Sonny climbed back into his car, started it up, and waited for the chance to pull into the stream of traffic.
Teroy
Teroy stood against the wall on one side of the broken window. Jojo was next to him. Between him and Jojo was the street kid.
This weird kid, chasing them around.
“You want a gun?” Teroy said.
It was a sort of joke. He wasn’t going to give a gun to the weird kid. Who knew what was going on in the kid’s head? He was probably crazy.
“You want to see stuff?”
Teroy grabbed the kid with his free hand and hauled him around so that he stood directly in front of the broken window.
“There. Now you see everything. What do you see?”
No reply.
“I know you can talk. What do you see in there?”
No reply still, but the kid wasn’t getting shot or shot at.
Teroy spun around, raising his gun over the kid’s head, pushing forward so the kid was sandwiched hard. He didn’t want the kid moving or being a distraction.
Through the window was a kitchen. The Englishman was in the kitchen. He was holding a woman against him like a shield. There was an older woman on the floor, bleeding.
Teroy didn’t shoot because he didn’t want to kill the young woman. And the Englishman didn’t shoot, maybe because he didn’t want to shoot the kid, but more likely because he didn’t have any bullets.
“Drop your gun,” Teroy shouted to the Englishman.
The Englishman shouted back in English.
“Move your fucking head,” Teroy shouted to the woman. “Move your head and I’ll kill him.”
Corazon
Corazon’s body worked to keep itself alive. Making decisions that were beyond any decision-making process: Coagulants tried to stop the flow of blood from the entry and exit bullet holes in her side; muscles stiffened around the wounds.
Meanwhile, Corazon slipped in and out of consciousness. When conscious, she noticed that she was sprawled on the kitchen floor. This disconcerted her, but no more so than if she had woken to discover she had slept in a twisted position, meaning a day ahead of grumbling complaint from a stiff neck.
While unconscious, however, her mind was more troubled. She dreamed that a black dog had leapt into her daughter’s house and was preparing to eat the family. Worse yet, if anything could be worse, she had a strong feeling that she had brought the dog to them herself, either by having failed to prevent its coming or, more likely, by a past word or action. A misjudgment, a mistake that had chased her for years and come to this.
“Perro negro, perro mío, Dios mío,” she prayed ardently. “Por favor, de su protección a ésta casita y a ésta familia.”
But the prayer was confused and as misdirected as her guilt, and it went unheard.
Mercifully, the dream was fractured. It never quite ran through to its terrible ending. If not interrupted by a few seconds of consciousness, it looped back on itself, returning Corazon to the moment she first glimpsed the dog, sitting on the road outside, about to turn its gun-barrel gaze to meet her. So she was spared all bloody conclusions, except, eventually, her own.
Don Pepe
Don Pepe’s mouth was red and dry where a bubble of blood had popped over his lips, his eyes were rolled up in their sockets, and his fingers were curled into claws.
In the Spanish town of San Sebastián, a restaurant owner recalled a memory of the rudest customer he had ever served, an old man with an unplaceable accent and a linen suit that looked as out of its time as his silver matchstick holder. In Quezon province, the young nephew of a Manila dockworker shuddered at a story about red mists and machetes. In Negros, a cemetery caretaker shone his flashlight on the graffiti-covered walls of an old Kastila mausoleum. In an Ayala Alabang mansion, six Dobermans licked their paws and listened for the sound of a Mercedes engine.
These fragments, and others like them, were the form in which the mestizo continued to exist. Together, they represented his life as inadequately as a shoal of milkfish represented the South China Sea. In this respect, death had reduced him in precisely the way he had feared it would.
Lita
Lita knew exactly what to do. She reached around Raphael’s head, clamped her hands over his eyes, and yanked him backward. She was much bigger and stronger than Raphael, so he couldn’t resist.
She pulled Raphael so forcefully that his weight crashing into hers sent them tumbling to the hallway floor. Even as they fell, Lita kept her hands over Raphael’s eyes. When they were both on the floor, she rolled him onto his front, trapping him beneath her. Her knees held his legs and her elbows held his arms.
It was a grip that ensured Raphael was blinded, contained, and protected. Lita felt as if she had known these actions under these circumstances, this drill, for as long as she could remember. She had learned it from her parents; it had been coded into her through years of witnessing the way they watched him, the way they spoke to him, even the way they put him to bed.
Lita held Raphael tight until the shooting stopped and she heard her mother calling their names, at which point she felt that the danger had passed and it was safe to let him go.
Jojo
Jojo heard Sean say “Okay.” Immediately, Teroy began shooting over the street kid’s head. Teroy fired three times; then he shoved the boy out of the way and began climbing through the window.
Jojo dropped his pistol.
The boy stumbled to the side, then took a few uncertain steps away from the house. He was holding his ears—Teroy’s gun had gone off only a few inches from his head—and he looked as if he was having difficulty keeping his balance.
Jojo walked over to the boy, who was now turning slow circles on a single spot on the driveway, and took one of his wrists. Jojo’s fingers closed so completely around the thin forearm that it felt as if he were making a fist.
