I ate some bad chicken, and I was wondering if I was going to die of botulism. My clone went into my room to find the Neosporin because Sugar had scratched him while he hugged him and the cat tried to get away. While he was doing that, I told him that I had eaten our sister’s old canned chicken, and I discovered that the way she had canned it may have exposed me to botulism.
“That’s very rare.” He was looking through the little drawer where I kept my medicine. “But you can’t uneat it, so you’re just going to have to wait if you get any of the symptoms. Where the fuck is it?”
“It’s literally right there.” I wasn’t moving from the bed, but I was pointing aggressively.
“Is it this?” He showed me a tube.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“This isn’t Neosporin.”
“Well, it’s antibacterial. They’re all the same.”
“No. They’re not.”
“Yes. They are.”
“Whatever.” He opened the tube and put some of the salve on his wound. It was a thin line that ran down the inside of his left forearm. “Mama’s asking why you’re stuck here in this room, and she hasn’t seen David in like a week.”
“Y’all should butt out of my business.”
“You broke up, didn’t you?” He helped himself to my glass of water I left at my computer desk.
“No. He’s having some kind of mental issue and doesn’t want to deal with people for a while.”
“Including you, who he supposedly loves?”
“Can you get out of my room, please?”
He poured more water from the pitcher I had and then drank it and then left. I took my phone that was charging beside me and checked my messages. None.
Dr. Tal asked me to come to the cafeteria of Makati Med for our session. He was meeting me during his lunch break. I met there, and he was in line. I was also hungry, so I got a tray, and got in line with them. Dr. Tal was a tall, thin man with a face that made him look much younger than he was. He had a pencil mustache and a mischievous smile that he wore even when we were speaking of my most crippling mental illnesses.
“They’re serving binagoongan,” he said. “You should try it. It’s better than anything I’ve tried.”
He considered himself a foodie, and we spoke a lot about the places where we’ve eaten. We spent a lot of time talking about those kinds of things, including the places we’ve gone on vacation and other luxuries. He was obviously very rich, given his professional fee, and I could tell that he loved to spend.
“Okay, doctor.”
“So, tell me…” He looked back at me after craning his neck to see how many people were in front of him. “How have you been feeling?”
“Not to good, doctor. My boyfriend has been very distant lately. And I’ve been so lonely.”
“Don’t you have your friends? Your family? I thought you were spending more time with them.”
“I have been, but I don’t know… It’s different with David.”
The line moved forward.
“When we’re attached in that way to people, it can be unhealthy,” he said, leaning his head in my direction while still facing ahead of him. “It’s dependency. We need to work on your independence, August.”
“Yes, doctor,” I said.
We reached the food. The lunch lady nearest us smiled at Dr. Tal and said good afternoon.
Dr. Tal told her, “What’s good today? I’m getting the binagoongan.”
“Try the munggo, doctor,” she said.
“Oh, I hate munggo.”
“Oh…” And she turned towards the food as if she was considering the question but then she just said nothing.
Dr. Tal placed the tray on top of the cafeteria thing and pointed at the binagoongan. He also pointed at the torta and the fried rice. I also got the torta and the fried rice, and I decided to try the pork chops.
We found a table beside the window. The cafeteria was crowded as it was about lunch time.
“I should really be eating healthier.” He removed the napkin wrapped around his spoon and fork. “We should all be eating healthier. Promise me you’ll eat a vegetable or something tomorrow, okay?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Now. That David person. What are your expectations regarding this relationship?”
“I don’t know, doctor.”
“Just going with the flow?”
“Yes.”
He nodded while chewing his food. When he swallowed, he continued: “Maybe it’s time we think about the future. Sometimes, knowing what we want allows us to make easier choices, because it tells us which direction we want to go, right? When we go with the flow all the time, the tides may bring us places we do not want to be. You know?”
“Yes, doctor.”
Dr. Tal wiped his lips with a napkin. “Then again, I know how everyone doesn’t want to think too far into the future nowadays. With the black hole. But they have it under control. I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about anymore.”
I thought about it and realized that I was never worried.
“So,” the doctor said. “If you had to plan some kind of future, what would that plan be?”
I was chewing, and I thought about it. The pork chop was dry. Which was what I expected. I thought that if I wanted anything out of my relationships, I would like someone steady. Someone who would be a constant in my life. Who loved me.
Dr. Tal was looking at me, waiting.
I said, “I wouldn’t mind a boyfriend.”
For a split second, I registered what might have been disapproval on my therapist’s face. But quickly his smile returned. “What else?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everything else is fine for me.”
“But you can do so much, August. I’ve known you for a while now, and from your mind and your accomplishments—I know you can do more. So much more. Don’t you want to maybe get a master’s degree? Move to another country maybe? You’ve spoken about moving to Europe.”
“Maybe.”
“Which country in Europe? Have you thought about it?”
“Somewhere in Scandinavia… Maybe Sweden.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I don’t know. Seems like a good country. I like their history, too.”
At Juno’s house we were helping with putting things in boxes, either to be sold or to be moved, because they were moving to Apayao in the Cordillera region. Despite their best attempts Juno’s mom snapped and said that if her family would not come to the Cordilleras with her, then she would go alone. For a while, Juno and her brother Apollo thought that if their mom went on with her plan, they would rent apartments in Manila and live there. But they could not bear the thought of allowing their aging parents to fend for themselves. None of them were well equipped to live in the remote countryside.
When Juno told us at hotpot last Saturday, she said: “What if they don’t know where to get food? What if mom has another one of her visions?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Your mother has visions now?”
“Yes. She has ecstatic visions. And she’s convinced that she levitates, but she does not levitate. She grabs onto furniture and pretends that she is keeping herself grounded by doing that, but actually she’s not. She’s really not.”
“I’d like to verify that.”
Juno listened and smiled and nodded. She finished chewing and swallowed. “August, I love you. But if you encourage my mother’s delusions even for one second, I will strangle you to death with my bare hands.”
I laughed. “Babe, your hands aren’t large enough for my neck.”
“I’ll use a rope. I don’t care. I can improvise.”
“Fair enough.”
Two Saturdays later we were at her house, helping with the move. I had never been to Juno’s house. It was small but spacious, and much of the place had religious knickknacks: crosses, small statues, plaques, icons, Bibles. And flush against the wall of the living room, which was open and visible after stepping in from the front door, was their altar, with massive idols—yes, idols—of the Holy Family, along with a golden, jewel encrusted cross, all fake of course. There was also another idol of the Virgin Mary, arms folded, blonde, blue eyed, and totally removed from her Levantine origins.
The place smelled heavily of incense mixed with spam or cooking grease in general. By the time we had gotten there, they had not yet started. We assumed this was because up until the last minute they were trying to convince the mom to change her mind. But, from what Juno had told us, she was going to go no matter what happened. Unless she was institutionalized or imprisoned she was not going to be stopped.
Emily, Danny, my clone, Niko, and I arrived a little after noon, having had lunch first. Juno ushered us to the kitchen that doubled as a dining room and asked if we had eaten. We said we did and were ready to help. She insisted we have coffee at least. The way that the house was deserted made me realize that her dad and her brother were still talking to the mom somewhere in the house. Juno made us coffee.
Niko said, “You have a lovely home, Juno.”
“Thanks,” Juno said. “Not our home for long.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Nice going…” I muttered at him.
We were both doing that thing where we were sucked in our lips and bit them to keep from laughing. And while we were doing that, Meg said, “Is Apollo here?”
“Yeah,” Juno said. “He’s in the back with my dad and my mom. They should be out in a bit.”
A few minutes of awkward silence later, Juno’s mom emerged from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Her face was bitter in the way that only old faces can be. But when she saw us, she managed a half smile, although not too enthusiastic. Juno’s mom had one of those faces that resembled a turtle or a frog, winkled with a flabby neck and thin, protruding lips. Her eyes, however, were sharp and her thin, penciled eyebrows projected with a force her religious contempt upon the mortal world. This filthy, fallen mortal world that she hated so much.
“You’ve eaten?” she said to the group.
We said opo. Juno introduced us one by one.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for coming to help. I hope all of you are aware of what’s happening. With the black hole, and Iran, and all these things—you know what I’m talking about, right?”
“What is it, tita?” Emily said.
Juno rolled her eyes. Emily spotted it but it was too late.
“Have you read the book of Revelation?” she said. “It’s happening now. You only need to pay attention, ha? You only need to use your eyes and ears. And your heart. Don’t you feel it? Things are happening that have never happened before. The world is ending. It’s obvious. You’re all Christians, aren’t you?”
Mostly we smiled, leaving it ambiguous. My friends were mostly atheists and agnostics, motivated primarily by apathy. And of course Niko believed in other things altogether.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it.” Juno’s mom went to the fridge and took out a jug of water. “I’ll be in my room, Juno.”
We were separated into rooms. Niko and I were left in the kitchen to pack those things up. We had to be careful with the food in the glass jars. Since they could not be sold or given away, they had decided to bring it with them. We wrapped them in several sheets of newspaper before putting them in one of the brown corrugated boxes they had.
Niko was at the fridge, while I worked on the pantries.
“What’s this?” he said.
I turned, and he was holding a bottle of ketchup.
“What’s banana ketchup?” he said. “Is this supposed to be sweet?”
“During the war we didn’t have tomatoes. So we had to use bananas.”
“Oh. Does it taste just like ketchup?”
“Yes. And it is ketchup. Go ahead and taste it.”
“You don’t think they’d mind?”
“No. They won’t mind.”
Niko opened the bottle and put a little on his finger and tasted it. “It’s sweeter than regular ketchup. I don’t like it.”
“It doesn’t like you, either.”
The time I’ve spent with Niko has taught me that he is obsessed with being liked. I supposed that his German upbringing, perhaps more broadly his European upbringing, had made him reliant on the approval of others, overly concerned with how his community views him. In Filipino culture, being overly concerned with how people view oneself is considered a lethal weakness. “Sino ba sila?” The moment one thinks too much about what others think is the moment one loses one’s verve to do the right thing. Though, paradoxically, Filipinos, like many other Asians, are very community-oriented. The key is to pretend we aren’t. We are up to the point that it does not suit us, or it degrades us, at which point, and exactly at that point, and only at that point, we aren’t.
But Niko is always so eager to please. If someone doesn’t like him, or he feels that way, he feels uneasy and wonders out loud what he could do to change. That attitude disgusted me. It reminded me of a dog.
Juno’s brother Apollo came by and stood beside the fridge, opposite the door. Niko straightened up, carrying two jars, and the two boys looked at each other. Although Apollo had always seemed tall to me, he was a few inches shorter than Niko. And Apollo was so handsome that we always joked about his prowess with women, and how people seemed to naturally assume he was a model or an actor. But face to face with Niko he seemed ordinary, plain.
“Sorry…” Niko immediately said, ducking and moving towards the box on the counter.
“Sorry, sorry…” Apollo said, ducking as well as if he were going through a narrow opening on the way around the fridge door, and taking out a jug of water. He poured it into a giant orange tumbler.
“Hi Apollo,” I said.
We had never spoken before. Juno had always found one reason or another not to invite him to our gatherings. And the few times where he was there, because he gave Juno a ride or because he was her ride home, he sat at a different table or wandered the mall until they had to leave, even if he had to do so for hours. I’ve always suspected that Juno wanted to spare him from my gaze, which was lustful and covetous and intense. Which was fair, so I said nothing about it. Although whenever I could catch a glimpse of him I did. And once in a while I asked her whether she could introduce me. She laughed it off, mostly.
“Hey,” he said, smiling. He placed the jug on the counter. “Thanks for helping out.”
“New life, huh?” I said.
“Yeah…” He sighed. He looked tired and sad. He had the appearance of a man totally bereft of hope.
I wanted to keep talking to him, but I knew nothing about him. So, eventually he said see you and walked off to the hallway and into his room.
We did our work for a while, and then Niko said, without looking at me: “That man was very handsome. Juno’s brother, right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like him?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“Why don’t you do something about it?”
“I don’t know.” He was wrapping their glasses in a thick layer of newspaper. “We’ve never been close. But I wish we were. We’d be a nice couple, don’t you think?”
“Do you feel anything apart from lust for men?”
I thought about it. “No.”
“Don’t you think that’s something to be worried about?”
“Why would I be worried about it?”
“Seems shallow.”
The box I was filling up was full, so I closed it and taped up the flaps. “I feel the same way about you, you know. So, what’s wrong with that? It’s not like I treat you like an animal or something.”
“Still…” he said, crouching, his face obscured by the fridge. It was beginning to make the beeping noise that fridges make when the door is open too long. “It’s not right. Das gehört sich nicht.”
Niko whipped out the German whenever he wanted something emphasized as the Truth—which, in any case, was to him the German way of life.
A while later, Juno’s mom called for everyone in the living room. The house was small enough for everyone hear her. We gathered there. Juno and Apollo were muttering something to her, probably asking her to stop. Juno’s dad was on the couch already, looking at the corner of the room.
“It’s 3 o’clock,” she told everyone. “Let’s pray.”
We all looked at each other.
“Go on,” Juno’s mom said. “Take a seat.”
She lit the candles and then pulled out a kneeler that was tucked underneath the altar. She knelt down. She held a rosary with one hand and a worn pamphlet in the other. She started with the angelus prayer. Naturally, she knew it by heart. But she didn’t breeze through it; she seemed to be thinking about every word, pausing at every sentence, as if to ruminate on the meaning. That impressed me.
Then, she began to pray in a way that made it seem as though she were merely talking to God directly. “Please, God, pass the cup of suffering that you present before me. But your will be done. Please guide our journey into Apayao. Make that place our refuge from the coming tribulations.”
She bent her face against her hands clasped tightly in prayer. She muttered softly, as if only to herself and to God: “Please, please, please.” And at that point I realized that she was deeply mentally ill, obviously. But during times like these, was it possible to stay sane? She remained in that position until her husband came over and rubbed her back.
Then, she said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, a Glory Be, and made the sign of the cross and walked away.
Before we could stand up, she told us to stay seated and produced ice cream and bowls from the fridge. She turned on the television and ate with us.
Apollo was flipping channels, and we passed a news station talking about the black hole. He pressed the button so quickly that he pressed it like three or four times before the channel flipped, but the mom noticed and told him to go back. She leaned forward, the bowl of ice cream resting on her lap.
The news anchor Julius Babao was conversing with an expert from the University of the Philippines regarding the black hole. Recently, they had contained it, using experimental technology that an international group of scientists and engineers had developed specifically for that purpose within the span of only eight weeks. They called it the Atomic Miracle because everything needed to have some kind of name. It was more or less guesswork at that point because there was almost no practical scholarship on how to contain a black hole, and the little that was there was speculative to the highest degree that speculative theoretical physics could be.
