Where are you taking me, she said.
Out of LA. He started the car.
What happened in there.
They’re dead. Can you trust me for a minute and keep your head down please, he said.
Why–
Just for a minute he said, and pulled out. OK you can sit up. Let me help you.
Up the street he stopped next to a fire hydrant; water oozing out around the bolts in the cracked concrete, already black. Around them trees on fire. Houses collapsed, smoking. The wind picked up; a burning LA X-Press hooker paper blew onto the windshield with a 2 page color spread of SUCCULENT CHRISTINA. She was fat, looked 50. He had to reach around out the window to peel her off. To the south and east, smoke columns churning dark and swarming with lightning. No cars on the road but half the phone poles were down, wires snaking onto the asphalt. How to get out. He reached across her waist and cranked the plastic dial forward to raise up her seat back.
I’m sorry to be weird but I don’t think we can let people see you, he said. Whatever men are left will want a car and a girl. He turned on the radio. For a full minute the Emergency Broadcast System tone played, indicating an emergency. No shit. He turned it off.
What happened, she said again. He said: nuclear holocaust.
I have to find my parents–
Where are they?
El Cerrito– they retired out here–
They’re probably dead. She gasped and he said, oh my God– I’m sorry. Now she was crying. He made a mental note to behave like a human being. She didn’t know. Nobody knew. He held her hand. She didn’t move. It’s a coordinated attack, he said. It’ll be all over. We’re lucky to be alive.
And where are you taking me, she said again.
We have to get to the country. Somewhere where there’s water–
Well if it’s everywhere what’s the point–
It will only be cities, he said.
How do you know?
Because I almost made it happen.
Aswang
Don’t come inside, said Maricar. She was 4′ 11”, 19, looked 14. Waray-Waray. The father a coconut farmer on Samar. There are beach there but no tourist, she explained. He’d never heard of it but decided to move there.
They were in the best hotel in Angeles. You could tell because there were so many Arabs. In the elevators they’d quietly appraise your girls and smile. One named Waleed he’d seen three times, earned enough trust to hear that your George W. Bush was a criminal. He worked for the Jews.
He thought she’d be impressed with the room but she only liked the toilet. Below off Walking Street pimps squatted on scooters by massage girls doing each other’s eye shadow. They were 15, looked 12. Too young to have a license to fuck clipped on their tube tops, a photo of the fat regional health minister in a polo shirt smiling. Instead they grabbed your sleeves on the street saying massage massage. Stuck out a card with a cell phone number you called to get them in your room for 500 pesos. From there who knows. Maybe you got macheted.
Maricar had never been with a white man. If you went too hard she’d cry. Her cunt felt like it was wrestling him in baby oil. He pushed it in slow, pretended it was not to hurt her. It was just that he didn’t want to cum too fast. When it got to be too much he tried to make himself come inside. So when he died he could think he might have a kid somewhere. He couldn’t.
His hair was going white and he had hips like an old German shepherd but the young girls still made his cum hit the headboard. Then ten hot ropes on her belly, her neck. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes and squirmed like a baby. For a minute he just looked at her. She put her hand over her face. I shy, she said.
The shower took ten minutes to get hot and the door had a big gap at the bottom where the water got all over the room. These places had been built in a week on top of jungle, by island people who didn’t understand time or straight lines. The girls had sex at 14. Ruined, they went to Angeles. Sold themselves to Koreans in loud bars. Wired the money to a hundred brothers and cousins who sat around playing cards, smoking shabu. They had drunk boyfriends who beat them up. A Catholic country.
Maricar showered too. She was fast. Most girls took forever. Maybe to be away from him before their time was up. Like when he’d take too long counting prune juice in the drug store basement, to get away from old Russians and their coupon disputes. Computer won’t let you? So your computer is almighty God? She came out in a fluffy white towel and they laid on the bed, wet together. Most girls kept their distance, said I shy. But Maricar put her face on his chest and her palm on his belly still warm from the water. For a second he felt something. Back home girls looked at him like a worm on the street.
You’re beautiful, he said.
You too, she said.
You want American boyfriend?
Maybe, she said.
Do you like me, he said.
Diri, she said, and laughed.
Out on Fields Avenue scooters with pigs in wire cages on the back blasted by. Hideous men with Boris Yeltsin gin blossom faces stalked from bar to bar looking at the ground. In the bars monkey faced girls danced listlessly to Katy Perry and other children’s performers. If you pointed at them they’d sit with you. Sip apple flavored beer. You struggled to make them understand questions until they got bored. Back at the hotel, $40 to fuck for a minute and a half. Then just look at them. In the states these girls would have you arrested for swiping right.
Here they told you about lives on hot islands no one had heard of. Coconut orchards stretching to the white beach. Palm huts blown away by typhoons. The other men were 60. Collected pensions. Drank cheap beer in the heat until nighttime when they’d roll around in giant soft hotel beds with high school age girls out of the “escape” section of Bridge Over the River Kwai. They were the unhappiest people he’d ever seen. It was monsoon season. Between rains he’d see their eyes in puddles like his own death.
You use condom, she said. No, he said. I don’t like. Please, she said.
Do you have something?
I no have a sick. But they give us talk at the bar. Health minister. It is important to use a condom every time you have sex. She sounded startlingly like a health minister. He made a mental note never to patronize The Drill Shack again.
Listen, I don’t have anything he said. I won’t come inside. Thinking how am I 8,000 miles away having this same argument. She had a tattoo that said Malibog.
Please, she said.
No.
She looked like she was about to cry. What’s the fuckin big deal, he said. We won’t fuck.
Mama san get mad.
Why?
She give you back money.
Wait– is that an option?
I go back, she give back money, very mad.
I won’t make you go back.
I don’t want to walk home, she said. I am a scared. At night is Aswang.
What?
I don’t know how you say in English. Some girl disappear.
Instead they watched cartoons. She was 21. From Palawan. He looked at her while she slept and decided to move there. She sent money to her father who’d lost his hotel job. There are beach but no tourist now, she said. Abu Sayyaf had stormed a resort with speedboats. Beheaded a Canadian. The State Department issued a warning. The Aswang was a vampire. In the daytime you couldn’t tell unless you looked into its eyes. Your reflection was a different person. At night it grew wings to hunt.