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           Ripples and Tangents

Chapter One

 [1]

“Happy Meal”

At last, the plastic fork broke, its teeth splintered like brittle toothpicks. He stared at the Chickenjoy as if he was considering commanding it to go get its own spoon and fork. Fast-food utensils were next to useless; that was one thing Aga Muhlach never told people in all his endorsements.

The grumble deep in the pit of his stomach brought him back to earth. He looked around; the sight of the long lines at the counter was enough to daunt the bravest of souls; no way he’d risk being lynched by snaking through that hungry, irritable mob. Never mind the fork’s uselessness. Never mind the saccharine picture of those multi-million-peso commercials. Just eat your P49.95 (plus 10% VAT) meal. Throwing away all pretension to the wind, he began attacking the chicken with his bare hands. That was when the fat kid came.

He came standing beside Matthew, his tray seemed brimming with double-orders of everything, looking for either an empty table or a friendly face. The kid must have thought he found the latter when he looked at Matthew. And he smiled; an honest-to-goodness, may-I-sit-here-with-you-please smile. Who could resist the charms of that? But Matthew didn’t smile back, didn’t say “Sure, pal!” in a singsong voice like what actors did in all those television ads. He just nodded as if he didn’t give a damn, which was true, anyway. But when he looked at the kid’s face, at the kid’s double chin and the small, sunny slits of eyes, that was when something snapped somewhere in his brain—a sharp sense of eureka, but slightly different from the ones that usually visited him on the edge of straining to come up with the next advertisement copy (during those white-hot deadlines when the boss was practically breathing down his neck); a sense of eureka that was older, something that brought back not words but that overwhelming sense of a lost life, not words but images in sepia, hoarse voices that screamed Oh God, I’m fucking sorry, man! It felt like the floodgates suddenly opened, the portcullis rolled up, The Memories, dressed in the mental equivalent of their Sunday best, trudged out from the storehouse of his mind like the biggest deal in town. He could hear again Sammy’s screams over and over as if Sammy would never stop. He could catch again the glimmer of those gray shards against an overcast sky, making lazy arcs in his hazy field of vision...

The fat kid, Jesus H. Christ, uncannily looked like Marvin The Martian.

[2]

Maybe the rest of 1996 would be a lot better, he remembered thinking as he looked at each of their faces; the new batch of student writers and editors sat around him in a tight circle in that cramped little office. If you’d ask him now, seven years later, he’d tell you there’s only so much you could hope for; the future’s an inky mystery—a singularity impossible to fathom. You could only feel around its edges, try to make out the figures in the dim light. Any attempt at certainty, with any degree of matter-of-fact assurance, was the province of fools. You could only hope, he’d tell you, and he knew the smug certainty he’d said it was in itself a logical paradox, but he was past caring for such things now. And he remembered yes, he was clinging to a hope seven years ago. Maybe the remaining months would be better, he remembered thinking. Theirs were awe-struck, expectant faces, and he stood before them with a ceremonial key in his hand, the smile on his face growing wistful by the second; his term as editor was over, and on that bright, sunshiny afternoon, he was handing the keys to the girl who would succeed him. (What’s her name? It’s on the tip of my tongue.)

The truth was, trying to forget about the tragedy that rained from the sky in March 1996 wasn’t easy. Until now, he’d dream about those shards, like gray snow, falling and arcing against an overcast sky, some of them fluttering down his face. Memories are strange, especially the painful ones; even if you’d try to bury them in the concrete tangles of everyday life, they would hold on, clawing their way just beneath the surface of your sanity. Sometimes he could still hear them roaring; sometimes, when the day was white just like that March afternoon, he’d hear them crying their anguished cries. And sometimes, they’d come spilling out when the right moment found the right place.

The gray shards raining from the sky. Jesus Christ, it looked beautiful.

The kid’s food edged out Matthew’s styrofoam plate of Chickenjoy and rice and a plastic cup of Coke to the table’s far edge, then he let the brown envelope slip off his armpit and onto his lap. The kid looked sweaty and his cheeks were a battlefield of acne and blackheads, and he smiled at Matthew, a little shamefaced; he must have felt like an unwanted intruder, but he had to unload all his food on the table, so Matthew must suffer.

“Hot day, isn’t it?” The kid said, glancing at him with hooded eyes. Matthew felt the kid was making small talk as some sort of consolation.

“You can say that.”

“You’re looking for a job too?” The kid looked pretty naive; he was seeing the world through his own spectacles. It had always been like that, Matthew thought. Back in college, he automatically assumed everybody else around him held the same black and white worldview about the evils of 21st century imperialism, and it deeply frustrated him when he discovered there were real people on the other side of the fence, protecting their own conviction with perhaps the same passion. Now this kid must have been job searching for months and his current worldview might be roughly articulated in the postulate: Dick plus a tie plus an earnest hungry face equals The Job Hunter’s Club.

“I’m well-employed, thank you.”

“Oh, sorry. I thought... Anyway...” The kid shrugged, then began attacking his double-burger, which he had just completely unwrapped, his short fat fingers half-buried in the soft buns. Both of them ate in silence. Matthew regarded the kid from the corners of his eyes. The kid seemed to contemplate his bite marks on the double-burger; his pimples flamed on his cheeks. Matthew suddenly felt sorry for him.

“So you’re job hunting, eh?” Matthew asked.

The question seemed to startle the kid, but he saw Matthew’s face, and Matthew’s face no longer bore that smug, impenetrable look. The kid made a wide smile on his fleshy lips, like a puppy eager to please. “Yeah.”

“Any luck so far?”

The kid hesitated for a moment then shrugged. He glanced at the brown envelope on his lap then shrugged again, as if resolving some silent inner conflict. “I guess this must be a bad time for writers.” Now, the kid looked old; he suddenly looked like some battle weary general who had surveyed the carrion-strewn landscape and realized most of the dead were from his own army. Yeah, this must be a bad time for wri... (sigh)  ters...

