“Boxers don’t skip!”
“Yes they do! You think you’re better than boxers? Too tough to skip!”
“That’s right!”
“Ha! A teeny prawn like you, and you’re tougher than Olympic boxers with prizes!”
“Yes!”
“Ah, fuck you!”
“Fu—!” Totoy picked up the rope and threw it in his mother’s face. “There!” he yelled, and began marching away.
She let him go about ten paces before she called him. “Hey, Tots,” she said. “Don’t sulk. Skipping is difficult at first, but you’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not going to get used to it,” he replied over his shoulder.
“I just thought it would be fun, but we don’t have to skip if you don’t want to.”
“Fun,” said Totoy, with the kind of distaste he usually reserved for invoking the names of notoriously dangerous policemen.
“Come on, Tots. I never see you, and it’s nice when we do stuff together. Like a proper family.”
They sat in the shade of one of the bus terminal’s shelters and shared a cigarette. Usually, Totoy didn’t smoke—he had dabbled with butts until he was eleven, and never acquired the taste—but on this occasion he smoked with his mother because she’d offered him a rare Champion blue-seal from a pack, and he knew how much that must have meant to her.
“Ah,” she said, drawing deep on the menthol. “It’s like a cool sea breeze. One day, Tots, I’ll take you to the village where I grew up. Then you’ll know what a real sea breeze is like.”
“That will be good,” said Totoy agreeably, thinking that the day his mother took him to the provinces would be the day hundred-peso bills rained from the sky.
“You’ll meet your grandparents, if they’re still alive, and your uncles and aunts. You’ll like your aunts and uncles. And I’m sure that there will be plenty of cousins for you to play with…” She sighed and tapped ash. “That’s all I ever did when I was your age. Play.”
“Skipping, I suppose.”
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was always the best at skipping. I could do it the fastest, and I could twirl around so my skirt lifted up. The other girls would get tired and barely be able to say the chant, but not me! I could sing the chant as loudly as I liked, twirl around, and still spy on the boys playing basketball.”
“So,” Totoy said dryly. “The boys were playing basketball.”
“The boys didn’t skip because they were too scared! The chant frightened them all to bits.” His mother laughed and pinched his cheeks with her bony fingers, bringing the tip of her cigarette worryingly close to his eye. “That’s probably why you flew into such a rage. The chant scared you!”
He shrugged. “It was a pretty weird chant. All those people being eaten.”
“Oh, but it had to be scary, Tots…” From the last drag before the filter, his mother paused to blow a neat smoke ring. “If it hadn’t been scary, there’d have been nothing to stop us from tripping.”
3.
Totoy was wrong. If Vincente had wanted to overtake the two suits, it would have been no problem at all—he’d gained on them quickly, and increasingly broad alleyways had presented him with the option to pass several times. But Vincente didn’t want to overtake them. He didn’t want anything. He had an impulse to tail the chase, and beyond that, he had no plan.
No plan, and only one worry.
“Don’t follow,” Vincente panted, though Totoy was much too far behind to hear. Every time Vincente glanced back, the small shadow was struggling along, just able to stay in sight.
“Stop following. I’ll meet you later by the Ermita McDonald’s. We’ll work customers on their way out…”
For their part, the two suits seemed unconcerned by their shadow. Neither gave any impression of knowing it was there.
The shit-covered white man led his pursuers out of the slum and into a wealthier area. Once in it, although the terrain made for easier running, their sprint speed dropped to a jog, as if they were taking time to appreciate the pretty scenery rather than battling with leaden calves and short breath.
To Vincente, the blossom that lined each side of these streets looked like the Mount Pinatubo ash-fall.
Which was appropriate, he immediately commented to himself. Pinatubo had erupted seven months into his year of silence, the midpoint between his father’s disappearance and Totoy’s leap from the Intramuros tree. He had heard the news in a traffic jam, walking past cars in which every radio was tuned to the same bulletin. Days later, ash from the explosion was still drifting down over Manila. The gray flakes had filled the air, coating the branches of trees, collecting in drifts by the roadsides.
Vincente almost smiled to think how much the observation would have pleased Alfredo, if this had been a dream. He would have asked, “Did the dream feel like a nightmare?”
“Sure.”
“You woke up feeling?…”
“Bad.”
“And what do you think the dream might mean?”
“I know what you think it might mean!”
“Go on.”
“You think the blossom is ash, and the running man is my father, and Totoy is following because he’s going to save me, jumping down from the Intramuros tree.”
“Yes. You are absolutely correct. And as usual your perceptiveness has confounded all my expectations, no matter how often I revise them. I should be used to it by now, Cente, but I’m not. I can never predict what’s going to come out of your mouth. You’re an endless surprise.”
“You always say that.”
“Well, what do you want me to say? You always surprise me.”
“Give me my money, please.”
“Exactly. QED.”
Vincente nearly jogged into the two suits’ backs. Looking beyond them, down a hundred feet of sodium lamplight pools, he saw that the running man had stopped running.
4.
