BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: THE MARTINI EFFECT

THE MARTINI EFFECT
by Doreen D.L. Jose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: THE LITTLE PEOPLE

THE LITTLE PEOPLE
by Maria Aleah G. Taboclaon

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

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

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

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

What could our poor family do?

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

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

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

All in all, it was a very good relationship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: LINES

LINES
by Lakambini A. Sitoy

SHE lived alone, she told me, in an apartment that could house a family of four. To fill the silence, the first thing she did as soon as she had settled in was get a phone.

"Yeah, me too," I said. "I had a second one installed a couple of months ago. Problem is every time it rings it's some asshole looking for a phone pal."

The company was a new one, eager to sign on subscribers. Brand new black wires now webbed the skies across the city. Strangers who had waited decades to get connected suddenly had unlimited access, to me as well as her.

I kept a box of calling cards by my receiver, which was an arm-length from the bed. Each pale rectangle represented someone who'd said they could introduce me to someone else: people who might show me the way to a better job with a fat paycheck and real perks. Those evenings when I was home, itching for something to do, I would dial my collection of numbers relentlessly, banishing the thought of rejection from my mind.

I soon made contacts of a different nature. Night after night, in between my calls, the phone would ring. I'd hear an alien "Haloh?", giggly and juvenile; or sometimes just silence for a heartbeat or two before the line went dead.

"Teenage boys," she laughed when I told her. "They want to make sure it's a girl on the other end. I get calls like that all the time."

She always put the phone down on those cracked, uneducated voices from out of the ether. Like me she was polite only to people she knew. I never counted this as a fault.



THIS was the big city. Unchaperoned, her family tucked away in one of those sleepy, cash-crop provinces, she enjoyed a kind of defiant freedom. Part of it was the license to be anonymous. Another was the right to style herself liberated, to go out to the little bars on Friday nights with guys like me and yet be too nervous to make love when the time came.

For company in the darkness she had her faceless suitors, who never rung her up earlier than half past twelve. I suppose they must have taken note of her number and the light girly voice on the other end, the mysterious woman who refused to talk to them yet never unplugged her phone. What kind of people would be up through the wee hours of the morning? I thought of the security guards at our building sitting slack-jawed beneath spotty fluorescent bars. Those connection fees were cheap, anyone could apply. Driving past squatter enclaves on my way to work, I would marvel at how each ramshackle dwelling, the size of a toilet, was topped with a television antenna. Each shack would hold a new phone. I smiled to myself at what must be taking place nightly in the 2:00 a.m. dark: she in her white, cologne-sprinkled bed, jolted rudely awake by some squatter's bid for contact.

She and I, we were a team, like brother and sister, a most efficient twosome. At the two-bit ad agency where we worked, the projects our bosses assigned us almost always turned out perfect. I hate to brag, but she had a good mind, like a deadly little knife, and so did I. She was as fiercely loyal as I was diplomatic, so none of our supervisors ever got away with stealing our ideas. Of course we were meant for higher things. Overworked and underpaid--that was a given. She spent her salary on clothes and cabfare and accessorized her apartment with books. The money was never enough.

Me, I had the car payments and the baby to deal with.

At least I didn't have to worry about rent. The house belonged to my wife.



"IT'S all here," she would laugh, passing her calling card to those friends of mine we'd run into, in some Malate bar after work. "Trunk lines, direct line, pager, cell phone, home phone but strictly for emergencies and only if it's a pick up and drop off sort of job you wanna talk about; email--"

These men, young fathers like myself, would take the thin scrap of beige from her, pass their eyes over her face and breasts and, imprinting completed, slip the card into some pocket. Then they would turn their inquisitive gaze upon me. I suppose she and I were a unit, even when we sat a chair or two apart--we must have been obvious, even then, before I'd even touched her. But I'd signal the waiter for another beer, my face revealing nothing, and their curiosity would pass.

We had been out for a few drinks, the summer night she showed me her apartment. In the car, she turned her pager over and over between her fingers, as though hoping for rescue. My hand moved to the cell phone at my hip, but if I cut the power my wife would know something was wrong. She noticed my indecision, made a great show of watching the road. We drove through a miasma of invisible waves, through air so thick I found it hard to breathe, my respirations audible over the whump of our wheels on the asphalt. My thoughts spun around in crazy circles until finally, as we neared the end of the journey and the tension between us was so great I thought I would have to crash the car just to relieve it, I ceased altogether to think.

