The Tesseract

  She knew that the last occasion she had been able to touch her daughter, without being aware she was touching her daughter, had been during the terrible typhoon. The rainstorm had continued for days, and each night Rosa had gone to sleep in Corazon’s arms. Corazon remembered it well. The way that her arms had ached, and how she had often wanted to shift position. Not that she had minded her arms aching. Not that one moment had passed between then and now in which she would not have happily done it again.

  But a brushed hand, or similar gesture, was the closest she had come since Rosa had left the barrio and begun her new life in Manila. And, of course, Rosa had left for Manila directly after the rainstorm.

  A strange thought, when put like that. Not comfortable, not worth dwelling on.

  And anyway, why dwell on the obvious? There was a clear implication: If anything was to blame for the change that had occurred, it was Manila. Manila changed most of the people it touched, so why would her daughter be any different? Nothing to do with coming of age or prices paid. Just the dark city.

  As predicted: A brief rinse and the ice-cream bowl was clean, so Corazon wondered what she might do to occupy herself next. Something normal and mundane was called for. If she couldn’t hold her daughter in her arms, she could at least surround her with reassuring normality.

  Still wondering, Corazon glanced up from the sink and looked out the window. There she saw clouds of nighttime insects whirling under the downward glow of each streetlamp. An unusual number of them, moving in graceless slow motion, as if they were in a dream.

  And, equally belonging to a world of dreams, or to childhood recollections of skipping-rope chants, she saw a silhouette.

  3.

  Corazon took three or four steps away from the sink, turning as she did so. Rosa scraped her chair backward. Through the ceiling, there was the soft bump of small feet sliding off their beds and landing on floorboards.

  Rosa asked Corazon what she had seen, and Corazon raised a hand to the side of her face. Rosa didn’t feel any particular alarm, didn’t make any connection with the exchange of gunfire ten minutes earlier, because Corazon’s expression was one more of puzzlement and surprise than anything else. She was almost smiling. “I thought I saw…” she said, but didn’t end the sentence.

  “Mom!” called Lita.

  Rosa looked toward the hallway, then back at her mother. Corazon, still holding the side of her face, still seeming no more than vaguely startled, looked back at the window.

  “Mom!”

  Lita’s voice was clearer, less muffled, coming from the top of the stairs.

  Rosa swore. “Stay in your room, honey!”

  “Are you going to come up?”

  “Yes,” Rosa replied, not moving. “I’ll be right up. I want you to go back to your room.”

  “I thought I saw…”

  The man outside was on his hands and knees, crouched in the middle of the road. A thick covering of an indeterminate filth glistened or glittered on his clothes and body. He had an automatic pistol. His head was hanging loosely and his chest was heaving.

  Suddenly he rolled over, holding his arms out stiffly. The gun swung around so it pointed down the length of his body. He was aiming at the street behind him, where, distinct under the sodium lamps, two more men had appeared.

  Hollow Be Thy Name

  1.

  In the nine years since she had left the barrio, Rosa made the return journey over the Sierra Madre mountains only five times. While she had been finishing school and starting university, she had made the trip home each Christmas, staying for no more than three days. After meeting Sonny in her first year as a medical student, she had not returned to the barrio at all. Their marriage, eight months later, had taken place in Batangas, the home of Sonny’s family.

  Twice a year, Corazon and Doming made the reverse trip to visit Rosa in Manila. They stayed at Uncle Rey’s. The purpose of their trip was twofold. Partly to see their daughter, whom they missed—especially Doming, who had never had a clear understanding of the reasons for Rosa’s abrupt departure—and partly to petition Uncle Rey for more college funds. Rey always was agreeable to the petition, having been the main reason that Rosa’s career had been pointed in the direction of medicine. Usually, he arranged for the transferral of money several days before Corazon and Doming even showed up.

  If Doming hadn’t died, Rosa never would have made the journey for a sixth time. If Doming had lived forever.

  Changes, in the nine years: The sawmill had expanded, exhausted the supply of trees around Infanta, and begun to strip the jungle along the mountain road. The river, visible as the road began its descent toward the coastline, was permanently brown from landslides in the defoliated areas. The stretch between Sinoloan and Real was tarmacked. On the tarmac were Japanese and Korean sedans. Sedans hitting thirty or forty miles an hour, where jeepneys—weaving around countless potholes and ruts—had once been lucky to touch fifteen.

  Just the start of the changes.

  Nobody looked up when an engine passed. Nobody hitched rides, because the rides were moving too fast to stop. The horses that lived in a glade by a hairpin turn had vanished. Concrete tubes redirected streams. The journey took two and a half hours less than it used to.

  “Different,” said Sonny, accelerating the Honda sedan to overtake a Kapalaran bus.

  “You can’t imagine,” Rosa replied.

  “All that used to be jungle. This used to be a dirt track. There weren’t any power lines.”

  “Okay, you can.”

  Sonny glanced cautiously at his wife out of the corner of his eye. “Caribous munched on fields of wild orchids. Rare birds took fruit out of the hands of children.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Mammoths would stampede down from the mountain summits…”

  There was no acknowledgment.

