabletops, the silence was a palpable blanket over the cubicle-filled hall.

  Patience, he thought. He wasn’t sure if he was referring to the clock or to Edgar. For a while, he imagined taking several swings at the computer with his swivel chair. That took around five minutes off the clock.

  Finally, it was 5:30. The sound ding-dong echoed through the hall, effectively signaling the end of the day-shift. Likewise, a laser hologram of Ms. Remy, the office HR, flickered into being near the ceiling and made last minute announcements. As his officemates started moving out of the hall, the noise volume jumped.

  Danny gestured to shut down his computer. As it did, he found his mirror-shades clear before his eyes like a television set turned off. He swiped his ID wrist-band through the electronic scanner near the console to log-out. As it processed, he took off his shades, placed it on the hook by his chair and stood up.

  Edgar said from behind him, “Are you sure you don’t want come with us? Teresa, Frankie, and me are going to Enterprise Plaza to get a round of beer.”

  Danny shook his head and replied, “No, it’s alright. I’m not going home to my apartment tonight. Gonna go home to Rizal to my Lola’s houseinstead. You guys go ahead.”

  “All right. Your loss, man,” Edgar said with a grin. He waved farewell and turned to go with the others.

  Danny turned around and took out his body-pack. He placed his lunch container, his notebook, and some pens in it. As part of his daily after-work ritual, he drew off his tie and pocketed it carelessly in his shirt chest pocket. Finished, he slung the pack on his shoulder and headed towards the exit.

  At the glass doors, a line had formed with employees swiping their wrist IDs into a wall-scanner. Danny took his place behind the line and absentmindedly studied the plastic band around his wrist.

  “So this is an ID band,” he remembered Mang Bal saying, looking at the bracelet with myopic intensity. The wristband’s queer black color, with glints within the band shining in the lamplight, made it appear as if Danny was wearing a small piece of the night.

  “Yep,” Danny had replied with a swig of beer.

  Mang Bal had asked, “How come it doesn’t have your picture? I mean, I know I’m as old as sin and I don’t give a whit for these modern things … but don’t IDs usually have pictures?”

  “These are electronic ID bands, Mang Bal,” Danny had replied.

  “So?”

  Danny had sighed and said, “For simplicity’s sake, it’s easier to store data in an electronic ID—my company profile, my SS number, my TIN, including my picture. They’re all in there. Of course, to avoid any problems like ID switching, company rules state that you can’t let anyone else wear your wristband. Else you face dismissal or worse even, prosecution.”

  “Watch your tone. I’m ignorant, not stupid,” Mang Bal had declared and added, “Thankfully, I’m too old for this stuff.”

  “You’re never too old, Mang Bal,” he had countered gently.

  At least, Danny thought glumly, he hadn’t told Mang Bal that his office was one of the few that hadn’t upgraded to the latest in palm- and iris-recognition technologies around. Then it was Danny’s turn and he swiped his own band past the scanner. It chirped his exit time at him and he stepped out of the office into the elevator foyer.

  Already, a sizeable group was waiting for a lift downstairs. Danny groaned when he saw the eight elevators on the move and none near his floor. Damn it. Elevator rush hour again, he thought.

  Ten minutes later and two elevator rides down, he exited the building. As always, traffic on Ayala was a stand-still due to the slow progress of construction of a new railway system right down the middle of the avenue. The cacophony of traffic was also deafening as clamoring car horns dueled with the persistent shrieks of buses’ air-brakes and muffler-shot engines.

  Despite the sound, the dust and the distance, Danny decided to walk to the MRT 1 train station instead of taking a crowded bus. Walking towards the Glorietta Mall, he took his time and let people rush around him like river water around a boulder.

  Danny wondered if there was any difference in traffic now that Makati had banned public utility jeepneys within its city limits. He remembered the protests and violent demonstrations by militant groups against the city government so well. But now, he thought, it was back to business as people took the bus or their own cars in resignation despite the interminable Makati traffic jams. Or, like him, they walked.