Her place was in a maze of sidestreets off a rundown commercial district. We had never been out so late. As I pulled up, I cut the engine without thinking, and she let her breath out in a sigh. On cat feet, so as not to awaken the neighbors, we found our way to her door. The apartment was a mess, laundry on the couch, crockery in the sink. She was embarassed, and at the same time defiant--so she was no housekeeper, so she was no one's wife.

She offered me something to eat, but there was nothing in the refrigerator but a few shriveled wedges of apple, and some capers and jam. In a recess she found a half-finished bottle of Kahlua, its throat encrusted with sweetness. The kind of treat women keep for an undreamed-of but hoped-for eventuality. We sipped the liquor straight, from plastic ice cream tumblers. The vapors made her sneeze.

We sat for some time while she pointed out spots on the walls where paintings ought to have hung and house plants flourish. Her gestures were small and prim from the tension. I was supposed to compliment her on her independence, I knew, and on how gutsy she was to be living alone, but in truth I wasn't sure what I felt. My voice quavered as we went up to her bedroom--some pretense about listening to a CD or two, at three o'clock in the morning, the two of us mouthing inanities, barely conscious of what we were saying. She clicked on a light. The room was bathed without warning in the warm glow of seduction, and there we stood in the half-darkness, looking inquisitively into each other's faces, until one of us lunged, reaching out too clumsily for the gravity of the moment, and closed the distance between ourselves.

Her flesh was soft and hot, perfumed by the sweat of a day gone by. Her blouse was the thin, fashionable kind that took forever to unbutton, so that ever so often she would stop breathing while I fumbled. An embarrassment that I couldn't help suffused me as zippers opened and garters snapped. Her flesh was so moist and so close, her response so sharp and immediate, and the terrible thing was that I knew her--she was no stranger in a karaoke club. I don't think I once met her eyes. She made just one token gesture of resistance, pressing her thighs together as I pulled her underwear down, the scrap of white cotton slipping unimpeded down her legs. I put my face to her pubis, my lips seeking out her wet folds--like teasing oysters from their weed-encrusted shells. She went rigid, stifled a shout, began to sob. Down in the darkness, gripping her buttocks hard enough to hurt, it was as if I was hoisting her into air, and fleeting images entered my head of my year-old daughter: the dull, half-words she too said whenever I picked her up. Her knees gave way and we fell in a heap, struggled to free ourselves from our clothes. As we moved back and forth, the scent of her sex, our bodies, rose in the air--the scent of sex, on our fingers, on my lips, and then all over my hair as she caressed me. It was an odor of beer and Winstons and sweat and sex and detergent and sun trapped in denim, and the sex was strongest. We were like two children playing pretend--now on the floor, now in a chair, on our knees, in her bed. We grinned stupidly, like wolves, and snuffled at each other.

That first dawn I came twice--the first almost as soon as I had entered her, the second in desperation when it became apparent she had lapsed into a kind of terrified, pained, interminable pre-orgasmic state. "It's not fair," I said afterwards, putting a little humor into my voice as I dabbed at the puddles I'd made on her belly. I was covered in sweat, and a little angry. I had, after all, buried my face down between her thighs. I wanted her to tell me how happy I'd made her. I needed a rating.

Somewhere among my clothes, the cell phone pulsed a couple of times--the battery signalling its temporary death. She stretched out an arm, one breast brushing my lips for a moment while she unplugged her own telephone receiver. Now we were unreachable. Incognito, exiled. I lay against her in the half light, still afraid to look into her eyes, the reality and the uncomfortable intimacy of what we had just done slowly sinking in.