“You’re a writer?”

“Oh, yes.” Suddenly there was a glimmer of glee in the kid’s eyes; glee that was almost pathetic, almost familiar. “I used to write for our college newspaper. I was the editor of the news section. I rubbed shoulders with school administrators and prominent campus figures, you know.”

Something in the kid’s joy made Matthew remember when Sammy and Mart, or Marvin The Martian to their long-ago grade school friends, were still around. They used to be a solid trio, until Fr. Angelo Gomez-Gomez touched their lives one night in December 1995, and it went downhill from there. He still saw Sammy after March 1996, but after the new editorial board was inducted in July, Sammy just sent him a note about a journey he had to take. Matthew was so burned-out then he couldn’t care less if his friend jumped off the top of Saint Vincent’s, but later, much later, (when the day was white just like that afternoon), he’d fondly remember the way Sammy would curse just about everyone in the board, including Matthew, and go about with his editorial duty while generously giving the newbies precious words of encouragement, like Rehash this shit Or I wonder how in hell you passed English 101. Through his nicotine-stained teeth, the words would take on a different kind of intensity, like something that lay in the gray area between harmless jokes and fatal voodoo curses; special, in a twisted sense. But despite his propensity for the nasty, Sammy was basically an OK guy, with a soft core of compassion if you dig deep enough. But all of it—how they used to be and the things they used to have—somehow ended in March 1996, when Sammy himself thrashed around the office, screaming I’m so fucking sorry, man like a madman, screaming it over and over until his voice grew painfully hoarse. He was desperately wishing he could turn back the time, back to that crucial moment before all hell broke loose, before things fell irrevocably apart. But weren’t they all wishing the same? After what happened that afternoon, death suddenly seemed so much sweeter. Matthew remembered staring down from the edge of Saint Vincent’s rooftop; he was wondering how much pain he might feel—would he find instant blackness or would he still suffer long seconds of mortal twitching—when Milet saw him and instantly they were all over him, Eric pinning him down and panting like a dog and Sammy cursing What the hell was that, Matthew? Puta, what were you thinking? Matthew broke down in tears and Milet cried too (she was such a cry-baby, anyway; she’d usually sob like a little girl whenever Sammy would give her write-up a cursory glance and declare This one deserves a peon’s funeral), but by then Sammy was largely done with the whole business of crying over spilled milk he just thundered inside the office cursing his lungs out.

And Mart, of course. Mart and his triple-chin and the way he’d swagger around the office like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man monster in Ghostbusters. At the tail end of that white day, there was the image of him on the gutter of San Marcelino Street, an image Matthew would never forget, an image that would keep flashing in his mind as Matthew stood later on the edge of Saint Vincent’s rooftop...

He looked at the kid’s face, who was engrossed in telling his war stories. “...And there’s blood. It’s horrific,” the kid went on. “After the fourth grader slipped from the top of the stairs, we rushed to the scene, we saw blood and gray matter trailing down, way down, and I thought God, he’s dead!” He stopped for a moment and gazed at the poster on the glass wall. “Well, you know, we rushed the kid to the hospital and I wrote a story about it. It was a sensation. The school administration even banned the students from using the steep—”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” Matthew said. “I also used to do that.”

“You mean?”

“I used to write, too. For the college paper.”

The kid looked at him for moments, then he slowly nodded, his double chin waving, his two slits of eyes obliquely regarding Matthew. His face was grave now, as if he had just received some very important piece of information. “You mean you’re one of us?”

“Well...” He groped for words; One Of Us carried with it a conspiratorial air he found childish, and it sounded like a cheesy line from a bad science fiction movie. But it came from this kid who probably still entertained delusions of grandeur, in the same way he once thought writers and artists—the persecuted, suffering few—were special in a cosmic, supernatural sense. He shrugged. “Well, maybe you can say that.”

Matthew felt his eyes were getting warm. Was it because the world outside was so bright? Or because of this sense of thick, choking darkness that had begun to bleed in his memory? Heck, 1995 was a good year; but it was the last good year. He looked at the pimply face of the young man and all at once he heard the old I’m fucking sorry, man deep in his head, the broken voice reverberating, bouncing off the cracked walls of his Memory Tunnel. I’m so fucking sorry, man.

“But you know, it’s all the same,” Matthew said. “Believe me, it’s all the same.”

The kid, looking straight into his eyes, nodded, as if believing it. “So you’re writing for a real newspaper now?”

“Oh, no.”

“A magazine?”

“No, no, no. I’m a whore.” Matthew laughed. “I’m a whore, my friend. Never thought I’d become one, but here I am, sucking up to the powers-that-be. That’s how it is. The future’s an inky mystery, impossible to fathom—I know that now. You could only hope. And yeah, life is funny.”

And you know what’s really funny? Matthew wanted to ask him, but he chewed slowly the crispy chunk of fried chicken and stared through the glass wall; outside, the guard was shoving a grimy kid away, but the kid was holding a Jollibee plastic bag and he was just laughing a druggy laugh, mocking the guard.

The funniest thing happened in March 1996, my friend. When the bomb, although homemade and crudely done, exploded in our faces—it exploded and I didn’t even hear a fucking sound, I didn’t even have any idea of what had just happened.

It exploded and he realized it only a moment later—when everything seemed flying in all directions—and suddenly he had a strong sense of impending doom. The release was like a tremendous fart that smelled of gunpowder and burned hair and charred skin. It was as if some giant, powerful hand had pressed the Pause button on the physical laws of the universe and you got a crystal clear vision of how the world was a millisecond before everything fell apart—behold, the sun on her hair, the laughter of the street vendors’ kids, youthful bodies and roaring voices, a dog crossing San Marcelino Street, Mart standing by the Saint Vincent gate fixing Butch’s Nikon, all in over saturated colors—then Play, and suddenly, every little thing collapsed, flying in all directions, leaving him with the smoke and the cutting smell of burnt flesh and the ragged edges of could-have-beens and that terrible What-If staring you in the face.