  Like lemmings was how Danny once described to Mang Bal the rush-hour crowd’s hustle homewards in the evenings. Unfortunately, he had to explain to his old friend what lemmings were. Mang Bal never did take to watching cable television, much less Discovery Channel or National Geographic.

  “People nowadays are so much in a hurry,” Mang Bal had said, and pointed a gnarled finger at Danny in admonition: “That’s why you get so tired just coming home. Better you should stay at the office or at… hrmm, what’s the name of that mall? Glo—Gloriska?”

  Danny had shaken his head in amusement and popped a piece of chicharon bulaklak dipped in suka into his mouth. “It’s Glorietta, Mang Bal. And besides, I won’t have anything to do in the mall.”

  Mang Bal had snorted and said, “Nothing to do? Only unimaginative people have nothing to do!”

  “Well, I’m tired after work that I sometimes just sleep during the travel from Makati to Rizal. But it doesn’t really matter since I only go home on the weekends.”

  Danny glanced up at the sky past the high-rise buildings and saw it was almost twilight. A sound like an angry wind disturbed his reverie and he saw in the distance the old MRT line. With a sigh, he joined the crowd heading towards the escalators to the train station.

  At the bottom of the escalators were salesgirls in their dark-blue SM uniforms, dusty trabahadors finishing the day shift from construction sites, and harassed-looking yuppies on their way home. Likewise, there was a smattering of Koreans in the crowd.

  Danny thought Kornoys or Korean-Filipinos had nothing on Chinese-Filipinos ever since pop idol Sandara Park came out in 2004. This, plus the infusion of South Koreans seeking better opportunities in the Philippines, had ensured the rise of a new breed of Filipinos. He wondered at times if the Filipinos as a breed were dying out. But then, he thought wryly, what’s a Filipino anyway?

  “Your parents were Filipino,” Mang Bal had said, “so you’re Filipino.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Danny had replied evenly. He hated talking about his parents. “My dad was three-fourths Chinese, remember? Lola used to say all my bad habits came from his blood. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Lola was a racist.”

  “What’s a racist?”

  “Never mind, Mang Bal.”

  Once past the escalators, he lined up at the queue leading to the turnstile and took out his Nokia cellular phone from his pocket in readiness to pay. As he neared the turnstile, he pressed a button on his phone and the screen lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors. Ahead of him, a pretty young woman dressed in corporate attire had done the same and was now flashing her phone at the turnstile. Then it was his turn and the turnstile scanner deducted the proper fare from his phone.

  However, just as he arrived at the platform, he saw the tail-end lights of a train vanish into the darkness. He sighed and turned to look for the next one. Soon enough, the platform filled with the next batch of commuters going home.

  “I hate waiting for the train,” Danny had told Mang Bal, “I always have the bad luck to get to the platform just as a barely-full train pulls out. And then when the next train comes in, it’s topped to the brim!”

  “In my day,” Mang Bal had said past a mouthful of crunchy
sisig, “people had someone to blame about those things. During my day, they called him Bathala. Or God or Allah or…”

  “Hey! Us young people still have religion.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Mang Bal had muttered, “Nowadays, it’s easier for you youngsters to go without any spiritual education—and I don’t mean attending churches. What I mean is that you have the sense that you’re part of a bigger picture.”

  “What do you expect? Nowadays, the younger generation has to have a sense of belonging to a group in order to be enthusiastic about it. But we—and yes, I’m including myself despite being 27 years old—we don’t get that feeling,” he retorted.

  “That’s because you expect everything to be handed to you on a plate. Look at what we’re eating now! Sisig in a can?” Mang Bal had said, waving the tin can before him. “In my time, I used to butcher the pig myself and chop up the pieces to make the dish.”

  Mang Bal slurped another spoonful of the pork dish before continuing: “Younger generations are content just to let things go their way as time goes by. It’s easier to feel contentment rather than working for what you want. And what do you get in return? Mediocrity.”