It took weeks and an incredible amount of resources. Many businesses and public services were vacated so that the manpower could be diverted to what was called the Wall of Light. I’ve tried to understand how it worked; there were discussions about it everywhere. New York Times, the Guardian, Vox. It had something to do with photons and radiations and quantum mechanics and everything. But basically there was a massive, more or less spherical barrier around where the black hole was, and this significantly slowed it down. Many people died installing it, and they and the leaders of the effort were more or less considered heroes who have saved humanity, if only for a while longer until we could find a permanent solution.
The devastation spanned around sixty percent of central Europe, encompassing much of France, Germany, and some parts of Italy. Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Netherlands have ceased to exist. The Black Hole was significantly smaller than the area of devastation; it was mostly the gravitational effects that were destroying the area. Time had also moved differently in the areas near the anomaly. It was too early to notice any significant effects. But at some point people who had to remain in those areas would be younger than those outside, given enough time.
I was on my phone. I came across a reel of someone with a filter that made them look like a plate of spaghetti. The caption said: “Spaghettified (al dente) by the black hole.” I liked it. Then there was a reel of someone using audio from some TV show and acting out quitting their job violently, loudly. “I don’t need this! Don’t need this shit!” They were acting it out, tossing things around and stuff. The caption was: “Me quitting my job knowing the world ends soon.” I liked that, too.
Finally, there was a reel of a guy donning a Guy Fawkes mask while reading a pink bathrobe and holding a candle. Gregorian chant music was playing in the background. The caption was: “Me after reading that the cultist nutjobs who worship the black hole pay their hospital bills as a group.” I liked that, too.
I looked up and everyone was still there, except for the parents. We had made progress with the boxes but half the things still needed to be packed. The sun was going down, so I didn’t think that it was going to be finished that day. I realized I didn’t actually know when they were going. But I knew they weren’t leaving tomorrow. At least, I thought so.
I yawned. Juno noticed and said, “You want some coffee? There’s still some brewed in the kitchen.” I said yes, and she told me to help myself, so I did. When I stepped in there, I saw that my clone and Apollo were already at the table, talking. Whatever they were talking about, they were taking it very seriously, and they were both leaning into one another, as if whispering secrets.
My clone, as if through some supernatural connection we shared, instantly noticed me, even if he was facing the wall. It’s like he felt my presence. He turned his head and looked at me in a way that was totally bereft of expression; it was pure gaze.
A few seconds passed before Apollo looked at me, too. He was a little startled, a little uncomfortable. He managed an uneasy smile, and after I’d taken a few steps, he asked: “You need anything?” He stood up. “Let me help you.”
“Juno said you had coffee,” I said.
“Oh. Yeah. It’s in here.” He moved to the cupboards, but we had already cleared them out, so there was nothing in there.
“We put it here…”
I took a cup from where he had kept them. While doing so, Apollo took water out of the fridge and poured it into the electric kettle and put it on for me. I thanked him. He sat back down at the table. I leaned against the counter looking at them, and they sat there awkwardly, unable to continue because I was there. I stood there until the kettle boiled, and I prepared the coffee and feeling unwelcome I walked off back into the living room.
Now, no one was there except Juno’s mom, who was staring off into the corner. I don’t know where they had gone off to. She noticed my presence and looked at me for barely a second before staring off into space again. I nodded a bit in respect and sat down and placed my cup on the coffee table.
“How are you and your family?” she said, quietly. She wasn’t looking at me.
“We’re good po,” I said.
“They’re not aware? That the end is coming? Surely they watch the news.”
“We’re taking it slower, I guess,” I said.
“Don’t you think we’re doing the right thing, by going away?”
“Yes. I do. It is probably for the best.”
“Christ is coming,” she said. “You know this?”
“I know this.”
“Christ is coming, and all our sins will be judged. And no one is blameless. So, we will suffer. We will suffer first—the most terrible suffering that we have ever endured, or will ever endure. And those who are not strong enough will perish. Not only by their bodies, but eternally. Their souls will be extinguished. Gone. An eternal death. But those who survive will live forever. They will have eternal life as promised.”
I nodded and intermittently sipped my coffee. She didn’t appear nervous or afraid or even proud. She was telling me this for my benefit, it seemed. Her eyes looked weary; it looked as though they were coated in tears, though she did not look as if she wanted to cry. If anything, she seemed determined. Ready to do whatever she needed to survive. As if everyone else were fools, and she was the only one who knew the truth, instead of the opposite, which was what I had assumed all that time.
“Do you want eternal life?” she said. “Do you want to live forever?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m not sure anything is so interesting that I should have it forever.”
She stared at me like I spoke a different language but was trying to make sense of it anyway.
“You are one of Juno’s best friends,” she said. “She talks about you sometimes. Remember that. Lead her towards the light, if you can. Do you believe in God?”
I thought about this. But eventually I said: “It’s complicated.”
“Is it complicated?”
“Yes, ma’am. It is.”
“Repent,” she said. “And I will see you in heaven.”
“See you there.”
She stood up and left. She went into the hallway that led to the bedrooms, calling loudly for Juno.
Later, after we’d all went home, and I was in bed about to sleep, I found that I couldn’t drift off, so I scrolled for hours on my phone. Going through every app, realizing that there were dozens now. That there was no end to the things to see, all of them served according to my desires that they had scried from my previous activities. And it worked. Save for my desire for novel things, which was unpredictable even to myself, the algorithm showed me things that interested me.
At the time, it was news and information on the black hole, as well as the various cults and religions and secret societies that were beginning to form around it. People were talking about the end of the world but there was no fear, no urgency. People were selling clothes to die in, containers for things that you do not want to get destroyed when the black hole consumes the earth (to be found by whichever civilization arises next), books for surviving the black hole as a Next Level Organism (NLO). Many people believed all sorts of things about the black hole, too. That it wasn’t real, that it was a very sophisticated ruse that used holograms.
The varied responses fascinated me. When I really thought about it, I realized that there was a good chance we were going to die, although I had hope in the Wall of Light. Humans have survived all sorts of calamities, and this might be towards the very far end in terms of difficulty and peril, but survival seemed by no means impossible. Yet the human experience towards this grim reality was extremely rich; fear was the least of it. I supposed that, in any case, humans have always had knowledge of their death. We all know that, at some point, we will die someday, somehow. Thus, humans learned a long, long time ago to forgo despair when confronted with their eventual death, their mortality.
Most people who were going to die because of the black hole would not die because of it directly. People were being removed from the areas where it had any influence. Instead, the migration crisis and other economic and political effects would cause a collapse of civilization that would then cause the end of the world. Only the few that remain after this would then die as the black hole consumed the Earth. The possibility was remote now, and way more remote than when the black hole first appeared, but it was still there, and many people thought about it. TikTok had hundreds if not thousands of live selling streams hocking “defense material” short of weapons and armor for when the time came.
I thought then seriously about death. About my death. I’ve wondered many times about it, as I know many people. But now it was here. Not where I was, but close by. And everyone knew. It was death itself; destruction itself. The very opposite of life, of existence. The Black Hole. I was not scared. Sometimes, I even wanted to die. Sometimes, I welcomed it. I thought then about my blog. I used to think that, if I were to die, at least I would leave something behind. But if all of this were destroyed, compressed into a single point in space…
I locked my phone and covered myself with a blanket. And I was finally able to sleep.
Nowadays, I spent my time playing games, doing nothing at all. My life is a total waste. I do nothing but consume. I consume food. I consume video games media. I consume social media. And then nothing else. I add nothing back, save for the work my mother requires of me for our business, which is a petty business that adds nothing to society. Should I vanish right this moment, I think the world should be better for it. Or maybe not even. Save for the compulsory tears of my friends and family, nothing would change at all.
Mostly David and I spend time together. Increasingly he is unable because he has to go to class, which I despise, but the classes mean much to him, and I think that deep in his heart he remains a man in the most vulgar, trite, and boring sense. And so he wants to become something and make something of himself, and to go along with that narrative of manhood that, despite his attempts at reforming and rehabilitating it, still came from the dark, depraved depths of history, where manhood meant greed, lust, domination, and bravado. But David despite his intelligence, which exceeds most people (keeping in mind that most people in any case are stupid), cannot separate, as it were, the wheat of masculinity from the chaff, and many times has it confused, but never in terms of its brutality or selfishness but in the more intricate things: the falsities attached to its promises of glory and prosperity, the easy and comforting lies about inner strength.
We were at Jupiter last Friday. We ate dinner at a French restaurant al fresco. The food was quite good. I supposed it was authentic, in that it was delicious without being pretentious. It was the singular time I enjoyed onion soup; usually I felt it tasted too sweet. David had the lobster tail, and we shared a plate of snails. We jokingly asked the waiter to guarantee that we would not unknowingly infect ourselves with some parasite, and he told us that the chef was educated in France, having served at a five-star hotel there for more than a decade. The escargot was delicious, too, and very rich and decadent. We could only have one or two each. For dessert, we had Crème Brulé, which was good and nothing less than good. Which for dessert is good enough and desirable.
Then, we walked around, even if it was dark. Many other people were walking anyway, and we were beside a mall that was heavily guarded. I carry also a knife for my self-defense. Even David does not know this, but I would never allow any harm to come to him or me. Jupiter Street is well known for its carnivalesque grotesqueries. We walked hand in hand, and many employees of bars beckoned for us to come in, and in some, trannies made hysterical, comical advances towards David, pretending to know him, inviting him to come visit them at the bar, joking about how he could have betrayed them for me. This spiel is common in Manila. I enjoyed them just as much as I enjoyed David turning red and flush at the commotion.
We found a place where there was mud wrestling between midgets and naked women, and we decided that this was a good a place as any to have drinks. I had gone to such places only a few times, during my youth when I was interested in making my nights as raucous as possible, because that’s what I thought young people must do. But I didn’t enjoy them, ever, despite the novelty, which wore off very quickly. I had supposed there would be interesting characters and storylines and catchphrases and jokes. But in the places I had gone to they merely brawled, and because they were hurting each other this was supposed to be funny and interesting, which they weren’t.
I supposed that if the show was boring I could at least drink and gawk at my boyfriend. We had been together for a few months, and I still enjoyed looking at him. In general I enjoy physical beauty, maybe in a base and primal way. Surely, in an unsophisticated way, which is in contrast with how I take many other things.
He caught me looking at him, enjoying his face as he smiled at the chaos unfolding before us. A little man wearing a luchador mask had jumped from the top wire onto a large, muscular woman with her tits out, and now the woman was running around as if a rat had gotten into her hair, both of them screaming, and everyone else laughing.
The smile was still on David’s face. He said, “How are you?” And he reached for me, and I took his hand.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I love spending time with you,” I told him.
He smiled wider and said, “I love spending time with you, too.”
David had a strong, manly face, with a square jaw and a serious brow. He always looked like he was brooding. And when he smiles, which is not very often, he seems a completely different person, and that his happiness is not like any other happiness, which otherwise he would have expressed merely with his ordinary sullen face. When he smiles, it meant that he was truly and maybe exceedingly happy. Love meant, of course, that all his appearances, more or less, appealed to me—but still one is allowed to have favorites, and I favored his brooding face and his half smiles and coy expressions.
I feel myself immensely blessed to have David in my life. Although I cannot help but feel, at the same time, that he keeps me at a distance. He has never been with anyone but a cis female, and up until he fell for me, or fell attraction towards me, he never felt that would ever change. We never think things will change until they do; and even change itself, whenever we anticipate it to continue or happen, seem constant until it stops. I’ve known David while he still had a lover. I had always had a crush on him but never thought I would be in a relationship with him. And then this happened.
His affection that night brought me some reassurance, despite the fact that David seems to treat me like an occasional lover or a lover of convenience. He has nothing to tell me whenever I ask him about this, or his thoughts about our relationship, or love in general. He calls himself a “Mystery of the Universe.” Which is supposed to mean that, within the depths of him, there is an undecipherable, untranslatable enigma, and this enigma emerges as his impulses, thoughts, whims, desires, but when we try to trace their origins the human mind loses its efficacy. Even to himself. In a sense, it is Freudian. But in another, it allows him carte blanche to do whatever he wills, and when he makes moral or ethical mistakes, he could say: I don’t know what is within me that made me do that. A facile excuse that, perhaps, even he believes and holds on, as a kind of panacea for weakness of the will. Something that, in any case, many people do. The ineffable as an excuse; it gives them an out. I suppose I do this too, sometimes. Although nowadays I guard against it. I try to act according to principles, purpose. And in this way I can tell whenever I make a mistake.
The following week David focused on his classes, and we mostly texted each other. On Tuesday, he told me that something happened that pissed him off, and he wasn’t in a headspace to talk. He would appreciate space, he said. So, I gave it to him.
I’ve always been an anxious person in terms of human attachments. As a child, I was continually betrayed and lied to—nothing too dramatic apart from juvenile drama that a few times got out of hand. But these experiences changed me forever, and I find it very hard to change, though I am aware of them. So, I feel myself continually resenting him, even if I know that he must be suffering. That there must be something to it. I suppose I am afraid most of all that his actions are the result of his affection for me waning.
Just a few hours ago, finally, he sent me something. “Thanks for being supportive,” he wrote.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I said. “Will we spend time together when you’re alright?”
“I don’t know,” he wrote back. “I’m not in a headspace to think.”
I suppose, as always, he considered this as emerging from the mystery within. And I began to think that maybe it was a mystery to him because he couldn’t understand it, but if only he’d let me see, if only he’d show me through the nooks, crannies, and corridors of the deepest parts of him, I would understand. And we would be able to consider it together. But then he wouldn’t anymore be able to say that it was a totally enigmatic source that gave him an excuse for his most inexcusable and inexplicable behavior. It would be an object that was capable of being put under scrutiny and examination and impeachment. He would be accountable, and that would bind his freedom, and he did not want that.
MY MOTHER—THE BEST I NEVER HAD—INTRAMUROS—BALUT—MANILA CATHEDRAL
My mother, despite her faults, which I occasionally find myself despising, truly despising as one would the faults of one’s worst enemies, is a good, loving person. In her childhood, she was abused, marginalized, and neglected. We know now that the children treated this way are forever transformed. Their brains are physically changed, so that they become almost irrevocably damaged. Without intervention at the soonest possible time, such people may become defensive, insecure, frightened, and anxious. My mother is now in her 70s. She has totally foregone the idea that anyone should help her, especially since her parents—my grandparents—had given her and her siblings a massive inheritance that made it unnecessary for her to ever succumb to the will of any other.
Thus, she is willfully ignorant. She despises being taught anything, or learning anything, because she views this as a sign of weakness. In allowing somebody to teach her, it means that she concedes her own stupidity, which she never would, though it is very apparent that she is stupid. She gives only one person the privilege of teaching her anything—me. Mostly regarding computers and business processes as relating to the government. These are things that she cannot afford to fuck up, and so it is a necessary compromise. In any other thing however even I like anybody could never dare correct or inform her.