Vincente expected the suits to continue toward the man without breaking stride, then kill him quickly. But instead they had immediately split apart, crossing to opposite sides of the road, and were now inching forward along the grass verge in a half-crouch. They were showing the man the same respect you’d show a cornered animal.
Vincente matched the new careful pace, but stayed in the middle of the road.
Vincente had taken ten short steps. He tried to imagine what the man was thinking, on his hands and knees, staring at tarmac.
The man answered by suddenly rolling over to lie flat. His gun veered in the rough direction of the suit on the left, then the suit on the right. On the next sweep, it hesitated on the small central target.
Vincente wondered why the man hadn’t started firing. Perhaps hitting people in darkness at such a distance was more difficult than it seemed. Perhaps his magazine was empty or had only a couple of bullets left.
The gun veered away again.
A soft patter of footfalls indicated that Totoy was closing.
Vincente felt a strange pressure swell in his chest, a hand that had reached inside him to grip his heart. He turned to the suit on the right. The suit was wearing a torn and black-stained shirt. “Why don’t you shoot him?” Vincente asked, pointing toward the man. “Are you out of bullets too? You should shoot him now.”
For the first time, the suit acknowledged the boy’s presence. He replied, “Kid, who are you?” Then he looked angry, and said, “This isn’t a game! Get the fuck out of here!”
Vincente turned to the suit on the left. The suit on the left returned his gaze without any expression in his eyes or face. “Stick around, kid,” he said, “and you’ll get killed.”
Vincente didn’t know if the suit was asking him to stick around or if he was delivering a threat. “I’m not playing a game,” he said, and the pressure subsided.
The man had more fight left in him than his broken posture on the road had suggested. He scrambled up and started stumbling across the front yard of a house.
N
ow, finally, the two suits opened fire.
The man screamed, or cried out, and jumped headfirst through what turned out to be a kitchen window.
Supersymmetries
1.
Alfredo opened the French doors of his living room and went out onto his balcony. He curled the fingers of one hand around the guardrail. In the other hand, he held the framed photograph from his desk. The lights of the city clustered and moved, cars and bedrooms, curtains drawing, blinds lifting, buildings etched in pin-prick vectors. These lights lit the night cloud layer, and the city was darker than the sky above it.
From the thirty-story perspective, in the cubes and rectangles, in the pinprick vectors, in the isometric conjunction of a shopping center complex and a low office block, Alfredo searched for and found a particular shape.
Cente.
Take six cubes and arrange them into the shape of a crucifix. Take two more cubes and stick them on either side of the crucifix, at the point where the cross is made. Now you have a tesseract. A tesseract is a three-dimensional object. A tesseract is also a four-dimensional object—a hypercube—unraveled.
A square unravels to a line. Two dimensions unravel to one.
A cube unravels to a cross. Three dimensions unravel to two.
A hypercube unravels to a tesseract. Four dimensions unravel to three.
You exist in three spatial dimensions. In the same way that a one-dimensional boy could not visualize a two-dimensional square, or a two-dimensional boy could not visualize a three-dimensional cube, you cannot visualize a hypercube.
A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand.
You can understand only the tesseract.
This means something.
For you and for me, Cente, this is the way it is. We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself.
2.
It’s early evening. A pot of chicken stew is ready to be warmed up on the stove, and a pot of rice sits beside it. You’re standing on the balcony of our apartment, leaning against the guardrail, taking in the view. Cente is in the living room, reading a book on the sofa.
Every so often he looks up to check on you. Sometimes you see him looking, and you give him a little nod. He nods back or gives you a smile, and goes back to reading.
Then he sees something in the book that he thinks you’ll find interesting. It’s a popular-science fact of the kind you like so much. A semiprecious science jewel, a useful side piece of the jigsaw, a big thought for a short pause.
Cente says your name to get your attention and reads the paragraph aloud so you can hear. He makes an effort to speak clearly and tries to convey the enthusiasm he feels for the idea behind the words.
When he finishes, he remains staring at the page. He knows that if he looks up from the book again, you’re not going to be there. At some point over the minute it has taken for him to read the paragraph, you will have jumped, slipped, fainted, or fallen.
It’s a dream.
Cente stares at the page for as long as I’ll sleep that night.
3.
Alfredo imagined letting the framed photograph drop from his hand. As he pictured it, he could follow the path of its descent for six or seven stories. The last he’d see would be a bright flash as the protective glass cover caught the light of a passing window. Past that, the distance between the top of Legaspi Towers and the pavement would be far too great to discern whether the photograph hit the ground or passed right through.
Part IV
The Tesseract
Sean
“Okay,” Sean said.
He was shot in the chest twice. The force of the bullets did not throw him backward; his legs simply folded and he collapsed onto the kitchen floor. As he lay on the floor, a third bullet hit him in the thigh.
For several seconds, Sean didn’t think of anything. He was aware only of turbulence. As far as he knew, he had fallen out of a plane, been struck by a car, been swept overboard by a wave, or tripped down a flight of stairs. The turbulence had no history and no future. It was a pocket of violent surprise. If somebody could have spoken calmly to Sean during these few seconds, he would have accepted any suggestion as a plausible cause for his confusion.
