5. Lucila’s version
She’s been having the weirdest dreams.
She’s flying over the alleys of Santa Cruz, her arms spread out. It’s not an astral experience. It’s not her soul that’s flying. The wind just picks her up, like debris, and there she is, skimming over the ramshackle dormitories, wobbly antennas spiked all over the tin roofs.
There’s Florante on a street corner drinking with his buddies. She zooms in and sees his lips up close, the lips she liked to bite in the heat of the moment, savoring the taste of iron and salt. He’s bawling his eyes out and cursing. He looks up and shakes his fist at her, at the sky, at the empty hole where God had been. Drink up, You God, and go to hell.
Now she can see Aniano lost in the warren of alleys and suddenly he’s at Shoe World in Carriedo, watching as she tries on a pair of wet-look pumps. It’s yesterday or the day before yesterday. When the saleslady brings the box over she clings to his arm and reminds him that there’s a run in the toe of her left stocking, because he had pushed her and now he’s sorry and he’s buying her a new pair of shoes to make up. He slips her shoe off and takes her foot in his hand, the way the prince did with Cinderella. He tells her it feels like he’s taking a rose, small and delicate, in his hand, and if he catches her with another boy again he’s going to snap that foot off, like a flower.
Now she’s with Joey in his room, and she’s standing by the window, looking out at the churning sky. Rain tonight, early rain. He creeps behind her and wraps an arm around her belly and presses hard against her. With his other hand he jabs a knife into her heart. The pressure makes her gasp for air. An odor of iron permeates the room.
And now she’s inside a flashback, just like those dreamy dissolves in the last feature show she watched at the Lyric on Avenida Rizal with Don, late at night in the back row of the balcony, when the ushers are too tired to stop them from petting. It’s the first time she’s met him, and Don is telling her something you wouldn’t believe happened when Joey introduced them earlier that evening, something wide-screen and cinematic.
“That’s what they all say, Don.” The sound of her own voice surprises her. She can hear the words loud and clear, like they’re resonating from her entire body.
“I knew I wanted you entirely,” he says. “The way the devil wants our souls.”
She laughs.
“Okay, you’ve heard it all before, but that’s the way it is.”
“Tell me one thing about me you’d kill for.”
“The color of your hair.”
“What?”
“I like looking at your hair when you suck my dick. It’s like getting a blow job from Marilyn Monroe.”
“The bitches at the Pagoda say it looks like cotton candy.”
“It’s the color of mandarin oranges.”
“Mandarin oranges, walanjo! Nobody in that dive can tell a mandarin from a chink. Fill my head with words, you son of a bitch.”
“I’ll smooth-talk you and pillow-talk you. Be your own private José Corazón de Jesus, your own heart of Jesus.”
“You scare me.”
“Why?”
“You’ll wind up like everybody else. That’s how it all ends.”
“Not me.”
“Every man I’ve ever met reminds me of Manila’s traffic.”
“Explain.”
“I never know which way to turn. There are no street signs, and everyone ignores the few that say Stop or Yield.”
She closes her eyes and imagines it. Through this maze of dilapidated alleys and dead ends, there’s nothing but long stretches of desolate highways, cities teeming with anonymous faces, restrooms that stink like a sewer, motels full of bugs where the walls still throb with love’s sticky whispers, and always a lot of stations where people come and go. She wonders if he can see it too. Of course he can. Everything is transparent in a dream.
“Nobody ever gave you what you’re looking for,” he says.
“Bingo.”
“Not me. With me, you know exactly where you’re headed. You can see the end of the road. You always wanted it, the final fade-out. I’m going to take you there. I never break a promise.”
It’s the morning after, and she’s brought him to her favorite fortune-teller, a creepy old widow in a shabby room above the Pagoda. The woman is telling them they’re for keeps. Her voice is raspy, quivering. “What a wonderful message the cards have for you today, Lucila. There will be no other man in your life after him.” He is her ace of wands, her flowering phallus, her other side of no tomorrow.
“Bullshit,” she says. “But better than nothing.”
Because that is what love is. Any fool can tell you this. It obliterates you completely, until there’s only room for the beloved. Everything fades to black. It’s like that wicked card the woman showed her, right after she first got off the bus in Manila, the armor-clad skeleton on horseback, the card of dying and rebirth. The woman kissed her palm: she had never seen a mound of Venus so clearly defined, had never met anyone whom the goddess of desire looked upon so enviously. Lucila, you will be astonishing, novel, and meteoric. A girl couldn’t ask for more.
6. Don’s version
Don steps out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. She’s nowhere to be found. He calls her name. No answer. He grabs his clothes and bolts up the stairs to Joey’s room.
She’s lying on the bed, Joey sitting next to her.
“Is she asleep?”
Joey shakes his head.
“Coño, Joey, you couldn’t wait to do it downstairs?”
“She was going to tell everyone about me.”
“Putragis, she ripped my T-shirt.”
“Fucking blackmail.”
“It’s real Ban-Lon, puñeta.”
“What do we do now?”
“Made in fucking Hong Kong. You know how much this cost?”
“We’ll get you another one, okay? You said you knew what to do.”
“Let me think.”
“Did you get the money?”
“Nada.”
“I told you to look in the cash box. She keeps everything in the cash box.”
“I looked. There was nothing.”
“It’s not a robbery if nothing’s stolen.”
“Obviously.”
“Well, this is really fucked.”
“It is fucked, puta. You’re so fucked.”
“Maybe she’s not really dead.”
“She’s dead, bobo. She’s already starting to stink.”
Suddenly Joey’s bawling like a baby.
“Leche, Joey, not now.”
“I wanted to do the right thing. I thought I was doing the right thing. Wasn’t I doing the right thing?”
He puts his arm around Joey. “We’ll think of something.”
“I wanted to protect you.”
“Not good, Joey. I can’t be your alibi.”
“Did you like her?”
“She liked me.”
“She wanted to do it to me too.”
“No kidding.”
“That’s why I did what I did.”
“Son of a bitch. Two-timing slut. I should have known.”
“I didn’t lead her on or anything. I would never do that to you.”