“Sit down,” he said. The words were hard to say. His tongue felt thick in his mouth and his head felt as if it were full of smoke. When the boy gave no response, Jojo pulled the wrist downward. “Kid, sit here. You’ll feel better soon.”
The boy sat, then laid himself out flat. Inside the kitchen, Teroy’s gun fired three or four times more. With each gunshot, the boy twitched. To Jojo, it looked as if the boy were being shot himself.
“Hey, hey,” Jojo said. “Relax. You’re not hurt.”
A woman in the house cried out.
“You aren’t hurt,” Jojo repeated, and he knelt down. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here. I can’t imagine why you chased us, but I hope you had a better reason than me.”
This comment produced a response of a kind, though it was unclear what the response might mean. The boy’s eyes flicked toward Jojo’s, then at the sky.
“I don’t think I had any reason to be here at all,” Jojo continued. “If you were to ask me why I came here, I’d say I came here because I did. I’d say, that’s just the way…”
Jojo frowned.
In his smoke-filled head and out of his thick-tongued mouth, Jojo heard his father’s voice. “That’s just the way it was.”
His father, speaking like a priest. A red mist, rising like steam off cane cutters’ backs in the early morning. A stooped figure in a doorway, smelling like the split husks beneath coconut trees.
Reflexively, his thumb turned the wedding band on his left hand.
“This is over,” Jojo said, standing abruptly. “I’m alive. I’m going home.”
Then he went to help Teroy, who was clambering awkwardly out of the kitchen window.
Totoy
There were more gunshots from inside the house, followed by the sounds of screaming and crying. Most of the screaming and crying was a kid, Totoy noted blankly.
A few moments later, a man—one of the two suits—climbed out the front window. As he climbed out, a part of his clothing seemed to catch on the broken glass in the frame. Maybe it cut through the clothing to his skin, because he suddenly jerked side
ways, which made him slip, and he fell to the ground.
The second of the two suits helped him stand. Then both men walked to the end of the driveway, passing Totoy without a second glance, and began jogging down the road, back in the direction of the slum.
Totoy walked up to where Cente lay in the driveway of the house.
“I tried to keep up,” he said, squatting beside his friend. “You were so fast, you left me behind. My legs are too short to keep up with you when you run so fast.”
Cente didn’t look as if he was listening. He was staring at the sky, tight-lipped and unblinking, as he had done earlier when Totoy had jumped him from the scaffolding.
“Are you winded?” Totoy asked. “Or angry?”
Cente remained impassive.
“Why are you lying down?”
The noises from inside the house distracted Totoy for a couple of moments. The crying had intensified, for no clear reason. When he returned his attention to Cente, his friend had closed his eyes.
An idea crossed Totoy’s mind. A little tentatively, he lifted Cente’s T-shirt and put a hand on his chest. Cente’s chest was warm and wet only with sweat, and under the rib cage was a heartbeat.
“Phew,” said Totoy, removing his hand. “For a moment, I was afraid you might be dead.”
He hesitated, then added, “The shooting,” by way of explanation. “With all that shooting, I was afraid you’d been killed.”
Inside the house, the crying abruptly stopped. Now the street and the night seemed very quiet.
“But you aren’t dead,” said Totoy. He lay beside Cente and folded his arms behind his head to act as a pillow. “You’re just thinking.”
Alfredo
Alfredo had stopped thinking. He closed the French doors to the balcony, sat down on his sofa, and picked up the phone. Then he dialed, agreed to hold, and listened patiently to Manila’s only twenty-four-hour dance-music station.
Romario didn’t leave him holding for long. “So?” he said.
“So,” Alfredo replied, “the larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown.”
“What?”
“The last words I spoke to my wife. Or at least, it was the last line of the paragraph I was reading. I couldn’t say for certain whether she heard it or not.”
Romario cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said.
“Did I never tell you that before?”
“No.”
“Well, there it is…Anyway, pick me up.”
“You’re coming to dinner?”
“Yes.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez,” said Romario. Then, down the phone line, Alfredo heard the sound of a briefcase clicking shut. “Fredo, stay right where you are. I’ll leave now. I’ll get over to you in about fifteen minutes.”
“Fine.”
“This is great! Silvie will be really pleased, and you’re going to like her friend a lot. She’s just the sort of girl you need to…” Romario paused. “Fredo, you’d better not change your mind on me.”
“I won’t,” said Alfredo. “Call on the car phone when you pull up outside. I’ll come down.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Sure,” said Alfredo, and began to put the phone down.
“No, wait!” said a small voice just as the receiver was about to hit its cradle.
Alfredo lifted the receiver again.
“Do something,” said Romario.
“Do something?”
“Uh…you’ve got to make yourself look nice. Have a shower and put on some fresh clothes. Some good clothes. Is fifteen minutes enough time for you to have a shower?”
“I’d have thought so.”
“Then have a shower.”
“All right.”
