Central Mindanao

THE LITTLE PEOPLE

by Maria Aleah G. Taboclaon 

THE elves came to stay with us when I was nine. They were noisy creatures and we would hear them stomping on an old crib on the ceiling. We heard them from morning till night. They kept us awake at night.

One night, when it was particularly unbearable, Papa mustered enough courage and called out. "Excuse me!" he said. "Our family would like to sleep, please? Resume your banging tomorrow!" Of course, we had tried restraining him for we didn't know how the elves would react to such audacity.

We got the shock of our lives when silence suddenly filled the house--no more banging, no more stomping from the elves. Papa turned to us smugly. Sheepishly, we turned in for the night, thankful for the respite.

When dawn came, the smug look on Papa's face the night before turned into anger for shortly before six, the banging started again, and louder this time! We got up and tried speaking to the elves but got no response. The banging continued all day and into the night, and stopped at the same hour--eleven o'clock. And at exactly six a.m. the next day, it started again.

What could our poor family do?

Papa tried to call an albularyo to get rid of our unwelcome housemates but the woman was booked till the end of the week. Meanwhile, the elves had become our alarm clock. When they start their noise, we would get up and do our errands. Papa would start cooking, I would start setting the table, Mama would sweep. The whole house--my older sister and my cousin would water the plants, and my brother would start coloring his books. (We really didn't expect him to work, he was only four.)

After a week, we got hold of the albularyo. She spent the night in our house and by morning, she told us to never bother her again. The elves had already made themselves a part of our life, she said. Prax, the leader of the elves, had spoken to her and had told her that his family had no plans of moving out. They liked things as they were.

We eventually settled down to a comfortable coexistence with the elves. They woke us up at six, they let us sleep at eleven, and in return for the alarm service we would leave food on the table. By morning, the food would be gone and the table cleaned.

All in all, it was a very good relationship.

After three weeks--the first week of May--I met Prax, the leader and oldest in the clan, and I met him literally by accident. I was climbing the mango tree in our yard when one of its branches broke. I fell and broke my ankle. The pain was so great that I just sat there numb, staring at my ankle which had begun to turn blue. I could not move or cry out. I went to sleep to forget the pain. My last conscious thought was that the ground was too cold to sleep on.

I woke to a hand touching my foot. It belonged to someone--somethingnonhuman, for his hand radiated warmth that seemed to penetrate to my bones. His hand was small, wrinkled and felt like dried prunes.

Although I was curious, I kept my eyes closed. I imagined a hideously deformed face, with long and sharp teeth. Would he disappear when I open my eyes? Or would he devour me? I pretended to be asleep.

After several minutes, I could pretend no longer; I was too curious to remain still. When I opened my eyes, the horrible sight that I expected was not there. Instead, there was this old, wrinkled creature, even shorter than I was although I was the smallest in my class. He wore overalls unlike any clothing I knew of. Its texture was a mixture of green leaves and earth. It clung to his skin and writhed with a life of its own. Its color continually changed from deep to light green, to dark to light brown, and to green again. It was fascinating to look at. I felt a sense of awe and respect towards the elf.

He was good with his hands. My ankle already felt better. He was massaging it with an ointment that smelled nice. Before I could stop myself, I sniffed deeply, bringing the healing aroma of the ointment deep into my lungs. Detecting my movement, the elf turned to me and smiled kindly. Although I didn't see his mouth moving, I could hear him talking.

"Don't be afraid," he said. His voice was so soothing that I had to fight my urge to snuggle and sleep in his small arms.

I shook my head slightly. What was I supposed to say? Hello, elf? How are you? I could not. I didn't even know if I was supposed to call him that or just say Tabi or Apo.

As if knowing what I was thinking, the elf smiled again. "You call our kinddwendes or elves, no?" I nodded. "I actually don't mind if you call me an elf, but please call me Prax."

Seeing my astonished look, Prax laughed. His laugh sounded like the whistling of wind through the trees and a bit like the breaking of the waves on the seashore. I thought it nice and longed to hear more. And I wanted to know more about his kind. Did they have children? Wives? Did they play games like patintero? Habulan?

But Prax was not in the mood to chat. He told me that I should have been more careful. I could have been seriously hurt.

I nodded absently, thinking that I liked his clothes, his laugh, and his voice. He reminded me of my grandfather who had died a long time ago.

I closed my eyes, letting Prax's healing massage lull me to sleep. Thirty minutes later when I woke up, the elf was gone. Only the lingering fragrance of his balm remained.

When Mama and Papa arrived, I told them what had happened. It was really frustrating seeing their reactions. They became pale, then collapsed on the sofa. I had to douse them with water before they revived. Why couldn't they be like other people and be glad that I had been befriended by a supernatural being? I had told them about my first encounter with a real elf, and they fainted on the spot! I sulked for the rest of the evening.

Mama told me to never, never talk to elves again. Or did I forget the countless tales of elves taking people to their kingdom after killing them? I just shrugged. After all, the elf had saved my life!

I thought no more of it and, indeed, began to enjoy the banging and stomping on our ceiling. I almost wished to be hurt again just so I could see Prax. But nothing happened and I passed the rest of my summer days dreaming about playing with elves.

I met my second elf in school. I was in Grade 3, a transferee to a new public school that had a haunted classroom. My classmates related tales about dwendes, white ladies, and kapres in our school. I believed their stories readily.

I tried to tell them about Prax but since they were skeptical, I decided to let them be. As it was, I was excluded from their games.

In the classroom, I chose the seat I felt was the most haunted, the one farthest away from the teacher's table. Nobody wanted to sit near me. Behind me was a picture of the president. Without the company of my classmates, I expected elves to make their presence felt. So I waited.

By the third month in class, it happened. We had a very difficult math exam. Our teacher left us and went to gossip outside and all around me my classmates were openly copying each other's work. I looked at their papers from my seat, hoping that their scribbles would mean something to me but the answers to the blasted long divisions eluded me. I looked at the ceiling, trying to see if my brain would work better if my head was tilted a certain angle. It did not. I looked to my right, nothing there. And finally, I looked down and saw this tiny little elf, smaller than Prax by as much as six inches, sitting on the bag in front of me tap-tapping his foot impatiently.

"What took you so long to notice? I've been here for hours!" he said.

What gall! Did he really think that his race would excuse his bad manners? I ignored him and frowned at my test paper. What was 3996 divided by 6?

Immediately, he apologized and told me that his name was Bat. He had seen me play outside and thought that I was beautiful, sensitive, and romantic. Did I want him to help me in my test?

Me beautiful? I enthusiastically agreed to let him answer the test. I showed him my paper, and he snorted. "For us elves, this is elementary!" he said. I wanted to tell him that to us humans, these problems are also elementary, third-grade in fact, but I changed my mind.

Bat and I became friends. He helped me with my homework and gave me little things such as colored pencils and stationery that were the craze in school. He cautioned me strongly against telling my parents of my friendship with him. After all, he said, some people might not understand our relationship. They might forbid us from seeing each other.

