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| PEARLSHA ABUBAKAR |
| Espiritu Santos |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
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| THIS IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |
| I
A few hours before her death, Fatima sat on a bench at the Riverparks, read a book aloud, scribbled and drew on a sketch pad. When she was done with her sketch of a young man’s face, she turned her pad outward, gripped the sides with both hands and weakly called out Joshua’s name. Actually, she didn’t need to call him; all the while Joshua had been right there beside her. But though she wasn’t blind, Fatima couldn’t see him anymore. She could never see him again as long as she lived. But Joshua knew it wouldn’t be long before they could be together again. As Fatima continued to draw and her death drew inexorably closer and closer, he remembered the first time he saw her three years ago, on February 20, 2020. He could never forget: after all, it was the day of his own internment. He had woken up inside the church, feeling very thirsty, and while trying to drink from a baptismal font, he saw his whole family – his mother, father and sister, friends – sitting on the benches, staring blankly ahead. A white funeral casket topped by a huge wreath lay in front of the altar. Behind the casket stood the priest, who solemnly intoned his full name every once in a while: Joshua Espiritu Santos. He screamed. But no one could hear him. His casket was soon wheeled outside the church, towards a waiting car. A gaggle of people consisting of half-remembered distant relatives, friends and colleagues looked on as his dad, sister and friends carried the casket and pushed it inside the car. Meanwhile, his mother, who had been standing on the side, suddenly fainted. A young woman in jeans and a ruffled white blouse sprang out from behind and helped his mom up to her feet. He’d never seen her before. She was light-skinned, chinky-eyed and had long, straight hair in a ponytail. After a few seconds, his mom regained consciousness. At this point, his dad had taken over, helping her into a car. The tumult of the whole episode had carried everybody away along with his casket, to be shut off in the funeral cars inside their minds. Meanwhile, no one, except Joshua, had noticed the young woman quietly slipping away towards the back of the church, to a path in the courtyard that led out into the street, where a black Honda Civic lay waiting. Mystified, Joshua followed her, getting into the car with her as she made her way home. She lived in a two-storey house in New Manila. Two figures in the dining room, her mom and dad, called her out to join them for lunch. But she didn’t seem to be in the mood to eat. She politely hollered back as she climbed the stairs to her room, plopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. What was she thinking? Joshua wanted to know. He suddenly remembered how Hollywood movies often portrayed ghosts as having immense powers of extrasensory perception, reading minds like huge billboards. But aren’t thoughts very quick, like dragonflies? Joshua felt that it took much effort to catch one and clip its wings, and didn’t get any easier with death. He thought: if one is no longer able to hold a glass, a pen between your fingers, then how much more an airy thought? So, to get an idea of the general flow and ebb of her thinking, Joshua had to stare at Fatima’s face for a long while, wait for the dragonfly to alight. But he never caught it. Instead, it caught him. She had a beauty that grew on you the longer you stared at it. Her small, faraway eyes, pulsing like quasars; her jet-black hair, with hints of copper lost in the strands, fanning out across her pillow. In repose, her curves became more distinct: the small mounds of her breasts, the fat of her hips and thighs, her bottom-heavy loveliness. He’d never seen this woman before in his life, but in his death, Joshua would come to know her intimately. Her colleagues called her Fatima, her close friends called her Fats, and her parents called her Ponchang. She worked at a construction company owned by her family in Binondo. It was one of the few establishments left in an increasingly wireless world, where people still counted the money with their hands, typed on a computer with their fingers, talked to people the traditional way, face-to-face, eye-to-eye. Most Filipinos these days preferred cell phone texting to direct contact, tapping messages with their fingers even to people in the same household or office. While everyone was already into tiny holographic phones like the popular Touchless 007, Fatima still sported a clunky Nokia 3210 that went “low-bat” all the time. Joshua especially looked forward to weekends with her, since, to his pleasant surprise, she also spent them hanging out in his favorite places: the Riverparks, which had a beautiful park by the river, and where the headquarters of his organization MoMad (Mountain Madness Club) was located. She also visited Cubao X at the Araneta Center, a quaint group of specialty shops where she ate lunch at Bellini’s, an authentic Italian restaurant where the blonde-haired Italian owner Roberto personally waited on you, and drank homegrown tea at the nearby Black Soup cafe while reading a dog-eared copy of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air – which also happened to be his favorite adventure book of all time. Every night, Joshua still went home to his family, who’d given up finding his murderer. It was good for them, since it was causing everybody so much pain and sleepless nights. His mom still cleaned his room everyday. His family had set up an altar with a huge photograph of Joshua beside his bed, where they prayed the rosary every night and left a platter of food and a glass of water. The photograph was distracting to Joshua, to say the least, but the glass of water was a big help, as they evoked memories that kept his intense thirst at bay. But there was another kind of thirst Joshua could never quench: his desire for Fatima to see him, to talk to him. He’d whittle away his time sitting on top of tall buildings, walking on telephone poles, hopping on water lilies, hanging on to a wing of a passing airplane, thinking about her. He had all the time in the world. He went to Nepal and climbed Mt. Everest, the subject of his favorite book by Krakauer. He stayed there for three years. The place was teeming with ghosts, who were thickly concentrated on a point near the Hillary Step, an almost vertical ice-face that presented a climbing challenge to mountaineers, but not to the dead ones, who glided by effortlessly, and heckled the humans making their way. It was here where Joshua first saw the immense ball of light that he would encounter a few times during his journey in this world. “What’s on the other side?” he asked a ghost, a bearded mountaineer named Rob who’d died on the mountain and whom he recognized from the pictures in Krakauer’s book. “Nobody knows,” the mountaineer replied. “How do you know when you’re ready?” “Edmund Hillary was once asked why he wanted to climbed Everest, and he quipped, ‘because it is there.’ Same with the light. You go to it because it is there.” And the light came and the mountaineer, along with the others, walked towards it and disappeared forever. However, a handful of them failed to disappear, rejected, as it were, by the light, in the same way that Everest, the great Sagarmatha, deprived unfortunate climbers of her glorious peak. One of them was a Sherpa guide named Ngowe, who’d died from a bad fall. Meanwhile, he and Joshua quickly became friends. “Man, what happened to you?” Ngowe asked him one day. Joshua stared at him, uncomprehending. “The knife. In your back,” Ngowe said. Joshua reached for it and felt the plastic handle of a balisong midway through his back. He tried to remove it, but the knife remained securely buried in its place. “I tried to save a man from being held-up,” he replied. “Is that why you still roam? To find your killer?” After a long while, Joshua said. “No. There’s a girl.” And he told him about Fatima. Soon enough, Joshua began to get homesick, and Ngowe accompanied him back to Manila. Since they’d been riding on planes the whole time, they took the boat for a change. It was packed with people – and ghosts, who stood and sat in the aisles, on the armrests. The ghost children sat gleefully astride on the railings near the starboard, under the chairs, and even under the boat itself. Some of them were playing peek-a-boo and causing quite a racket. As they approached the pier, people took advantage of the cell phone signal that had now come back on as they quickly activated their tiny holographic cellphones, which they either wore as pendants around their necks or wrists. These phones could project a virtual monitor and keyboard on any surface, and everyone was tapping away, like clerks on speed. The two then made their way to New Manila, to pay Fatima a visit. A mass had just ended in a small church along the way, and people with crosses on their foreheads were walking out into the street. “What’s going on?” asked Ngowe. “It’s the start of the Lenten season,” explained Joshua. “The ash crosses remind us that from ashes we came and to ashes we return.” “So does this mean no sexy films showing in moviehouses?” Ngowe smiled naughtily as Joshua grinned back. They encountered many fellow ghosts along the way. They appeared to Joshua imbued with a new alertness. For instance, Margallo, the famous dancing traffic policeman who was killed when a car ran over him while he was in action, was no longer just sulking in the corner but had resumed his operations, directing traffic at an intersection and dancing his trademark chickenman jig while at it. Manang Nora, the white lady from Balete drive, sat on the passenger seat of a taxi, gesticulating wildly to the driver. Josie, who’d lived and died a prostitute, sashayed beside a short, stocky human fellow as she smoked a cigarette. As they approached Fatima’s house, Joshua was seized by a most delicious dread. He had been away for more than three years, isolated in Everest. How was she? How had her life turned out? The house was empty. Joshua and Ngowe took the shortcut, going right through her window into her room, and waited. It was still the same spic-and-span affair, with the wood parquet flooring waxed to a shine. Her bed lay parallel to the large bay window. A cassette player with small speakers sat on a built-in shelf across the bed. A brocade cover protected it from the elements. Beside the cassette player was a shoebox crammed with old cassette tapes. He and Ngowe sat on the edge of her bed and waited. Just a few minutes