MORNINGS as soon as my wife had left for work we made love, relentlessly, over the phone, her breathing exploding in my eardrum, her voice tiny, taut, almost weeping. In the office we devised little games by which we could do it, in our clothes, without contact, murmuring to each other as we pretended to surf the net. One night we stayed until everyone else had gone home, and as we made our way down a darkened corridor to the exit I pulled her to me, and we stumbled into the meeting room with its glass door and long table and swivel chairs. "This is our secret, ok?" I told her; it would be our private contract. She kissed my lips, slipping me the tongue. "I trust you." The heat was wretched. Her fingers knew nothing about button-flies and it took forever for her to open my jeans. She went for my cock as though trying to inhale it. I propelled her downwards until she knelt before me, then tugged at her hair, hard: "Now look at me. Look up at me." Deep, protesting sounds came from her throat. The darkness whirled. I felt myself coming. I wrenched her to her feet and slung her against the table, slipping into her from behind, one hand strumming the folds of her vulva, the other hard over her mouth. She bucked for a few moments, then turned languid and pliant. Someone entered the outer office then--one of the guards, training his light over the silent computers, the coffee maker, the rubber plant. He looked directly at us through the one-way glass; I met his unseeing eyes over her nape, but never once stopped the gentle movement of my pelvis. I fucked her, from behind, as though in some aquarium, fluid and in total silence. That was the night I found out what it was like to disappear.

Disappear--diffuse into the ether, to emerge in some motel room, falling sideways across the bed, the air crisscrossed with inaudible voices bouncing off our sweat-slicked bodies in waves. That summer I discovered how to live many lives: that you could be a totally different person in secret, that you could have a day face and a night face, a face for your lover, a face for your wife, a face for the fat and aging personnel manager who got you drunk buddy-fashion to hide her desire. I learned you could lie so efficiently as to deceive even yourself: watching my wife get dressed in the morning I would repeat word for word fictitious conversations with drinking buddies I made up then and there. When she had gone I would lie sleepily back in the pillows, staring at the parquet floor, the pink drapes, the shadow of the mango tree against the window--things that were my wife's and were now mine as well--and think with faint disgust of me and my lover lying in each other's arms just hours before.



BUT the thing was she simply didn't understand the dynamics of fucking. She began to demand favors as a matter of course, and how could I make her understand that these were things I couldn't even give the woman I was married to? She wanted kisses, on the lips and then on and on, over her breasts. She wanted pillow talk, her fingers moving over my chest in the familiar fashion of people you've grown up with. We swapped stories about losing our virginity, but she didn't much care about the women I'd bedded; she wanted to know how she measured up next to them, was she good, was she thin, did I like what I saw?

And she had this hang-up about love, a word she tried to slip in every now and then--"I love your body; I love saying your name"--to see how far she could go.

But it's not about love, it's never about love; it always starts with the clinical act of looking: at some girl, at her red-black hair and skin that's so pale it's literally white, the cute way she enunciates the t's at the ends of her words, the straps of her sandals alien to the accidental touch of lumpy jeepney-riding feet. It's in the looking and the chatting and the choosing, the incomparable thrill of finding a soul as horny as yours. Of finding out which one is attached but will come across, which one will ride in your car with you, direct you in the night to her little apartment with, invariably, a sports bra in the bathroom and a teddy bear on the bed.

It's discovering infinitesimal variations in a multitude, a paradox of flavors and textures, like the salmon and capers in that sandwich I once had at the Pen, at once tart and yielding, oozing pleasure onto your tongue.

There were moments when, listening to her respirations coming slower and deeper from within her chest, the corners of her mouth fluttering, I lost track of my own flesh. Was it the movement of her fingers, or mine, that caused that liquid warmth to spread unnervingly throughout my body; was that her tongue, were these my hands--

When, for a change, she touched herself as I watched, she did so with such sublime confidence, proud of her awakened cunt, offering it up to my gaze like a peeled fruit or a vulnerable and self-inflicted wound. It was unsettling to hear her calling my name. In orgasm she sounded like a child that had been whipped. She came so intensely after a while, and so often, that I found myself rising too soon afterwards to stumble to the bathroom, flagellating myself with cold droplets from the shower. One morning I discovered that a scrap antenna on the garbage truck had knocked our wires down; it was her time of the day to call and, longing acutely for her voice, I jerked off twice before I even got out of bed. After that I found myself putting in extra work not to be involved, and when that time came the sex was no longer fun.

