Philippine Speculative Fiction 9 Read online

  Mendoza had a massive heart attack while watching the duo fight neck-and-neck down the homestretch in good enough time to set a track record. The stewards and judges in their high nest were caught up in the excitement, slamming the glass of the picture window and yelling for their favorite.

  After the race, they turned to see Mendoza slumped over, his eyes open, his mouth slack. It took five men to bear him down three flights of steep stairs, still in his chair as a sort of makeshift stretcher.

  Everyone wondered when, exactly, did he die—when the horses were halfway down the stretch? At the wire? Did he at least see who won and broke a long-standing record, before his vision dimmed into pinpricks and winked out? It would serve the bastard right, they said, to die without knowing.

  Jane stared at him, her reason tottering on the edge of insanity. So there were such things as ghosts, after all? Was everything she’d ever believed a lie? Were the tales of Naic’s being a hub for spectral activity true, then, and not just a collective illusion?

  Why was Mendoza’s ghost here? Was there a man so dedicated to racing that he would perform his duty, even after death?

  She pulled herself together and found her voice.

  “Chairman,” she said, “tapos na po ang last race. Uwian na. It’s time to go home.”

  MENDOZA WAS SURPRISED. Were the races over already? He must have dozed off for a moment there. Hang Sparky and Aileen and the lot of them for going off and leaving him asleep. Jane’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. He must be more tired than he realized.

  So it was time to go.

  Home. That sounded good. He needed rest. It had been a long and confusing race day. He nodded at Jane, who looked frightened and properly respectful as she backed away. He’d rung up the broadcast earlier, and he was annoyed that the phone was still defective. The people at the other end never seemed to hear him.

  The glasses he’d been looking for were at his elbow all along. He put them on and walked to the door.

  The corridor was wrapped in dark shadow, but at the end of it a brilliant white light beckoned. He’d never seen such a thing before. It drew him. He moved toward it, slowly and tentatively at first, and then faster and faster.

  Kat Del Rosario

  Oscar’s Marvelous Transformation

  Kat Del Rosario is currently taking her MA in Creative Writing in UP Diliman. She adores cats, and lives in Manila.

  WHEN OSCAR WOKE up to the cold, it was an awakening unlike anything for there was no line between it and sleep. He was only ever conscious of the promise of sun, hidden behind a haze of what Oscar knew vaguely as clouds, those great haunches of plump grey white bruised with purple, or sometimes orange—or what he remembered of it; Oscar became aware that he could not see, and he could not hear; and Oscar did not mind. He stayed in his favorite chair by the window, dotted with the afterthought of last night’s rain, awaiting the sun.

  When the house came to life, as with the street, low whispers of dreams ending and eyelids unfolding, kitchens and trikes sputtering to life, slippered feet slid quietly over floors waxed to a blush, and as the maid bent over to pick up yesterday’s newspaper—scattered across the living room floor as usual—she gasped and quite loudly, santamariajosporsanto, to see an odd plant in sir’s favorite rattan armchair. It was a knobbly, pathetic looking thing, with wiry, rheumatic roots and limbs that twisted and bent at odd ends, giving way to boughs that sighed under the succession of leaves shaped like hearts, spinning their way to the top where they gathered into a bald, wispy knob, waiting to sprout, stooped over slightly as if asleep.

  The world lurched as the maid crammed him into a clay pot where the lucky bamboo shoots had recently died; and as he was set upon the windowsill, Oscar tasted the morning, considering for a moment the many strange rituals he had cared about, how amusing, how ridiculous it was, now that it was quite a joy to be so still.

  When his wife found that he wasn’t at the dinner table that night, which Oscar no longer had any use for, only then did she start to look for him. Her voice rang loud and swift all over the house, echoing across the walls. She called for him in every room, and when she didn’t find him, she rang the police and started fussing over the smallest of trifles she could find in the house. Once or twice it crossed her mind that Oscar might have gotten too upset and ran off, but ah, then again, she knew the man had no spine and would come trotting back home, bald head hung low like a sorry dog. And she was right, for Oscar did not have the spine to run away, too devoted to his wife and daughter the only way he knew how, while faithfully working longer and longer hours for bigger and bigger paychecks, dealing with all his anxiety with sleep, sometimes wondering how peaceful it would be if he would be given time to be still, and wishing, fervently wishing as a thunderstorm passed over the house, that he could stay as he was then, in the most motionless of states, nourished only by rain.