later, she arrived, wearing a ponytail, jeans, a shirt, and an ash cross on her forehead. She quickly threw a glance on the bed and for a while Joshua thought she saw them. But then, she slowly made her way to her cassette player, fingered the shoebox and her collection of tapes. Fatima slowly took a cassette out of the shoebox, and then, to their utter surprise, hurled it straight at them. The cassette case hit the wall behind them and cracked open like a nut, exposing the tape. He and Ngowe froze. “Why won’t you leave me alone?!” she screamed. Fatima’s lips – her whole face, in fact -- had turned red. Without another word, he and Ngowe got up to leave. “Joshua?” she whispered, color draining from her face. He and Ngowe exchanged glances. “Be right outside,” Ngowe said as he glided out and disappeared into the door. For the first time, Joshua and Fatima saw each other, and both were struck dumb for a long while. “I just want to ask you some questions,” Joshua said softly. “I’m really sorry about that, ghosts just keep popping in unannounced. Naughty little boys and lechers, driving me crazy. I can’t even undress in my own room anymore,” she sighed. “Why is this happening?” he asked, incredulous. “How come you can see me now?” Fatima stared at him in disbelief. “Oh Joshua, where have you been?” she said, furrowing her brows. “SMS activity from cell phone users went critical a few years ago. Now it’s gotten worse,” she explained, reaching for her broken cassette tape across the bed and sliding it back into the shoebox. “The huge volume of traffic caused by cell phones emits electromagnetic waves that alter the alpha frequency in our brain and enable us to see and hear you ghosts.” “How about my friend Ngowe? Will his family be able to see him back in Nepal?” “No. Apparently, the phenomenon is exclusive to the Philippines and in areas where the electromagnetic traffic is strong.” “You’re not scared?” “Oh, we’ve all gotten used to it. I’ve seen scarier-looking ones that played tricks on me years ago. I couldn’t sleep well for weeks.” Silence. Fatima stood motionless in front of him, incredulous, looking at him with a tender glaze in her eyes. Joshua cleared his throat and said: “Actually, I came here to see you.” She blushed. “I can’t believe this.” “I saw you at my funeral. You helped my mother. Do we know each other?” “Kind of.” “How come?“ She was silent for a long while, pursing her lips as though trying to prevent the answer from escaping in her breath. Finally, she relented and giggled. “MoMad invitational climb, February 2017. Mt. Banahaw,” she looked at him staring blankly at her, and shook her head. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?” “We do that climb every year, and a lot of non-mountaineers join ---“ Joshua mumbled apologetically. He’d never felt so dumb and stupid in his after-life. “I joined the climb, and I saw you. You were guiding another team up the mountain.” She hesitated, then continued. “I started following you after that. I’d go to the Riverparks, at the Cubao X.” She took a deep breath and gave Joshua a shy smile. Joshua smiled, shaking his head in disbelief. She grinned in turn. “Did they ever catch your killer?” she gently asked. “No. My family gave it up. Good for them. I wouldn’t want my mom to keep going through that,” he said. “Fatima. Your name is Fatima, right?” Then it was her turn to stare incredulously at him. Joshua spent the whole night talking with Fatima, explaining how he came to know her, and as the night grew deeper, how he wanted to spend more time with her, and as the sun streamed in the next morning, how he wanted her. Fatima didn’t want to waste any more time, having wasted so much of it already by not doing anything about her affections for him when he was still alive. She confessed she loved him the moment she laid eyes on him. “You had that light about you. You struck me as someone very kind,” she said. “Thank you,” he laughed. Joshua came back home with Ngowe early the next day, shaken and stirred by Fatima’s revelations, but also very happy. His mom fainted again. Joshua asked them to keep away his photograph. His mom insisted on hanging it on the wall in the living room. II Everything had changed now that people could see the earthbound spirits that had for a long time lived quietly among them. Though they couldn’t touch and move anything, much less inflict physical harm, and cameras and microphones couldn’t capture their likeness and voice, ghosts had become an indispensable part of Philippine society. They worked as security guards especially on graveyard shifts, teachers, traffic policemen, circus freaks, stuntmen, Department Of Health-approved sex workers, singers, stage actors, entertainers in live shows, and all-around guides who could give directions to travelers lost in remote places and treasure-hunters looking for sunken ships under the sea. Their salaries were automatically remitted to their still-living families, and their services vastly improved the country’s economy. Meanwhile, Joshua introduced Fatima to his family, who liked her instantly. But Fatima’s family was another matter. Her grim-faced parents shook their heads at Joshua, bluntly telling him that he was dead and their daughter (‘our only daughter,’ they stressed) was still alive. How was he supposed to protect and take care of her? And how were they ever going to have