Something warm was trickling down his nostrils as he lay there on the pavement, and suddenly he felt so sleepy, so peaceful—like this was not San Marcelino Street, like this was not a battlefield where eleven students just died, not the Ground Zero of a crime that would soon sweep the papers; he felt so sleepy and peaceful like this was the first day of an endless summer vacation and he was just lying there on the grassy meadow of his childhood looking up at the sky, the blades of green grass poking his nape and armpits. But he was looking up at an overcast sky, not the bright blue vision of his childhood; that in the here and now the firmament was bloodless gray and lumpy and the thin rays of the sun shone feebly through the edges of a big cloud cruising overhead; it made him remember some biblical movie where God spoke from the heavens, His voice thundering, admonishing little men for the little bad things they do with their little lives: And Because All Of You Have Wallowed In Evil Deeds...

And the dark shards, arcing in the air like dirty snow, landing softly on his face. Christ, why was it so beautiful?

And as he lay there on the pavement, he remembered through the haze that chilly Christmas party at the tail end of 1995, when Fr. Angelo Gomez-Gomez, the university president, set everything off with his little half-drunk confession. Yeah, it all started there, on Saint Vincent building’s rooftop terrace, and Matthew returned to that night as if in a deep dream: he was 19 again, Butch the photographer playing with his camera’s flash, The Teeth’s Laklak pounding through the karaoke’s battered speakers.

Chapter Two

[1]

Nineteen-ninety-five was the last good year, and its goodness was punctuated by the hilarity with which Fr. Gomez-Gomez spilled out the rotting beans on that night in December. Some seven years later, Matthew could still vividly feel the warm sense of ambivalence the memory would always make deep in his heart, like an old friend who’d suddenly appear at your door with a self-conscious smile and a blood-smeared carving knife—it felt like happy-happy-joy-joy, as Sammy used to say, but also the beginning of an insane metamorphosis, as he might have added. (Those were the months he began to appreciate Kafka.)

Even now, in the obsessive watches of his often-sleepless nights, the sights and smells would come back with startling clarity. After all, despite whatever happened later, the memories were all things except painful. He’d get dizzy again through the neon corridors of the video game Doom, while Marimar cavorted on the boob tube. The frozen Inca mummy was on the frontpage of the Discover magazine he had stolen from Booksale. (The terror of getting caught had assured its place in his long-term memory—imagine the student paper’s editor getting a mug shot like a common thief at the WPD?) The late afternoons on the terrace with the bunch of them downing the bottles of Gilbey’s smuggled past the zealous guard at Masagana’s (who would always check if they were legal enough to buy hard liquor), and Mart and Henry retching miserably by the writers’ lockers in the small hours of the morning. And he’d hear Ely Buendia’s voice through it all, trying so hard to make Huling El Bimbo a decent-enough ditty for the love-struck college kid; a cloying and sticky white noise he’d hear over and over in his head in the few years that followed, turning into the tinny, wretched Muzak of his lostness.

[2]

Saint Vincent building was basically your regular three-story prewar monstrosity, and it faithfully looked it despite the season’s demands for a makeover. You could see the flaring, colorful tails of parols peeking through the tall, arched windows; you could catch the occasional swath of blinking Christmas lights above its massive doorways or wound around the classical columns of its porte-cochere—but add up all these dressings they still seemed picayune, like scant underwear, compared to the magnitude of Saint Vincent’s morose gothic lines and peeling gray paint.

On weekends, the building, a beehive of cavernous rooms where classes for elementary and high school kids were regularly held, would be as hollow and peaceful as an abandoned cathedral, the ghosts of its checkered past swirling thickly in its musty, has-been ambience. (But he could remember those weekend afternoons where the sun was on the leaves, and the colors bleed in his eyes.) Matthew used to have dreams where he’d run around its endless corridors, screaming I’m fucking sorry, man in Sammy’s hoarse voice, looking for a way out but never finding it; he’d wake up with the feeling that being locked in a perpetual maze made perfect sense, that the pain and terror felt like something deserved.

When Matthew arrived at Saint Vincent that afternoon in December 1995, he found the long corridors awash with the shells of bonbons, torn wrapping paper, flattened party cone hats, confetti and trampled parols with their bamboo skeleton jutting out like broken ribs. Above him, perhaps on the third floor, hip-hop music throbbed across the mostly deserted halls, sometimes mingled with the high-pitched laughter of what he thought were high school girls.

He climbed the stairs. On the third floor, the concrete stairs still climbed up another story, ending at the very doorway of what old-timers called The Penthouse, the Chronicle’s office. To the right, another door opened to the rooftop terrace, with its expansive views of the art deco Jai Alai building and the Luneta Park. But that afternoon, the sight of the barren terrace depressed him; it simply told him You’re the first sucker.

But not really; when he opened the door to the office, he found Sammy standing before the life-sized mirror, admiring the bags of puffy flesh under his eyes and his stained front teeth.

“Where are the others?” Matthew asked under his breath.

Sammy looked at him half-startled; he shrugged. “Milet said she’s coming before seven.”

Matthew looked around, disbelief bristling in his eyes. He suddenly felt a compelling urge to scream: I can’t believe they’re not here yet! We barely have four damned hours! On the white board was a frantic demonstration of the Chaos Theory, a tangle of thick marker scrawls of cryptic messages posted by the staff the day before. Dwarfed between “I’m so heartily sorry...” and “Final list for the Food Brigade” was what must be Milet’s little anal message: “Road directions for the lechon man by 6 PM.”

“Oh Christ,” Matthew hissed. He went straight to the phone, cradled the receiver between a cheek and a shoulder and began punching keys. “What about Mart and the girls?”