  THE POLICE CAME the next morning, as Oscar’s wife had demanded. Oscar could have been amused, for his wife had never been so flustered, had he not been so occupied with the sun. He found that he had no control over his body, that he could not so much as move his leaves, but that he knew where each of them were sprouted, knew how his roots settled comfortably under the soil. In every inch and nook of himself he found that he could breathe and feel somehow, the air and sunlight coming together within him and every bit of him, and he had never been so blissful and content. He found that he would be gladdened by the quick breeze and sickened by puffs of smoke from the street below, feeling a slow, inward urge to curl and seize in the quiet subtlety that only plants knew, as the unwanted stuff passed through inside of him. He sat unaffectedly as his wife made quite a show of weeping, weaving stories of infidelity and constant arguments, that once, she said, he had even raised a hand to her and hit her on some nights. “Oh but I put up with him,” she sniffed to the audience of young men in blue, as rapt and attentive as the idea of their responsibilities as protectors of the populace still hung fresh in their heads. “I put up with him; I can’t raise my daughter on my wages alone.” The younger of the policemen cast his eyes briefly at the wisp of a girl with vacant eyes, fiddling with a color magazine and folding away its pages on the living room floor. A sorrow stirred in him, and lingered still as they left to return to the station, muttering about the case with his partner as they climbed into the car.

  BUT HAD OSCAR’S wife been thrifty, her wages from selling skin care products and jewelry would have been enough to raise her daughter. Oscar had brought this up the night before, still human, no less withered and stooped then as he was as a plant. It had been his first slip; the first time he had ever bothered to speak his mind, instead of the usual passive grunts where he would submit, exhaustedly, to his wife’s very loud, very threatening wheedling. It was the first time he refused her, and she had responded, scathingly, “You call yourself a man? You’re an old, limp vegetable!” But it was only when she mentioned their daughter that the sparks of rebellion died in Oscar, and he felt wilted once again, promising her half his monthly paycheck, and the recent bonus his boss gave him. He had stroked his chin, mulling over the vegetative insult, watching his daughter with the vacant eyes stare at the television from over his trembling arthritic fingers, thankful that her condition was an obstacle to realizing that she had a weak, good-for-nothing father. If only he had enough time to stay at home, with this poor girl whom he loved, but sometimes he wondered if they were both strangers, each one far away and never meeting. He wished to be an ornament then, constant and steadfast, and thought he heard the heavens expressing their consent, applauding him with the sudden arrival of rain.

  THE SEARCH FOR Oscar continued for days. At one point, the company where he worked financed a search for him, with his boss and the CEO coming over for a visit to lend the poor, distraught wife their sympathies. They had known nothing of his violent behavior, and he had come across, to them at least, as a meek, mild-mannered old man who did his job well, and that had been all they cared abou
t. They thought it proper to extend an envelope containing a sum of money, passed around the office a day prior with a note about the daughter and her illness, and left with plump hearts, convinced of the sincerity of their deed.

  By then, Oscar had flourished somewhat, his leaves glossy with nutrients. Occasionally, small butterflies would rest with him before continuing their search for prettier gardens, and at night, the moths hid from hungry bats by lurking behind his leaves. His daughter had at one time climbed onto the windowsill with him and planted an earthworm in his pot of soil, and Oscar welcomed its friendly intrusion with relatively plant-like mirth.

