Ah-ma goes into a trance, her eyes rolling back until they are merely whitish, quivering splotches on her face. This has always creeped Charmaine out, so she looks at the ground or at her own hands or at the table that sits between the two of them. Also, there is a low hum, a ululation that signals Ah-ma’s possession by a spirit or spirits. For now, the grandson is a suitable alternative to Ah-ma’s altered visage. He is playing peek-a-boo with Charmaine. She smiles at him. She wonders if he can tell what she is. She wonders, too, but less so, about Ah-ma; again, the fat peacefulness of that face makes any kind of emotion or judgment impossible to read.
Ah-ma makes a subtle transition back to her old self. She opens her eyes and smiles at Charmaine. Because her Tagalog is broken, Charmaine has to sometimes ask the woman to repeat what she’s just said.
Before Ah-ma invoked the Buddhist spirit or spirits, she’d asked Charmaine to come up with a question. This is the question for which Ah-ma intercedes on Charmaine’s behalf, conversing with the other world: Will everything go all right over the next week?
And the other world, through Ah-ma, has answered in the affirmative.
Charmaine hands over a one-hundred-peso bill. This is not payment. That’s what Ah-ma says to all who come to her. By giving money, they are merely helping keep Ah-ma’s temple clean, making sure there is always incense for the funerary pictures and gods of the altar, as well as offerings of siopao buns and hopia cakes, since hunger is the most marked characteristic of the dead and of the immortal.
Where is the grandson? Peek-a-boo! Out he comes from behind the skirt that wraps around the base of the altar, making the golden embroidered phoenixes and Chinese lettering on the cloth dance. Before Charmaine leaves, she fishes in her handbag for two sour ball candies. She hands them over to the fat grandson, the plastic wrappers making a noise.
Yes. Everything will go all right this week. But Charmaine, walking home, is not assured. Why should she disbelieve Ah-ma now?
Fear makes her hungry.
Wah Sun is a little out of the way but this is what she comes for: the menagerie of animals in aquariums and terrariums screening the kitchen from the rest of the establishment. An albino python that might as well be stuffed except for its resplendent fatness and its seemingly oiled skin. A baby crocodile, or maybe it’s an alligator — and what is the difference between one and the other anyway? A large bayawak with carbuncled skin and a crested, thorny spine, blinking its disdainful eyes at the customers. And her favorite: a giant, very flat fish with seen-it-all eyes that reminds her of an aquatic basset hound. It’s grayish-black, about the size of two large pancakes, and makes the most minimal motions with its dorsal fins to stay put in a private spot in the green water.
You’d think it’d be the young waiters she’s bonded with on her frequent visits, but instead it’s the oldest employee, a short, bald man who looks like a human relative of the fish. It’s he who’d told her that the fish is an oscar, commonly found in Africa, though this one was caught in the Pacific, having strayed far from home. They’re aquarium fish, but this one had spent years in another Ongpin restaurant where diners chose their food from display tanks. But no customer could stomach the fish’s ugliness, and so the years passed and the fish got bigger and even less appetizing, until somehow it had ended up here in Wah Sun, one freak next to various others.
Here comes her duck-egg porridge decorated with scallions and burnt flakes of garlic on top. Now she is really famished. Outside it has begun to drizzle, and the quiet streets of seven p.m. Binondo will be ghostly by the time she is ready to go home.
You do not tell the men who you are.
You ask for the lights to be turned low or all the way down. And though you’d think this would be a giveaway, it also signals a becoming modesty. It can be used as a turn-on.
You insist that the men come to your place. This way, it’s easier to control what she calls the “performance.” That she lives in an out-of-the-way, mysterious place like Binondo can be both good and bad. Good: anonymity. Bad: the clients’ suspicions of criminality that anonymity breeds.
Your outcall visits must only be to hotels, and in these hotels you must have a personal relationship with one of the staff, preferably a concierge, but you’ll settle for a bellboy or a maid. You give these contacts a 20 percent tip for their troubles, which usually runs to four hundred pesos. Never, ever go to someone’s home. The casualties: Nene from Tacloban; Aurora; Saltie. They had been made to forgo their usual precautions by either the promise of larger-than-normal fees or enticing photos of the men sent over e-mail. They’d been lured to apartments in various parts of Manila and had ended up dumped unceremoniously near estuaries of the Pasig, by the slums. Saltie’s body had been not-so-cleanly severed along the waist. Her top half was found in Tondo and her bottom, from which her “thing” had been cut off, dug out of a dump by the squatter areas of Balut.
The best bet is to have the men passed on by your circle. These men having been vetted, the sex is more relaxed. Though you’d have to wonder, if these men are so great, why would they be passed along by the other girls? But sometimes the answer is very simple: these men want variety. Variety upon variety. They want as many girls as they can get.
To them, to everyone, you are a girl, as normal as any girl. To preserve your virginity you will only take it from behind. That way, too, the men don’t have to wear condoms. There is no threat of pregnancy taking it from behind. And what man doesn’t prefer to go condomless? Never mind AIDS or HIV. Safety among the girls of her circle is a wish and a prayer: at night you may court danger, but in the day you don’t think about it.
This is another story about why she will only take it from behind: she is the pet mistress of someone high up in the Philippine government. This jealous man employs a private gynecologist whose job it is to inspect his stable: the women are to remain pure for him and only him. And after they have been deflowered, they are no longer of any interest to him. This man is a virgin fetishist, a blood fetishist. Far-fetched and long-winded for a cover story, she knows, but in fact a true story: there is such a man high up in the government and his cravenness is legendary. Rumors are that he will soon run for president.
Her jawline is soft and more than convincing, and that was true even before hormones. Every night she has to oil and massage her breasts, because even though they look terrific, they can feel hard to the touch and sometimes, when the weather gets cold, they tend to get stuck. Lesson: never buy anything Filipino. Always go abroad. Maybe her new breasts will be from Scandinavia. But Scandinavian tits — Denmark is best — have a price tag to match their quality. Though in that part of the world, the moralities are not so hypocritical.
Her nipples are sensitive, even more with her breasts. Why should this be a surprise to her? But even before she can think of new tits to replace her old-school silicone models, she has to take care of things down there. Finally. After eight years. After a series of psychiatric interviews to determine her “stability of mind,” her “100 percent certainty.” She is finally taking care of things down there. In three days, she is flying to Bangkok — a middle ground between quality and price, not the best but better than anything available in Manila, and certainly more affordable than Europe; with a lenient psychiatric screening process that is widely considered no more than a formality — a joke, really. Nobody “interviewed” will ever be denied; at least nobody who is paying for Dr. Srichapan’s services. Alicia had gone to Dr. Srichapan. Now, Alicia doesn’t have to ask for the lights to be turned down. She can wear a bikini without much work. And according to her — the number one question from the girls — she has a range of feeling down there. She can let the men fuck both without condoms and without risk of pregnancy. The only gray area is whether to reveal her story to the men. Pro: full-op tranny fetishists are not uncommon, and they can be made to pay much, much more than those who are only paying for girls. Con: why bother going through all that work of transformation only to undo it by one slip of the tongue?