Sammy was still standing before the mirror, looking straight into his reflection’s eyes, probably aping Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver; everybody knows Sammy was a sucker for Martin Scorsese flicks. Sammy always did that gunslinger swagger, that lunatic stare whenever he wanted to intimidate the junior editors, and he’d probably have his hair shaved a-la Mister T had the school administration allowed it. Sammy began to grin. “I called up Marvin the Martian, but his Mamma said the Martian hasn’t landed yet since he left last night with Butch. They’re looking for cheap hookers to shoot for that goddamned catholic photo contest.”

“What about the girls?” Matthew asked.

Sammy shrugged. “How in hell would I know?” He slumped on the bench and stared languidly on the ceiling. Sammy was what the literati would describe as a poet always on the verge of discovering le mot juste but never quite finding it; he was perpetually fiery, grumpy, sarcastic to an extreme. Place an unlit match beside Samuel Portes and the match would probably ignite. But this afternoon, his countenance was pure calm, which was something that happened so rarely. There was talk that Sammy was dating one of his professors, some sultry feline in her early twenties, but Sammy would always dismiss the snoops with a solemn, “Don’t go there, it’s my Area 51.” But with “Sex for tonight” written all over Sammy’s face, Matthew thought there was no doubt about it.

“Oh, no,” Matthew said. “Please, no. You mean they’re expecting us to do all the dressing up?” Matthew was looking around and was seeing things that added to his already mounting depression: the boxes of floodlights and Christmas decors and the battered karaoke were heaped like garbage in a corner, just beside the bundles of the Chronicle’s December Special Issue. Save for a flimsy cardboard cut-out of what passed as the nativity scene according to Picasso, (this one was meticulously invented by Henry Mortel, their literary editor) sitting on top of the small refrigerator, there was no indication that Christmas had already landed at the Chronicle’s office.

A man from Sosoy’s Lechon answered at the other end, saying Yes, yes, I know the place, it’s not far from here. Matthew said thanks, placed down the phone and checked his watch. Thirty minutes past five.

“It feels lonely, isn’t it?” Sammy said, still gazing at the newly painted ceiling. “It happens all the time in the affairs of half-men and half-brutes.”

“Tell me if I’m morally weak. But I’d love to strangle these people the moment I see them.”

“Hey, where’s the Yuletide spirit?” Sammy let out a druggy laugh. “Besides, those maggots outnumber us? It’s not like you can just mow them down.”

“Puņeta.”

“Hey, I am here,” Sammy said. “I can be useful.”

“Yeah.” Matthew dropped on the over-sized Editor-in-Chief chair, a cushy affair of black faux leather, hard plastic and foam; the chair was a ‘boss’ thing that went as one of the unwritten perks of being the chief editor. “Yeah, Sammy. Go on and piss me off.”

“Cool down, will you? The point is, I can be useful when I want to. What do you want with this girlie stuff, by the way?” He pointed at the metallic looking strips bunched in a heap over the boxes. “Are these for Christmas? They look to me like fucking costumes for drag queens.”

“They’re garlands, Sammy. From Mart’s Mamma.”

They went out on the terrace dragging the karaoke and the boxes of floodlights and trimmings, the extension wires trailing like rodent tails behind them. It had been a cloudless, bright blue afternoon, but now the sun was nearer the western horizon; the terrace looked gloomy with the long and dark shadows the balusters cast.

Sammy shouted “Good morning!” as he dropped the boxes. He then ran to the edge of the terrace facing Luneta Park and the setting sun, then bellowed out a full-bodied laugh, probably aping some Scorsese villain again. Matthew was thinking, Well, there goes sanity.

“Sammy, will you shut up?”

Sammy was still giggling like a schoolgirl, amused at his own foolishness. “Ok, Mr. Editor. So how do you want us to dress up the drag queen?”

There were long steel poles on the four corners of the terrace, and the two carefully mounted the floodlights on them, using Milet’s weaving yarn to tie the lights in place. (In January, Milet would sob quietly like a baby when she’d find out about how much of her yarn they’d used up, but they would pay little attention to her melodrama; things had begun brewing by then, bigger things, and the days that Butch Lagmay later called Big F Days had begun filing past their lives.) Matthew stood on the whitewashed balustrade gazing in the direction of the sun. Down four stories below, just outside the campus’s perimeter fence, clustered like mushrooms in the muddy compound of the old Jai Alai building were shanties of truck drivers that worked for the nearby freight hauler. He saw a skin show there one midnight. It was during one of those painful all-nighters of editing what basically were atrocious drafts, and he was taking a leak on the terrace’s drainage hole (which doubled as an emergency toilet for the guys), his skin prickling from the cold dewy breeze, when he saw yellow incandescent light streaming from an open window in one of those shanties—and two naked bodies cavorting on a leaf mat. He reflexively ducked down and peeked between the balusters. You’re a filthy, goddam voyeur, a voice from somewhere his brain was saying, the editor of the paper a filthy goddam voyeur. Deep into the little peepshow, he almost jumped when somebody from behind him sleepily spoke, “What’s the matter?” It was Butch, unzipping and aiming on the opposite drainage hole even as he spoke.

“Somebody’s having a good time down there,” Matthew whispered. “Look.”

But it took Butch a few precious minutes to empty his bladder, and then it was too late. “Nothing there but darkness,” Butch said, peering in-between balusters at the dark clumps of shanties four stories below them. Somebody had just closed the window. “You’re seeing things. Get some sleep, man.” He yawned and left. Matthew remained standing there, waiting for the window to again open, waiting for the skin flick to resume either because nobody in a black tuxedo and an ivory-tipped wand had yet declared That’s all folks!  or because he just wanted to escape the dreary job of hacking at poorly written stories that seemed hopeless even by his still fledgling standards.