I don't know how the people at work found out. She must have told; I am pretty sure I didn't. A casual mention, over beers, that I was fucking someone at the agency--that doesn't constitute telling, and the folks I was talking to were probably too drunk to hear. But it got around. In record time the usual morality posse in any office, the ones with an axe to grind against the pretty, were giving her the cold shoulder. It didn't help that she had alienated herself from them . Of course those had been my instructions: "to avert suspicion make sure we're never seen together." That put her in an invisible cell, for everyone was my buddy; I'm simply that sort of guy. If she'd been Machiavellian enough to fit into a corporate office she would have ignored my instructions, brazenly kept up our old flirtation. Hiding in plain sight. Instead, she'd sit miserably in her cubicle, occasionally chirping a question to one of her girlfriends, puzzling over the inevitable monosyllabic response.

Then someone took her off the cookie company account. The personnel manager wrote her a memo, but this one was about performance--she hadn't produced anything worthwhile in months--so it didn't have anything to do with me, nothing at all.

The strange thing about it was that everyone loved me; the guys flipped me knowing grins; the girls were extra nice, extra supportive, made it a point to start up private conversations with me whenever she was in the room. They plied me in shrill voices for stories about my wife, my little girl. The boss called me to his office, where to my surprise he poured me a beer. What's between you and her, he said, but he was a man who already knew the answer to that one and I bonded to him instantly. I told him as far as I was concerned, we were just friends; I didn't know what her problem was. We had a good laugh. He shook his head, and as I let myself out of his office, my face warm and my cheek twitching happily from the attention, I saw her, just coming out of the pantry, a styro cup of coffee in one hand. There was something different about her face, a tautness beneath the freshly-applied layer of makeup, and her jacket was something I hadn't seen before, too new, too radical; something a more exciting woman would wear. She looked into my eyes; I saw the panic there.

We encumber ourselves with the internet and phones and pagers, all the modern means of transmitting the word, but in the final analysis, despite the wonderful clarity of voice and image, we have nothing substantial to say. I turned from her and headed for my cubicle.



I STILL think about her sometimes, in the mornings when my wife has left the house and I'm drowsy and erect, my mind reaching for the phone even before I'm fully awake. This is the only time of the day that I have for myself--my nights are spent in bars now, usually with company, and on weekends we take the baby to the mall. My daughter is taller and a whole lot heavier, she talks in a perfect American accent too; I don't know where she gets it, Nickelodeon maybe.

So, taking myself in hand, I think of the woman who was once my lover. I still hear the words she used to murmur, more for their sake than to get any meaning across: You are so good, why is this good, I love this part of you. I remember the curve of her buttocks and how satisfying it was to smack her there, lightly, just hard enough to hear the rich report. I remember the intensity of her gaze, rolling up to meet mine; how close she would come to asphyxiation; how fear and pleasure were indistinguishable in her eyes. All right, I'll say it; I miss her. Maybe I should have changed offices when it started; that would have been a whole lot more convenient. Now my memories are spoiled with a heavy dose of guilt at not once coming to her defense when they fired her, me who knew her work best.

I know it could be disastrous--my wife has been uncharacteristically curious about how I spend my evenings nowadays--but I wish she would call, just once, just to ask how I'm doing, preferably when I'm alone. Is she sleeping with someone now; is he married, too; does she have a new job? I knew her favorite radio station but never heard her speak the dialect she had used as a child. Nor found out what her hometown was called, whether her brother had once touched her breasts long ago the way I'd once explored my sister's, what would have gone into that children's book she was always saying she would write.

Sometimes scents, textures, entire blocks of memory will surface. I know enough about the human subconscious to understand that much of this is censored, broken and reassembled, to form something which, like a well-written advertorial, stops just short of the truth. When I see her again that secret shared pleasure will be gone, that trust, that certainty I had those nights when we were the last to leave the office and I needed to wait only a few seconds before I felt the pressure of her fingertips against my fly. I suppose all the people you ever knew amount to nothing more than impulses in your brain, chains of chemicals with lengthy names. After a while the substances in your system rearrange themselves and then you're all right.

One Saturday we came home later than usual, and as I loaded the week's groceries into the refrigerator, I caught my wife staring in puzzlement at the caller I.D. Someone had tried to contact us for three hours straight that evening, 67 times all told. I went cold. But the number was something I had never seen before.

