Note: Because the story is long, and I'm so bleeping lazy, I just wrote in the first two of six parts.
Afterwards, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of the stuff swirling around my head. Visions of blood and umbilical cords and feeding bottles whirled around my eyes like malevolent frisbees. The newspaper was lying next to the platter of toast; I read the headline about two hundred times. "May use poison gas, Iraq warns." Next to it, a picture of a dead Kurdish woman clutching the body of her child. Mother. Child. I felt like throwing up all over again. I imagined the creature ripping out of my stomach in a gory mess, like the monster in Alien.
There was a Post-it note on the mirror: "Lunch with Lawrence, 12:30," Lawrence being a fifty-fifty candidate for the father. I painted a face on and stared at the mirror. I saw my belly swelling up, my clothes rising like a circus tent, and all I could think about was the ten pounds I'd just lost and the new dress I bought to mark the occasion. Finally I got my new dress out of the closet and put it on while it still fit.
In the elevator my next-door neighbor smiled and said Good morning. She had this sort of knowing smile, and I found myself wondering if she knew about me. I wasn't just being paranoid; this is Manila, the neighbors know everything. They are extremely sympathetic, and if you let them, they will take over your life. It turned out she was just trying to sell me a watch. Her husband managed to get out of Kuwait by driving across the dessert, and when he got home the banks refused to change his Kuwaiti dinars. that's why she was selling his watches. I felt kind of sorry for Mrs. Santos, setting out with her imitation Gucci handbag and several dozen gold bracelets to sell her husband's watches. Or was it Mrs. San Juan, I can never remember.
A nervous breakdown would've been in order, or a fit of tears or keening, the kind that comes with a runny nose and smeared mascara. But I've never been one for hysteria. Thanks to my parents, by the time I was eight the sight of a chair being hurled across the room was no longer cause for alarm. Maybe there is something to be said for a lousy home life. Ramon says my emotional range is limited to rage, guilt, and occasional hilarity. He neglected to mention blankness--there are when just don't feel anything.
Ramon also claims he can read my thoughts by looking at me--he says I'm transparent. I hope so; it's embarassing to tell somebody there's a fifty per cent chance that he may be a father in several months.
By the time it occured to me to catch a ride I was halfway to my office and decided to walk the rest of the way. I was swallowed up by the crowd of people hurrying to work; rising above the din of traffic, their footfalls sounded like the marching of a distant army.
In the front of the church where rosaries and good-luck charms were sold under the baleful stare of the Archangel Michael's statue, a strange figure appeared on my right: a filthy man with long, matted hair. A tattered bag was slung across his bare chest, upon which his ribs protruded like spikes. A thick layer of soot covered his emaciated body--he looked like a walking pile of ashes. He started speaking to me in urgent tones, as if he were revealing important secrets, and there was a crazy glint in his eyes. I understood nothing. He was speaking either in dialect or in gibberish, I couldn't tell, I looked on stupidly. People stared, expecting perhaps that he would produce a cleaver and hack me to death. The man went on with his weird recitation; why he chose me, I had no idea, maybe he could see past the designer clothes into my dark and grimy soul. After a while he frowned like a teacher who had just given up on a particularly moronic student. Then he wheeled and dashed into the church, stopping a moment to rub with his filthy hands the scowling face of the Archangel Michael.
Positive, she said cheerily, as if I shouldn't go out and hang myself this instant. I held on to the phone for a long time; I was sure that if I let go, I'll fall down. the coffee turned to mud in my mouth--I ran to the sink and heaved. Congratulations, it's a fetus. You frigging idiot.
"It's exactly as Nostradamus said," Pocholo announced. "He predicted earthquakes signalling the end of the world, and we had that big one last month. Then he said a leader from the Middle East would launch a world war. I thought it would be Khadaffi but no, it's Saddam Husein."
"Sure," I said. I watched Wilma slam the phone so hard it fell to the floor. Cursing mightily, she stopped to pick it up. On this particular day, she was clad in polyester cloth abloom with pink and purple flowers, which made her look like a demented sofa.
"Anyway," Pocholo continued, "my aunt says they saw this vision in Taal." His voice dropped to a whisper. "They saw a horseman in the sky."
"A what?"
"A man on a horse. Riding across the sky. A hundred schoolchildren saw it. According to my aunt it looked like the statue of St. Martin that stands in their church."
"St. Martin on a horse?" I said. "Maybe that was St. George or Joan of Arc. I don't think St. Martin rode a horse."
"No, stupid," he said. "You're thinking of St. Martin de Porres. We're talking about St. Martin of Tours. And you know what? My aunt says they saw the same vision before the World War II. Then the Japanese arrived." He ran his fingers through his artfully moussed and tousled hair. "Oh my God, what if it's really the end. I mean, I don't even have a kid yet."
I looked away so he wouldn't see me grimace, and was just in time to see Wilma spitting into her wastebasket.
All morning I wondered whether I should ask Wilma for her abortionist's address. She would give me the address, I knew, even accompany me to the place. Probably some decrepit wooden house in the fetid alleys of Tondo, where the gangs hunted each other down with homemade revolvers. Wilma hid nothing, she wore her brazen honesty like a soiled and rusty halo. She had had four abortions, she told me casually while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom; the washerwoman down the street performed the operations, she owed Wilma money. I imagined Wilma's insides, as torn and bloody as a battlefield. She said, she'd regretted her last abortion: it was a girl, she'd always wanted a baby girl. She put her fetus in a jar of formaline and kept it in the drawer where her wedding dress, which had outlasted their marriage, lay yellowing among mothballs and dead flowers.
The others she'd flushed down the toliet.
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Geo g'book sucks?