[3]

They were untangling the plastic garlands when the first few staffers came in trickles: Rina and Milet, with their paper bags of wrapped gifts, followed by Henry and his Food Brigade—Eric, Luke and Wilson—with their Tupperware boxes of party food. Henry was ebullient and looked proud of his accomplishment, and he sauntered into the terrace with a naive little grin on his hairless face, admiring out loud how “everything looks festive.”

It was then that Sammy snapped and began throwing tantrums; he threw aside the box of decors and savagely kicked the karaoke, which toppled in slow-motion and made a dull woody thud on the granite floor. Henry looked like a teenage matador before a raging bull, confusion on his bloodless face.

“Is that it?” Sammy snarled. “You all walk here like some big deal kids, chirping ‘oh, every little fucking thing looks festive!’ How about that?”

“Sam—“ Matthew began, smelling where this would all lead to.

“You ladies, you don’t fucking understand, do you? You seem to have no respect at all for the institution that pays for your goddam tuition fees...”

            “Sam—“

“...And buys you the toilet paper you wipe your sunny little faces with. Do you maggots understand that? Putsa, you’re not even human beings!”

“Sammy,” Matthew said, trying to be calm. “Shut up.”

“That’s the second time in the course of this afternoon, Matthew, that you told me to shut—“

“Puņeta! Didn’t you hear me?” Matthew howled. “I said SHUT—YOUR—TRAP—UP!”

Sammy was stunned. He looked at Matthew as if he’d just woken up from a deep dream and suddenly found himself in a strange time and place. His left upper eyelid twitched with some sort of palsy, which usually happened whenever Sammy was genuinely hurt and genuinely embarrassed. He glared at Henry before thundering off and slamming the terrace doors hard, muttering his usual expletives.

           Milet and Henry et al—members of the once glorious Food Brigade—stood there motionless, like melting statues in a wax museum.

“I just...” Henry began, he seemed on the verge of crying. “I just... I mean, we just tried to make sure all the food’s okay. But the road’s full of people. It’s not easy to haul all these boxes of spaghetti and barbecue and hotdogs and...” Little Henry wiped a tear. “Why doesn’t he... Why doesn’t he see that?”

Matthew suddenly felt like he was spinning on an axis. This was how a baby-sitter must feel, he thought, when trapped in a room full of murderous kids out for one another’s necks. He took my yo-yo! That boy took my yo-yo!

He gave Henry a light pat on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Henry. You’ve done a good job with your assignment.” Matthew felt a pang of guilt—just an hour earlier, he was the one cursing these nameless, faceless kids in his mind, hating them for not doing their job. But now he was giving them this silly little pep talk, as if he were on their side all along. It somehow felt like betraying Sammy. “Let’s just try to fix this place up, okay? Will you help me?”

Henry slightly nodded, and when he began picking things up, the others followed as if on cue. Rina took over in making an arch over the terrace’s doorway with the plastic vines they found in one of the boxes. The boys also moved like clockwork, dressing up the long dining table borrowed from the third floor faculty room. Luke was at the karaoke, grinning widely when he successfully coaxed the battered box to play Eraserheads’ Fine Time.

Matthew checked his watch. It was a little past seven. Fr. Gomez-Gomez would arrive by eight. His staff would finish decking up the terrace on time.

He slipped into the office and wearily dropped on the boss chair. Through the window that faced the terrace, he could see them working and laughing. They were just kids, he thought. They were all just kids—youngsters who barely know how to respect deadlines or arrive on time or understand Strunk and White’s words of wisdom. And yet, these crybabies were the writers and junior editors who loved pretending in their write-ups (not excluding himself) that they were there to help the students know their rights, to save them from the ravages of “capitalist education,” to “deliver” them from the “tyranny and greed” of “corrupt school administrators.” But at the end of the day, they were just kids. He took my yo-yo! That boy took my yo-yo! Matthew wanted to be a real journalist someday, and he wondered how real journalists fared in the real world; he wondered if real journalists’ lives were any different, if their minds were free from the smallness of their individual lives, if they, in fact, were capable of delivering what well-meaning people called The Truth.

Here, they were toying with the Campus Version of the Power of the Fourth Estate, and most of them were already far gone in believing that their moral duty to “bring the truth” was enough to cover up for their individual weaknesses. Here, they think they come close to fulfilling what George Bernard Shaw described as their obligation to cure society’s ills, but probably were nothing but the kids in the God-forsaken island of that William Golding novel. Years later, Matthew would finally understand the how and why but knew, from the depths of his heart—in that achy hollow where both angels and demons laughed and loved—that despite everything, he and the others might still choose the way they’d chosen. March 1996 would still happen, would inevitably happen, with the finality of a physics postulate or the gravity of a pendulum’s swing. March 1996 was a sad place they were all destined to end up in. The Chronicle and the things it took and gave, he would admit in dark moments of candor years later, was the flame, and they were the moths that fluttered towards it, mesmerized by its blazing illusion.

Chapter Three

[1]

“Those bitch tits! Look at those bitch tits!” Even from the doorway, Matthew could tell it was Luke Clemente’s squeaky voice making obscene calls at something that might or might not be actually obscene, rising above what seemed like awed murmurs of that bunch in the far corner of the terrace. “I’ll empty my Pop’s credit card just to have a taste of that!”

“Where in hell’s Sammy?” Matthew asked aloud. It was a few minutes before eight and he was still undecided about forming a welcome party to receive Fr. Gomez-Gomez at Saint Vincent’s gates. He’d usually ask his associate editor, Samuel Portes, for a second opinion, not that Sammy’s opinion really mattered, but because he only needed some sort of sounding board to see if his thoughts still sounded good when it came from other people’s mouths. “Have you guys seen Sammy?”

Mart looked up, the biggest in the group, his triple chin waving as he shouted back. “Forget Sammy. Look what we’ve got.” He held up sheets of photos. “One hot Mamma, fresh from Quiapo.”