“Good clothes! A clean shirt!”
“Yes.”
“Fifteen minutes!”
“Yes,” said Alfredo. This time he disconnected the line with a push of his finger.
Rosa
The armed Filipino outside the kitchen window shouted that Rosa should move her fucking head so he could kill the man behind her.
The Englishman shouted, “I’m going to die. I’m covered in shit. I fell in a fucking sewer.”
The Filipino gunman repeated that Rosa had to move her head.
“I’m going to die in this fucking kitchen, covered in shit.”
“Move your head!” the gunman shouted a third time.
“I can’t move my head!” Rosa shouted back at him. “Please don’t shoot! You’ve already shot my mother! There are two young children in this house! Please don’t kill them!”
Something indefinable in the gunman’s expression seemed to change. He said, “Your children are not going to be killed.” Then his mouth closed and he didn’t shout at her again.
Rosa blinked. Her mind was working slowly, but her thoughts were clear enough. “Is it possible for you to shoot over the head of the boy?” she asked the Englishman quietly.
“How can I?” he answered in a half-sob. “I don’t have any fucking bullets left.”
“Then,” Rosa said, “in a few moments, unless you let me go, he will kill us both.”
The man sucked in a sharp lungful of air before replying. During this time, Corazon expelled a loud sigh.
“Okay,” he said.
He let Rosa go. Rosa threw herself to the side. The man stood alone for half a second, arms bunched at his sides, pointlessly tensed in defense. Then he was shot.
Rosa slid to the floor and covered her eyes.
She could hear the Filipino gunman climbing through the window.
“You said my children wouldn’t be killed,” she whispered.
A crunch of glass told her that he had jumped down from the kitchen sink and was in the room.
“Please,” Rosa said.
She uncovered her eyes and saw the gunman standing over the dying Englishman, firing into his head. The gunman fired until his pistol was empty. Each explosion caught her breath like a hiccup. The final shot made her scream.
While Rosa screamed, the gunman reloaded and the Englishman’s blood spread quickly across the floor. She continued to scream until she dimly realized that the gunman was waiting for her to stop.
The scream tapered away.
“That’s your mother,” the gunman said, gesturing with his free hand at Corazon’s body.
Rosa didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m sorry she’s dead,” the man said flatly.
She nodded.
The man nodded back. “Sorry,” he said again, in the same oddly polite, emotionless voice. Then he walked to the sink, hauled himself up, and was gone.
“Lita,” Rosa called. “Raffy.”
At once, two reassuring wails burst out from the hallway.
“Kids, don’t come into the kitchen. Everything is…Stay in the…”
Stay? The word sounded ridiculous. What for? Stay until she had a chance to clear up the mess, slide Corazon and the shit-covered foreigner out of the way somewhere, mop the floor? What difference would it make?
Rosa sat in the blood and glass, her gaze alternating between the two corpses.
She told herself: Take a minute to think. I should recognize this territory by now. This is an aftermath, and they are familiar to me. I know what to do from here.
She tried again.
“Lita, Raphael, stay where you are.”
Vincente
Vincente lay beside Totoy on the tarmac. He wasn’t dead; he was thinking.
He had chased a running man and seen what happens when a running man is caught. In the house, he had seen a young boy, about the same age he had been when his father disappeared. He had seen a sink; plumbed in, a good sink, the kind of sink you get in a good house.
He thought: There should be something here that I am meant to understand.
Vincente thought harder.
Some time ago, Fredo had talked about thinking.
?
??When you say, ‘I just thought of something,’ what you mean is, ‘I just stopped thinking of something.’ You’ve been having the thought for a while, turning it over in your mind, developing it, without realizing you were doing so. Maybe for days or weeks. Maybe even years.”
Vincente thought: The running man wasn’t my father, the boy wasn’t me, and my memory is so bad that I can’t be sure if I ever had a sink like that or not.
Maybe there is nothing here I am meant to understand.
Maybe there is no meant to understand.
This means something.
Vincente stopped thinking.
A car pulled into the driveway. Vincente and Totoy sat up, squinting into the bright headlights until the driver switched them off. Both boys recognized him, but he didn’t seem to recognize them. He stared over their heads with a puzzled expression on his face.
Up and down the blossom-lined road, figures stood in lit windows. In one front garden, a man in shorts and a vest held a shotgun, watched from the doorway by his wife. No farther than five blocks away, a police siren rose and fell.
“We’d better go,” said Totoy quietly as the Honda driver ran past.
“Rosa?” yelled the driver. “What the hell is going on?”
“We’d better,” Vincente agreed.
As they hit the street, they heard a woman’s voice behind them and the driver’s sudden gasp of alarm.
“God!” he exclaimed, as if his faith had been punched out of his body.
Totoy looked back over his shoulder and Vincente didn’t.
Some definitions of a tesseract describe it as a hypercube unraveled, and others as the hypercube itself. I chose the version used here only because I happen to prefer it. Similar liberties have been taken with everything presented as fact in this novel.