I thought nothing of it and kept silent about my friendship with Bat. I enjoyed his company, for he was very thoughtful. He was a good friend and I thought we would be friends forever.

The time came, though, when he declared that he loved me. He wanted me to go with him to his kingdom and be his princess. I refused, of course. For God's sake, I was only nine! I didn't know how to cook or do the laundry or do the other things that wives are expected to do. And he was an elf! Short as I was, he only came up to my knees. What a ridiculous picture we would surely make. He pleaded with me for days but out of spite I told him that I had already confided to my parents, and that they were very angry. It was not true, but Bat didn't know that. He got angry and launched into diatribes about promises being made and broken. Then he vanished.

That night I dreamed that Prax talked to me. He told me that I should have never offended Bat outright. "That elf is a stranger in our town," he said. "We don't know his family. He might be violent."

But I had already done what I had done and there was no use wishing otherwise. I told Prax I'd never worry. After all, he'd always be there for me and my family, right?

"Wrong," he said. His gift was for giving good luck and for healing minor, nonfatal injuries. "What good is that for?" I asked. He couldn't answer, and left me to a dream of falling houses and shrieking elves.

The next day, I got sick and did not get well even after the best doctor in town treated me. My parents had grown desperate so the albularyo was called once more. She told my parents to roast a whole cow, which they did willingly. The albularyo and her family feasted on it. When I was still sick after a few days, she instructed my parents to cut my hair; she told them that elves liked longhaired women. The problem was Bat liked my new look, and in my dreams, he was always there, entreating me to go with him. I got sicker than ever.

The albularyo, getting an idea from a dream, then tried her last cure--an ointment taken from the bark of seven old trees applied to my hair. It cost more than the cow and nobody could enter my room without gagging. The smell was terrible. That did the trick. Apparently, Bat was disgusted but he would stop at nothing to get me, even if it meant getting my family out of the way. I told him again and again that I didn't love him and would never go with him, but the elf's mind was set. In the end I just ignored him, for who could reason with an elf, and a mad one at that?

He did not turn up in my dreams the next few nights. In a week, I was up and running again and I thought that all was right. My parents decided that I should transfer to another school, this time a sectarian school.

Then something happened. My mother had a miscarriage. People blamed the elves and talked about it for a long time. I remember the sad and fearful looks of my parents every day as they heard the banging on our ceiling. Were they friends or were they responsible for the accident? I had never told them about Bat, who Prax said was the one behind all these incidents.

Years passed, and since nothing untoward had happened since my mother's miscarriage, we began to let go of our fears. The alarm service continued, and our belief that my mother's miscarriage was the elves' doing was discarded. It was simply the fetus's fate to die before it was born.

"Bat left town, probably to look for some of his kin to help him," Prax said.

It was a chilling thought, and with Bat's words the last time we talked, I was terrified. I laid awake at night thinking of a way to protect my family. I had Prax, but what about them?

When I was twelve, the banging on our ceiling stopped. We were having lunch, feasting on the pork barbecue my mother had bought after her experiment with chicken curry failed. The sudden cessation of the noise we had been living with for years was jarring. The silence grated on our ears. For the first time, we could hear ourselves breathe.

No one moved. Even my brother, who was now seven, stopped chewing the pork he had just bitten off the stick. Papa stood up and called to the elves. Nobody answered. Gesturing for my cousin to follow him, they got the ladder and prepared to climb to the ceiling. They took with them an old wooden crucifix and a bottle of water from the first rain of May. My cousin brought along a two-by-two and a rope. I didn't know what they wanted to do but we looked on, our barbecue forgotten.

Papa went inside the ceiling and my cousin followed. Moments later, they came back running. My cousin descended the ladder first and I don't know whether it was because of fright or just because he was careless, but a rung broke and he fell to the ground, back first, hitting the two-by-two he had dropped in his haste. He lay there, unmoving except for his ragged breathing, his back bent at an angle we never thought possible.

Mama fainted, Papa stood still, my sister called an ambulance, my brother wailed, and I sat in the ground, laughing. It was not a laugh of gladness, just my nervous reaction to what happened. But they misunderstood and locked me in my room. I cried, shouted, cursed, but remained locked in. From inside my room I could hear them talking, the medical help coming in, and relatives pouring inside our house. I was ignored. I slept and dreamed that an elf was laughing. When I woke up, the whole house was filled by elven laughter. Then my cousin died.

After another year, my little brother followed. He was run over by a postal service van. I can still hear the anguished wail of the driver as he asked for forgiveness. He claimed that a tiny creature had run in front of his van and he had swerved to avoid it. My brother was unfortunately playing by the roadside and the van ran straight into him. Witnesses say they had heard laughter at the exact moment the wheels caught my brother.

The driver was imprisoned, but the deaths did not stop there. Barely six months later, my father drowned while fishing. A freak storm, the fishermen said, but for us who were left alive there was no mistaking that our family would die one by one.

There were only three of us left: my mother, my sister, and I. We tried to seek help, but the policemen laughed in our faces. We were branded as lunatics. And Prax was gone, defeated by Bat and his family apparently on the day the banging stopped. Even the albularyo could not help us. What use were her potions and ointments? What the elves needed was a good dose of magic, and the albularyo was primarily a healer and an exorcist. She had no training when it came to defending a whole family against vengeful elves.

And poor Mama! A mere week after my father died she followed. Extreme despair, the doctors said but we knew better.

My sister and I left home and went to live with our relatives in the city, hundreds of kilometers away. We told them about the elves but they laughed and told us we were being provincial. "It is the 90s," they said. "Belief in the little people died a long time ago." We knew they were wrong, but how could two orphaned teenagers convince the skeptics? Perhaps, we should have insisted on talking more but, as things were, our aunt had already scheduled counseling sessions for the two of us The fear of being sent to a mental institution stopped us from further trying to convince them. In the end, we just hoped that the distance from our old home would keep us safe from the elves.

But they followed and, one by one, our foster family died. Car accidents, food poisonings, assassinations through mistaken identity--there were logical explanations for their deaths but we knew we had been responsible. We could only look on helplessly, and despaired.

We traveled again, haphazardly enough to let us think that we could outwit the elves. But they finally caught my sister about a year ago. We were on the bus bound for another town when a tire blew out. The bus crashed into a ditch and although most of the passengers including myself were injured, the only fatality was my sister. I realized then that there was no escaping the fury of the little people.

After my sister's death, there was a period of silence from the elves. I decided to continue studying and enrolled at the local college. I had no problem with finances. I had inherited a large sum from a relative I had unwittingly sent to death.

After I got settled in the school dormitory, Prax appeared in my dreams again. He told me about a chant that he had dug up in the enormous library of a human psychic he had befriended. It was a weapon against any creature--effective against those with malicious intentions, whether towards humans or other creatures. Prax thought it would he better if I could defeat Bat myself. After all, hadn't Bat done me great harm already? I agreed and prepared myself for the battle that would decide my fate.

