Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10 Read online

  “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 13th, 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 see
med 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 no
tes 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!