  “Why is she so dirty, Yaya? Did you let her out into the garden?” Oscar’s wife shrieked. She was very rarely home these days, eliciting the sympathies of friends and neighbors, so adept at it that she gave up her previous job of selling soap in favor of selling tears. The maid, young and new and idle as she was in a house without both her bosses, had taken to letting the small child loose in the garden while she went neighboring, exchanging chatter with the maids of other households. Oscar would, somehow, sense a deep looming loneliness, for as a plant all things around him grew more apprehensive, the stillness never betraying signs of life. Ever so often his daughter would come into the house and feed herself handfuls of mushed banana on the windowsill with him, as if feebly aware of his transformation. She said nothing, for she had always been a quiet child; unnervingly so, from birth, and had only learned to speak when forced to in the special school she went to before. When she took a nip at one of his leaves or dug a few of her fingers into the soil, Oscar would recollect, briefly, how her stillness disturbed and saddened him, and also feel a kind of delicious warmth that his former internal organs and human capabilities had denied him. But now he understood her predilection and they would sit together in silence, weighed down with unknowing, mutual affection.

  ALL THE MONEY ran out within months. The comfort of money was a false security, and without Oscar, his wife knew she would be reduced to nothing in a matter of weeks. She became a fixture at the police precinct and local radio stations, pleading into the mic for a husband she secretly wished would not return, and a daughter she openly used to gather pity. Oscar would recognize her voice, bristling with the strange residual human emotion he knew was guilt. Whatever it was that had remained of the human Oscar in his plantly incarnation struggled against his cellulose skin, and as it rained again that night, he was awash with regret. A great pungent pain surged through him like a current, resting on his leaves that were closest to the soil, burned and soon felt alien, like they were no longer a part of him, a series of dead extremities that, as dawn broke, sloughed off of him like a dead shell.

  OSCAR FOUND NO relief when the sun finally came out; the maid had come up to the plant on the windowsill to splash it with half a tabo of water as she did every morning, and discovered earthy bills pressed among the newly moistened soil. She backed off a couple of steps, saw that a handful of them had made it to the floor, and in her grand astonishment could only think of screaming, “Ate! Ate! Ate!” in varying pitches, and scurrying in small circles as if her shock had confined her in that small a space.

  “What in god’s green graces are you screaming about?” Oscar’s wife rattled back, but the maid was not to be silenced. Emboldened in the face of startling peculiarity, she tugged and pulled— and were it physically possible, thrashed her Ate about, babbling and pointing—Oscar’s wife soon pieced the signals together, and reacted similarly, albeit with more screaming.

  AND THAT WAS how the nationwide search for Oscar was abruptly discontinued. The sorrowful wife declared that she had to, unfortunately, give up, and returned home with a heavy heart. She was careful of all outward appearances, and had the maid swear on her life to secrecy. The money tree was to be their salvation, however withered and ugly it was, and so greedily guarded that they sought no expertise on its strange manner of shedding money—actual cash, approvable, non-forfeited bills—caring naught about myths and legends and the implications of an actual money-bearing plant. This money tree was a gift, and that was all it was.

  Oscar shared in this disbelief, a faint idea of it, but he derived no pleasure in this new ability. He found himself constantly and indiscriminately sprayed with pesticide, its irritating bitterness tainting the smoothness of his daily nourishment. His peaceful tenant, the earthworm, whom Oscar had grown very fond of, was murdered one day with pliers, cast aside with his lesser leaves, whose only fault were not being as vividly green as the others. The butterflies and moths stopped visiting him, finding their feet and tongues burned by the persistence of chemicals; and now not even aphids or ants dared come near, whose company Oscar would have readily welcomed. By now it seemed that the only person who shared in his distress was his little daughter, who let out a whimper as she took the pieces of the dead earthworm and buried them in the garden. Nevertheless, Oscar would continue to shed, as if on schedule, twice a month, and at times his wife would pause in her retail therapy to harbor thoughts of this strange schedule as being eerily similar to when her lost husband would hand over his paychecks. It was at these times that she was at the very verge of realizing, somehow, that her husband and the plant were connected in some way, but it was too fanciful a thought to dwell over and she would quickly forget, immersed too devotedly to the tending of things she thought actually mattered, like a new paint job so that the house could stand out from the hovels her neighbors called houses, or to transform the garden into a veranda where she could host friends.