Lecherous grins were pasted on their faces as he approached them. The photos showed a naked girl in seductive poses in some motel room, her lips glistening and her eyes dreamy; those were, in Butch Lagmay’s parlance, fuck-me poses. Matthew’s heart thump-thumped at this unexpected show of bare skin, but he stifled it. He solemnly looked at Mart. “Where did you guys get this?”

The kids giggled. “She’s our model for the contest,” Mart said, and looked back at Butch, who was then resting by the balustrade, his usually glossy black hair turning orange in the floodlight’s glare.

“Yeah,” Butch seconded, making quick puffs of smoke with his Marlboro. “For the catholic photo contest.”

Luke was laughing, snorting like some happy pig; every now and then some wit of Samuel Portes’s sensibility would slip through the Chronicle’s sieve and by December 1995, Luke Clemente was proving to be such a disciple. Loosely circling them were staffwriters Wilson Ang, Eric Cervales and Paul Luna, all sporting identical grins.

“This nude?”

“Yeah. But the nude session was only a bonus.” Butch snickered. “Actually, the theme was ‘Modern Filipina.’”

“What’s a modern Filipina?” Luke suddenly blurted out, obviously off the top of his head.

           “Well,” Butch looked up, as if reading something written on the black sky. “A modern Filipina is... Well, we dressed her up to make her look like some decent and sultry professor, with an assertive, can-do expression on her face.”

“Just like Sammy’s babe,” Luke said, which sent the kids in a fit of hearty laughter. There was a kind of sick desperation in making fun of Sammy behind his back; it sounded like something that had been bottled up for so long.

Matthew said nothing, and he felt somewhat guilty again for saying nothing, for not defending Sammy. But he also knew these kids sometimes needed to vent out what they really felt about the one who often kicked their asses. Yet, Matthew wanted to tell them Sammy wasn’t really despicable, that he was in fact a nice guy when you were not on his bad side. Matthew wanted to tell them how Sammy really was way back in those distant halcyon days in Saint Michael’s Institute’s grade school, when he and Sammy and Mart still called themselves The Three Stooges. Sammy was the hands-down clown in Miss Sarino’s fourth grade class, called Section B, which was a kind of middle range category for kids who were neither very smart nor very dumb. It was another way of saying they were a bunch of boring kids, the mediocre ones, who would probably end up someday as assembly line drones who would never make decisions that mattered in the nation’s life. (Those were post-EDSA days when, each morning, students sang Magkaisa after Lupang Hinirang.) Matthew and Sammy had been good buddies for a year when they first met Mart in a lonesome part of the schoolyard, just behind the canteen, his round cheeks dripping with tears and his eyes and lips red and already swelling from all the crying. Mart was much smaller then, still had no triple chin, only a thick shock of curly hair that made his already big head look bigger, over a sunny little cute face that must have reminded his third grade teachers of Niņo Muhlach in those grainy late-70’s and early-80’s flicks. A meter or so from where Mart slumped stood Ramoncito Toledo, a burly, loud-mouthed kid who also happened to be the son of the school’s guidance counselor. Ramoncito also had a complete collection of The Transformers action figures (which gave him god-like stature among his classmates) and was in fact using Optimus Prime to bash Mart’s neon green lunchbox to pieces.

“Oh God, stop it!” Matthew screamed, his anger was so sudden and unfeigned that Ramoncito stopped on his tracks, Optimus dangling from one hand. At his feet was the lunchbox now ripped apart on its plastic hinges, Mart’s presumably half-eaten bread spilling out.

Matthew stared at the lunchbox’s contents and thought, Baby Jesus, he was eating sugar? He would remember this years later because the scene was hideously sad: in a schoolyard awash with fancy recess snacks like Oreos and Presto Cookies and Pringles Potato Chips and Granny Goose Tortillos, here was this chubby kid who ate alone in this secluded spot, probably ashamed to let other kids peek into his lunchbox and see what he was eating; that while other kids guzzled down Tang Orange Juice or Cetrin from special juice canisters, he probably drank tap water directly from the canteen’s faucet; that somebody of Ramoncito Toledo’s malevolence should come along to add insult to injury capped what Sammy called, years later, as the Ultimate In-fucking-justice. For Matthew, who considered eating sandwich with peanut butter as already scraping the bottom of the barrel, it was heartbreakingly cruel. Baby sweet Jesus, he was eating sugared bread? He looked at the chubby kid, (whose unforgettable name they’d know later) who had pink bruises on his knees and slumped on the moist ground like an over-grown baby, and Matthew realized the kid was now gazing at them with some sort of relief in his eyes. (Years later, in March 1996, on that afternoon when Sammy was screaming I’m fucking sorry, man, Matthew knew they were both thinking of the images of this distant morning.)

But Ramoncito Toledo wouldn’t see that; he seemed consumed with an anger that could only be exorcised by destroying the lunchbox of some helpless kid who ate nothing but sugared bread. (Not grape jelly, not peanut butter, not cheese spread; nothing but brown sugar, sweet Jesus.) People like Ramoncito would eventually become one of the Big Questions in Matthew’s life (the question being Why do people who simply have everything would still be unexplainably upset? Along with other Big Questions such as Why is the Philippines always poor? or Why my father never got promoted despite all his hardwork and loyalty?), but at the moment, Ramoncito looked at them with a kind of impatient annoyance, as if they’d uselessly interrupted him in the middle of some very important work.

“Stop it or I’ll tell...” Matthew swallowed hard, realizing for the first time who they were up against. “I’ll... I’ll tell Mrs. Toledo...”

“Go ahead and tell,” Ramoncito hissed, then proceeded bashing the lunchbox and giving them a nasty stare. “Go ahead and tell my mamma.”

Beside him, Sammy, the class clown, the one people never took seriously, stood his ground despite knees that had already begun trembling. “You animal,” Sammy began. “You stupid, whiny, mindless beast. You booger-faced idiot...” Then Sammy stooped down to pick up a perfect piece of stone.