The phone rang for the 68th time. I picked it up gingerly. It was a man on the other end, sounding drunk, disoriented and more than a little desperate--could he talk to Sheila?

It was a young voice, comfortable with his English, but a public school accent. Intrigued, I found myself being polite, for the first time in my life, to a stranger. I told him he had the wrong number, could perhaps check his address book instead of wasting his time. But the fellow didn't seem to understand. "I just want to talk to Sheila," he repeated; growing more and more blustery the longer he talked, trying to fathom the relationship between his Sheila and this unknown man about his age on the other end. Finally I slammed the phone down. I thought of this phantom Sheila, if that was her name, and wondered where she lived and if she was at home right now, doing stretches on the floor of the bedroom she shared with a friend, after a dinner of Dulcinea carrot cake that she worried would wind up on her bony ass. I saw her laughing goodbye in the first light of morning, girl in platforms, girl with Bellady red hair, slipping this moron a number randomly scrawled before disappearing into a taxi, never wanting to see him again but too charitable to spoil the afterglow. I've taken to dialing pager numbers now, sort of for my own amusement. I punch in the autopage suffixes, and then the other five or so numbers at random. I listen to the greeting messages. It's mostly boring, uninvolved, unemotional stuff. Hi. This is Dr. Enriquez. Please leave your message so I can get back to you.

Some folks, though, they will play their favorite song. Once I even got a blast of synthesized sound. Funny what elaborate forms of camouflage people will erect. Professional tones or electronic noise, it's all the same thing: a bid to keep distance, over a system designed to thwart it.

But one night I got this girl, with a light, scratchy teenage-slut sort of voice. I paged her via the operator and left her my cell phone number, but she didn't return my call. It was a relief to have something else occupy my mind, and the more I dialled her number, the more her message grew on me. A teasing salutation, then a phone number rattled off in some elusive language, too low and rapid to decipher, and then gasping little kissy-kissy sounds as the tape ran out. She was too young, I figured, to have any notion of soul. A clean slate, nascent; no talent, no career and no ripened sexuality to juggle.

I jerked off to the sound of her voice through the receiver. But it wasn't any good. I would have gladly traded in the past six months for a shot at the rest of her. Puppy-ear breasts, dimples, and her hands in particular, pale, perfectly-oval fingernails with cuticles calcified from too much pruning. Hands of which she would be vain.

The touch of a stranger is hot and exotic, a world apart from your own. Tentative at first, it turns forceful right when you least expect it, a foolhardy bid for intimacy, flooding you all the way to your heels with triumph and joy. That's all we look for basically, a little joy.

BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: KARA'S PLACE

KARA'S PLACE
by Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak

I'M pretty sure there are only two rats. I've seen both so often that I can tell them apart now, and ever since I gave them names, I've started feeling something almost like affection for them. I mean, I don't feed them or anything -- they manage to steal quite enough of my food, thank you -- but at least I don't freak out any more when they pop up, and I don't reach for the nearest blunt object. I saw Ludlum (he's the smaller, darker one) this morning, just behind the dishrack, and Le Carré paid me a visit as I was eating lunch. I guess that's how I think of them now: they're visitors, and God knows I don't get many of those here in Krus na Ligas.

Well, there's Eric, of course. It's kind of funny; we've known each other for years -- went to the same high school and all -- and we've never really been more than buddies, but nowadays, I think he's gotten kind of sweet on me. Why else would he squeeze his Civic into the narrow streets of KnL? Why else would he hang out in this lousy place? I mean, to call my room makeshift would be an act of kindness; it doesn't seem constructed so much as slapped together. That it's an architectural afterthought is proven by a window set in its back wall: a grimy screen covers said window, and its wooden jalousies have now been nailed shut, but anyone can see that it once served as the house's front window. I guess the owners needed some extra money, looked at the square meter or so of extra space in front of their house, and decided to cobble together a "room" for some gullible student, i.e. me, to rent.

The right wall was made out of hollow blocks, up to a point, that is. From around waist height upwards, it's just chicken wire, supported by a wooden framework. This fact is just barely disguised by the heavy yellow curtains that hang down from the roof. The left wall is made of wood; but it's also unfortunately a shared wall. Half of it belongs to the people next door, I can hear them arguing from here.