It was not long after my conversation with Prax that Bat tracked me down. It was a weekend and I had the room all to myself. I looked up from my notes and saw him--much older, his once clear complexion now marred with dark, crisscrossing veins. Hate screamed from him, and he stooped and walked with great difficulty. I pitied him.

He gave me an ultimatum: go with him or die on the spot. I pretended to look defeated and worn out. My act was effective and Bat looked pleased. He wanted us to go immediately but I dallied. At the pretext of packing my few valuable possessions, I told him to wait outside and count to a hundred.

When he was gone, I took out the ingredients I had prepared and the mini-stove I had borrowed. I boiled a small amount of sweet milk. I unwrapped Bat's image made in green and brown clay, with strands of his hair given to me by Prax, and started blowing and chanting words that meant nothing to me.

Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.

Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.

Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.

Outside the room, Bat's count reached 70. I put aside the image and into the pan I poured hundreds of brand new pins and needles that had been blessed. The count reached 80. I repeated the chant and immersed the image in the boiling liquid. I waited.

Bat's count reached a hundred but I did not worry for it had become faint and weak, just as Prax had told me. Then Bat dissipated into a mist--shrieking, I might add--to where, only God would ever know.

Prax appeared again in my dreams that night and told me that they--Bat and his family--would never bother me again. He himself would move his family away from humans to avoid similar incidents in the future. It was too bad he didn't discover the old book with the vanquishing spell earlier for I could have saved my family. I could not bring them back, he said, but I could build a good life of my own. With the luck he bestowed on me, I would never be in need for material things the rest of my life.

I kissed the old elf, knowing that we would never see each other again. I watched him fade away, seeing the last of my family go.

When I woke up, I went to my desk and studied math, remembering where it all began. 

THE MARTINI EFFECT

by Doreen D.L. Jose

IT is a lovely spring morning and Dr. Nelson, the lecturer in Technology and Communications, is no longer talking Greek to us. By now, our second semester at the University of London's Center for Media Studies, my classmates and I finally understand all things digital as well as analog.

We're now into cellular and mobile personal communication and Dr. Nelson is explaining how the digital revolution is leading to a true convergence of all communication networks--computer, wired, and wireless--such that in the end there is going to be just one network. The information society. The martini effect. The … what? Syu-Chin. the Taiwanese girl raises her hand and asks Dr. Nelson.

The lecturer is taken aback by this. He looks us over one by one, each of us shaking our heads in turn. Instead of explaining, he says we can consider it as a possible essay topic: "What is the martini effect and how will this be brought about?" I guess it's not a very lovely spring morning after all.

MY boyfriend Roy seems to he flirting with the other girls in the mailing list that has us both as members. I don't want to imagine how he must be behaving in chatrooms. Funny, the thought of his virtual life frightens me so. It's probably because I just finished the case study: "The Internet as a playground where more and more people are migrating."

Roy and I used to meet at IRC's #filipino channel in the first months of our separation until I realized that I was spending way too much time online and this was affecting my performance as an overseas graduate student. I explained this to him and he said he understood. So we've kept ourselves to e-mail and the occasional long distance calls ever since.

It's only been a year, but it's like I don't know him anymore. I learn more about his life now from our e-group. "I can't help missing the old republic of two we used to have," I e-mailed him once. "Nothing to worry about," he said, "that republic still stands." Checked its flag lately? I wanted to ask, but it would just be a waste of bandwidth. Redundancy is all very fine, even necessary in face-to-face communications, but e-mail is a different terrain.

Even my mental picture of him has faded to a blur. I asked for his pictures recently and the jpg files he sent me as e-mail attachments showed him with shoulder-length platinum yellow hair. He exuded a look of self-consciousness that wasn't there before, probably because he took the pictures himself with a digital camera. He'd started growing his hair before I left for London. He'd started losing himself in cyberspace at around that time, too.

Do I have a right to complain? I left him to follow my dream, didn't I? But I shouldn't be thinking of this right now. I have work to do.

THIS e-mail looks like good news: "Hi, I'm Simon Ellis. I badly need theBT Technology Journal which you have--1997, Autumn issue. If it's alright, can we meet so I can photocopy the articles I'm looking for? I might also be of help if you're working on a related research topic or problem. You can find me in my cubicle at the second floor of the College of Electronics and Engineering during office hours. Cheers, Simon."

Apparently he got my e-mail address from the engineering library where I borrowed the relevant materials right after Dr. Nelson gave us our new research topic. The postgraduate adviser wasn't kidding when he said on orientation day that we'd soon be reading technical books and journals for our courses.

It's been a week and right now, I'm at a dead end in my research. Whenever the martini effect is mentioned in the readings, it's always taken for granted that it doesn't need any explanation. It's starting to feel like an elaborate joke played on the uninitiated by the engineering community. So, Simon Ellis's e-mail is a cause for excitement, indeed.

I e-mail Roy: "hi babes, guess what? somebody from engineering wants a journal that i have. maybe he can explain things to me. no?"

Roy e-mails back immediately: "it's your good karma at work, karen."

Whatever he means by that. The Force does seem to be on my side.

SIMON, it turns out, is a neat looking MSc research student of electronic engineering--well-trimmed hair, polo and slacks pressed using just the right amount of starch. He looks... uncomplicated. I notice his well-pressed clothes because I can't quite manage this trick myself. This is actually why I usually go for the grunge look. Today, for example, I'm in a tie-dye shirt and well-worn jeans, my hair in a braid because I didn't have time to wash and dry it this morning.

Naturally we were both happy to see each other. He asks me what a Communications student like me is doing with this technical material, so I explain the multidisciplinary nature of our program--the aim is to equip us so-called creative people with enough know-how so we can work with the technical people in bringing about the killer apps of the information superhighway. He tells me he's working on possible interfaces for third generation mobile telephony for his dissertation.

As I hand him the BT Journal, he asks how my research is going. I say, "Not too good… Do you happen to know anything about the martini factoror martini effect?" He smiles, surprised, then says, "Yes, of course, it refers to the martini adverts showing you can have a martini at the beach, on board a plane, in a bathtub… and is used to describe the coming information environment where you can have information anytime, anywhere." "That's all it is?" I ask. "That's it, yes," he says.

He gives me a copy of the early chapters of his thesis for possible use in my research. He also shows me some more references he has--transcripts of recent European mobile telephony conferences. Apparently, it is on the wireless front that things are happening in Europe. "You can borrow whatever you want," he says, beaming. I took him up on his offer, of course.

BEFORE Simon explained the martini effect to me, I'd tried to do a little participatory research. When I went out with my classmates to celebrate Sayaka's birthday at a Japanese restaurant along West End a few nights ago, I had two martinis--dry. It didn't taste particularly strong, so I gulped one after the other. Dmitri, the Greek guy, was a bit to blame for this, actually. From the corner of my eye, I saw him watching me maneuver my chopsticks. I met his gaze as I put the sushi in my--gasp--wide open mouth and he didn't look away. He even smiled. I must have spaced out after that because the next thing I knew, Sayaka was asking Dmitri, with a hint of exasperation in her voice: "Are you gay?" Dmitri, his eyes sparkling in amusement, said, "No,… why do you ask?" That was all he needed to get started on Greek stuff--this time the island of Lesbos. I wondered to myself why he didn't choose to tell us of the common homosexual practices of ancient Greek males, which seemed more appropriate.