  Oscar, meanwhile, found himself dozing further and further on into the sentient indifference of plants. The movement of humans seemed quicker to him now, their voices a shrill and steady thrum delivered to him in waves. Hours were minutes to him, and everything else a haze; the only things slow or still enough were objects that had remained as such for longer than he had been a plant: the house, the furniture, the garden; the prickling of new grass, the grim intensity of the acacia in the neighbor’s yard. The only things that mattered now, were the welcome heat of the sun, the acknowledgement of rain, and the consistency of air. Once or twice though, he would come to, and almost regain that same platform of consciousness, of being, of human-ness, but it would be gone in an instant, swift as a passing thought. He grew more oblivious to the growing tensions at home, which in the rare times that he sensed, he chose to overlook. He would only catch on, almost readily, whenever his daughter touched him, stroked a leaf, or moved around the soil with her fingers. She could not visit him as often as she pleased, as the tending, care, and harvesting of the miraculous money tree would be left to Oscar’s wife and the maid, exclusively. Whenever she tried, she would be pushed away, led outside into the garden to occupy herself with other plants. On rare visits, in the dead of night, she would manage to speak to him, a word or two, and Oscar despaired at the gift of sentience, for he was not able to hear, only feel in low, significant vibrations in the air, what his daughter was trying to say.

  TWICE A MONTH, Oscar’s wife and the maid would take the plant into the kitchen, and seal all the doors and windows, and begin harvesting. Oscar would be roused from his reverie, fully conscious, accustomed to the gathering of money; it was the only time they were ever gentle with him. On these days his wife and the maid would talk about the bills, renovations, and new things to replace the old things—a new television, a new fridge, perhaps even a new air-conditioning unit. Oscar would recall conversations like this from a time that seemed to him so very long ago, from which he was always excluded because of his weakness with calculations and aversion to the luxury of new things. They were all just words to him now, a dull thrumming in the air as they went about their business and it would only be a matter of time before they set him back by his peaceful windowsill and he would drop out of their callow world once more. It was something that he could live with; after all, did they not only bother him twice a month? Did they not always return him to his place by the window, with the sun and the rain? Would he not a
lways forget every time he was not in it, eventually, as plants care so little about remembering? It was an arrangement that benefited everyone except the little girl, however, and in the flurry of new excitements she was no longer the priority of the house and the people within. Her mother would leave it up to the maid to care for her, and the maid, giddy with her new freedom, abandoned her duties to cavort with the water boys and istambays of the neighborhood, and it could easily be theorized that one day she would run off with one of them, never to return, telling her grandchildren wild stories about plants. The little girl would only be fed whenever the two older women would remember to eat, or cook, or bring home a meal, and that was not very often, as they would instead feel nourished and content by merely buying new things. At times the little girl would venture a taste of the mulch that had accumulated in Oscar’s clay pot while Oscar, aghast of course, with as much of it as he could recall, sat by, with nothing to even feed his own daughter.

  The day came when Oscar’s wife discovered the little girl trying to eat Oscar’s precious leaves, and she flew into such a panic that she pinched the girl’s cheek until it drew blood. But the girl held dangerously on to the plant, throwing her thin little arms around the pot and thrusting her head against the stem as if to seek protection from beneath it.

  “You little bruha! You’re going to break it!” shrieked the girl’s mother. The commotion brought Oscar to his senses, the heaving and shaking and the confusion of what he knew to be voices, and a constriction around his being that he recognized as his daughter’s. It did not take long for him to understand, as much as a plant possibly could, and for a moment he thought he was to become human again with such a rage streaming through his boughs that he felt inclined enough to lash out, to protect the little girl from his wife, the maid, the world, and he could feed her again, care for her again. But there was nothing, and he was still a plant, motionless, thrashing inwardly to no avail until all the struggle around him ceased and all was silent again. Later, he would sense the salt of his daughter’s tears as they ran deep into the soil, the price of a wish fulfilled, the iron taste of it as it spread swiftly through his roots, his stem, his leaves. He thought then that he should not forget, as he soaked up the bitter memory of this girl with the vacant eyes, and so with all his strength he strained against his stillness, but there were no hands to reach out, no voice to speak with.