I don't really mind all that, though. I've rented worse places. I spend most of my time asleep anyway, so I don't give a damn about the interior design, or lack thereof. The noise I can tune out, after a while; it just becomes like a background hiss, like the white noise an off-duty TV makes when it's way past midnight and you're nodding off on the couch. The thing that bugs me, though, is when I have to go into the main house to use the bathroom. Of course I know enough never to step out of the bathroom wearing just a towel or even a bathrobe; but for my landlord's useless son it's apparently a turn-on just to see me in shorts and slippers. I have to pass through the kitchen to get to the CR, and if he happens to be there, I'll feel his gaze on me, travelling the length of my body up and down. I don't even have to glance at him to know this; he's not exactly subtle about it. Get a job, I want to tell him; get a goddamned life.

A knock sounds on my door. My door is made of cheap lawanit half-heartedly reinforced by some galvanized iron. Somehow any sounds produced by striking it don't sound quite real, and so I wait until I hear the knock a second, a third time, before I get up to answer.

"Who is it?" I call.

"Just me," a familiar voice replies.

"Eric?"

"Yah."

I push my monobloc chair aside to clear the way to my so-called closet. The chair makes an irritating scraping sound. "Hold on," I say, as I open the closet door, and tug at one of the drawers. "Just give me a minute or two to make myself decent."

"Okay," he says, as I rummage for a bra -- my white T-shirt is pretty flimsy, and there are limits to my bohemianism. I find one, snap it on, then get up and open the door.

"Hi, Kara," he says, with a big grin and a small hand-wave, as though I were several meters away. The goof.

"Hey, Eric," I smile, " -- come in." I point at the chair. "Sit down, feel at home." He sits, quite happily obedient, and I can't help trusty-canine comparisons from springing to my mind. I know, I know, I can be so mean. And to think Eric's one of those rare persons I actually like.

I sit down on my bed; it's an old army-issue steel number whose aged springs creak whenever I shift my weight.

"So. How are your classes?" Eric asks, plunging straight away into the small talk. A new semester has just begun, our second here in this university, and for the first time in a long while I don't feel the usual surge of enthusiasm for a new grading period, that wave of self-delusion that has me telling myself, this time I'm going to work my butt off, this time I'm getting high grades in everything. I just feel kind of blah about it all.

"My classes? They'd be okay if they didn't interfere with my sleep so much."

Eric laughs, and then his face turns serious and he says, "Kara? Can I talk to you about something that's been bothering me a little?" I say sure, go ahead.

Eric starts talking about this quartet of sweaty sando-clad men who don't seem to do anything except hang out at the sari-sari store down the street. He says that, just now, when he got out of his car and glanced at them, he noticed that they were drunk. He goes on about how they could be dangerous, about how one of these nights when I'm going home, you know, something could happen, that I should let him fetch me from my last class every day, it's no big deal...

I feel like telling him that I'm pretty sure they're all right, that they seem nice enough, that all they ever do when they're drunk is sing -- badly -- but I know he'll just say I'm being uncharacteristically naive. I also feel like asking, hey, wait, what are we anyway? What's this fetch-me-every-day business? Did I miss something? Aren't we getting a little bit ahead of ourselves? But sometimes it's just easier to let awkward questions simmer, in the false hope that they'll evaporate completely. So instead, I stare absent-mindedly at my lumpy mattress. It's covered with a shabby white bedsheet decorated with little orange flowers.

Then, just as Eric finishes up his speech, there's a tap on the roof. And then another. And another. We look up. It's beginning to rain.

We sit there for a while, listening to the taps coming faster and stronger, listening to the rain gathering strength. Soon it sounds like the entire Filipiniana Dance Group, on steroids, is performing on the roof.

"Ha! Never fails... Just had the car washed." Eric shakes his head, and then a slow grin spreads across his face. "You remember Jo-ann's birthday, in senior year?"

How could I forget? Jo-ann was one of only a handful of people in our batch who had a car, and she was the only one who had a new car, a brand-spanking-new Galant, as opposed to the secondhand slabs of rust that normally sputtered around the parking lot. And so, on her birthday, the barkada decided to slather gunk all over her car, as a surprise. The plan was that we would bring cans of shaving cream, spray their contents all over the car's surface, put some cherries on the hood, and then hide. When Jo-ann returned to the parking lot, we would savor our view of her stunned expression, and then suddenly leap out of the hedges, scream 'surprise!' and then cheerfully wipe off all the gunk. The problem was, we didn't know that the shaving cream would eat right through the car's paint job. We spent the next few months pooling our allowances to pay for the repair work.