Sometimes Dmitri would get so lost in his country's past it's just heartbreaking. He tried to explain to me once what exactly was going on in Bosnia by going back to 14th century Macedonia. I was, however, too lost in those dreamy Mediterranean eyes of his and his lullabyish accent to absorb anything.

"In Greece, we're so hung up about our past," he said, "because the present is disappointing."

"Well, at least you have something," I said. "We Filipinos don't even have a past to fall back on. We're a people with short memory," I said.

Our hang-up may not have anything to do with time, but with space, I thought as I watched the kimono-clad Filipina waitresses in the restaurant. Even the chefs who cooked teppanyaki-style right before our eyes, juggling eggs, carrots and spring onions in the air before cooking them, were Filipinos. My classmates--a group of Asians and Europeans--had been amused both by this fact and the cooks' performance. The manager of this place, however, is a stern Thai woman. I know because I sometimes work as a waitress here too, and every time I relax my smiling muscles, she gets on my case.

At the end of the night, Dmitri said he was seeing me home because we were both taking the Northern Line, anyway. We took the tube, then walked the short distance from the station to my flat. It was chilly. The weather seemed to have regressed to winter while we were busy with dinner. Dmitri took my bare hand and we walked in silence, the full moon hovering above us profoundly. At times like these, I guess, it's but natural to think of what-if's-and-all-that, but I told myself it was just the weather and the night and the moon, nothing more.

TODAY'S Sunday. I wake up before nine in the morning, which is good. If I wake up after that on a Sunday, I usually end up puttering about in my bathrobe the whole day. No one is in the kitchen when I come down for my breakfast of strawberries, chocolates, and coffee. My flatmates--all British girls--will probably be lying in till after lunch. Sunlight streams through the kitchen window, it almost feels like I'm back home. I feel lethargic when the weather is like this. It doesn't matter, I tell myself. I can't waste any more time today. I've lost enough time already the past few days going out with friends or just staring at the ceiling.

Go-go-go. I urge myself, rolling up my sleeves. I vacuum the carpeted floor, change the sheets, leave the laundry in the washing machine, then soak myself in the bathtub. Afterwards, I work on my technology essay and review for an exam. I can hear the crowd going wild in my head, cheering me on. Then I hear a referee whistle. Break time. I read The Guardian and come across a news item about credit card bills being stolen en masse and the thieves making mail orders using stolen account numbers. A thought flashes through my mind--my bank wrote that my credit card statement was on its way. That was about a week ago. I can see the crowd getting listless waiting for the game to resume, for the players to come running back on to the field. But nothing happens. This is a well-behaved crowd, though, and instead of booing and throwing things, they quietly leave, some of them scratching their heads as they do so.

As the day draws to a close, I think of Roy. He said he'd call in his last e-mail. He always calls when he says he will. What could be keeping him? It's early evening here in London already, so it must be past midnight in the Philippines. I'm a woman waiting for the phone to ring. Sheesh. I grab my denim jacket, take some coins with me, and go out to make a call from the streetcorner payphone. I had used up my phonecard which I need to call from my flat's phone, so I need to use one of those coin-operated units outside. When I dial his number, though, all I get is a taped voice in his answering machine. I can't believe it. Since when did he have an answering machine? I go to the Indian store and buy fags. My vision is so blurry I can't even see the price and have to ask the vendor how much it is. Three pounds and fifty, he says.

I once swore never to smoke again, but what the heck. It's all I can do while somebody somewhere is probably stealing my credit identity, and Roy… well, what's that answering machine supposed to mean?

WHEN I went to my bank to check up on my credit card statement, I was startled to find Simon Ellis working there. I wondered at first what he was doing there banktelling when he was supposed to have his hands full helping shape a future technology. Then l realized it wasn't him, just somebody of the same age and type. Anyway, this reminded me I had to return the materials to him. I was also reminded of Sophie, my French classmate, who had wondered aloud in our International Communications class how the Chinese policemen were able to identify the people they were doing to arrest from that sea of chinky-eyed (and to her, identical) faces in Tiananmen.

AFTER I give him back his materials, Simon asks after some small talk: "Would you care to have martinis with me one time?" I feel the blood rising up to my cars. "Oh, I don't know," I say. "I'm terribly busy right now." I try not to feel stupid as I say this, thinking of Roy, his broken promise and his answering machine. There's too much static between us now. Or is all that the signal itself and I'm just missing it like a fool? No, once my work here is done, I tell myself, Roy and I will talk things over and… I'm almost sure everything will be alright between the two of us, just like before. I'll probably be wondering every now and then about Simon and Dmitri and all the could-have-beens, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to he something I can't live with. I realize I'm more afraid of the future, of the unknown, than I'd care to admit and this is why I'm holding on to Roy. Tried and tested Roy. We've been together five years, after all. That must be worth something. "Thanks a lot, Simon. See you around," I say as I turn to reach for the door.

LIFE abroad has meant checking e-mails from people back home first thing it the morning, as soon as I get to school. It has become like drinking coffee to me. I even check my e-mails at the nearest computer cluster during coffee breaks. It's strange but I seem to be more in touch with them now than I ever was when I as in Manila. Oh, except for Roy…

Roy's e-mail today has as subject: "my bombshell." I double-click it. It's probably nothing to do with us. He had e-mailed me a bombshell a few months ago, when my good friend Annie came out of the closet and left her husband to be with her girlfriend. Roy was so shocked. "She's so feminine and so beautiful," he'd said. "I don't care if it's not politically correct to say this."

Hey, what is this? A practical joke? "dear karen, i miss you a lot and i wish we never got separated. i need to tell you something very, very important. and i want you to be the strong woman i have always known and loved. i have fallen in love with someone else. i love her very much, though we have never met in person. i know it sounds crazy but from her first e-mail, the connection is just so strong…"

I've known all along without knowing, haven't I? Headlines chased each other in my mind: "Girlfriend Left Out Cold in Cyberia"; "I Find Her Bits More Attractive Than You!"; "Man Dumps Real Life Partner For Cyber-Love." It's like my subconscious has been composing the news item all along for this very occasion. I've been reading The Sun a lot, I realize.

"Karen? Are you alright?" a familiar voice pulls me out of it.

I look and see Dmitri, then shake my head. He leads me out of the computer cluster. I tell him the story in between puffs of strong Hamlet cigars, over ouzo, at the nearby Ole English pub.

I'M ready to hand in my essay. I have everything put this time around--how exactly the wireless mobile telephone is about to become a universal personal communicator and usher in the martini effect. Basically, mobility (and therefore, wireless) rules, as the third generation will combine the features of a telephone. a computer, a television. a newspaper, a library. a personal diary, even a credit card.