Despite this she is a loving woman obsessed with duty, like the best mothers of the previous generations. She hates only one thing more than being learned, and that’s sensing (not even necessarily correctly) that one of her children or grandchildren are hungry, sick, or in pain. Whenever she comes across anything she thinks we’d like, she buys it as a surprise. I love her.
When my mother was 18, she was forced to leave her home because she was with my father, and my grandparents hated my father because he was a country boy from Batangas: A gaunt, dark-skinned farmer’s son with a mustache and unrepentant ambition to make it big in Manila. My grandparents on my mother’s side were already extraordinarily wealthy as a result of a work ethic shaped by the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. They did not want the likes of my father in the family. I have 10 aunts and uncles on my mother’s side. They lived in a building that was so large it was converted into a hotel when the children moved out. It was sold recently.
Still, my mother found in my father the love that he never truly found in her family. So, despite having to move out and live in a slum, she did. Around this time, she had my three sisters, each a few years apart. During this time, they were so poor that they seasoned rice with soy sauce and sugar and called it barbeque, and this would be their meal. As a snack, my sisters had sugar sandwiches. Still, they were happy.
Later, my grandparents accepted her back. The entire family was part of a corporation, and this meant that she was now eligible to receive a portion of the profits. She was lifted from poverty, along with my family, and it was around this time when they had me.
I was adopted. The story is hazy because I do not want to know the story, though my mom and my sisters have asked me before if I wanted to know. But I don’t. I don’t because I’m not interested and because I think it would make my already complicated life that much more complicated for no reason. Although many times I do feel like an outsider in my own family, but I feel that way everywhere. I wonder sometimes if this had anything to do with being told that I was adopted, but I doubt it. I’ve always felt this way.
My father did not want to tell me the truth, and even when they already had, he was adamantly against giving me more information or even acknowledging that I now know the truth.
Over the next couple of months, Nikolaus and I got to learn about each other. We spoke online, and he visited the house. We watched movies, drank coffee, played games. Mostly, we played narrative games. We played Life is Strange, and I was happy to know that he found it a disgusting piece of emotional slop like I did. He also adored The Walking Dead series by Telltale, as did I.
I called him Niko. He was extremely polite. I thought that maybe this was because of his upper-class European background. He was not only kind and considerate. He was seemingly enthusiastic about whatever someone around him offered him or showed him. When my father came in from the garden carrying chilis, the way he acted so amazed and asked questions and listened carefully to the answers made it seem as though he had never seen chili before. When my mother fed him some pinakbet, he acted like it was the best thing he had ever tasted. It was good, but nowhere near the best thing my mother or anyone else has ever cooked.
But this endeared him to us. Filipino culture can be quite brutal. We value brutality; weakness is undesirable, pitiful, pathetic. Even among friends we express our deepest affections in terms of fake, play aggression. Sincerity is “drama.” It is uncomfortable. A sense of doom accompanies it: The feeling that now we have let our guard down, we could be assaulted and destroyed at any moment. Our colonial past had made us so ridden with anxiety that we comforted ourselves with reminders of our brutality and strength and ruthlessness. And that never left our national conscience, even if independence was more than a century ago.
I have been lonely for most of my life. More than 90 percent of my life. But with Nik as my neighbor, I was not so alone. Mostly because he was literally always around. There were times when he joined us for breakfast, stay until we had to sleep, and then cross the street to return home. My clone would also be there with us, but he treated us exactly the same. He sometimes did what my parents did and continue things he started with my clone with me. By this point I had already gotten over how annoying this was and did not mind. It was also easy to overlook things that otherwise irritated me when I was with him.
One time he told me he wanted to visit Manila Cathedral. As an architecture student this was supposed to be interesting to him. Emily, Danny, and Juno came with me, my clone, and Niko. In the car we asked him if he listens to CUT. Juno was scandalized to learn that although he has heard of them, like most of the world, he has not actually listened to any of their songs. So, she played her entire playlist, picking songs from their EGO and SUPEREGO eras.
I liked CUT. There was a time when I was a diehard, and I was the one who introduced Juno to cut, once upon a time. It was X who captured me. He totally entranced me with his beauty, in a way that made me relate to cult members and the insanely religious. He was an avatar of the concept of perfection, which included—rather than excluded—the faults and follies of an ordinary human. It was like how people love Jesus, who was God reduced to human form, shedding his omnipotence and power. That was what X was like to me. His imperfection was part of his perfection.
But it was hard to love somebody the way I did in the fake way that I did. I was in for the art, but there was no escaping that they were a business. Much of their natural, human impulses were suppressed in the name of brand image. I was irked by their commercialization, even though that was supposed to be a natural and expected part of who they are. Eventually, the contradictions could not sit so comfortably within me, and I had to move on, even if I still liked X, and I still liked CUT.
I reminded Juno to play The Best I Never Had. That’s my favorite song from them. CUT was at their musical best, their most musically innovative. Before then, they merely repeated hip-hop tropes, though they did it exceptionally well. After that, they had sadly descended into a kind of power pop slush with enough variation to diversity their offerings but still maintain a constant, identifiable sound. All their new songs sounded alike to me.
The Best I Never Had was a response or companion piece to their earlier, hip-hop driven The Best I Ever Had. This was an earlier song during their second (or was it third?) album. It was a hip-hop song with long rap sections, synthesizer music, and a surprisingly complex arrangement. Still, it was standard fare. The Best I Never Had was from their MANIFEST album, which was released around a year after they achieved the pinnacle of their international success. Here, they broke free from all preconceived notions and—crucially—they were doing it for the first time. Thus, there were no rehashed ideas, there were no retreads. There was no redoing something that succeeded before.
The song was ostensibly a power ballad, something that might be akin boy band version of a Jim Steinman song, who wrote It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), obviously with rap sections built in. However, the total effect was nothing short of extraordinary, in that classic power ballad ideas were used in a fresh way, with the unexpectedness and syncopated beats of hip-hop.
The song changed keys as the song progressed, but it was always in a minor key, and ostensibly so. It bled a palpable melancholy like a Beethoven song. And the synthesizer sounds were so alien. In the background, spaced very much apart, was the sound of something like a drop of water, a single note echoing in such a bizarre, almost otherworldly way. And this was paired with conventional instruments that carried the melody and the beat.
The lyrics of the song were in Korean, but I’ve read several translations of it. The individual rap parts shared the general theme with the chorus, which was longing for someone you’ve known for a long time, and are friendly with, but would never be with you: “After everything, this is it? / This is all that we have, and I’m thankful. / Thank you for being here, though you don’t love me. / What does it mean if you don’t love me?”
Like all the best sad songs, it resonated with my specific, personal sadness. They vibrated at the same frequency. Even then, when I hadn’t heard the song in a few months, I was still somewhat overwhelmed with how much I loved the song in all its ways, all its subtle twists and turns. Niko said that he loved it, but I could never really tell with him. He said that about everything. I could see that Juno thought he was a CUT fan in the making because he asked if he could have a list of all their best songs and albums. But I knew that he did that with everything.
We stopped at Plaza de Roma, which was across from the Manila Cathedral. The afternoon heat was unbearable. In the car, before we got off, Niko took out a little spray bottle from his body bag and covered himself in sun screen.
“You don’t use sun screen?” he said, when he saw that we were all looking at him. “The UV is really high this time of day.”
Juno asked some, and then Emily. I thought I might as well have some, too, and when I did, Danny followed suit so that he wouldn’t be left out.
We went on a Thursday, so that it wouldn’t be so crowded. Emily had the week off, and Danny decided to use a sick day when I guilted him into the trip. He owed me. Juno worked from home and did not have much to do that day, which was so unusual that she decided it deserved to be celebrated, even though all she really wanted to do was rest. She was also a true believer and thought it would do her good to visit the Cathedral.
The plaza was a quaint place with benches and a statue to King Charles IV, who sent the first smallpox vaccine to the country. For a time, statues of the three friars who aided the Philippine Revolution against Spain stood there, but they changed it back to King Charles IV for some reason. Consequently, this area and the place it was in, Intramuros—the walled city, was a kind of monument to our colonial past and the foreign powers that demarcated these more than seven thousand islands as one nation (though we were, are, and always had been a diverse peoples) and then exploited it to ruin.
“Disgusting,” I muttered, while looking at the statue. It was all green and dirty and malignant.
“You don’t like it?” Niko was holding up his phone to take a photo of it. “I think it’s quite beautiful.”
“I don’t mind the statue, I guess… But it’s just what it represents that bothers me.”
“What does it represent?”
“Imperialism.”
Niko looked at the pictures he took. Then, he spent a while posting it on his Instagram. He was trying to make the most of his move by turning it into some kind of inspirational narrative on social media.
“Maybe it did this country some good,” Niko said. “Brought prosperity and religion here.”
How could I miss something like that?
“Are you saying that imperialism was a good thing?”
“Don’t get me wrong.” He put his phone in his pocket. “I know that imperialism had some very evil aspects. I don’t deny that. But there was also much good that imperialism brought. Don’t you think? It civilized many people.”
“I don’t know about that…”
There were not many people around because it was a weekday, but the square was still full and all the seats were taken. Some stalls in front of the Cathedral were selling street food, and people were also crowded around them, eating fishball and kikiam and isaw.
It was a little past noon, and we hadn’t eaten yet. We decided to have some as well. Niko hadn’t tried the street food so we let him try a little bit of everything. Predictably the fishballs and the kikiam were delicious to him. The first challenge was the isaw. Grilled chicken intestines. He asked if it was so fresh that there was a chance there was still chicken shit inside it. We said no but I didn’t really know. I had just always supposed that they removed all the contents of the intestines before cooking it. And yet there were still gunk and stuff inside when you eat it. That’s where all the flavor came from.
And then there was a man with a straw hat and a basket of eggs seated on bench. We herded Niko there and told him that as a stranger in our land he must undergo the most brutal trial any of our visitors must face.
He must eat balut—fertilized duck egg.
Niko said that he’s never heard of balut before. That only made us more excited. We ordered one from the old man, who was smiling at us with his crooked and yellowed teeth. He knew what was going on. The other people seated around him were also watching, and we encouraged them.
Niko stood there holding the egg with his long, delicate fingers. His nails were so well-manicured. So curved and a little shiny. Did he do that himself or did his mother insist on that when she brought him to the parlo? Or maybe one of his sisters had a kit at home.
“What do I do?” he said, smiling awkwardly.
“You peel the top off,” I said. “But be careful that it doesn’t spill. There’s juice in there.”
“It’s the pee,” Emily said.
The strangers around us laughed.
“That’s not the pee…” I said. “It’s the amniotic fluid.”
“Well, it’s gotta pee at some point,” Emily said. “And where does it go?”
Niko peeled the top of the egg, revealing the hardened albumen, now a mass that almost looked like a pebble. His eyes widened upon spotting the chick, almost fully formed, with bits of black feather. “Don’t look at it!” I said. But he was already staring at it: its closed eyes, its beak. It was easy to imagine it as only sleeping. That if you coax it gently a bit, it would wake up and chirp and spread its wings and fly away. But it wasn’t alive of course, and could not be revived.
I could see from his gulping that he was trying hard not to gag. He could see the fluid. He placed the egg against his lips and tipped it into his mouth and sipped. He looked like he was in agonizing pain.
“What does it taste like?” Danny said.
“Soup,” he said. “Stale, salty soup.”
“Now I want one.” I motioned to the old man for another. He gave me one and I paid him and I sipped mine too after quickly cracking it open.
“What now?” Niko asked, but he knew what was coming, and he looked like he dreaded it very much.
“You eat it,” Emily said. “Obviously. It’s food.”
“Even the baby?”
Juno did not eat balut. She groaned and pouted at the characterization.
“Yes,” I said. “Eat it.” I began to chant: “Eat. It. Eat. It.”
My friends followed, and then the strangers. Even the old man was clapping his hands, but he wasn’t saying anything, and he was clapping like a seal, with his fingers all stiff.
Niko took the chick and closed his eyes and dropped it into his open mouth. He chewed with a wincing expression and then picked the beak and feet from his mouth.
There was applause.
The façade of the Manila Cathedral was not as ornate as one would expect from the name. In fact, it was the minor Basilica and Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The gray façade and the tower on its western side was certainly big. A basilica, whether minor or major, should indeed be large. However, one cannot help but feel it should be grander somehow. There were three archways for the entrance, as well as four statues of men at the front. I did not know who they were. I imagine school children are taught who they were in social studies. I cannot even recall being told, ever. I imagine they were important foreigners. Important to somebody, at least.
Niko and his family were Protestants. Such sights were quaint to them but important only in a cultural way. Strictly speaking, such buildings should inspire disgust within him, at the gross excesses of Papists. I doubted he took religion that seriously. I wasn’t sure.
We wandered around inside. Shau lit a candle. Danny and Emily were the common type of agnostic, for whom apathy were the main concern. In a kind of childish way, they felt that God must probably not exist because they certainly could not see him, and have not seen him at any point in their lives.
A mass started while we were in there. The Primate was celebrating. He arrived from the back, sacristans on either side of him. He was wearing violet as well, but with gold trimmings and a golden ferula topped with a crucifix. The people who were on the sides of his path fell on his knees as he passed. It was a dramatic sight—quite dramatic for an after-lunch mass on a weekday. The choir sang in dark, melancholy Latin.
Niko was entranced with it all. Or maybe he was just happy to get out of the afternoon heat. I was seated to the right of him, and when I looked at him, his nose blocked my view of the stained-glass windows. It was large, but in the way that I liked. I thought it was very attractive.
“I’ve seen a few Catholic masses,” he said. “But I’ve never participated in one.”
“A bit underwhelming, don’t you think?” I said, whispering. We weren’t allowed to talk in church.
“It has its charms. I understand it’s not as magnificent as the Cathedrals in Europe, but it has its own… colonial character.”
“Can you say that? Colonial?”
“Say what you will about imperialism—”
“You bet I will.”
“—but it was a tremendous productive force in history that really… Well, it made the world better for that time even if there were some trade-offs. But there are always trade-offs, aren’t they? Some things must be sacrificed, given up, so that we can have better things. And when we have those better things, then we do not need to make those sacrifices anymore.”
“Historical dialectics.”
“Yes. In a way. But not in a Marxist way.”
“In what way, then?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It is what it is, but there is no, like, historical force that will make violent, working-class revolution inevitable.”
“Empire seems pretty violent to me.”
“In general, but not in particular.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
We didn’t finish the mass. We walked out and went into the car and thought about the other places we should go. We visited all the interesting sights, for Niko’s sake, and in the end had dinner somewhere in Makati, because we had had enough of Intramuros.