Eric and I are laughing, as we tell each other the story again. "And then," I say, gasping, "and then there was that time when we were sophomores, and it was raining like a bastard, raining so hard they cancelled classes, and then Rachel announced that she wanted to watch a movie...?" Eric is nodding his head vigorously. He finishes the story for me -- "Yeah, and we told her she was nuts, but somehow she commandeered the Assistant Director's official transport, and we got a free ride to the mall!"

Story follows familiar story. Do you remember that time in the biology lab, when...? And how about that day at the fair... We've forgotten the room, the ratty yellow curtains, the question of us. For the moment, we're somewhere else, safe from decisions and possibilities and consequences. We're in a shared area of memory, a kind of amusement park of the heart, where nothing goes awry unless it's for our enjoyment, where days past can be repainted in colors bright as happiness.

Sometimes I think that that's what I really like about Eric -- that we can talk about all that, all the stuff that happened to us in high school.

"Well," Eric concludes, "those were the days."

I make a derisive sound, something that's between a laugh and a snort. I don't know why. Is it because of the cliché? The fact that those words sound kind of stupid coming from someone who's not even twenty? Or maybe it's because his careless, tossed-off statement has scared me a little. What if those really were 'the days'?

Eric senses my unease, and steers the conversation back into safe waters. "So what are you taking this sem?" he asks.

I start rattling off my subjects. Communication II, Social Science, etcetera, etcetera, and Math 17.

"Hey," he says, frowning. "Didn't you take that last sem?"

"Yes," I say.

"So what's the deal?" He has a genuinely puzzled expression on his face.

I wonder how I'm going to answer him. Eric knows me well enough to realize that there's no way in hell I could have failed Math 17.

"I failed it."

"No way."

"It's true." I point at the containers arrayed by the kitchen sink. "Hey. You want something to drink? Iced tea? Coffee...? Some Dom Perignon, perhaps?"

"No, no… I'm okay." He brushes off my attempt to change the topic, with the determination of someone whose mind tends to run on a single track. "How could you fail Math? I mean, you were the best in high school. Everyone copied assignments off you. Heck, you probably solve calculus problems in your sleep!"

I shrug, and look away from him. I suddenly realize that I'm going to give him an explanation, and I don't want to be looking at him when I do. I pick up my newsprint edition of the Math 17 textbook, and flip it open to a random page: a mass of graphs, symbols and equations unfurls. I recognize this chapter, and some of the problems listed.

"Well..." I start, "Well, you know how, in Math, attendance doesn't mean anything?" He frowns. "I mean, that's what all the other Math majors told me. All the teachers care about is if you're good. Some of them don't even bother to check who's absent or present. All that matters is that you pass the exams."

Eric's still frowning. I begin to worry that he might crease his forehead permanently.

"So, my Math 17 class was at seven in the morning. Too early for me. I cut class, a lot. By the end of the sem, I was just showing up for the exams. And let me tell you, I aced those exams." I'm still looking at the open page. With my index finger, I trace an arc of plotted points on one of the graphs. "And then, just after the finals, my teacher asks me to see him in his office." I pause. I take a slow, deep breath.

"I go there, he's all smiles, come in, come in, he says. He sits down, points to a chair just opposite him, tells me to sit down. I do. He starts by saying that I didn't show up for classes enough, that I'm in trouble because I went over the maximum number of absences. I'm listening, and I don't know what to say in my defense. Suddenly his hand's resting on my thigh, and he's telling me that actually, the attendance really won't be a problem, as long as I'm not averse to the idea of having a little 'fun'."

Eric is staring at me, like he can't understand, much less believe what I'm saying, like all he's doing is watching my lips move.

"I left, of course. And when I got my class card, there was a big fat failing grade on it."

Eric blurts out, "Why didn't you tell me?" And then, as if fearing the honest answer to that question, he quickly asks another. "Did you confront him?"