Like all the other kids in the small universe of Saint Michael’s Institute’s schoolyard, they were afraid of Ramoncito Toledo—were in fact deathly afraid, but they swallowed all their fear for reasons still unknown to Matthew years later; yeah, swallowed their fear—in much the same way a desperate fish would swallow some crafty fisherman’s hook, line and sinker—and for what? To stand against Ramoncito and save the skin of some kid they didn’t know? He couldn’t remember the exact reasons now, in the same foggy way he couldn’t remember how it really ended. What he could recall was what happened afterwards at the Guidance Counselor’s Office, how Sammy desperately tried to convince Mrs. Toledo that what he threw was nothing but a small piece of stone (“It was just a wee bit of light pebble, Ma’am, please believe me and please please please don’t tell my mother!”) in Ramoncito’s general direction, but somehow the stone ended up zeroing in on the bully’s forehead with perhaps the same uncanny luck David had in felling Goliath.

Matthew could also remember the three of them (Mart still clutching the two plastic halves of his lunchbox) cooped up in the detention cell at the Guidance Counselor’s Office, looking through the glass wall that separated them from where their mothers earnestly begged for Mrs. Toledo’s mercy, professing how ‘well-behaved’ their sons usually were. Miss Sarino was also there but she didn’t speak; she was merely doing those solemn little nods that she usually did whenever Sammy sent the whole class into wild laughter. Ramoncito sat meekly beside his mom like some altar boy who could never do any wrong, white gauze wrapped thickly around his head. The bully-turned-saint would not even answer the grown-ups’ questions, even when Sammy’s mother pleaded him to tell his own—supposedly the certified true and correct—version of the story. Sammy’s eyes narrowed into vicious slits when he saw how Ramoncito ignored Sammy’s mother’s pleas. It was simply unacceptable. For a bully to hurt another kid was one thing; for a bully to hurt another kid’s mother, although not physically, was another. But they were just prisoners there, and the overwhelming sense of helplessness—and that rankling, nameless pain children felt when confronted with a still abstract thing such as injustice—prompted Sammy to do one of his classic Samuelisms: he hawked up a glob of phlegm from the back of his throat, then spat it straight onto the glass wall.

Such insolence amazed Mart, who had been sitting quietly on the wooden bench behind them, and whenever he’s amazed, then as now, he’d just smile that big dumb smile of his, followed by a brief attack of the giggles.

Thank sweet Jesus nobody saw what Sammy did, not even Mrs. Toledo, who later forgave them for ‘ganging up’ on her ‘poor little boy.’ The truth was, Mrs. Toledo had ‘forgiven’ them because she couldn’t refute the evidence—the broken lunchbox, the bruises on Mart’s knees and the simple logic that it was plain unthinkable for smaller kids like them to start something with somebody of Ramoncito’s hulk and influence. But despite their acquittal, Matthew’s father and Sammy’s grandpop didn’t kindly take the humiliation of having their mothers lawyering for them at the Guidance Counselor’s Office. (“Detained there like some common criminal,” Matthew’s father seethed that night, his thick leather belt savagely lashing at Matthew’s bare buttocks.)

“You know what, the Decepticons sometimes win,” Matthew would wryly comment later, as he showed Sammy his welt marks inside the boys’ CR.

“No. The Decepticons always win, Matthew” Sammy would say, an iota of wisdom dawning in his tear-drenched eyes. “That cartoon’s all a lie. The Decepticons always win.”

[2]

Without saying a thing, he gave the photos back to Mart, who said, “We made her pose for these extras—for free.” He giggled.

“She thought Mart was cute,” Butch said.

“Yeah,” Mart said, his face beaming with pride. It was the same childish glee Matthew would remember seven years later while chewing his Chickenjoy; glee that was pure sun.

“Why are you looking for Sam, by the way?”

Matthew glanced at his watch. “I’m thinking about receiving Fr. Gomez-Gomez at the gate.”

“Oh, is that it?” Matthew thought he caught a hint of cynicism in Butch’s voice. “Anyway, no need to worry. We saw Sammy making some small talk with the guards at the gate. I think he’s waiting for Fr. Gomez-Gomez.”

“Yeah,” Luke threw in. “Sammy’s sitting on the lap of Saint Vincent’s statue, sucking his thumb.”

It sent them into a fit of laughter. Matthew snickered too; he’d been trying for self-righteousness in those days but this bunch always made him fall just a bit short. And from somewhere, like a faint quiver just below the horizon of his reckoning, was that old stab of guilt, that small voice of conscience. This laughter behind Sammy’s back... Like some sort of betrayal.

“What are you dickheads doing out here on a night like this?” Somebody from behind them boomed. They looked over their shoulders and saw Sammy standing by the terrace’s doorway, and they were all thinking Here comes Round 2. But Sammy seemed to have forgotten about the earlier screaming match; he stood on the doorway in his old gunslinger stance, his countenance enthused. He strode toward them with a springy gait that seemed to say “good news!” He stopped and glared at the photos Mart had been holding like a trophy.

“What’s that?” Sammy asked, snatching the pictures. “What’s this? Oh—my, oh my, oh my! Look at those bitch tits!

“Yeah,” Luke seconded, who always seemed to listen closely to every word Sammy blurted out. “Those are terrific bitch tits.”

Sammy shuffled the photos. He looked solemnly at each of their faces. “And you want a Man of God see this perversity, you dickheads?” He shoved the photos back to Mart, and turned to Matthew. “He’s here.”

“Fr. Gomez-Gomez?”

“Yeah. Astrud and Stella’s chatting with him on his way up. I bet they’re on the second floor landing at this very moment. I went ahead to see what you guys are up to. I knew something evil’s brewing here.” He grinned.