  “Whoa!” Danny had said, “Wait a minute. I was just commenting on my bad luck with trains and now all of a sudden, we’re a generation of slackers and losers?”

  “Yes. Do you have a point?”

  When the next train arrived, Danny was swept into the train carriage as the crowd jostled to get seats. As the train signaled its departure with a pitiful whistle, he thought he was going to be crushed as the last few passengers tried to squeeze into the carriage before the doors closed shut.

  Fortunately enough, he found himself with enough space wedged against the train window. He tried to concentrate on the view outside as he breathed through his mouth. Despite the air-conditioning in the train, people were perspiring badly in the stifling heat and the odor of sweaty bodies was making him nauseous.

  Outside the train, he saw the traffic was marginally better than on Ayala Avenue as a bumper-to-bumper river of red lights fed southwards. Turning his head, Danny found himself with a spectacular view of the Makati business towers. The buildings themselves were lit both inside and out with a Donald Trump-esque extravagance.

  As they neared Guadalupe Bridge, he saw a number of people on the train taking advantage of the giant television screens near the river. Danny figured whoever thought of the idea of planting screens near grid-locked major highways was a veritable PR genius. He thought it put a whole new spin to the term “captive audience.”

  And speaking of the Pasig, the river itself looked as if it had finally given up the ghost. Only a small muddy trickle ran down its length as decrepit and rickety houses lined the sides, a growing squatters’ colony politicians had dubbed “River Town.”

  “I still remember when there was a Pasig River,” Mang Bal had said, staring moodily at the gas lamp, “There were fishes in the river and birds flew its length without being overcome by the fumes. And during the rainy seasons, the river would overflow to flood the banks.”

  “Well, the government did try to revive it before in the late ‘90s,” Danny had said. “They even put in a ferry service complete with stops along the river.”

  “And look at it now,” Mang Bal had said.

  Several stops later, his train pulled up into the Cubao station and he waded through the crowd to exit the train. Walking to the bridge that connected the MRT to the LRT line, he looked out at the thriving bazaar that filled the empty and half-constructed buildings of the Cubao commercial center.

  Despite an effort to invigorate Cubao in the early 2000s, the venture had failed, forcing real estate investors to leave the environs to the tsangge crowd: the DVD bootleg movie sellers; the ukay-ukay marketers; and the cell phone syndicates. However, despite the failure to change its face, Cubao was still alive.

  From his spot on the bridge, Danny saw a veritable sea of lights amidst tarpaulin tents and covered stalls selling almost everything: second-hand clothes, cheap Taiwanese toys, stainless steel pots and pans, cell phone covers as well as used cell phones, pirated CDs and memory sticks, pearls and plastic jewelry.

  Likewise, he could smell the palengke a few meters beside the train station that was marked by a garbage pile at the center of the wet market. Disturbingly, the smell of offal had combined with the heady aroma of sizzling barbeque, crunchy kwek-kwek eggs, and a dozen other fares being cooked on the spot to make his mouth water. Already, hawkers had taken over the front of the Cubao station’s ground floor.

  “That only goes to show that the Filipino ingenuity knows no bounds,” Danny had told Mang Bal.

  “Or is it because Filipinos are still poor after so many years,” Mang Bal countered.

  “Aren’t you cynical.”

  “Hah! I read the newspaper. Sometimes, when I get the urge, I watch television. And so far, nothing’s changed. People are still struggling to get by.”

  “Well, us young ones have to have something to be hopeful about because you oldies are already past your due anyway.”

  “During my time, we lived in trees, remember?” Mang Bal had snorted in reply. “Pass the bottle opener by the way.”

  Danny soon reached the train and boarded it. A shrill siren blew and then they were moving swiftly above the sharp lights of Aurora Boulevard. Not too many people were on the train and he was able to get a seat.

  As he peered into the darkening evening, he wondered if a sign of progress in Marikina was the proliferation of billboards. Already, most of the signs cast multi-colored lights below at the residential communities that nestled beside Marcos Highway.