The third generation mobile essentially means three things--global coverage, a handy pocket-sized terminal, and multimedia capability. Scenario: while waiting for your flight, you can download and watchTrainspotting on your mobile phone or maybe read the daughter you've left behind a bedtime story until she falls asleep. And just as the martini has endless variety--there's Blue Martini, Dirty Sicilian, Dean Martini, and so on--the services of the next generation of mobile telephones can be customized to fit specific needs and preferences. Welcome to the information society, where you can have information/communication anytime, anywhere.

There's still a lot of work to be done to get there, of course, both technically and politically, but the industry is confident that the martini effect is just around the corner. As I see it, the choice of metaphor for what is to come betrays a great deal of optimism and enthusiasm, even giddiness. It tends to sidestep one big question: Is the world ready for/Do we really need all this?

I'm submitting the essay well ahead of time. I'm all set to leave, not for Manila, but for Greece. With Dmitri. There's a lot to learn over there, I feel. I check my e-mail today for the last time. I think I'll take a break from all this brave, new world stuff once I'm in Greece. I think I'll try classical studies or archaeology there for a change. 

MEDITATIONS OF A PISS ARTIST

by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento

JOJO was idly tracing arcs and swirls on the rooftop of the Faculty Center. He was alone and his urine fizzled slightly on the pleasantly warm concrete with the hiss of rain. As in the unforeseen workings of mimetic magic, there did then arise from the heat-swollen earth, the vapors of a slight precipitation to come. Jojo felt triumphant, a personal sense of accomplishment. Maybe he was some kind of shaman, and he didn’t even know it: a still untapped power which was his by right of his Indo-Malay cultural heritage and through the divine workings of that mythical hole in the sky, the same one through which government subsidized psychics during the fabulary Marcos regime had discovered supernatural powers streamed forth. Maybe it was because his was an astrological water sign, Pisces, that he could make water with such skill, channeling through well-considered sphincter and priapic muscle control, the purposeful and selective release of his electromagnetically charged bodily fluids, delicately balancing the rise and ebb of ions and protons in the atmosphere. A few minor adjustments and with enough practice, he could raise up a storm or even a light summer drizzle. He bestowed a genial benediction upon the acacia trees whose susurrant leaves and splayed, interlacing black branches always made him grateful he had gotten into the Diliman campus.

Another name for acacia was raintree. Miss Farrin, his third year high school English teacher in Masbate had taught him that. She had asked him to read a sentimental love story about rain trees set in Baguio. Jojo had been aware that she was watching him read all the while with a moist, intent earnestness as though she had handed him a treasured memento, a part of her soul, and now wanted to see how he would receive it. With a lazy spitefulness, he’d told her that acacia timber was also known as monkey pod wood. A hint of pained distaste creased her perpetually anxious features. It was as though he had profaned a shrine, so he had considerately added that he liked the name raintree better. She had tremulously pronounced him sensitive, telling him that she sensed in him from the start a special vibration and had asked him to walk her home as she had all the five sections’ final quarter exams and reports to carry.

It had rained, just like in the story they’d read, and he had to wait it out in the little room she rented behind the provincial bus station. After helping her arrange the piles of test papers and book reports according to section and in alphabetical order, they had sat side by side on her army surplus cot with the faded, blue-flowered Chinese cotton coverlet and the line of troll dolls and stuffed toys. Neil Young was wailing away on her portable audiocassette player and she had leaned gently against him, her frail body redolent of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum and Johnson’s Baby Cologne and told him of all sorts of insights she’d had into his character that he had never even realized were there. Then for lack of anything better to say or do in response to her utterances, and wanting to see besides how she, an older woman and a figure of authority, would react to such overtures, he had boldly grabbed her, suddenly turning and landing so heavily on her, he practically squeezed the breath out of her as he pressed her against the thin mattress. The bedsprings shrieked while his smooth large hands cupped her bony buttocks through her nylon bikini panties.

“Sus ginoo—Arru-uy! Agu-uy!” Miss Farrin had interjected, forgetting the carefully enunciated English that she had cultivated all those years since she’d been a Rotary scholar. And that had been Jojo’s first time, when he was just a boy of fifteen, and he was proud of it. They had done it three times that afternoon. He was proudest though of not having had to pay for it and that it was with a woman who was eight years older, had been baccalaureated in a Manila university and passed the government licensure exams. It was as though being with her would allow some of her accomplishments to pass through in some weird form of capillary action into his own underachieving being.

Miss Farrin gave him money to take a tricycle home, fussing over him with a reverent and diffident tenderness that made him want to laugh. That was also the first time he’d been kissed on the ears. He didn’t like that part, and had recoiled at her tongue lathering warm saliva along the ridges and hollows of his ears. The next week, Miss Farrin bought him two T-shirts from the town viajera, genuine Bossinni and Giordano, and black hightop Converse sneakers. They had gone on seeing each other for a while until she left to take up post-graduate courses at FEU. Miss Farrin had written to him hopefully several times during his senior year and sent him more T-shirts. She must have heard that he was in Manila, too, but he had never gotten in touch with her there and expected that one day, when he was home on vacation, he would learn that she’d married, or even better, gotten the teaching position she’d dreamed of in Guam or Brunei.

On hindsight, Miss Farrin’s judgment may have been as good a reason as any for Jojo’s decision to be an artist, besides not being smart enough to get into one of those quota courses on the UP College Admission Tests. He had gotten in on a certificate course but had planned to shift to a bachelor’s degree program later. During the talent test, they’d been asked to draw a human figure in charcoal, a detail from a calendar reproduction of Luna’s Spolarium. He’d noticed the college dean staring intently at him and had insolently spread his legs, adjusted his crotch and stared right back. The old man’s mouth had made a little “o” of schoolgirlish surprise. Later, all a-dither with avuncular good will, he’d offered to give Jojo a private scholarship. Jojo accepted. He had been quite an innocent then. The only gay men in Masbate had been, as expected, hairdressers and dressmakers and the Boy Scout Master. He’d never expected to meet one in such an exalted position and was frankly curious. Besides, the dean always made it a point to be seen with young girls at discos and to be photographed bussing some high society lovely at an artsy event.

The summer before that freshman schoolyear, Jojo had gone with the dean and his current favorite, Ferdie Danao, to one of those gaySantacruzans in Malabon. Ferdie, a somewhat pudgy bemoustachedmestizo who looked like a Super Mario Brother (he was also an advertising model) and had tried to paint like Anita Magsaysay-Ho, had chattered cheerfully about this up and coming couturier who had a heavy crush on him. Dean Batumbacal’s skin rash shone through the layers of his makeup foundation under the acidic gleam of multicolored incandescent bulbs strung along the streets. Several times, he discreetly rubbed his paunch against Jojo’s rump, and just to tease him, Jojo had wriggled ever so slightly back. That was as far as he went for now. He believed there was integrity that on principle, he would never do it with another man although he enjoyed their unabashed admiration. Otherwise, he was bored. The spectacle of these urban queens with their well-defined, overarched eyebrows and tricolored hairdos, demurely parading in clouds of lime and fuchsia organza and ruffles, or black satin sheathes and tulle was disheartening. It was so safe, so predictable and provincial, looking for all the world like a Masbate cotillion. This was his first outing with the beau monde and it was like he had never left home.