One evening we were watching a Korean movie, and we were lying in my bed so close together. I had the urge to embrace him; it felt only natural because of how closer we were together. I found myself staring at him in the dark, lights flashing against his face. His handsome face. He turned to me, and he smiled. I think he smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. But I know that he knew. He must have known. I wanted more than anything for him to lean in and kiss me. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it unless he wanted to. And I could only know that if he leaned in and kissed me.
But then he turned his head. I sighed. He must have known I sighed. He must have heard it. But he didn’t do anything. He didn’t move. I wanted to blow into his ear, but that might have been too much. I didn’t want to do too much. I didn’t want to be too much. I was looking at him the entire time. I didn’t even watch the movie anymore. I was lying there with both my hands underneath my head, staring at him.
I woke up around an hour later. He was watching YouTube on the television now.
“Fuck…” I said.
“You fell asleep.” He didn’t turn to look at me. “Too bad you missed the movie. It was pretty good.”
He turned towards me. I tried not to breathe too in case I had bad breath. My spit tasted stale in my mouth.
“You good?” he said.
I spoke with a hand in front of my mouth. “Yeah.”
He laughed at what I was doing. “Listen. I appreciate you a lot. And not just because you’re the first friend I’ve ever made in this place. And not just because you’re been so good to me. I like you. But—”
“Right. Right. Sorry.”
“I’m not like that. I’m sorry.”
I’ve felt that kind of pain before. From this type of thing. But you can’t ever get used to it. It always stung like the first time. Like barbed wire tightening against my heart.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t be sorry.”
“Okay.”
“What should we watch next?”
“You’re not going home?”
“Unless you’re tired.”
“No. No. I just took a nap.”
He laughed. “Right. So, what do you want to watch next?”
THE PAULINE LETTERS—WINGS PLACE—THE SCIENCE MUSEUM—A BABY
“A righteous man eats to his heart’s content, but the stomach of the wicked is empty.” —Proverbs 13:25
I found this verse. The way it was written seemed to imply that a man who is righteous eats a lot. The wicked do not each much. I sat back on my chair and shared it the group chat. It was 4PM, so everyone was still busy. I had found myself bored enough to read the Bible. I supposed that as some kind of intellectual—or someone that purports to be one—I should be familiar with the Bible, so whenever I needed something to read but could not decide what to read, I read the Bible. Mostly the Pauline letters, which I admire for their philosophical rigorousness, for its dialectics that found a universal application for the teachings of Christ based on the concept of the paradox: Jesus the highest died in the lowest way, and in doing so created a contradiction at the very heart of Truth that totally vanquished it. And in so doing vanquished also the strictures of Justice that demanded mortal punishment. The crucifixion in Paul is a kind of cosmic event that completely upended the ontological order, in fact destroyed it, so that until Jesus’s return the entire universe was in a suspended state.
The most striking thing is how wrong he was regarding the Second Coming. And given that so much of his moral imperatives were predicated on it, then there is much in Paul that should be reconsidered in light of this particular error: For example, his assurances that poverty and suffering can easily be tolerated because the world was to end soon anyway.
In the spirit of this, Emily invited us to dinner, and we went to a wings place that was close to my house. Danny went with us, and so did my clone. I asked David to come with us, but it was too late, and he said that he wanted to rest early because he had classes in the morning. If it were up to me he wouldn’t need to take those classes. He would spend all his days tending to me, making me happy, and when that was done making himself happy. He did not need to exert himself any longer.
But David was a man’s man and thought that he was not complete until he had a career. A career and children.
We spoke about Iran at the wings place. At that point it was past midnight, but there were still a lot of people there. One of the reasons I liked that place, apart from the food, was how it was open all through the night.
We ate with our hands, wearing gloves.
“It’s too bad David couldn’t come,” Emily said. “I was excited to meet him.”
“He’s very busy.” I looked at the baskets for a nice leg. “He’s studying business.”
“Isn’t he our age?”
“Yeah. It’s some degree program. He wants to restart his career.”
“Restart? What was his career before?”
I thought about it. Then, I said, “He said he did odd jobs.”
“You know what that means.” He put a piece of chicken in her mouth. “Right?”
“I have a bad feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“He was a prostitute.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Danny was laughing, his head leaning against the wall.
Emily shrugged. “You don’t hide what you do unless it’s something nasty.”
“Well, there are nasty things beyond being a prostitute.”
“That’s true,” Danny said. “Maybe he was a drug dealer.”
“Alright…”
They were both dying laughing at their own jokes.
I made a face at them, but I knew they meant nothing by it. Still, by making the joke, I knew that there was some reality to what they were saying. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense. And it did.
“And what about you?” Danny was addressing my clone, who was seated beside me. “Are you also in a relationship with David? Or are you considered a totally different person?”
The clone looked up from his food and glared at him. “I am my own person. I’ve always been my own person.”
Emily said, “Before you became a person, what were you?”
“Oh my god, Emily,” I said. “You can’t just ask a clone that.”
“Why not?”
“That’s like asking someone why they’re white,” I said. “Or why they’re so fat or something.”
“I was an embryo,” the clone said. “Like anyone.”
Danny had his mouth open, a piece of chicken only barely touching his lips.
Emily was engrossed now, too. “Whose embryo? Did Elmer steal an embryo?”
“No.” The clone rolled his eyes. “He inseminated an egg, and he got the embryo from that.”
“Sounds unethical,” I said.
“Like a chicken egg?” Emily said.
“Oh god…”
“I mean,” Emily said. “What egg?”
“A human egg!” I said.
“I mean, I guessed so,” said Emily. “But where would he get something like that?”
“That is very fucked up,” I said. “The very conditions of your life is an abomination.”
Emily swallowed a mouthful. “Supposing Elmer did use a chicken egg, what would you be?”
“Excuse me?” the clone said.
Danny and I were laughing.
“Closer to the original probably.” The clone side-eyed me. And Emily almost spat out her drink.
“I deserve that…” I said.
I saw David that Thursday. His weekends were always out of the question. He always said he was a big family guy, and that meant that every weekend is spent with his family. Which was fair enough. He said that if I wanted to spend time with them then that wouldn’t just be alright, that would be wonderful. But I didn’t like spending time with people in that way, in an environment where I have to bother being proper and polite. Making sure I don’t have to say certain things or do certain things. Moral laziness, maybe. Or ineptitude.
Whenever we met, I dressed up in girls’ clothes. I consider myself gender queer, and sometimes I want to be a woman. I know this bothers many people, especially those closest to me, including my friends who were supposed to be okay with these sorts of things. The unconscious mind is a hell of a thing; it persists despite your intentions, and many times in opposition to it. This is what might be called the superego, which exists not as a kind of higher moral agency, a la Freud, but in fact is the outcome of the fact that all things are hounded by their opposite and their non-existence, and so on, and so forth, and what have you…
I didn’t consider myself a particularly beautiful woman. Although the definition of what is beautiful changes all the time. But in my mind I wasn’t beautiful. Still, David saw something in me. The usual consolation is: He likes you for your personality. Which I despise. Because I didn’t care about my personality, or my mind. I wanted to be beautiful, the way David was.
As a woman, I called myself Arya.
We went to a science museum because that seemed like a fun thing to do. It was mostly empty because we met at around 4PM. It was near Bonifacio High Street, and we were going to have something expensive. We didn’t know yet what.
David was extraordinarily handsome, with a masculine face, and a beard like a Western sheriff. He had a mustache and a soul patch. His hair was naturally wavy, and his eyes had a squint, as if he were doing Blue Steel from Zoolander. He could have been a model. But he was short, around my height. This never bothered him, or never seemingly did, but this limited his appeal to many people. Not to me, though.
There was an exhibit on dinosaurs. We were holding hands in front of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and blinked at it a few times.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I think these are its bones.”
We were still looking and holding hands and we stayed like that. The place was mostly empty, and it was so cold.
“And?” I said.
“This creature lived a very long time ago. And that’s impressive. I guess.”
“Ahuh.”
We passed by other bones. There were some that reminded me of lizards if they were magnified like ten times. Some were more interesting, with crests and hoods and all sorts of things.
“This is why I hate natural science museums,” I said. “It’s all just dirt and old stuff.”
“We’re learning about the past.”
I sighed.
We finally got out and then we were learning about the human body. That was a lot more interesting.
There was a slice of a man with all his nerves in the proper place. The brain looked like a mushroom that had grown roots. The slice included the eyes, and they were so round, like he was completely surprised to have been sliced into even pieces.
We came across a giant mouth that you could go into. We went inside, and we sat on the molars and looked around. The floor was supposed to be the tongue, and it was all bumpy.
I thought about David’s mouth. I had never really looked into his mouth, but I had felt around in there with my tongue. That was a strange thing to know. In that respect, his dentist was more intimate with him than me, and I hated that.
“Can I see your mouth?” I asked him.
“My mouth?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never seen the inside of your mouth.”
“Yes, you have.”
“When?”
He thought about it. I knew this because he paused, but his face was always so tense that had he not paused I would never know what he was actually doing.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe you never have. But does that matter?”
“To me it does.”
“I would love to know why?”
“You would love to know why it’s important to me to know every inch of my boyfriend’s body? We swore ourselves to each other. I would want to know every detail of what I swore myself to. Is that so ridiculous?”
“Yes. It is.”
We went through the mouth and it led to an esophagus that led to a stomach and the intestines and finally the bowels. There was a small exhibit there about stool. The history of it, and what is inside it, and fossilized Neanderthal poop.
“Do you think we can safely lick that, if we wanted?” I asked.
“No. And why would you want to?”
“To test the limits of my humanity.”
At the gift shop, David bought me a little enamel pin shaped like a flower that was actually a stylized human anus. He was thoroughly revolted by it, but he knew that I would like it, and I did. I wore the pin immediately.
After strolling around Bonifacio High Street, we ended up eating somewhere familiar. We found ourselves at Village Tavern. I loved the food there. I often tried something new, and it was always good.
One of my greatest pleasures was sitting across from a handsome man and admiring them. Mostly, now, I admired David. And he was a little bit jealous, which I liked. It meant that he liked me, and all the things that might entail, good and bad.
There was an annoying boy, around five or six years old, who was running around the restaurant, going from table to table, chased by his nanny while his family had dinner. The most the mom did was occasionally call out to the boy in an annoyed voice, although she never stood up or anything.
David saw me glaring at the kid. He said, “Hey, let him run around if he wants. He’s not bothering us.”
“My ears are bleeding.”
“They’re not.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can see them.” He was smiling at me. David grew up in Canada and tried to apply being nice to everything. “How’s your pig face?”
He was referring to the sisig I got. “It’s good. You’re referring to my food, right?”
He laughed. “You know, I’d like to have kids of my own someday.”
I gave a fake, exaggerated smile, like he was making a poor joke, tilting my head and rolling my eyes. “How do you intend to do that with me?”
“There are options,” he said. “We don’t need to think about that now.”
“Oh, okay. And when do we think about it?”
He had the roasted chicken. He was trying to avoid carbs so he had the steamed vegetables instead of the rice. He was slicing a bit of it, and he was watching it, like he had to be very careful.
“We could adopt,” he said. “Although personally I think getting a surrogate is better.”
“Okay. And who’s seed do we use?”
“Well…” He shrugged and laughed. “I mean…”
“What if I want to pass my genes on, David? Have you ever thought of that?”
“We can have two children.”
The child passed us again, screaming some hideous song. The nanny passed soon after, muttering, “Jax…! Jax…!”
We followed them with our gaze for a moment.
Then, I said, “Do you think our children will ever be that annoying?”
“That’s how kids are.”
“Annoying?”
“They want to have fun. That’s how they learn, you know. Exploring the world. Playing.”
“Pain is a wonderful teacher. Did you know that? Zenyatta from Overwatch says that.”
“Hm.” He nodded sarcastically and raised his eyebrows while he returned to his meal.
“What do you think will happen to us in the next few years?” I said. “Do we have a future together?”
He seemed taken aback by this question. “Of course. I mean, I love you, Arya.”
“Okay.”
We ate in silence for a while. Jax finally settled down because his spaghetti arrived. It was pleasant, everything considered.
And then, he said: “What do you think? About our future?”
I thought about it. “Jesus is coming. Did you know?”
My psychiatrist Dr. Taluntunan-Guyavera, who I called Dr. Tal, sat across from me in his office, and he smiled. Sometimes, we run out of things to talk about, and I think keeping quiet was his method of teasing out something, anything from his patients. But I was not the type of person to break the silence, and I too was able to wait what might be considered an awkward amount of time for the other person to shed their advantage and make the first move.
I was there, of course, to be helped. And the doctor was not somebody I had to overcome. That was not the point at all. Despite this, the longer I remained in therapy, the more the sessions strongly resembled my ordinary interactions. I wondered if this was by design.
Dr. Tal said, “How’s your love life?”
The doctor used this question when he was satisfied with the rest of the session, and he wanted to put it to a close. He knew how important love was to my life. And I suspected also that he thought I might have a pathological attachment to it, so he always wanted to check on me regarding the men I loved.
“Not good, doctor,” I said. “As always.”
“Tell me.”
He leaned back. He knew, somehow, that this was going to be quite a story. I suppose it always was. He began fiddling with his pen with two hands, and I had opened my mouth to say something, but then he started up again with a finger raised. “Excuse me.” He stood up quickly and moved to his adjacent office. He vanished there for a while and then reemerged with two bars of chocolate, one in each hand, holding it up so that I saw what it was.
He sat back down and placed one in front of me on his desk. “Mars bar?”
I took it and opened it and began…
I had been depressed for several months. I had nothing to do and did not feel compelled to try anything new. I spent most of my time in bed, either on my phone, or lying there with my eyes closed. I found that, when I could not sleep (which was often), I could practice meditation, pushing away all the thoughts of my mind, so that it was not even darkness or emptiness, but more like a primordial state of being, where time and space were all gone. To the degree by which such a thing could grant enlightenment I was unsure; it never had any such effect on me. But it allowed me to open my eyes at some point and time had passed and that was good enough for me.
My parents and my sisters occasionally showed up at my door to check up on me. They complained that they had not seen me for days. Even my clone, who tried his best to live independently, was spurred by curiosity to see whether I had perhaps taken my life. But he knew as much as I did, being the same person essentially, that I would do no such drastic thing. At this point he had become such a part of our lives that I paid him no mind. And like me he did not like to be minded. My parents had developed such familial feelings for the interloper that they had given him his own gaming PC, his own desk, and other things that allowed him to live his life like I did. He worked for my parents, too, for basically no pay, apart from lodging and food. In this way, compounded with my depression, he had practically vanished from view. Gradually, he took my place in the few occasions that my family did expect me to be around. And so I was totally left to my own dark devices.
In my room, some light still streamed from the outside even though, six years ago when our house was totally renovated, completely from the ground up, I was promised that the curtains would block the sun. I did not get that because my parents were basically incompetent. I don’t say this out of cruelty; they were something of savants, both of them. They were especially talented in business and worked very hard, perhaps even obsessively, but they hardly had the capacity to accomplish anything else. I suspected they had learning disabilities that, as they aged, only became more prominent, as they had become increasingly incapable of navigating their day to day lives.