  “Rosa,” Sonny said, after a brief pause, and reached over the gearshift to squeeze her knee. “Is there the slightest chance of getting a smile out of you?”

  Rosa shook her head, though she gave Sonny’s hand a squeeze in return. “There’s no chance. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” said Sonny quickly. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just trying to…”

  “You’re trying to make this easier.”

  “In any way I can, if you just tell me what to do.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “But if you realize there is something…”

  “Yes.”

  “You just tell me.”

  “I will.”

  Raphael, lying on Rosa’s lap, head rolling with the turns, stirred. Two months past his first birthday. A better sleeper at that age than his older sister had been.

  2.

  Rosa started to feel ill when they reached the coast—which meant that Infanta and Sarap were now no more than a thirty-minute drive away. She asked Sonny to pull over, handed him the baby, got out of the car, and threw up. While she was throwing up, Sonny also got out of the car and came to stand behind her. It reminded her of Lito and the dead pig on the beach, which made her throw up again.

  “This is too hard for you,” said Sonny. “We’ll drive back to Manila. Tomorrow, I’ll collect Corazon myself.”

  “No,” said Rosa over her shoulder. “I’m not missing my father’s funeral. Just give me a few minutes on my own. I’ll be fine.”

  A short walk took her down a grassy slope and onto sand. Feeling the eyes of her husband and children watching her from the Honda, she maneuvered until the car’s bright blue paint was obscured by roadside trees and bushes. Then she sat down, halfway between the high-tide watermark and the sea itself.

  “Your beauty is as rare as your fingerprint.”

  It was an unexpected line, said earnestly and with a noticeably prepared seriousness. Thinking back on it many times, Rosa suspected that Lito had lifted the line from a sari-sari store romance comic. She also suspected that the next line would have been a marriage proposal. Which, if her life had been her ow
n, she would have accepted.

  But instead, she told him that within forty-eight hours she was going to be on a jeepney headed for Manila, where she would live with her uncle Rey. And she told him that they would probably never see each other again.

  Lito said that he didn’t believe her. He had a look on his face as if he’d just staggered out of the sea with bleeding ears and glass splinters peppered in his skin. Rosa thought maybe she had the same look on her face. She certainly had it in her head. When she screamed at Lito, telling him that it was true, she felt as if she were screaming through cotton wool. And when the words came out, they were whispered.

  Lito asked why. Why Manila, why never see each other again. Rosa had answered him by lunging forward and hitting him. Or scratching him. On the chest.

  It was hard to remember the specifics, in the same way that it was hard to remember why her answer had taken the form of an assault. Except that it was appropriate. Without fairness or reason—appropriate in its context.

  Then she was pulled back by Doming, who must have followed her when she had run out of the house early that morning, tracking her as noiselessly as the world in which he had come to inhabit. Doming, who had not understood the silent movie scene that had exploded in front of him the night before—Corazon and Rosa twisting their mouths into inexplicable expressions of fury and hatred—but who had understood its aftermath well enough. Saw it on his daughter’s face as she had seen it on his face, as she had seen it on Lito’s face. And indeed, as Doming could see it on Lito’s face.

  This boy with a strangely ruined chest, reeling under the dynamite shock. Son of Tata Vin, the man with the strangely ruined leg. Withered like a polio victim’s—the fingers of one hand could have closed around Tata Vin’s thigh. But at least Tata Vin had been better off than his father, Tata Ilad. Ilad had been born without any arms below the elbow. It made you wonder what a family could have done to be so cursed.

  Perhaps a third of a mile down the beach, Doming stopped and sat. He still held Rosa, managing to contain her rage with one entirely powerful arm, while the other was kept free to stroke her head. It took time for her red mist and wildcat strength to dissolve, but eventually it did.

  When Doming released Rosa, he checked her eyes for the autopilot. And when he found it—found the blankness—he relaxed, partially because he knew that whatever the nature of this explosion, the autopilot would guide her through.

  3.

  Doming was in an open casket. A good casket, white with brass handles and gold-plated edging, and a plastic viewing window. It had been paid for largely by Sonny, who—while Rosa was still an intern—was the family’s only real earner. He was congratulated by several of the mourners for having honored his father-in-law with such a lavish send-off.

  “I doubt I’d have done the same for my father-in-law,” whispered Turing, who already had a few San Miguels under his belt. And it was quite a belt. The spread of his girth had been so extreme that Rosa hadn’t been able to place him at first. “Turing,” he had prompted cheerfully. “I might not have married Leesha if I’d known she was such a good cook!”

  Recognizing Leesha, however, was no problem. Of course she looked older, and three children had added a complementing weight to her, but in all other aspects she was the same. And anyway, in the five intervening years between Rosa’s last trip to Sarap, the two of them had exchanged photos—Leesha’s presumably taken by the ballooning Turing, his expansion hidden behind the camera.

  And Rosa recognized Ella easily too. Where Leesha had glided, Ella had scuttled, tugging after her a thin man with a greasy, translucent complexion and a slightly haunted air.