Jojo wasn’t even supposed to be up on the Faculty Center roof. Too many horny kids and freaks were using it to make out, to drink tequila or vodka and to smoke grass, so the Blue Guards had hammered a waist-high wooden barrier at the foot of the stairs. But so what—there was no door at the top anyway—it had long been ripped off its hinges—so everyone just climbed over that practically useless fence. Right now though, it was still broad daylight, so he had the place all to himself. He’d just been to a screening of a French documentary about that American expressionist artist Jackson Pollock who’d killed himself way back in the fifties. Jojo wondered why Filipino artists so rarely committed suicide. A deficit of angst? Offhand, he couldn’t think of even one.

On one of the walls of the Faculty Center roof deck, someone, probably a colegiala, had scribbled some lines from Saint Exupery’sThe Little Prince in a wavery, sensitive colored chalk script. Miss Farrin had been gaga over The Little Prince and had been disappointed that he hadn’t shared this passion. She’d insisted that everything in the slender little book had some deeper esoteric symbolic meaning, including the three volcanoes on the Little Prince’s planet. The one that was dormant, she interpreted to be his sex drive. Jojo couldn’t remember what the other two were supposed to be and wondered why it was even important that they be about anything. Those academics who were forever analyzing and categorizing and setting limits and gradations on thought amused him. The integrity of their footnotes and their bibliographies left him cold. He had no qualms about stealing other people’s ideas if he could. He had no respect for intellectual property, especially not Third World intellectual property. He wondered how someone from Masbate could be such a snob and was amused by his own presumptuousness.

Jojo tapped the head of his dick expertly and the last tiny drops spattered close to his foot like a signature. With insouciant grace, he zipped himself up. He had given up wearing underwear because it saved him money, was less laundry for him to do and more of a turn on for some girls. It worked for him that he resembled a bulol icon with his angular features and the glints of verdigris in his skin, an effect he’d since learned to emphasize with layers of brass slave bracelets that reached midway up his sinewy forearms, rings strategically pierced through one earlobe, and tattoos around his wrist. A real chick boy, agreed the guys who had called themselves S.M.E.G.M.A.—Ang Samahan ng mga Egoy at Gago na Matitigas ang Ari. Ginayuma mo ‘ata, p’re, they joked with a trace of envy and admiration. He never had to pay for it and even had to avoid them when they waited for him, uninvited at his dorm. Since Miss Farrin, there had been more girls than he could count on his fingers and toes. Not bad for a guy who was not yet eighteen.

AS he left the building, Jojo mulled over a project proposal to cover the entire rooftop of the Faculty Center with the bodily fluids of one hundred Filipino artists in celebration of the Centennial, sort of like a liquid Cristo, that Greek guy who he’d heard got Fortune 500 corporations and governments to give him a lot of money just to wrap things in tarpaulins or parachute silk. Bodily fluids being as ephemeral and transient as time and serving as a metaphor for the corresponding illusory nature of our freedom and nationhood, which were likewise ephemeral and transient, ever changing and impermanent and all that, along with some kind of profound statement about political and artistic consciousness in the Third World being as ephemeral and transient as bodily fluids etc. He just needed to find the right Derrida-ish—or was that Foucault?—diction for it and hoped Mr. Beltran the art theory professor had the right texts.

The guy in the movie had piously divided Pollock’s work into style periods: le drip, le dribble and le splatter, and he really meant it. The French are so serious about everything especially high culture. A very attractive man, Pollock, Jojo decided and wondered if it was true that he had swung both ways. Ferdie Dayao, being half-white himself, claimed that although Caucasian penises were generally larger, they were not as stiff as Oriental ones. He had preened prettily before Jojo during their last outing, when they went skinnydipping at Pansol. Jojo had looked on politely, with detached curiosity. He wondered if piss, puke and spit would pass for a project as hallowed as the coming Centennial. To enhance the whole project, he would put in a background of ethnic music and maybe some tribal dancers. Then he could call it a multimedia experience.

Once he’d asked Mr. Beltran what the whole art thing was all about and he’d stared coldly back at him, like a bilious fish through his rimless oval reading glasses then rumbled deep in his narrow scholar’s chest, his rounded shoulders hunching up aggressively: “What do youthink it’s about, Cruz? I’m sick of all these pretentious pseudo intellectuals who read art reviews then pass off the opinions in them as if they were their own. What about it, Cruz? Why don’t you tell me what you think it’s all about?”

“Well, sir, I guess I’m just another pseudo-intellectual myself,” Jojo had softly said, and he really meant it. He was not insulted. That sort of got Mr. Beltran off balance, like by a mental jiujitsu trick. Jojo was not about to get into a discussion with a guy who probably jerked off to Art News. He felt that it was a really Zen experience, except that if he could say it, then it probably wasn’t, and he probably was not Zen either. But it was good just the same to have everybody slapping his back and giving him high fives after the class, and saying “Okay ka, pare,” like he’d done something really heroic. What a lot of shit that was but still kind of fun anyway.

In one instance that was meant to partake of an unaccustomed confidence, Mr. Beltran had told his class in his gruff, somewhat muffled voice which was his normal way of speaking how he had been turned on to painting by those photo essays in Life magazine about the New York art scene. That had been just after the Second World War. There were no glossy art magazines in Manila then. It was not unlike seeing the world by the light of dead stars and Jojo had found it all quite touching. It reminded him of how it had been for him in Masbate, how he had rented used books and remaindered magazines and had devoured TV shows at the only home with a satellite dish in those years before cable TV. He tried to imagine Mr. Beltran as a young man like himself in the throes of a just revealed passion, albeit an intellectual one and only vicariously experienced from the pages of a pictorial weekly. Or had Mr. Beltran as a young man been as turgid and stultified as Mr. Beltran the old man, parsing his opinions, measuring his reactions, calculating their correctness against a standard greater and higher than any known of in Masbate, or even Metro Manila for that matter.

“It was this whole idea of flatness—the flatness of the actual painting as well as the flatness of the mechanical means used to reproduce it, meaning the photograph,” Beltran had tried to explain himself. He always seemed driven by the need to hypothesize, to formulate a theory which was why they must have had him teaching art theory anyway. He was made for it. Every M-W-F, Jojo came into the classroom to find paragraphs culled from art critics, painstakingly printed out in neat block letters on the chalk board. Like a mother pelican feeding its young, Mr. Beltran had thoughtfully distilled and regurgitated these for their edification. They should have been more grateful to him and tried to understand him instead of speculating on his sexual orientation and gossiping about his ostensible mates.