I suspected that their success in business led them for many years to become masters of scores of people who had no choice but to obey them for the want of money. The natural capitalist order. Because of this they simply never developed as people. This was a constant source of disappointment in my life. Perhaps cruelly, which I recognize now, I despised how my parents were not more cultured or intelligent or cared much about those types of things. But now I realized that this was because they had my sisters while they were very young—only in their mid-20s—and so they were preoccupied mostly with trying to provide for them. Everything else—literally everything else—was superfluous.
Despite this, there were times when I wondered why other parents could be what my parents were now as well as competent enough to promise curtains that totally blocked out the sun and deliver on that promise. I’ve found that, even if my eyes were closed, the sun still bothered me. I wondered if that was some effect of the body, that it could somehow detect sunlight on the skin. I couldn’t sleep whenever I happened to sleep during the day. My sleep schedule was random, and many times I did sleep during the day.
I slept during the day because I despised the day. In sleeping through it, I could pretend comfortably that it did not exist. The day is so busy and loud and people go through their ridiculous lives doing ridiculous things during the day; I felt always like I was in the middle of a wilderness documentary whenever I was among society during the day. But more and more I felt this way no matter what time it was.
I was so fed up with the fact that I could not fall asleep because of the sunshine one morning that I had torn up black bags and intended to cover the sides of the window, where the light streamed through, so that I could get some sleep. In doing this, I was able to see a van pull up the house opposite ours that had been abandoned for some years now. The van was a BMW (I did not even know they made vans). I watched as a family emerged and was surprised to find that the people had blond hair. They were Europeans.
It was not so strange to find a foreigner where I lived, although they tended to live in the areas closer to the richer parts of the metropolis. I counted them: A mother, a father, two daughters, and a son. All of the children were past college age; they looked like young professionals. The son was in his late twenties or maybe even my age. He was blond, like the rest of his family, and wearing a tan colored shirt and white shorts. He looked like a neopreppy (preppy nouveau?). When they spoke to each other, I tried to listen, but I really could not hear anything. I had hoped that, in doing so, I would be able to tell where they were from.
They finished their conversation and opened the trunk of their van. They went back and forth through the front door, carrying their luggage, and then vanished inside their house. Now, there was only the street in the daylight, with their squarish, dark blue van parked against the sidewalk. A squirrel ran through the power lines, going so fast the eye could barely register it.
I continued blocking out the sunlight and then went to bed. I took my phone and checked the home association Facebook group. We lived in an enclave called Homeowners Association and Tenements of Concerned Homeowners (HATCH). It was very apparent that they thought of the acronym first and did their best and failed to come up with the name—a backronym. The group was called Hatchlings. The old people who lived here shared all sorts of things, not only things related to our living conditions or the enclave or town politics. Mostly it was a place where neighbors gossiped and chatted. An event as big as this would have definitely made an impression on the neighbors.
But there was no mention of the new neighbors anywhere. There were only stupid videos that the geriatric members were unable to tell were AI. Many of them were far right content that they spoke about being old world values that this generation had forgotten, thereby causing a kind of gradual collapse that will bring about the end times. They regarded the CERN disaster as a portent of the coming Final Judgment, and that it was a sign for us to repent. At least they were right about one thing: The black hole growing at the heart of Europe could end the world. And soon.
Mrs. Valderama in particular was an avid sharer in the group. She was an old lady whose husband had a lot of money and worked almost all day, so she had a lot of time on her hands, and spent it watching videos online and telling people about the fantastical things she discovered through doing so. Things that, if they only paid attention the way they do, would alarm them, and wake them from the decadent slumber that plagued humanity today. I saw her once in a while in the street or during events, and she was a good enough lady. Always ready with a good thing to say.
Right now, there was a post from Mrs. Valderama about people worshipping the black hole, believing it some kind of gateway through which a dark god would emerge. The video included photos that purportedly showed a face emerging from the random patterns of light and debris that circled it. The video included an interview with one of the worshippers. He said that they were the servants of Tsi’Gurrath, Dark Lord of the Void. He was a young guy with red hair, sallow skin, and a large nose. I couldn’t help but think that he was bored at home and so decided to get out and do something and settled for this.
“The wide gates have been opened,” he said to the interviewer, a woman in a pantsuit who was barely able to disguise how horrified she was. “The Dark Lord advances. The Black Reign is at hand!”
I liked the video.
I noticed that there was an upcoming event, and almost everyone seemed to be going. I hadn’t realized that it was Chinese New Year. There was going to be a mass and then a block party that Friday to celebrate both the Chinese New Year and Lent, as some weird syncretic excuse to feast. It was a pot luck. My parents had already RSVPed. I wondered if the new neighbors would be coming.
The intervening days between then and Friday passed. I was able to sleep fairly well because of the darkness, although I found that the deeper I slept the more disturbing and vivid my dreams became. Still, I remained in bed all day and tried to sleep immediately after waking up. It was easy in the darkness, and when I could not do it I took the medicine Dr. Tal gave me, which always made me sleepy. Whenever I needed to eat, I went down and ate and went back up. More than a few times I felt the acid in my stomach rise to my throat, and it burned so hot it was agonizing. But still I was able to sleep through it, and like any and all my troubles it vanished in that little death.
My friends were surprised to receive a message from me that Friday. I wanted them to come so that we can join the block party. In the group chat they accosted me about my true intentions. They knew that I was not asking because I simply wanted to go or wanted to socialize. So I told them: I saw a handsome European move in across the street. I suspected he was going to join the party, and I wanted to get to know him. They would be my wing people.
They had their fun at my expense and then told me that they would be coming. They were not the types of people to need much convincing when it comes to showing up. That was more my problem. And they did relish any and all opportunities to spend time with me. I do not deserve my friends. I never have.
Right after that conversation there was a loud, obnoxious knocking at my door. I yelled, asking who it was, and it was my clone. I told them to go away, but they insisted and kept making a terrible noise that was giving me a headache. I opened it to get him to stop, and he said: Why haven’t you told me about the handsome European?
The answer was simple. I wanted him for myself. And I knew exactly what I would do in my clone’s position. I would steal that European man, no matter who I had to cut down to do it, including literally myself. But he had been part of the chat, and though I had wanted to exclude him and even removed him myself several times, they kept inviting him back. The way everyone else saw it, the way they treated the clone was how they treated me, too. That was an interesting interpretation, but I did not subscribe to it.
“I need to see,” he said, and stepped into my room.
I pushed him. “No. He’s not out there. Are you stupid?”
“No, you’re stupid.”
“No, you’re stupid! He’s probably inside the house. Why would he be hanging around the street? Idiot.”
“Move!” He grabbed my arms and tried to move me, but I grabbed him in return and pushed him.
The way we were tugging at each other we looked like sumo wrestlers.
I realized, then, that if I pushed him only a few more inches, he would fall down the stairs. And if I push him hard enough maybe he would hit his head and die. And then I would be rid of him once and for all. I leaned into him abruptly, with all of my strength, hoping to push him further until he was past the top landing. But he swung around, taking advantage of my exertion and my lack of balance, so that he was to my side. He pulled his arms back forcefully, and in doing so I found that I was supported by nothing and landed on my torso on the floor.
“Played by yourself,” he said.
The clattering sound got the attention of whoever was cooking in the kitchen.
“Careful up there!” my mom said.
“You piece of shit,” I said, picking myself up. “What if I hit my head? What if my teeth caught the edge of the step?”
“Don’t pretend you weren’t trying to kill me.”
I was feeling generous, so I didn’t pretend.
He walked off into the room to the window and tore off the black plastic garbage bags so he could raise the curtain. And the van was pulling up to the garage, the gate held open by their house helper. The door to the van opened, and from the driver’s seat the father came out, and from the passenger’s seat, the mother. From the back, the two women and the man. I looked at my clone’s face briefly. And I recognized the look on his face because it was mine.
That Friday, February 20, my parents made a fuss when they saw me come down the steps having showered, wearing nice clothes, and with my hair combed. It was strange enough to see me—but to see me made up was almost surreal, and they wondered what kind of omen this was. I told them that my friends were coming, and that was why I was dressed the way I was. I could tell that their suspicions remained but did not want to make the effort to inquiring further. They had to prepare for the mass anyway, and my mom was going to read the Psalm. My father was going to help collect the offerings. On the table there were various dishes on platters that we were going to contribute to the potluck. There was no need to make so much food, especially since everyone had prepared so much, but not attempting to reach the limits of generosity was an affront to the Filipino spirit of community.
Emily arrived, and I met them outside. People were already milling about the streets, where they had laid out tables and chairs and a stage where they had put a makeshift altar. There were streamers with Chinese characters strewn about the roofs, and paper mâché horses around three feet tall that lined the streets.
Emily, Danny, and Juno emerged from the white Montero. It was around 3PM. I asked them if they wanted anything to eat, and they said no. So, we stood there awkwardly, watching the older people scurry all over the place, making a big deal about everything. Mrs. Santos flattened the tablecloth with her hands, making large motions about her like she was doing a breast stroke, careful not to disturb the food and drinks that were already there. She did this for so long, making sure everything was perfect. It was like that was all that mattered to her. Like it would matter to anyone.
I heard my parents make sounds of surprise and delight, like people did when receiving a gift, and I turned behind me, and there they were. The first thing that surprised me was their height. I hadn’t quite noticed, from my room, how tall they were. Even the daughters towered over my parents and me. Danny was right around the same height, but he was still shorter than the father and the son, who I had to look up at to see his face. He was better looking up close. In the distance, the general proportions of his face indicated his handsomeness. But when one observed the actual features of his face the general impression gave way to the specifics of his manly beauty: His strong jaw, his sculpted nose, and his large grey eyes in particular.
The mother was holding out a large loaf of bread wrapped in paper to my mom. She said her name was Astrid; her husband was Alexander. The girls were Clara and Francesca. The boy—I finally found out—was Nikolaus. They were from Germany. While they were talking I inserted myself, smiling at them as I did, and took the loaf from my mother so I could read the card. It said:
To our dear new neighbors, from Astrid, Alexander, Clara, Francesca, Nikolaus Rothenburg und Eichenfels. Warmest regards & to a lifelong friendship.
I was wondering where I’ve seen that name before when I felt my mother’s hands around me. “This is my son,” she was saying. “August.”
I looked up and the girls were waving. The father, Alexander, reached for my hand, and I shook it. Such domesticity embarrassed me greatly. I didn’t know why. But for the sake of appearances I did my best. Then, when he let go, I walked off with the loaf of bread into the house. I placed it on the table and heard someone coming down the stairs. My clone.
“You didn’t wake me,” he said.
I turned around to open the fridge and get a pitcher of water. “And if I had the opportunity to make you sleep forever, I would.” I took a glass from a cupboard underneath the island counter and poured myself a glass.
He was already wearing nice clothes. They were new ones, the ones my mom bought for him so that he would have something to wear. He saw the loaf of bread and read the card.
“You’ve met him?” my clone said.
“Yes,” I said. “We are in love.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
When we both emerged from the house my parents were now talking to Mr. and Mrs. Gonzalez, a plain looking couple who also had very wild, prolonged streaks of problematic behavior (reporting children to the barangay when they played too close to their house, taking entire platters of food during potluck to take home even if people still wanted to eat), despite the fact that they were, in person, very pleasant and deferent. They had brown skin, and Mrs. Gonzalez had wavy, unkempt white hair that went past her shoulders. Mr. Gonzalez was bald, save for very short, white hair around the crown of his head.
They smiled when they saw me, and then the smile vanished upon seeing my clone.
“And who’s this?” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I didn’t know you had twins, Mr. Tabernak.”
“Yes,” my father said. “This is his clone. My son got one from his friend.”
Mr. Gonzalez reached for my clone’s hand, who shook it with a pleasant disposition. “Just as good looking as the original.” Then he held on to that hand and inspected it, as if searching for flaws that might betray its nature as a copy. “And totally flawless! Where did you get it from?”
“My friend made it, Mr. Gonzalez,” I said. “He’s a genius. He used to work for the US government.”
“I am not an it,” my clone told me. “I am just as human as anybody, sir. My circumstances for coming into being might be strange and unusual—but whose isn’t?”
Mrs. Gonzalez nodded as if a great truth had been presented to her. “Indeed,” she cooed. “Indeed.”
My mother turned her head and began to wave her hand. We all looked, and we saw that there was a commotion down the street because the bishop had come. The Most Reverend Arturo Macatarungan, the bishop of Paranaque, frequented the rich enclaves of Facundo, ingratiating himself with the wealthy and the famous. He was in his full ecclesiastical attire, despite the heat of the sun, his miter towering above the small crowd that had formed around him and leaning on a crozier. His vestments were violet because it was Lent. The way the people followed him it looked, truly, like a “shepherd of men.”
The bishop was a fat and stout man with large, thick glasses and a pleasing expression that made his ugliness easier to digest. He was shorter than even me; he must have stood only around four and a half feet tall. A group of children ran up to him and took his hand for a “mano”: They took his hand and pressed the back of it to their foreheads. With each, the bishop muttered, “God bless you.”
Suddenly the bishop waved at somebody in the distance. I followed his gaze, and he was looking at Alexander Rothenburg und Eichenfels, who waved back. They met and shook hands and Alexander called his family out. They came from the side of the house, probably from the back. After greetings, the bishop said: “Are you going to join our mass?”
“As you know, Father,” Alexander said, “we are from a different denomination. But if you will allow us, we could join you as spectators.”
“The blessings of the Lord are for everybody,” the bishop said. “No matter who, no matter what.”
And I thought: Even Hitler?
I turned, and Emily was beckoning me in small movements of her hand. I wondered what she could want from me so urgently. But then I realized that Nikolaus was at the table, filling a paper cup with melon punch. I approached and got a paper cup from the stack beside the large bowl and filled it. Nikolauslooked at me.
“Nikolaus, right?” I said.
“Yeah. Sorry, I forgot your name? I’m sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”
“August,” I said.
“Right. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Unlike his parents, he had a thick German accent, although inflected with an English accent. He was so tall that he was looking down at me when he spoke. I didn’t know what to say, like a dog who had unexpectedly caught up to a car it was chasing. Emily and Danny, who had been hanging around, left with a knowing glance at me, as if to give us some privacy.
After a while, Nikolaus said, “What’s there to do here?”
“Not much,” I said. “If you want to do anything, you will have to go to the north of Metro Manila. Down here, barely anything happens, and when it does, it is usually meaningless.”
“I haven’t explored Manila yet,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s a wonderful place.”
I sipped my drink and thought about whether I should say what I wanted to say. Finally, I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re absolutely wrong. It is not.”