“Okay,” Matthew said. He looked around. The girls were doing some finishing touches on the long dining table; Milet would occasionally look up at the evening sky, probably hoping that no rain would spoil the open-air party. “Butch, Mart and Henry, come with me and Sammy. We’re meeting Fr. Gomez-Gomez on the third floor landing. Time for a little show of courtesy now. Luke, you take care of the sound system.”

Luke laughed, stealing a glance at the karaoke, who had stopped playing the Eraserheads tape half an hour ago; it had in fact stopped playing anything. “Yeah, sure.”

They were thundering down the stairs when they met Fr. Gomez-Gomez’s party halfway. The priest had been talking animatedly with the two girls, and he flashed a warm smile when he looked up and saw them coming down.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Matthew said, firmly grasping the priest’s hand. “We should have met you at the gate.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Matthew. You shouldn’t bother with such formalities. Anyway, these two fine young ladies here have been throwing me some very interesting questions.”

Matthew shot an inquiring glance at Stella and Astrud but mentally reserved his questions later. “It’s a matter of courtesy, Father,” Matthew said, and from somewhere at the back of his mind, The Monster Cynic repeated it: A matter of courtesy. Yeah, right. For the past seven months, the Chronicle did nothing but harshly criticize Fr. Gomez-Gomez’s every administrative move, every decision that had anything to do with the students. (They even once ran an editorial that called the priests ‘raving dogs’ for ‘dreaming’ and boasting about the university as ‘a center of excellence.’) But whenever they’d meet in person, they’d exhaust all the diplomatic trappings in the book, acting out the charade of civilized people. It was a strange, almost surreal relationship.

Fr. Gomez-Gomez was looking around the tall ceiling and walls of the stairway as they all ascended, and the glimmer that registered in his eyes as he drank up the gloomy, claustrophobic sights had the absurd fascination of somebody watching an autopsy. After all, an administrator of Fr. Gomez-Gomez’s stature rarely went beyond the comforting reaches of the university’s safer, happier parts —even if his trademark style of tending his flock (called MBW or Management By Walking by his underpaid spin doctors) was supposed to spread him out evenly on the surface of his world. He rarely visited Saint Vincent’s melancholy environs, preferring to consummate the delicate dictates of MBW around the lively periphery of Saint Therese Quadrangle, where he could awe the freshmen, soften the frat men’s resolve and reassure professors with his soutaned presence.

As they passed by the dilapidated writers’ lockers on the final landing, the small corners of Fr. Gomez-Gomez’s mouth curved in a small smile, probably guessing why most of these ‘lockers’ had no locks at all; a stylized Che Guevara poster must have attracted a small amount of his Vincentian-trained curiosity, but he said nothing; his aquiline nose, a gift from his Iberian ancestors, wrinkled upon seeing the November 1995 national poverty levels survey graph from Ibon Databank, but he said nothing. But when he came to the framed poster showing a small, naked boy, his flimsy body curled up like a fetus on the wet pavement, a few pieces of coins visible inside a truncated plastic Caltex can beside him, Fr. Gomez-Gomez said, “Very poignant. Where did you get this?”

“From CEGP, Father.”

“CEGP?”

“College editors guild of the Philippines, Father. It’s an organization for student newspapers.”

Fr. Gomez-Gomez nodded with a wrinkled brow, trying to locate the significance of this piece of information in his memory. Matthew and his retinue were behind Fr. Gomez-Gomez in a sort of strained, solemn procession: they’d walk when he’d walk, they’d stop when he’d stop, they’d nod their heads when he’d grimly nod his head. All of them had nervous, almost stupid smiles. “Very polite,” Sammy would comment later, “very fucking strange.”

At the threshold of the Chronicle’s office, Fr. Gomez-Gomez paused again to read the messages posted on the corkboard. Matthew’s eyes widened when he saw his own three-week-old note tacked right on its center, some scribbled admonition to “Those editors who didn’t help in last night’s final editing of proofs. May the typos in your stories disturb your souls till kingdom come.” He wasn’t the only one who noticed it; beside him, Butch was anxiously elbowing him, whispering to his ear, “Why didn’t you take that out?”

But Fr. Gomez-Gomez didn’t seem to notice the particular note; after all, the corkboard was smothered with notes and bills of different colors and importance, fluttering at the slightest breeze like butterfly wings. He gave everything a cursory glance, then looked at Matthew—the cue for the show to begin.

As Butch opened the door, Matthew gestured and said, “Welcome, Father, to our humble office.”

When Fr. Gomez-Gomez stepped inside, the already cramped office seemed a lot smaller with his presence. Fr. Gomez-Gomez was again looking around, taking note of everything. So this is where all the slander comes from, he was thinking. This is where they manufacture all those malicious stories, those lies masking as exposes. He felt slightly uneasy as he sat on the wooden bench; he was finding it difficult to associate these very polite, very nice young people that surrounded him with the op-ed pieces the Chronicle regularly published, filthy essays that often referred to him as ‘The Raving German Shepherd,’ and called his underlings ‘Fr. Gomez-Gomez’s Attack Canines.’

Their smiles, their incessant Father This, Father That, Father Till Kingdom Come—all of it was giving him the hives. Maybe their nervousness had begun rubbing off on him, maybe this was what that bunch in the psychology department called vibes. Not exactly bad vibes, but something that walked thinly between good and bad, something that made him think of perfunctorily giving them his official blessings and say goodbye, thanks for the night, I’m running back to my castle, praise Jesus.

“Father, we’re having the party outside, on the terrace,” Matthew was saying.

“Oh, really?” Fr. Gomez-Gomez said, and in his mind: Did we give them a permit to do this party on the terrace? But this he didn’t say, which was all right, in keeping with the dictates of prudence. But later in the night, after guzzling down many a Gilbey’s-soaked fruit punch, he’d say things he’d regret later on, things that would stick in his brain like a serrated knife for the rest of his life.

[end of chapter 3]


                    Copyright (c) 2004 by Joe Bert G. Lazarte