  Like the city of Manila, the passage of the years had taken a toll on the cities of Marikina and Quezon. Residential suburban areas had quietly stumbled into ill-regard as moneyed families moved out to far-flung subdivisions in Bulacan and Laguna. Danny had studied at the state university in Diliman so he had an idea how Quezon City had once been regarded as the premier green city with its forested parks and grassy fields.

  “I once visited U.P. myself,” Mang Bal had announced proudly.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. When your mother and father were still young, still studying. I took the time to walk around to see the beautiful trees stretching their branches over the streets as if the roads were rivers.”

  “Yep, I remember those. I used to wonder if you knew those trees, some of them were so damn old. Last I heard, those trees are all gone now.”

  “I know.”

  Fortunately for Danny, Mang Bal had turned maudlin at the subject and they didn’t talk about it again.

  By the time the train crested to its final stop at the top of the Antipolo hills, evening had fallen. Danny got out. He trudged past the exit turnstiles of the station, joining the crowd down the stairs. As he exited the station, he looked at his watch—its digital face faintly glowing in the dark—and wondered if he would be able to make it home early enough.

  He felt his stomach growl and he detoured to a nearby food stall. He still had a little money in his wallet—around a hundred bucks—and this was enough for a small dish of kikiam doused in sweet-and-sour sauce and a cold glass of gulaman. Finishing his meal, he wiped his hands on a small piece of napkin and threw the rest in a nearby garbage can. He then went looking for an FX shuttle.

  Fifteen minutes later, Danny was in an FX shuttle together with a number of passengers as it climbed the roads to Rizal. He napped now and then as the travel was uneventful despite an occasional jeepney or tricyle on the road. Lining the road were trees: miles and miles of it cloaked in a darkness that was almost primeval except for distant, isolated island-lights of a house here or a streetlight there.

  At times he could almost think the whole world was just the circle of headlights that enticingly revealed a view of the road before them. That, and the heartbeat-like thumps—pada-bump, pada-bump, pada-bump—of the shuttle’s wheels on the pavement.

  One time whi
le he napped, he dreamt/ remembered Mang Bal telling him about his parents.

  “Your mother and father was a nice couple. They loved each other so much. There was actually a moment I thought your Lola would cry herself to death when she received the news of their accident.”

  Danny had gritted his teeth. “It wasn’t an accident, Mang Bal. It was only an accident that they were in the wrong place and time during the bombings in London. Besides, I barely knew them. I was still a baby when they moved abroad to work.”

  “Be grateful, Danny. From what your Lola told me, they went abroad for your sake so that they could send money home.”

  “Yeah, but it was Lola who took care of me from day one. Is it my fault that I can’t even remember how they actually look like? The only way I even know is through Lola’s pictures.”

  Danny woke up as the shuttle chugged up a steep hill, a sound that told him that he was nearing his destination: a small dirt road leading off from the main thoroughfare.

  “Para!”(“Stop!”)

  Danny got off the shuttle and started walking. Despite the blackness of the night, he wasn’t afraid. He had grown up under the eaves of this forest and knew each and every root and rough patch of ground from the road to his house.

  Still, Danny felt something stir from the pit of his stomach. Despite his familiarity, this part of the forest reminded him of ancient nightmares that haunted his ancestors. Unfortunately, he knew all the old tales: the dark underground-dwelling dwende, the malicious cigar-smoking kapre, and the bestial horse-headed tikbalang.

  He shivered a bit as he heard the leaves rustling high above him. Was there a wind? For a moment, he imagined it to be some creature with sharp teeth and immediately felt the top of his head itch. But before his fears ran out of control, he saw a small well-lighted bungalow standing at the end of the dirt track and knew he was home.

  He swung open the creaking brown gate. A couple of dirty-white mongrels came out from underneath a rusting Beetle in the garage and started barking. When they realized who it was, the two dogs started jumping up and down in excitement.