He laughed at this.
“Which city in Germany are you from?” I said.
“We lived in Dresden. But my sisters and I sometimes lived in our apartments in Berlin, where there were more things to do. Especially for young people.”
“Yes, well… Manila is a very, very different place from Dresden or Berlin.”
“I suppose so. Since soon Manila will exist whereas the other two will not.”
“Oh?”
“The black hole.” Nikolaus suddenly looked very serious. “It is destroying Europe. We were the first to escape, but pretty soon the entire continent would disappear. And maybe even the world.”
“And of all the places you could go, you decided to come to Manila?”
“It is far enough.”
“Yes. It is.”
I felt the rush of a job well done, of a mission accomplished. From here, there were so many possibilities: Do I ask for his socials? Do I invite him to my house? Perhaps we could play some board games? Did he play Overwatch? I thought that there was much time for all those things. For now, I admired him as we spoke. He said that he studied architecture but was working with a nonprofit before he left that helped preserve historic buildings all around Germany. He was 29 years old. As usual at the mention of his age I felt useless and, compared to him, a wastrel. He asked what I did. I said nothing. He waited for me to say something more, as if to clarify that it was a joke or a figure of speech. But I didn’t.
During the mass, my friends and I sat together. My mother delivered the responsorial Psalm. Then, the gospel reading was of Matthew 9:14–15. The bishop delivered a homily that started with: “Gising pa ba kayo?!” Are you still awake?! Priests were sometimes too eager to seem casual and relatable that immediately they seem pathetic, and one then begins to listen only out of pity. The congregation laughed politely. It was odd seeing the Germans laugh with us, since they probably did not even understand what the bishop said.
Bishop Macatarungan’s homily was about the meaning of fasting and sacrifice, that sacrifice meant to make something greater by taking away, just as Jesus gave everyone eternal life through death. I saw that my father, seated somewhere in front, was losing the struggle to stay awake. My mother nodded during odd times, indicating that she was more intent on showing she was listening than actually trying to understand. Mrs. Valderama was on her phone.
Then, the bishop said: “This is why we should remember our neighbors. You are all neighbors, not only in the greater sense of all of God’s children but literally. And now you have new neighbors who come from a faraway land, and they come in need because their home is being destroyed by a natural calamity. This black hole from the CERN atomic disaster. Let us welcome them into our neighborhood, into our hearts, into our families. Let us remember that in the eyes of God, we are all brothers and sisters. So, let us all turn to the Rothenburg und Eichenfels family and say: Welcome.”
The congregation literally turned to them, the people in front turning back, and the people to their side craning their necks. And together, somewhat stupidly, they said: “Welcome.”
For Valentine’s Day we decided to go as a group, even if neither of us were couples, except for Danny who (displeasing me greatly) brought his lover, a woman he met at the office and for whom he broke off our highly lucrative (for both of us) secret relationship, though it took place mostly thru chat, in constant roleplay. But the roleplay was sexual in nature, at times merely romantic (the most desperate times), and so he had to stop when he found someone to truly love. And so I was going to have to spend Valentine’s Day being reminded of this.
Although Danny and I never loved each other, the way a couple would, we still engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship, in that he sexted with me in exchange for gifts and money. I suppose one might call it a sugar-type relationship, although we simply called it mutually beneficial, which it was. But real, actual love appeared in his life, and whatever we had, and no matter what he gained from it, amounted to nothing in comparison. That is what true love is, and that is what true love does. It is bigger than the entire universe—much bigger—and so it is easy to betray one for the other.
We had hotpot, which was a concept towards which I was gravely suspicious: Is it not soup? In Europe during Medieval times when food was scarce, they put anything and everything edible they found into a pot and boiled it continually for months or years and hoped that there would be some nutrients in it, somehow. They called it pottage. We were essentially going to eat peasant cuisine and pretend that it was something we wanted, which was a slap in the face of every peasant who had to starve to death or die of malnutrition. But no one cared about the peasants anymore. No one but me.
We had to line up because as always the group chat ignored my constant reminders to book a reservation. And I certainly wasn’t going to do it, because I didn’t want to go anyway. If we decided to eat at Miyazaki or that Korean place where we always went, then I would be happy, but instead we had to “try something new.”
All of us sat at the chairs lined up outside to wait for our name to be called. There was a crowd there: families, couples, groups of friends. The hotpot place was in one of the new strip malls in the area, and seated there we had a view of the street where cars and pedestrians passed. The night was cool, and the moon was waning.
I was seated next to Danny to his right. Valerie, his new girlfriend, was to his left. She was beautiful, and I understood why he left me for her. She wore tight shorts and a shirt, and somehow it did not seem at all slutty or suggestive, because of her face and her demeanor, both of which possessed a kind of innocence and feminine virtue. She was a chinay with a pert nose and a full bosom and might be considered attractive enough to be a model. And most of all she was warm and friendly and deferent to the older members of the group, which was most of us. She called us “kuya” and “ate.” I liked her as much as I despised her; her charm was so overwhelming that it affected even me.
Danny leaned towards me and showed me his phone. “Have you heard about this?” He pointed at a news story about a small black hole being created as a result of new experiments in CERN. People in Reddit were having a field day making jokes about the end of the world. “They say it’s going to suck in the world and destroy it.”
“One could only wish,” I said.
Then he turned to the other side to tell Valerie about it, too.
On my other side Emily had one hand tucked under the opposite arm, while the other hand scrolled through reels. The usual insignificant trash that we all delighted in. Most of the reels were about Valentine’s Day. About people who didn’t have anybody on that day, and people who did. I wish I had somebody. I wish I had a valentine. Instead I had these people and my clone. I saw it (he) and Elmer speaking in the corner, standing. God knows what they were talking about. I thought that Elmer must have been interrogating him about his body, about whether he felt stable. We did not know how long clones were supposed to live for. If they were truly exact matches or if they began to diverge after they were created.
I did not care and wanted my clone to go away. I wondered if murdering one’s clone was the moral equivalent of killing a person. Surely, that was a new moral category for which I could become some kind of pioneer. And I could do that by murdering my clone and seeing what the courts would say about that.
My parents were surprisingly very accommodating to the clone. At first they treated him as a scientific marvel, a kind of miracle of technology. They inspected him, spoke to him, touched him. This lasted a few minutes. Then, they treated him like a guest. They invited him to sit and eat. They gave him drinks. They gave him the guest room. A few days later, they were talking to him the way they spoke to me, like they had known him their entire lives. But the clone was more polite, more deferential than me, perhaps assuming the role of guest out of caution—something I would do. Though we were the same person, in real terms, he was still “another person.” And he knew that, though my family did not seem to think so. Sometimes, my dad would talk to me just as I came in the kitchen and my clone leaves, continuing the conversation they were having. When I say I don’t know what he was talking about, he would say: “What do you mean? I just told you.”
“That’s not me,” I would say.
And he’d shrug and continue talking and expect me to follow the thread.
At this point I thought they would be disappointed, at least, or even furious if I killed him. They considered him a part of the family. And perhaps even the better part of me, because he was very accommodating, the way I would be if I were a guest. And so my family did with him the things that they have always thought I should be able to do: dinners during Saturday, church on Sunday, trips to the supermarket in the morning to help carry the groceries.
So although I was the original I was not even the favorite of me in the house. I had mixed feelings about this. I felt that it was good for me because my family could get the best of me, all the while I don’t need to do anything at all. On the other hand, that was not really me. And while in many cases this was a moot point, the fact that essentially I was not my clone still bothered me.
Whenever Elmer was with us, he and the clone spoke a lot and intimately. And knowing myself I knew that my clone relished that attention. In any case, Elmer was not a bad looking person, although I was not naturally attracted to him. He had a kind of twinky charm. Although his features were unremarkable, he could be handsome, especially when he abandoned the old jeans and shirts and wore something expensive, as shown by pictures from weddings he had attended.
It made me wonder if Elmer was or could be interested in my clone if only because he was a clone. I knew that intelligence could drive a person to twisted and novel desires. Would he ask me, too? That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Or would he only want the clone?
Now, I watched them as they spoke against the lights of the passing cars. Elmer was nodding and periodically saying something. But it was my clone who was doing most of the talking.
I was hungry. Juno was also with us, and she was sitting there minding her own business on the other side of Emily. She was also facefirst into her phone. The glow of whatever she was watching splashed against her face.
Emily whispered something to her, and Juno whispered something back. Emily gasped and acted incredulous to whatever she heard.
“I can’t believe it!” she said. She leaned back to include me in the conversation and said, “Her mom is really going through with it. They’re going to move to Cordillera.”
I rolled my eyes. “She’s not going to do that. Where would they even live?”
“She’s already looking for apartments,” Juno said. “She’s going through with it. She’s packing our stuff and selling our furniture.”
Juno’s mother believed that the end times were imminent. Although she obviously wanted to be there for the last part, where Jesus comes down from heaven crowned in glory and judges the living and the dead, they would prefer to live through the calamities that presaged the Second Coming. So, she was making preparations. She was a doomsday prepper.
I said, “We can still instant message. It’s fine. And you work from home anyway.”
“I don’t want to live there,” Juno said. “It’s foggy. I’ll get sick and die.”
“You’ll probably meet us soon after,” I said. “When the dead rise.”
They finally called Emily’s name. We all rose. Elmer met my eye, and I beckoned them to us so that we could come in.
The restaurant was spacious, with decorations for Chinese New Year as well as Valentine’s Day. All around the room, there were shelves, trays, and counters of food that you could incorporate into your soup. Every table had a heated pot, into which you add your ingredients and you season your own soup. I’ve heard about this type of restaurant many times before, but I’ve never tried it because of the (perhaps erroneous) belief that because all the food was going in the same soup, they’d all taste the same.
In any case, I was assured that there would be dimsum, and if the soup was not to my liking I could order a la carte. We sat and looked over the menu and got the big platter for our soup. We decided collectively that it would be a little spicy, but not too spicy. It was hot in there. Despite the fact that there were air conditioning and fans, the heat from the pots made the place sweltering. I was already in a bad mood, but the heat was agitating me.
“Guys,” my clone said, addressing the table. “By the way, I’d like to introduce to you my clone.”
“Shut up,” I said.
Snickering.
Juno said, “Wait, but who’s who? For real?”
“I’m me,” I said. “He’s the clone.”
Juno looked at me and then at the clone and then me again. “Is there no way to distinguish you two? Apart from the clothes?”
The waitress came to ask if we were ready to order.
“Elmer didn’t have the foresight,” I said.
Elmer pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It was a prototype. I’m thinking that the clone would have some kind of indelible mark. Or maybe all the clones would share a specific feature – like an extra finger or birth mark.”
“A birthmark that says ‘Made by Elmer’ right on their ass,” the clone said.
Elmer nodded and pointed at him. “Exactly.”
Emily ordered. As usual, we ordered a feast for ourselves, with the idea that Danny was going to eat anything and everything we were not able to finish ourselves. And in any case his new girlfriend was here, and I’ve read somewhere that men tend to show off their masculinity to potential mates by eating much more than they normally do. Some quirk of the vestigial reptilian brain.
I looked around, and at a table in front of us, there was a very handsome man. He must have been in his late 20s, wearing glasses. He had a beard and curly hair and olive skin. He was with a girl who was very obviously his date. She was also very beautiful. In some backwards way, I suppose one could say they were meant for each other. Although, of course, looks aren’t everything, and all that. My friends and my therapist and my conscience have many times, and in regular intervals, reminded me that there is more to a person than their physical appearance, and I know that. And in fact given the way I myself look I depend on that.
Still, I am very honest with myself regarding my impulses. And if I need to readjust my beliefs or take other things into consideration, then I could do that consciously, rather than leaving it to chance or, worse, allowing these impulses to be buried among the various processes of repression, sublimation, projection, &c., that constituted the subjective mind.
I met my clone’s eye and made movements with my eyebrows towards something behind him. He seemingly understood immediately and turned behind him quickly and looked back at me, with a smug look on his face and making a thumbs up.
“August, August.” Emily tapped me on the arm. “Tell them about our deal.”
“What deal?”
“That when we’re forty…”
“Oh god…”
Emily laughed. “We’re going to get married, right? For political and economic purposes.”
“I was coerced into that deal,” I said. “Nonetheless, it does make sense. It is a kind of alliance. Also, it would be nice to have somebody there for when I lose my mind.”
“Thought you’ve already lost it,” Emily said.
“Oh, please… The worst is yet to come.”
The appetizers arrived. Typical of these places, there was a huge assortment. Seafood pancake, marble potatoes, kimchi, pickles, rolled omelets, and so on. It was a Chinese place, but the stomach did not distinguish between nationalities. Only flavor. We were all hungry, so we dug in.
The handsome man was laughing now. He fed his lover some kind of vegetable from the soup using his chopsticks. She was smiling too widely that it was apparent even while she was chewing. It looked like a bad commercial. She fed him something in return.
I loved my friends dearly. They have taken so much shit from me, especially when my myriad of mental illnesses had not yet been diagnosed and therefore not treated. Still, they remained loyal, compassionate, understanding, and caring towards me. Still, I would walk right off and join that handsome man if he wanted me to. I would invite them to the wedding, and many times we would all hang out. But I was sure they would understand. They would understand that all my life all I wanted was to be loved in the way a woman was loved in the most vulgar, basic, and instinctual sense: in a protective, somewhat jealous, caring way. I wanted someone who would cherish and defend me. I have looked for that all my life, and I have never, ever found it.
This is why I hated Valentine’s Day. I have always hated it because it was a stark, powerful reminder of my distinct, specific unhappiness. Of the fact that all my life no one has desired me in the way that I wish I would be—in the way that was reserved for beautiful people, which I was not. No amount of reassurances regarding my looks will convince me against my ugliness. I had no qualms about my appearance as such. What bothered me was what this entailed regarding the capacity of men to love me. To desire me.
I knew exactly the nature of my hideousness. I could see it right there, beside my view of the handsome man. My clone was overweight, with wild hair, beady eyes. A nose that, while not especially large, was bulbous and not attractively shaped. Thick lips that were not luscious or enticing but instead out of place on my stout face. There was a kind of austere gravity because of my beard, but that was about it. That was all that was good about the way I looked, which mattered only in certain cases, mostly academic or professional.
Elmer was whispering something into my clone’s ear. Elmer’s chopstick that was holding a piece of the seafood pancake stopped right before his mouth. Then, the clone finished what he was saying, and they both laughed. Elmer used the knuckle of his forefinger to push his glasses up again.
Juno had asked Danny and Valerie how they met. Danny was saying that they had been working on the same project for a few weeks. Someone had a birthday party, and they got to talking there. Eventually, what they had evolved into a romantic relationship. I couldn’t bear to listen.