When his mind began to clear, Sean was left with an overwhelming sensation of limited time. Time for his mind to have and complete a single, final thought.
Through the strobe of images that followed this sensation, a girl’s face resolved itself. She didn’t have a face that would have launched a thousand ships, and she had no enigmatic smile. But she was honest, solemn, and Sean knew she was there to protect him from whatever she could.
Lito
In the light of the oil lamp, with the sheen of sweat, her solemn face looked like polished bronze. Lito pressed four fingers of rice into a ball and popped it in his daughter’s mouth. She screwed up her eyes and spat it out. “Not nice?” he said, and she shook her head.
Lito sighed contentedly. Every night of Isabella’s pregnancy, he had lain awake worrying about what form their baby’s abnormality would take. And when the baby had been born and a careful inspection of her body had revealed perfection, his alarm had increased. He could imagine only that the abnormality lay on the inside: a missing lung or damaged heart, or a crucial defect in some other vital organ.
So when, after the milk stage, her abnormality turned out to be that she refused to eat rice, he had nearly died of relief. Yes, it was endlessly problematic, given that rice was on her parents’ menu three times a day, and the volume of fried potatoes she consumed made Lito feel ill if he stopped to think about it. But her freakish diet didn’t seem to have stopped her from growing into a healthy and beautiful three-year-old girl.
“Spat it out again?” said his wife’s voice behind him.
Lito brushed a mosquito off his daughter’s leg. “Yep,” he said.
“Lito, if you want her to eat rice, you should stop trying to force it on her. If you stop trying to force it on her, she’ll come around. Take it from me.”
“No, Isabella,” said Lito tersely. “Take it from me. She won’t.”
“If you tried—”
“Isabella,” Lito interrupted. “That’s enough.”
Isabella let the matter drop. Her husband was a sweet-natured man, but he could get oddly fierce when it came to discussing their daughter’s eating habits. A blessing in some ways, that Lito’s one area of short-temper concerned something as inconsequential as rice.
“It’s hot,” said Isabella, to change the subject. “Nights like this never seem to end. So hard to sleep.”
“True,” Lito agreed after a short pause. “Maybe we should sleep outside tonight.”
Isabella nodded, pleased to hear her husband’s voice returning to a less abrasive tone. Then she walked over to the doorway of their nipa hut.
Through it she could see the silhouette of Lito’s boat, pulled up on the beach past the high-tide mark. Beyond the boat, moonlight caught the swell on the sea. Beyond the sea, a strip of electric lights glowed on the mainland like a broken necklace.
The lights of Barrio Sarap, one mile distant from their small island.
Raphael
Through the kitchen doorway, Raphael saw his grandmother on the floor of the kitchen, bleeding like the victim of a jeepney accident. Beyond her, framed by the broken glass of the window over the sink, he saw the head and shoulders of a boy.
The boy had a ragged clipped haircut and a filthy face. Raphael wondered who this kid was, where he had come from, and why the glass had been broken in the first place. He felt sick and cold with fright. He clenched his hands to his bare chest. Under his fingers, he felt the hard delineation of his scars and hoped that he wasn’t about to be burned again.
A man appeared over the head of the boy. At once, there was an explosion of shouting. Amid the voices, he heard his mother. Her voice was lower and quieter than the others, but more urgent. The shouting continued, strange barking words that he didn’t understand.
br /> The shouting stopped. He heard a man talking with his mother.
Then there were three loud bangs. Raphael felt a clawing blow on his head, tugging him backward, and everything went black.
Sonny
“Gotcha,” said Sonny, and stood up to admire his handiwork. Somehow, the newly replaced tire made his car look more complete than it had before the puncture. More complete and more his own.
Similarly, the grease and dirt on his shirt and hands pleased him. It had been too long, he decided, since he had scuffed himself up in such a way. Another thought quickly followed: The coming Saturday, he would take Raphael to the Megamall. They’d eat a pizza or some kind of American fast food, maybe see a film, do a little window-shopping, and then—springing the kind of surprise that earns permanent credit in the good-dad bank—they’d buy a bike.
A bike. Training wheels that eventually would have to be removed, jogging down Baluti Avenue with his palm on the small of Raffy’s back, the application of Band-Aids to small brown knees, the changing and mending of flat tires.
Sonny felt like phoning Rosa at once to tell her the plan. She could take Lita out on the same day and buy her an appropriate girl’s treat. Could be a dress, he speculated, or some jewelry.
“Lita’s first necklace,” he said. “Gold.”
For another minute, he remained gazing at the Honda—which now looked to him as if he had built it bolt by bolt, from scratch. Then he took his mobile phone from his trouser pocket and began dialing his home number.
But just as he was about to key in the last digit, Sonny changed his mind. This was the sort of plan that was best not explained over the phone, particularly if Corazon was hanging around in the background—which she certainly would be. Better to tell Rosa later, when they were lying together in bed, her head nestled against his left arm. That would be the best time.