This girl that Jojo really liked also took the Art Theory class. He always came in after her so that he could sit in the row behind her, a little to the side where he could watch her profile, the soft curve of her slender young arms. He had to keep his sketchpad or a jacket on his lap because sometimes just looking at her made him hard. Makati girl, he called her in private. That was his way of saying that she was everything fine and above him. She wasn’t even from Makati but Jojo just thought that she had real style and class just the same.

Funny, but her friend Aenid Blanco who had won the Miss Photogenic title in one of the past year’s beauty pageants thought it was she whom Jojo liked. She assumed that all heterosexual men desired her above all other women. She was from Silay and was always volunteering details about her privileged upbringing. For one thing, the servants in their household outnumbered the family members.

“You know, it’s so different where I come from. We have three cooks because my mom and dad are gourmets. Then there’s a gardener for the orchids and a gardener for the lawn and the other ornamentals,” she said in her irritating singsong. Every now and then she would pause expectantly, waiting for the usual exclamations of polite awe. She knew that most of them did not even have maids. She made no secret of it that she was drawn to what she saw as feral and lumpen in Jojo. She thrilled at the contrast he presented to the somewhat soft exclusive school boys with their puerile speech.

Makati Girl was genuinely nice to talk to. Jojo had never heard her start a sentence with Shit! the way the other girls say it with the short “e” sound in the middle which he found especially contrived and irritating. She didn’t punctuate her sentences with Fuck in that coy and petulant way the other girls did when they wanted you to think they were cool. Makati Girl laughed at the stories and jokes that the other guys would tell—stories that would gross out the other girls who had all these hang-ups about their being colegialas. She lacked the convoluted prudishness that afflicted most. When the Figure Drawing class had to submit their life-size nude self-portraits, she was the only one who did hers with full frontal nudity. Even the boys in class coyly masked their genitalia with carefully placed hands or a bent leg. Jojo felt his insides churning as he looked at the way she saw herself. She was so honest, she had drawn herself with one breast slightly smaller and higher than the other, and the lotus labia of her tender pudenda clearly outlined through the fine fronds of her pubic hair.

Makati Girl talked to just about anyone. There was a coño kid who was so in love with her, he would come all the way from De la Salle to Diliman in his rich father’s Beemer just to look at her and to tell her about all the shit he was taking and the sinkhole that his life had become. Jojo seethed whenever he saw them together, Makati Girl sitting on the cream colored stone ledge by the library steps, framed by bamboo, santan and hibiscus blooms, like a virgin in a grotto, and the junky standing a little below her, leaning on the ledge, looking longingly up at her. He was telling her how ashamed he was about being so deep into drugs. She listened to him with such a rapt, solemn and gentle look, that he had to go and get stoned because she actually made him feel worse about himself. All the metaamphetamines and cough syrup had clogged up his lungs and pitted his nose and cheeks. He sniffed constantly at a mentholated inhaler. She had such perfect skin and clear, calm eyes that still held that pure, direct look of childhood. She hardly wore any makeup. That poor junky just wanted her to stay pure forever. He never touched her. Jojo was almost certain that she was a virgin and the thought was alarmingly poignant.

A CROWD was milling about the College of Fine Arts lobby. It was odd because artists generally do not mill. If anything, there was a customary desultoriness, a muted fragmentary quality—almost like single-stop animation—about their movements. Then Jojo heard: Benny Grajeda had killed himself. It just blew his mind. There he had been, just a scant half hour ago, mulling over why so few Filipino artists were suicidal and now one of his classmates had actually jumped off the top floor of the Palma Hall and left some of his teeth embedded in the asphalt below. Boboy Encantado, the aged madman of Mt. Makiling, was down there now, trying to pry Benny’s bicuspids out of the hot sticky blacktop with an etching stylus. He wanted to use them for aretablo that he had conceptualized as an installation piece.

“Jojo, you knew him, didn’t you? You were friends,” it was Makati Girl actually talking to him.

Jojo felt a rush. It was one thing to piss and conjure up an afternoon drizzle, but this was actual life and death. He nodded. “He was always kind of weird.” he said. It sounded lame.

Now a Filipino artist was dead, although Benny wasn’t famous and was barely half-formed as an artist. Actually, Jojo thought his paintings really sucked, no disrespect intended for the dead, not that it would matter to him now anyway, or even then, as pig-headed and tasteless as he was. Reasoning that retro was in, Benny had been into this pattern painting thing, all precious-like with the masking taped grids and the airbrushes. Boring blah blah statements about the qualities of color and light. The kind of stuff you see in the reception rooms of people who think they’re so slick because they’ve got abstract art, and to go with it all this dark leather and bright chrome Bauhaus style furniture set against distressed paint finishes, soapstone sculpture, shiny Italian granite tabletops, onyx obelisks, faux ionic pillars for pedestals, all for what their decorators hoped was a post-modernist effect.

“I feel so sad for him. Maybe he just didn’t have anyone to talk to, to share his thoughts and feelings with,” Makati Girl said, and she really looked like she meant it about being sad for him. Jojo felt his heart going out to her and casually positioned his sketch pad before his groin.

And then again, Benny was basically a bastard, a real sadist, and everyone at the College knew it. Every time it rained, he would be down by the lagoon, systematically stomping with his steel-toed boots on the little brown and green frogs that came hopping out of the rank matted talahib. Those frogs must have been evolutionally unprepared for such an unnatural enemy as Benny because they were so easy to catch and to kill. They never knew what hit them. Benny even had a pet, a rhesus monkey with a belt and chain around its middle. He would swing it around and around way over his head while it screeched in wild terror. That tiny emaciated creature was so scared of him that whenever it saw him coming it would vomit and defecate in mindless panic. Jojo wondered what would become of the monkey now that Benny was dead. If he had known that in some African provinces, they made monkey meat into a kind of tapa, smoked or salted and air-dried, what vile recipe might he have come up with?

Just two months ago, Benny had brought cat meat asado siopao to the college on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday. He was mechanically inclined and had made a machine to electroshock stray cats so they’d pass out, then he would skin them alive. He’d sniggered over his cleverness as he’d told his disbelieving classmates how there really was more than one way to skin a cat. He’d handstitched the cat fur into a Davey Crocket style cap, except his had three stringy cattails, instead of a fat coonskin one hanging from behind. Some of the fur, he’d made into watercolor paint brushes. On what turned out to be his last birthday, he’d come to school, wearing his catskin cap and with his cat meat asado siopao in a green plastic sando bag, looking very pleased with himself. At least he was decent enough to tell them what was in the siopao.