children? Fatima’s parents barred them from seeing each other again, but they always found a way out. Meeting up in their favorite park, the Riverparks, they’d take long walks together or sit on their favorite bench facing the sunset as Fatima tried in vain to draw Joshua’s face on a sketch pad. During one such time, they passed by a great banyan tree, whose branches dipped low like someone curtsying. It was teeming with ghosts sitting and sleeping on the branches. They were all waiting for the Light. “Sometimes, don’t you just wish you’d crossed over sooner?” Fatima asked him. “Before I met you, probably,” he told her. “But now, we’ll have to go together.” And he kissed her and it felt real. Up until that point, Joshua had not taken the trouble to find a job; he had the full support of his family, who was only too happy to have him back. But now, faced with resistance from Fatima’s parents, Joshua had to find a way to convince them that he was worthy of their daughter’s love, and even more so than any man alive. He knew that Fatima loved her parents dearly, and to make her truly happy, he had to find a way to make them happy as well. Perhaps if he made himself useful to society, they would change their view of him. The Department of Ghost Affairs was created by the Philippine government for dead people wanting to earn a living for their families. As soon as Joshua entered the premises, a very modern, multi-million peso building along Roxas Boulevard, he was given a once-over by one of the staff and herded off into a room along with other ghosts who had what was called “projection problems.” These were people whose gruesome deaths had marked them forever. Some had eyes and limbs popping out of their sockets. Some held their brains or intestines or severed heads in their hands. They had trouble finding regular jobs because employers found them too scary-looking and could only manage seasonal jobs in circuses, especially in horror shows. Most of them had already finished their contract with Fiesta Carnival, which replenished its ranks with new hirees every six months or so. Among these poor ghosts, those who’d been murdered had better chances of getting compensated than those who’d deliberately maimed themselves. A ghost could file a murder case against his killer, who would then be compelled by the Department to pay his victim a certain percentage of all his earnings for as long as he lived, and after his death, for as long as he was earthbound. Joshua thought the rules were crazy, as they merely propagated the cycle of violence and hardship that human society in general should be trying to eradicate. He saw no point in finding his killer and meting out his brand of justice. Crime does not pay and it must remain that way. Besides, ghosts not only had to deal with the complexity of filing a case but also with red tape and the attendant graft and corruption. Joshua felt that the easiest way to deal with this was to give equal treatment to ghosts regardless of their appearance and enshrine this in the Constitution. Death itself should be amnesty enough. Surrounded by fellow ghosts whose only crime was dying an ugly death, Joshua found his calling, a calling that had eluded him when he was still alive. He eventually formed a ghost workers’ union, Karapatan Para Sa Manggagawang Multo (KASANGGA MO), the moving spirit, as it were, behind it. His newfound advocacy took him to many places across the country. Though the union was comprised mostly of the scary, less fortunate ghosts who had trouble finding jobs, many other ghosts were soon signing up. Joshua personally went to all the newspaper offices to tell his story about how ghosts were being discriminated against, how they were being treated like second-class citizens in their own country. Most of the newspapers were sympathetic to his cause and published his plea for sobriety, along with an accompanying image of himself, complete with the knife still on his back, that an artist had drawn on the spot in one of his interviews. Fatima went with him as often as she could, even as her parents plotted to marry her off to a young and successful businessman as quickly as possible. At first, Joshua met a lot of resistance, not from the ghosts, but from the still-living families they were supporting, until he made them realize, through endless dialogues, that they were, in fact, the real beneficiaries of this move. Soon, ghost workers were going on strike across the country, paralyzing many industries. The government couldn’t stand back and do nothing anymore. It couldn’t make ghosts, impervious to hunger and physical pain, feel its cruel indifference and military might. Joshua pressured many sectors, including Congress, to hold a Constitutional Convention to discern the popular will about ghosts and their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention their right to employment. Soon, he had built a loyal following, although just as many people were opposed to his idealism, wanting to take the path of least resistance. “This world isn’t meant for beings like you,” someone told Joshua. “You can’t change the world.” “Yes you can. Because it has changed,” said Joshua. The activities of KASANGGA MO deeply troubled the head of the Department of Ghost Affairs himself, Secretary Ferdinand Sanchez, a former mechanical engineer who’d risen from relative obscurity by