  “My deepest condolences,” Ella had said. “Everyone will miss your father.”

  Knowing better than to open her mouth, for fear of what might come out, Rosa simply nodded. Then she turned away, to where Leesha was showering a somewhat bemused Lita with kisses and hugs. Ella and her husband left not long after.

  Late into the night, around twelve, the very oldest and the very youngest at the wake had either drifted or been taken home, or were curled asleep in the house. Everyone else was outside. The teenagers were sitting in a circle around an oil lamp, taking turns singing recent pop songs. Relatively recent. Rosa noticed that there was still a detectable time lag between Manila and the barrio.

  Sonny was in another circle—a circle of husbands. He had been roped into a lambanog drinking session organized by Turing. Unused to the locally distilled spirit, he discovered that he had got himself extremely drunk, but far too late to do anything about it.

  Corazon was on her own, with the coffin, one hand laid on the plastic. She had been there since Rosa had arrived, as she would be until the casket was taken to the church the next day.

  And Rosa and Leesha sat together, separate from the others, having the private chat they had been waiting for all evening.

  “Now,” said Leesha, pouring herself a shot from her own supply of lambanog. “Do you want to talk about how you feel?”

  “I don’t think so. I’d rather hear about you. You know, you look so good, and all your children are beautiful.”

  “Thank you. I agree. I wish I could say the same about my man, though. Your photos of Sonny don’t do him justice, whereas perhaps you’ve noticed that Turing’s photos…”

  “I haven’t seen photos of Turing. You didn’t send me any.”

  “Exactly. I didn’t send you any pictures of a caribou’s ass, either.”

  “Leesha!”

  “Just a joke.”

  “There aren’t…problems between you?”

  “None at all. Everything’s fine. I’m very happily married, and I’m sure it’s going to stay that way.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Although I must admit, I have my doubts about the third baby. She’s a girl, so I’m hoping that if my doubts are confirmed, it won’t show up too much. But if it had been a boy…well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Rosa frowned, turning this comment over in her mind. Then she said, “Oh.”

  “Sison,” said Leesha, probably a little louder than she should have, and knocked back her shot. “Don’t look at me like that. I held back for four years. But it seemed like everywhere I looked, there he was, playing basketball, being handsome. It drove me crazy.”

  So it turned out that Rosa had been wrong, because she managed a smile after all.

  They never talked about Lito. At one point, Rosa had been tempted to ask. From Leesha’s letters, Rosa knew that he was still a fisherman and that he was still unmarried. But now that Rosa and Leesha were face to face, talking about him didn’t seem easy.

  Rosa had almost wanted him to appear at the wake. Even if they didn’t speak, just seeing him, she thought, would tell her what she needed to know. If he was okay. If he’d moved on in the way that she had.

  To the extent that she had.

  Guilty toward Sonny that she was thinking about Lito so much, guilty toward her father that Lito was the biggest reason why this return to Sarap was so hard.

  Perhaps he would appear at the funeral tomorrow. Perhaps, if he did, that would be a good thing.

  4.

  Leesha stayed the night with Rosa and the children, behind the curtain partition that had once made Rosa’s bedroom. Raphael lay in the protective arc formed by Rosa’s right arm. Lita lay similarly with Leesha, though she was too big to be completely encircled, so Leesha’s arm doubled as a pillow.

  It left no space for Sonny, but by the time he realized how important it was for him to stop drinking and get some shut-eye, he was far beyond caring where that shut-eye might happen to be found. He woke at five the next morning, hung over and still extremely drunk, puzzled to discover Corazon’s toes only a few inches from his face. Puzzled, then appalled when he realized that his search for a bed had led him under the trestles that supported Doming’s coffin.

  Which partly explained the fitful dream that had plagued him for each of the three ho
urs he had been approximating sleep. His own death, repeatedly, by a variety of means, but always at the hands of the fat sawmill guy with the sadistic drinking games. “Just one more!” Turing would cry, pulling a byenté nwebé from his back pocket. “Just one more!” as he started stabbing Sonny in the neck. “No,” Sonny would protest politely. “Really, I think I’ve had enough.” “Just one more!” And the next time, it would be a gun or a machete.

  Coincidentally, Leesha also had dreamed of Turing. She was playing a game of one-on-one basketball with Sison, and the ball was Turing’s head.

  “Corazon, I am so sorry. Please forgive me, po,” Sonny tried to say as he crawled out from beneath the coffin, but his lips were dry and stuck together, and didn’t open. Fortunately, Corazon was too exhausted to take much notice of the bizarre singsong whine that came from her son-in-law’s nose.

  Sonny hauled himself up, desperately trying to produce saliva and massage some life into his mouth with his tongue. Once he’d pulled the creases out of his shirt and regained some dignity, he made a second go of the apology.

  “I don’t know what to say, po…There’s nothing I can say. I am so sorry.”

  “Oh, Sonny,” Corazon replied, gazing at him through bleary and bloodshot eyes. “I’m sorry too. I don’t know what I’ll do without him. But I know he is with Jesus now. He was a good man all his life, a good man, and I know he is with Jesus.”