I took out my phone. No one had sent me a message. I sent David a message, wishing him a happy Valentine’s Day, but that was more than six hours ago. He was online but wasn’t saying anything. I didn’t mind double texting, degrading as it was. But I couldn’t help but feel that I had gone as far as I would ever get with David. And the source of the small, insignificant kernels of affection I gleaned from our conversations had run dry. I had helped him during his time of emotional turmoil. Now that he had recovered he had no need for someone with which to chat. He wanted someone new to hold and fuck and adore. Occasionally I sent him gifts to ease the turbulence of a life in transition after his major break up. This entitled me to some of his time and kindness. But as time went on I was beginning to feel that he was ready to move on.
I messaged Kiran. I asked: “Do you have a Valentine?” He was online, but I didn’t hold my breath. He barely had any time for me anymore. But I was hoping for some kind of attention from someone I found attractive. If I couldn’t have a valentine I was hoping that at least I felt some type of affection. But the possibility of that grew more remote as the evening went on.
Every year on this day I felt so alone. Unconsciously I would surround myself with people, perhaps in a vain attempt to abate that feeling. Of course it never did. It distracted me. Allowed me to think about something else. But ultimately between the conversation and the jokes and the longwinded, stupid stories the loneliness prevailed.
I looked at my feed. Everyone was talking about the black hole. The coverage had become more and more hysterical. Apparently CERN had released a warning that the black hole did not dissipate as anticipated – a one-in-several-billion chance – and the lab had to be evacuated. It seemed the black hole would continue to grow and consume the planet over the course of the next few days, maybe next few hours. International agencies were working together to find some kind of solution.
None of my friends seemed to have received this news yet. I decided not to say anything. I did not want to go through the panic or terror or anxiety this may provoke in them. I was unhappy enough as it was. And in a way, in some stupid, stupid way, I was thankful that the world would be destroyed. And I and everyone else and the handsome boy and his girlfriend and my clone and David and Kiran and this hotpot place would be destroyed, torn to shreds as we are compressed into an infinitesimal point. I was thankful that this was it. I did not like being here anyway. And given everything I saw around me, the things I heard about day by day happening all around the world, maybe this was for the best.
Juno’s mom was right. It was the end times, and this was a manifestation of God’s providence. It had to be. And that comforted me. My friends stood up to get food for the hotpot. I did not stand up. I was too lazy. I was going to eat whatever they put in the pot. It would all be the same anyway. It was the same pot. It was the same soup. It didn’t matter. It was all the same soup.
Today, I went to the IKEA in Metro Manila. I was surprised to hear that it was the largest in the country. “Larger than Sweden?” I asked Emily. And she said yes, and I wondered why that would be.
I had known about IKEA for a long time. I knew that they had massive stores that you walked through, and there would be various show rooms, and you could see their furniture arranged as they would in a person’s house. It reminded me of the premade rooms in the Sims, which I always used because I was always too lazy to design them from scratch. I’ve never been myself, although the store had been in the country for several years already.
On the way there, I saw a big, blue building. I said, “Is that entire building IKEA?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was a store inside the Mall of Asia.”
“No,” Emily said. She was driving. “That entire building is the IKEA.”
We were able to park at the PWD space because, luckily, God had made me absentmindedly and therefore suffer from a crippling mental illness. I have bipolar disorder. This entitled me to certain benefits strictly enforced by the country’s laws: Cheaper medicine, cheaper food, and parking closer to the entrance.
I was pleasantly surprised that the inside of the IKEA was beautiful and well-maintained. I had never seen anything like it in the Philippines. The malls here have a completely different design philosophy that makes the aesthetics seem dated. The IKEA store was modern and inspired by the minimalist, functional aesthetics as seen in Europe. I liked it, even if for many in the West, the appearance and even the ideals behind such aesthetics are beginning to become tinged with a cynicism. It had become too familiar and too associated with a society that valued functionality over sentimentality, over a sentimental yearning for values that (for some people) our global, capitalist society has forgotten and as a result produced a world culture that was nihilistic, godless.
Well, I liked it. And for whatever reason that might be, I did, and that was enough for me.
We went up to the first floor of the show room. The way things were arranged, and the way that they were supposed to be viewed, reminded me very much of a museum. But unlike museums in which furniture was viewed, these things were for lives that were yet to be lived, as opposed to lives lived before. And so it was like a museum for what was going to be in a museum.
I could see why going to IKEA and picking out furniture for an apartment was a cherished milestone for new lovers. One built the foundations for a life there, and there was something for anyone, mostly. I wished, suddenly, that I was there to build a life with someone, instead of with Emily, buying new furniture for her renovated room. And in fact in some of those rooms I saw myself and certain men in my life, past and present, hanging around those rooms…
URBAN APARTMENT “A compact space for living, entertaining, and making memories.”
Here, the apartment was small but had modern furniture that somehow crammed a TV, a couch, a kitchenette, and a bed. There was a fake window that opened to a picture of a cityscape. The lighting was moody, but a sign said: “Lighting that could be dimmed to set the tone for any occasion.”
I was on the couch (KLIPPAN, ₱14,990) and Jason was there and he was complaining, like always, that I had taken away his belief in God. When he was drunk he thought about things like these, and he always brought it up. He enjoyed having these kinds of highfalutin conversations with me. I suspected what he enjoyed most were not the actual insights we might develop having such a conversation but the fact that he could hear himself saying things that, in some contexts, might be perceived as profound. In other contexts, one needed to use one’s imagination a bit.
It was his birthday, and it was the time of the party when people began to break up into groups and have their own little discussions regarding their own interests. Our apartment was not very big, but there were a lot of people, and so we were all crowded there. Jason and I were on the couch. I did not to have this conversation. I did not like talking about philosophy or God or psychoanalysis, and my patience for talking about literature and cinema and art were thin. These things I did privately, while writing, or thinking. And one of the compromises I had to make when I got with Jason was the need to talk to them about these things.
I reasoned that being with someone already meant that the things that are usually private become common between the two of you. This includes things such as the penis and the assholes and bank accounts and activities such as taking a dump, showering, and in this case talking about philosophy.
“When I first met you,” he was saying, “I believed in God. He was like the anchor in my life. I wasn’t an especially good person, but still I had something to aim for, and whenever something bad happened, I thought to myself: There has to be a reason for this, because God has it all planned out for us.”
I was cradling a bowl (FÄRGKLAR, ₱249) of chili hot popcorn. It was my favorite, and I had laid out several bowls for the room. But upon realizing that Jason had drunk just enough for him to rant, and he sat beside me and embraced me and kissed me and said he loved me, I realized what was happening. I took the bowl that was on the coffee table (VITTSJÖ, ₱3,990) and prepared myself. The last time I said that we should move on from the topic he was so wounded and outraged that I didn’t even know what to say in return, and I was too afraid to match his anger because he was so red in the face and acting so offended that I thought he might actually snap. Eventually, he went away and took the car and went somewhere. When he came back, he was calm, apologized, and told me that those conversations important to him.
He was talking, that time, about what it meant to be a good person. About how good and bad were extreme concepts that were never present in real life. That in reality, people were both in an objective sense. In a subjective sense, then it would depend on the person evaluating. His points were so trite and sophomoric; that’s why I wanted it to stop.
Now, his points were more personal, rather than grand philosophical statements, which I appreciated. But still I felt like I was held hostage. And everyone else was engaged in their conversations around us that none of them knew it was happening. Perhaps they thought we were having some kind of important conversation, which couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, our time was being wasted.
“Are you listening to me?”
I realized that I had been drifting. I was staring at the carpet, watching peoples’ feet shuffle against it. Thinking about all this. About the last time this happened. About how love is like this; it makes you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. It compels you.
“Yes, honey.”
Attention IKEA Customers…
Please remember to throw your trash in the designated bins.
Thank you for keeping our store clean.
COZY COUNTRYSTYLE KITCHEN “This kitchen and dining room is comfortable, functional, and beautiful.”
Ever since Rex and I moved to the country, he had been happier than ever. Rex had always been a gentle person, if a little spoiled and moody. But he would say, with increasing frequency year by year, that “a black hole” was following him. This was his poetic way of saying that he was unhappy. I told him that this was called depression, and that he should see a professional. But he said that he was capable of handling it, and that seeing a psychiatrist would only make him more depressed, in proportion to the amount of good it would do him, so that it would only be a waste of money.
His family was rich in those days, and so was mine, so I didn’t know what he was so concerned about money for. Ever since we had been in college, he liked to pretend that he was middle class. I suppose it allowed him to fit in. And despite his independent streak, he did care very much about fitting in, even if it were in his own way. For example, despite claiming that he did not care about the opinion of other people, and that he was a “free spirit,” losing his hair was a sort of existential crisis for him. The moment he realized he might go bald, he tried everything short of taking minoxidil. Taking minoxidil meant taking it all his life as well as various sexual problems, so he wanted to try the easier measures first.
His hair was important to him, but his penis was also important to him. We had a very specific arrangement. He could have as many mistresses he wanted, as long as he prioritized me, and that he knew, understood, accepted, cherished, maintained, and secured the fact that I was his main life partner. He agreed to this, and during the “probationary period” where we tested out this arrangement I was quite happy. There were times when he had to “go out” and he returned the next morning or later than night before sunrise. Then, we spoke nothing of it.
This arrangement was predicated first of all by our mutual consent and understanding. But, beyond that, it was made possible by his personal manly beauty. This was essential. If he was not attractive enough for women to like him in the first place, and for these women to accept our circumstances and conditions (about which he was always honest, as a matter of ethics), then it was more or less impossible. And though he might attract other girls through the sheer force of his charisma, despite his baldness, this was far too much trouble for an affair.
For two years he tried all sorts of things on his hair. Then, when we reached 34 (we were the same age), he decided that either his hair loss had spontaneously stopped or all the different things he had been trying worked. I noticed since then that his hair had in fact not stopped falling out. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t really care about his hair the way he did, and I didn’t want to upset him. Whether it was delusion, ignorance, or a mistake on his part, I didn’t know. All that mattered to me was that he had divested himself of that anxious energy he always had while worrying about his hair.
Later, when our families had grown old, and we could no longer be bankrolled, we moved to Batangas in a new house. Our kitchen (METOD kitchen system, ₱25,000+) we decided we would get from IKEA. He had gotten a job at a bank. I did research at home.
We were having dinner on a Friday night, and he said: “I think I am losing my hair again.”
I had made pesto, which was his favorite. To change things up I used angel hair pasta. It was not appropriate.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Men lose their hair gradually after a certain age. That doesn’t mean you’re going to go bald.”
“No, look.” He bent his head down to show me his crown, and his bare scalp was not exposed. A circle of hair had definitely vanished. He looked up again. “I’m thinking of getting a transplant.”
“You got transplant money?”
“Yes.”
“We just bought this kitchen. We had to settle for IKEA. And now you’re telling me you have enough money for a transplant?”
“It’s my money.”
My fork (MOPSIG, ₱59) stopped in midair on the way to my mouth. “I thought your money was my money. And my money was your money. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?”
He didn’t say anything. He took a bite and chewed while looking at his plate (VARDAGEN, ₱349). Then, he said: “I’m getting a transplant. I’m not going fucking bald.”
Dear IKEA Customers…
Please return carts to the designated areas after use. Cart return areas are available at the entrance and at our parking spaces.
Thank you.
LAWN SETUP WITH FIRE PIT “An easy to setup outdoor area for spending quality time with loved ones.”
Recently Jon had started using a vape pen. He used it to take marijuana, which helped him with anxiety. He had always found smoking disgusting but his anxiety had gotten to a point where he was willing to try anything. The meds did not work and left him him without energy. It also sapped him of his personality. Which already was in a perpetual shortage because he was Canadian. So he tried weed.
He found that it helped. Although it was expensive because it was illegal we considered it an essential expense. The anxiety used to be so bad that he would tremble. He would lie on my lap, and I would hold his head and stroke his hair and I saw in his face that he wanted it all gone. He wanted himself gone. I would touch his hand, and it was so cold.
We shared the same psychiatrist and went together. He said that there were things like electroshock therapy, but before we try those things, he had a suggestion if we were open to it. And Jon tried it, and it more or less cured him. One day we realized that we were not spending so much time curled up in bed and instead we were sitting outside sitting on one of those tables with an umbrella at the center (SUNDSÖ, ₱5,990) in the garden behind our house.
That time, it was the colder months of the holiday season, so we lit the fire pit and sat there in quiet. I was on my computer writing and playing games and he would sit there, smoking, looking through his phone.
I realized something. “Aren’t your residency papers due?”
He was smiling at something on his phone. He looked up and said, “Are they?”
“I think so.”
“Let me check.” He took a drag of his vape pen, which had a metallic sheen and was decorated on its face with a skull. I got it for him as a gift. He poked at his screen for a minute. Then, he said, “Yes. I’m going to have to renew it soon. In a month.”
“When do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, make sure to slot that in soon. We don’t want to forget.”
He took a long drag while nodding. Then, he looked at me. From the illumination of the outdoor lantern (SOLVINDEN, ₱799), I could see that his eyes were now all red, and there were bags underneath them. And the way he looked at me, there was such a sadness. When you’re with somebody for as long as we’d been together, you recognize those things.
He said, “Actually, I think we don’t need to renew it.”
“What do you mean?” I said, as if I didn’t know.
“I’m thinking that maybe I should go back to Canada.”
“Why?”
He locked his phone and placed it screen down on the table in front of him. “I just think that this part of my life is over now.”
I blinked at him. “And that’s it? You’re moving on because you’re done? What about everything we’ve built here. What about everything we’ve been through?”
“I’m sorry. I know you’re disappointed.”
“Of course I’m fucking disappointed… I can’t believe this.” He reached over to hold my hands, but I pulled them away. “So, what do you intend to do until then? Just live here, with me, until it’s time for you to go?”
“If it’s alright with you. Yes.”
“You’re so fucking stupid.” I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it. “Idiot.”
“I deserve that.”
I stood up and slapped him and went inside.
“That, too,” he muttered under his breath, before taking another drag.
Attention Dear IKEA Shoppers…
Please note that delivery is currently unavailable due to a surge in demand.
Thank you for your understanding.
MEDIUM SIZED MASTER’S BEDROOM “A bedroom that balances comfort and luxury, perfected for well-being and rest.”
I was lying in bed (MALM, ₱11,990). The lights were already off, but light streamed from the open door that led into the bathroom. Jackson was trimming his beard. I could hear the buzzing of the electric razor (SKÄRANDE, ₱1,290).
The darkness was palpable. I could feel it suffuse with my being, so that I was not only where I was, sewn in my skin, hanging onto my bones, but also where I was not. The darkness pressed against me, squeezed me, and I could feel the blood rushing to my brain. I could feel my chest being compressed until I could not breathe. And I could feel the darkness going into my nostrils, down my throat, into my lungs, and carried in my blood…
Jackson came out rubbing his face with a towel. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah.”