"Sure I did. I asked Rach to come with me, we went to his room, and I told him that I thought the whole thing was stupid. I told him that our last encounter in his office constituted harassment. I also pointed out that there were other people in the section who cut class just as much as I did, and he didn't fail them. He denied that he ever came on to me, and, regarding the grade, he said that he was just executing University attendance policy. He also implied that I would be in big trouble if I spread my story around."

Eric is pissed off. He actually looks more pissed off than I ever was.

"Eric, calm down," I say, but looking at him, I know I'm wasting my words.

"Ba't ang yabang niya? Does he have a frat? Is he the brother of a senator or something?"

"What does it matter?"

"You're right, it doesn't matter. I mean, he's not gonna know who or what hit him anyway."

"That's not what I meant."

"Look, it's in the Bible! If you have a grievance against somebody, the first thing you do is talk to him. Then, if he doesn't listen, you bring a friend and you try to talk to him again. And then, after all else has failed, you have to go ahead and smite him. You know, beat the shit out of him."

"I know what smite means, thank you. And just where in the Bible did you read that?"

"I think it's in Matthew. I'm pretty sure that's what it says."

"I find that really hard to believe, Eric."

"Look," he says, and for the first time he frightens me. I'm looking into his eyes, and I realize that Eric, sort-of-goofy Eric, my old high school friend, is perfectly capable of premeditated violence. "Look, we have to do something. He can't get away with this."

"Eric, I swear to God, if I pick up the Collegian next week and find out he's the lead story, I'll never talk to you again."

He has nothing to say in response. He just sits there, his fists clenched, in silence. Finally, he mutters, "He just shouldn't get away with it."

I suddenly feel very tired.

Eric stands up. "I guess I should..." He makes some vague hand-motion in the general direction of the door, but otherwise he doesn't move. I look at his eyes; they're glistening. He puts his hand over them, as if to stop them from leaking.

I get up, walk over to him, and put my arms around him in a reassuring hug. The last time I hugged Eric was our graduation day, right after the last ceremony, when everyone was laughing and cheering, and throwing their programs in the air because we didn't have those silly four-cornered caps. That was a good day. Here, now, his arms wrap around me, and they start to squeeze just a little too tightly. He opens his wet eyes, looks at me, and his head ducks down and his mouth meets mine and I can feel his tongue work its way between my lips.

I push him away, with all the strength that suddenly surges into me. He staggers, and for a second he looks like he's going to fall, but he manages to plant his hand on the table for support.

"I'm sorry," he says, straightening up abruptly. He just stands there, looking utterly lost, frozen for a moment, and then he almost trips over his own feet as he turns around, and lunges for the door. He swings it open, and just like that, before I can say anything, before I can yell at him or offer him an umbrella to borrow, he's outside, running towards his car, getting drenched. I watch as he fumbles with his keys. Finally he manages to get in, and start the engine. His headlights blink on and he honks the car horn a couple of times. I make a small waving gesture, but I'm not sure if he can see me through this downpour.

I close the door, and sit down at my kitchen table. I pick up a screw-top plastic container, it's full of this iced tea powdered mix. I shovel a couple of tablespoons of the stuff into a glass, pour water into it and stir the whole thing vigorously, until I can no longer see the individual grains swirling around, until all that's left is a homogenous dark brown liquid. I take a swig. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ludlum as he zips across the kitchen sink's edge.

There are times when I wish rats could talk. Hell, there are times when I wish dogs could talk, and cats, and all sorts of animals, and inanimate objects too -- I could have conversations with my books, and ask my clothes which of them wants to go out today. I could go to our old school, run my hand across the pebbly surface of the Humanities building's walls, and thank my favorite narra tree -- the one near the Girls' Dorm -- for pleasant oblivious afternoons spent in its shade. I gulp down the last of my instant, too-sweet tea, and smack my lips. There's an unpleasant puckery aftertaste. I set the glass down on my table and shuffle over to my bed. The springs creak as I lie down. I take a deep breath, close my eyes. I can hear another argument starting next door. I can hear the scratching and scrabbling of my two rodent roommates as they cavort inside the hollow wooden wall to my left. And outside, there's the constant roar of the rain, as if the sky itself is laughing at some great joke that I just don't get.