marrying into a political family. Sanchez received a phone call from his father- in- law, Congressman Dimaculangan, one day. “Who does this Joshua Santos think he is?” the Congressman roared. “Are you going to just sit there and do nothing about this? He’s making you look like a fool!” “As a matter of fact,” said Sanchez. “I have an idea.” III As early as eight in the morning in an amphitheater in Quezon City, a large crowd of humans had gathered to hear Joshua and his party of ghosts announce their platform and urge the government to create a constitutional convention to amend the Constitution and give the ghosts their rights. But there was a huge problem: nobody could see Joshua and his party. As soon as Joshua and his party had set foot in the amphitheater, they disappeared from sight. This happened in all the rest of the venues where the local police had permitted them to hold their rallies. The human crowds could not see and hear them, so they thinned out and eventually dispersed. “We’ve been put in the dead spots!” said Margallo, Joshua’s partymate. After careful investigation, Joshua discovered that Margallo was right. They had been issued permits to hold their rallies in areas outside the coverage of cell phone transmitters, where the electromagnetic field was nonexistent. Joshua wanted to file a complaint against the National Police, which had issued them their permits in the first place. But who would hear his complaint? Perhaps the media could help him. But the newspapers were no longer as cooperative as before. His media contacts hinted at powerful people blocking his efforts. His story became a little two-hundred word bit on page 20 of the Bulletin. But a few weeks later, something happened that made it to the front page of the all the leading broadsheets in the country. Secretary Ferdinand Sanchez, the head of the Department of Ghost Affairs, died -- of a heart attack. Joshua then received an invitation from the First Lady of the Republic to a lunch meeting in Malacañang. To Joshua’s surprise, Sanchez was there – as a ghost, asking the First Lady to convince the President to put him back in his former post. He promised to cooperate with Joshua this time in improving the situation of the ghost laborers. “Madame,” Joshua told the First Lady, “may I respectfully suggest that you put back Mr. Sanchez in office? Frankly, Mr. Sanchez knows much more about the system than I do, and I believe everyone deserves a second chance.” In just a few days, the announcement was made public. Ferdinand Sanchez was reinstalled as head of the Department of Ghost Affairs, while Joshua Espiritu Santos, a former mountaineer turned ghost labor union leader, was to be his new Undersecretary. But nothing else changed. However, Joshua’s relationship with Fatima’s parents improved dramatically. Fatima came by his office one day to invite him to dinner – with her parents, at their house. When he arrived at the house, the mother herself led him to the dining room, where he was served a huge bowl of fragrant pandan water while everybody else ate salad and honey chicken. For the first time, Fatima’s parents treated him like a real person, like a real man, as they talked to him about art and society, about religion, which had been thrown into yet another existentialist chaos because of the emergence (or rather, re-emergence) of the ghost society. Joshua noticed Fatima listening intently, her eyes glazed with happiness, not fixed on any one spot but suffused in the whole moment. For the first time, he saw her truly and completely happy, and his heart leapt at the sight of her joy. For the first time in his after-life, he had a job; he could marry Fatima and support her. They could adopt children. They could have a life together. They could be happy. Then the revelation came one day, as Joshua and Fatima sat together on a bench at their favorite park, watching the sunset. “Joshua, where are you?” said Fatima, frantically turning her head left and right looking for him. “I’m right here, my love,” he whispered. But Fatima couldn’t see and hear him. She stood up, looking for him all over the park, as he followed her, practically screaming in her ear: “I’m here my love! I’m right here!” “Fatima is sick,” her mother finally confessed to him. “Since when?” “A month ago.” The tumor was located in her pineal gland and was somehow blocking Fatima’s brain from perceiving the ghost dimension: Ngowe, Margallo, her dear Joshua. In a matter of weeks, Fatima’s condition went from bad to worse. She went to the hospital for chemotherapy every twenty-one days and spent most of her time resting at home. Her parents translated for Joshua as he told her how much he loved her, until he began repeating himself and the words ran out. There was nothing else to do but wait. IV Sitting on her favorite bench at the Riverparks, facing the sunset, a few hours before her death, Fatima continued to sketch Joshua’s face on her pad. She seemed especially pleased with the eyes, unusually large and deep-set, and the lips, full and dewy like cherries. “I think I caught your eyes,” she said. Sitting right beside her, Joshua put an arm about her, looked at the drawing and nodded, smiling. In the distance, he saw a red balloon blow across the sky, and heard the sound of church bells tolling. This story won Third Prize for Futuristic Fiction in the 2005 Palanca Awards |