The girls were so upset and offended by Benny that one of them reported him to the Assistant Dean, Miss Caymo. However, Benny was perversely pleased at getting so much attention on his birthday that he stapled a Kotex pad to the fly of his blue jeans. He declared that this signified his solidarity with women and his realization of the female principle inherent in every man. The little provincianas just walked past him with averted eyes. He gave them quite a giggle though in private and something to tell their friends back home about how bad and crazy the Manila boys were. Then a husky frat guy threatened to make Benny eat the Kotex pad and push all his cat fur paintbrushes up his ass, so he took it off that same afternoon. Miss Caymo was at a loss about what to do with him. The Kotex pad had been flushed away, and bringingasado siopao to school or wearing a fur cap were not causes for disciplinary action. She’d tried to share the Gospel with Benny instead believing that he may have been possessed by Satan’s minions. When he killed himself, she was more than convinced and asked the Jesuit priest at the parish office to bless all the premises that Benny had frequented in his short troubled existence in order to make sure that he would not return to haunt them. Miss Caymo was also going to have all the locker doors painted over as Benny had covered these with poetry fraught with ill feelings and apocalyptic images of death, dismemberment and the coming chastisement. For diminishing the number of starcrossed artists, his death had a kind of purpose and nobility after all.

“I think we should go to the wake after classes,” Makati Girl now said, looking appealingly at Jojo. Of course, he would go with her.

“Yes, let’s,” echoed Aenid, looking at him, too. Inwardly, Jojo rolled his eyes, not feeling ready for Aenid just then. But still it was a chance to go somewhere with Makati Girl. Also he was curious to see what Benny looked like after a fall like that.

BENNY was laid out in his high school graduation barong, with his catskin cap on. They had left the coffin open even if he had lost most of his teeth in the fall. Jojo was amazed at how ordinary Benny’s family was: the dad, a civil engineer who’d gone to Saudi; the mom, a math and science teacher at an exclusive girls’ school, the other three siblings, forgettable and unremarkably plain. They smiled wanly at their condolences but seemed cheerful enough, if a bit baffled about his sudden death. They seemed to have no idea of what Benjamin had been really like. Only the first page of the guest book had any writing still. Miss Caymo had sent a mass card but no one else from the College had been there yet. The three of them stood in respectful silence looking at Benny in repose. Makati Girl then went to kneel at a pew with her head bowed. She must be praying for poor Benny. Aenid asked Jojo to stay with her outside while she smoked. She was the most pruriently suggestive smoker Jojo had ever seen, continually tossing her head, shifting her hips and arching her neck backward to call attention to how she had left the top three buttons of her shirt undone.

After the wake, they decided they’d go to a movie. Aenid gave Jojo some money to get her a kilo of lanzones from a fruit vendor at the pedestrian flyover. She was full of coy gratitude when he returned and acted as though it meant something special and intimate had transpired between them. She took his arm and placed it around her waist while they walked through the mall, as she giddily swung the bag of lanzones. Jojo gently disengaged as they stepped onto the escalator, Aenid on the higher step and himself just below her. Then Aenid turned, and with a melodramatic flip of her pre-Raphaelite curls, lunged at his throat and shoved her pointed little tongue in his mouth. He was nearly bowled over. They were quite a spectacle, Jojo striving to keep his balance as they rocked back and forth. Aenid had twisted her limbs around his, and entwined her fingers in his hair while the plastic bag oflanzones that she still held went wumpph-wumpph against his nape. He practically had to carry her off the escalator. Makati Girl looked puzzled and stooped to pick up some of the lanzones that had rolled out of the bag onto the tiles. The fruit were brown and bruised from all the excitement.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jojo asked Aenid, in exasperation and alarm. Just as abruptly, she composed herself. The people sitting on the benches to one side were smirking and whispering among themselves.

“What are you looking at?” she tartly asked them “Don’t you have anything better to do with your lives than to mind other people’s business?” Then grabbing Makati Girl’s arm, she walked on in quiet dignity to the theater with Jojo following behind them. They each paid for their own tickets. No one spoke throughout the movie. Jojo’s only consolation was that Makati Girl sat in between Aenid and him. After a while, he was able to discreetly press his leg against hers and she did not draw away. It was less than perfect. If Aenid ever came on to him again, he guessed he might give her a tumble. She was a good kisser, after all. Also, her father was an haciendero and she did have a beauty contest title and that was worth some points. It would be a shallow triumph getting to her first. Before that Chinese casino operator who was nearly twice her age got to her anyway. Her mother was trying to diversify and expand their financial interests through marriage now that the sugar trade was down.

To make up for the escalator scene, Jojo offered to take Aenid home. Her eyes brimmed with tears but she let him. They rode the taxi in silence to her condo. She kept her arms around him all throughout the ride, with her hands clasped as though she were praying and her face pressed against his chest. Occasionally she mumbled what did sound like praying. His hands rested limply on her hip.

In bed with Aenid, he pictured Makati Girl as he usually did even when he was with some other girl and felt a little weepy. Instead, he banged away even harder so that beneath him, Aenid arched her back, clawed and bit him. She wailed despairingly that she really loved him, no matter what happened. When it was over, he shut his eyes, trying to imagine what he would do if he had Makati Girl with him instead of her best friend: how he would hold her, how she would look up at him as she lay in the crook of his arm. They would laugh about nearly nothing in that irrationally happy and secret way that only those who are very much in love do.

EARTH-MAN SONG

by Evee V. Huervana

1. Decrescendo

The rhythms have been set

in the distant blast, light years past

We knew the cadence of a jerking crust

even tempos in the swell of lava underneath

harmonious undulations of liquefied iron and ore

mixed precisely in the core

the lyrics waters murmur condensing

in the atmosphere or trickling from a spring

voices of surging or ebbing seas

--pulses of the earth once converged in

     our infant soul.

But our pompous blast in not too-distant past

     silenced the melodies

Too many refrains about our divinity

     shattered the symphony

How then do we propose to trap

notes traipsing with the four winds?

Wholes in the north, halves in the south

quarters in the east or dotted quarters in the west?

There is neither clef nor rest

to guide our unmetered steps,

no flat nor sharp to fine-tune falsetto laughs

in the three-four beat. Shall we waltz

or tango with the two-four beat?

Our choreographer is a master

but his choreography muddles our gait

we lose our footing, fall flat on

     our scared faces.

2.Crescendo

We leap and run after a maestro

desperate to string in the baton of a virtuoso

notes dripping from a drying fountain

(this attempt paints a blush on our cheeks)

Arranged in non-dissonant meters

these fountain notes will rise to a crescendo

Or so we thought...

--before a gold-rimmed stick mangled the tune of

     our mortal song.

To reassemble scattered pulses of the earth,

we lay our faces, right-ears-down

prostrate upon the ground--

awaiting the hard crust's deathless groans

the storm of sand and rocks,

earth's jerks: rain upon our cheeks;

blind our eyes; stuff our ears to deafness

--we sense rhythm upon

     our singeing skin

The limbs learn to waltz and tango

Melody is resurrected in our torso

Though we've run out of choreographers

     and virtuoso masters.

WORDS

by Angela Manalang Gloria

I never meant the words I said,

     So trouble not your honest head

And never mean the words I write,

     But come and kiss me now goodnight.

The words I said break with the thunder

     Of billows surging into spray:

Unfathomed depths withhold the wonder

     Of all the words I never say.