He tossed the towel back inside the bathroom. I didn’t see where it landed. He didn’t look where he threw it, and I think it probably landed on the floor. But he didn’t care about stuff like that.
He climbed into bed. I turned and embraced him. He smelled like aftershave.
I looked up at him. “You’re so handsome,” I said. He was the most handsome man I had ever known.
He kissed my forehead. “How was your day?” he said.
“Boring. How about you?”
“We had bagels.”
“Oh? Corporate sponsor?”
“No, Iris brought them. She came back from Seattle.”
“And she brought back like 50 bagels?”
“No, she bought them and had them delivered.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What’s the point?”
“I guess she wanted to do something nice because she just came back from a months-long vacation.”
“This is why I’ve always hated Iris.”
“Come on…”
“I’m serious. And don’t pretend she doesn’t look at you in this very weird way. Her ugly ass was at James’s dinner party a few months ago, and she was ogling you.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not silly.”
“I never saw her ogling me.”
“She would obviously never do it when you’re looking, stupid.”
Jackson rolled his dull green eyes.
I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp (RANARP, ₱1,490). “I hate her.”
“Okay. Okay. You hate her.” He was still lying there, his hands on his stomach, looking at me. “I don’t know what you want me to do about it. I can’t do anything about it right now.”
“Text her on your Slack chat that you hate her. In front of everyone.”
“What?”
“Tell her you want to push her down a well.”
“That’s going to get me fired. You know that, right?”
“Why? That’s your personal opinion.”
“That’s HR worthy.”
“Nah.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever…”
I sat there, deflated. I really did hate her.
“Can you turn the light off, please?” Jackson said.
I turned the light off again.
“Come here.”
Jackson pulled my down by the arm until my head was resting against his chest. I embraced him again. I could hear his breathing. His heartbeat.
It didn’t matter.
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There was a walkway that connected IKEA with the Mall of Asia. We met up with our friend there, and we had dinner. We had Japanese food.
Emily tried a piece of sushi from the platter we ordered. She took a bite, and immediately she made a face like she was disgusted and whined. She gulped her water.
“I told them not to add wasabi…”
Pat said, “That’s why I don’t eat that stuff.”
“It’s good.” Emily raised her hand to call a waitress’s attention. “It’s just the wasabi. I don’t like it.”
A lady came by and Emily told her that she specifically asked for no wasabi. The lady apologized and took the food and went away.
“Did you know there’s a new Wuthering Heights movie?” Pat said. She was poking at her savory pancake with her chopsticks. I could tell that she was already full. She was a thin, frail lady who could barely handle a cup of rice. “Margot Robbie is in it. And some guy whose name I forgot.”
“Oh?” I said. “Did you know there’s necrophilia in that novel? Implied.”
“Best kind,” Emily said.
I took out my phone to see the details of the movie. I saw that Jon had texted me.
He was replying to the message I sent the previous night, asking whether I should go to IKEA even if I wanted to stay home and play TFT all day and night. I was so close to platinum.
He said yes I should.
I said we had already gone, and we were actually already out having dinner.
“How did you like it?” he said.
“Took some time before I was able to force myself out of my room,” I said. “But I owe Emily, and when she arrived at the house I didn’t have a choice anyway. I had a lot of fun, though. I liked looking at the furniture. It kind of made me wish I can shop for furniture with a partner someday.”
“I have no doubt that will happen someday,” he texted.
“Did you know there’s a new Wuthering Heights movie?”
“I did not.”
“Sounds interesting. You think we could maybe watch? Tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
I looked up and Emily was staring at me. “Maybe you can put the phone down? We’re trying to spend time together here.”
I texted back quickly: “Great. See you then.”
“See you :)” he said.
I put the phone down. The sushi platter arrived. I took a piece and ate it.
been dreaming of a very specific chinese restaurant recently. located in a small tenement in a very large, dirty building in the very guts of manila. there are multiple floors, and you can climb the fire escape to reach the second floor. the first floor is spacious, but the second floor (which was opened out of necessity due to the number of customers) is very narrow, with booths lining both sides. always come to it very late at night – 2am, 3am – but it’s still always very busy. we walk up, and the city is dark and dead but the glass doors of this restaurant still radiate a warmth. and inside while eating dumplings and soup and duck my innermost unresolved oedipal dramas unfold. and outside the windows the city is dark and dead and pitch black as a rabid dog’s eye.
For New Year’s Eve, my family had a party, like they always did. All sorts of people came by, mostly people who wanted to eat for free. I hated it. I hated how people would come by and open my door and say hi and wonder what I did the entire year. This was annoying enough when it was extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. But this was especially annoying when it was my parents’ friends. I usually say, “I’ve been well,” and leave it at that. Sometimes, they ask specific things: When are you getting married? What do you do for work? Do you still work as a researcher at the university?
I don’t mind sharing things about my life. I’m telling you this story, so obviously I don’t. My problem is I have to do this rather than doing something else that I enjoy; I am essentially taken hostage. And if they wanted to know about me, then they could read my blog. I don’t want to stand there, responding to each and every query they happen to have. Especially when the question is with regard to how they expect someone’s life is supposed to go. For example, they ask: When are you getting married? Because they expect someone my age to already have a wife.
Which doesn’t even apply to me because I am queer.
That New Year’s Eve, I opted to skip the party altogether and accept my friend’s invitation to have an impromptu trip to Tagaytay. My friend Benny had come from New Zealand to visit. He was going to have New Year’s with his family, but he wanted some time with us. Emily suggested, jokingly at first, on a road trip to Tagaytay. Friends in Manila always joke about going to a spontaneous road trip to Tagaytay. But this time it seemed feasible, perhaps even enjoyable, and so we decided to do it.
Coming along were Emily, Juno, Danny, and Joshua. Benny also took his wife Tina.
2
At around 10 AM people were already coming to the house. We had our gates open and our doors open, and people wandered in and spoke to my parents and sisters, and they got food from the spread we had on the kitchen table. I could see them from the second-floor mezzanine. I stood there, looking at them. I despise people so much.
One of the guests my dad was talking to noticed me and pointed me out. My dad turned to see me before I could duck from view. He beckoned me, so I could say something to the guests. But I nodded and turned to go as if I were going down the stairs but actually I went inside my room, the door to which was at the upper landing.
My friends came for me a little before noon. My parents happened to be out on the street greeting new guests when they spotted Emily inside her car. They beckoned everyone out and invited them to eat. They had to refuse because we were about to eat.
My dad said, “Bring him back tomorrow, okay? He spent the entire year in his room. And I’m not kidding. He only left his room to eat, and then up he goes again.”
“We’ll do our best, tito,” Emily said.
Emily had a white Montero. It was one of her prized possessions, and it struck me sometimes how she treated it like a living creature. Then again, despite not being alive, it did serve her well. It was, in a sense, her instrument of freedom. Before this car, she had to use public transportation, and sometimes though she had the money, she was simply too tired to go along the streets and look for a bus and then a jeepney and then a tricycle in whatever order. It took hours, sometimes, and if the whether was bad or it was rush hour, she could suffer that entire time.
With her Montero she had an extension of her home. And she liked to drive. She always had, even when we were kids in high school. She drove even when she was not allowed to drive because of her age.
After exchanging pleasantries, and expressing surprise that we were actually going through with our plans for once, I asked Benny how he had been since I last saw him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Been lying around at home. Cleaning, cooking for Tina.”
“House husband,” Emily said.
“And how about you?” Benny said. “What have you been up to?”
I realized then that I should not have asked because, to be polite, he would have to ask me this question. And I had no good response. I did nothing the entire year. And that’s no exaggeration. My entire year had been totally wasted. It was inevitable, of course, that certain things happen. And things happened, the way things tend to do. Beyond that, I had nothing.
“I’ve decided to become hikkikomori,” I said.
“What’s that?” Benny said.
“I have decided never to leave my room, unless absolutely necessary.”
“Why?”
“Just wanted to.”
And it’s true. I decided in 2024 that I would never leave the house, unless I was compelled to do so by extreme need. I must have left the house less than 5 times, if that. I left to go to the bank once, to my mom’s birthday celebration at a restaurant, and 3 days at the resort during Christmas. That was it.
I have come to feel that there was nothing for me outside. Or in fact this world. That there are few if any things that I could truly see, in the physical sense, that would awe me or make it worth the effort, save for very few things.
3
At Leslie’s, we sat outside, where we could see Taal lake and the volcano that was partly submerged. I’ve seen it a few times now in my life, although the view was always nice. The German idealists, who had their hands in everything, called it “The Sublime”—the feeling of knowing your place as an insignificant part of this infinite thing called nature, the cosmos. The universe. All that is the case.
I don’t really care for nature. I tell people this, and they hate me for it. But I don’t. If people get dirt on their clothes, they try to clean it. But a mountain, which is supposed to be a very, very tall mound of dirt, is supposed to be beautiful. I don’t understand that. Or is it a matter of scale? If it is a tiny smudge, it’s dirt. But if you get enough of the stuff, it becomes a majestic feature of the natural world.
I was telling Emily this.
“How does that work?” I said.
“Well,” she said. “It’s because the mountain isn’t on my shirt, is it?”
I thought about it. And that may be it.
They ordered the bulalo, because they always have that here. I don’t like Spanish stews. I ordered the sisig.
“What did you guys do for the new year?” Benny said.
“Went to a resort,” I said. “Didn’t want to go, but my family forced me.”
“Did you enjoy yourself, at least?”
“No.”
“How about you, Em?”
“Just stayed home,” she said. “We don’t really celebrate the holidays anymore… Just an ordinary night for us. Maybe we cook a special meal or something.”
“And you Juno?”
“Oh god…” Em cooed, knowing what was coming.
“Mom believes that the end of the world is imminent,” Juno said. “She wants us to move into a religious commune in the mountains, so that when the antichrist takes over we won’t be here to suffer the worst of it.”
“Can I come with you?” I said.
“No.”
“Is it because I’m gender queer?”
“You’re gender queer?” Emily said.
“I thought you were just gay,” Benny said. “Wait, are there other things? What’s a lesbian?”
“What is a lesbian?” Danny said.
“I’m still thinking about,” I said.
“We’re not going to the Cordilleras,” Juno said. “We’re going to stage an intervention.”
“I’ve been there before,” Danny said. “I was a baby, then. But I remember, as a baby, falling down a hill.”
“Did you hit your head?” Benny said.
“It’s those reels,” Juno was saying. “She can’t distinguish between real life and AI. She believes everything.”
“I fell off a hill before…” Benny said. “I was a bit older. Nearly broke my foot.”
4
For the great majority of people, seeing Taal volcano surrounded by Taal lake is one of the most wonderful sights in the country. And while I do regard it with some awe, at the same time I see that it is like a toilet. And beneath that rancid pool of shit, piss, and dead fish, there is fire so hot it turns solid rock and stone into a molten ocean. And should circumstances be right, the way it had been several times in the distant past, then this entire place would be destroyed, killing thousands of people. We were standing at the site of a future cataclysm.
Or go further and one inevitably comes across the idea of the end of the world. Why should we think that, if the world heats up and all life dies, means the Earth is destroyed? The Earth is a mote of dust floating across the infinity of space; it is a thing. Billions of years before it was destitute of life; billions of years from now it will be consumed by the sun. All of this is as natural as any other.
I find that people are so selfish that they think if the universe does not have the conditions necessary for life then it must be broken. The idea that we should be the stewards of nature is also such a condescending and egotistical position. The cosmos does not need us or anything.
אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה Ehyeh asher ehyeh
“Have some.” Danny was standing there and the way he was looking at me it seemed like he had been watching me for a while. “They’re buying treats down at the gift shop.”
He was holding a packet of dried apricots.
“No thank you,” I said. “I hate fruits.”
He shrugged and ate another and looked out over the lake.
“Pretty, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
5
We moved to a Starbucks that was also adjacent to a cliff. We were now looking at Taal lake from a different vantage point. A fog had settled around Tagaytay, and it was cold. There were also many people there, families and friends celebrating the New Year. A big family in particular was arriving in several cars. Several generations clogging up the place. Children running around and shouting as they played, their mothers trying to tell them to shut up although not meaning it. Fathers talking loudly with their arms crossed against their chests.
Some days I felt that things were not alright. And the older I got, the more I felt that. As a young person, I was frequently anxious, depressed, even suicidal—but that was different because there was a reason for me to feel those things. I felt that way because I cared, and the fact that the things I desired so much were not coming to fruition wounded me deeper and deeper. But now, at my age, I felt that things were not alright because I had lost interest in living; I no longer believed in the promises of life.
Danny was a handsome, powerful man. He sat there in front of me vaping and looking out at the lake. Wherever Emily went, Danny came with her. They were cousins, and had been close ever since they were children. Despite this, they grew up under very different circumstances, and while Emily lived an easy life of money, Danny grew up in poverty and abuse. So, Emily grew up impetuous and imperious, though she had always been kind, or tried to be as kind as possible. Danny had learned long ago that survival meant going along with the whims of those who had more than him (the great majority of people) while still trying to make his own way.
That journey was still continuing for him, and so I did not know what it would be like if he had the advantages Emily had. But he was an engineer now, and a hard worker because of the previous circumstances of his life, and I could easily imagine him climbing to the top through grit alone.
I’ve never had any grit. Now, I have more grit than I ever had in my life, and it’s still not much. Many times I wish I did, and people mistake me for having more grit than I actually do. But within me there is consistent turmoil, no matter what the world around me is like. A roiling, bubbling, uncontrollable turmoil that occasionally becomes unbearable, that once in a while, though invisible, pushes out my sorrows like lava from the orifices of my body. Until it fills up the room, and I drown in it, this little lake of sorrows…
I said, “How are you?”
“I feel alright…” He blew a gigantic cloud of vapor while facing the cliff. Then, he looked at me again. “How are you?”
“Good enough…”
He nodded that slow nod people do when there’s nothing more to say. And there wasn’t.
6
I got home at around 5 PM, after going to different places, taking pictures, and having an early dinner. There were still people in the house, but now they were localized at the dining room. They and my parents were eating and laughing loudly and exchanging stupid stories the way old people tend to do. They asked me what we did, and I said nothing, and went upstairs.
After removing my clothes and changing into my house wear, I laid down in bed and rested and couldn’t help but think the whole thing was a massive waste of time. The trip. The day. The celebration. The year. All my life.
Here I am again, here.
What was the point?
I watch people on YouTube how wander the world, discovering things already discovered, meeting people like any other person they’ve ever met. Doing things that have always been done. I would never find pleasure in doing any of those things. Perhaps that says something about me. I have gone to Japan, to Dubai, to Hong Kong—many places, and in all those places, though I did enjoy it, there lingered always the feeling that I’ve been there before, that I’ve done this before. And the dread that this is all that there is, that this is all that is the case.
