Greer was the only one who hadn’t praised Faith’s meat; she soon became self-conscious about her silence and felt she had to contribute something. “And every steak at the feminist steakhouse also comes with access to the salad bar!” she added. Faith, recognizing this was meant to be funny, smiled at her.
Greer got busy cutting a perfect cube and then spearing it. Glancing at it in the light, she was reminded of one of those drawings of a cross-section of a piece of human tissue. To eat meat when you hated it and when you hadn’t eaten it for four years was an aberration, nearly a form of cannibalism. But also, she told herself, it was an act of love. In eating this, she was being someone Faith would want to continue to confide in and listen to and rely on; someone she would want to cook meat for. Greer deposited the piece onto her tongue, hoping it would somehow dissolve there like a sugar cube, but finding instead that it obstinately retained its shape, its integrity, not ceding any muscle or fat. The inside of her mouth was like a slaughterhouse in miniature, with a hint of cedar closet. It was disgusting.
Do not be sick, she thought sternly. Do not be sick.
Greer tried to reframe the idea of eating meat; was it really all that different from, say, what took place in sex? In the beginning with Cory, Greer had been both excited and afraid. But soon she was less afraid. Other people, she learned, were not so bad. Cory was just another person, a soul inside a long membrane. He was an animal she deeply loved. Just as this, now, this cubic inch of lost and mournful cow, wasn’t so bad either.
Goodbye, cow, she thought, picturing the distant green blur of a meadow. I hope your short life was at least sweet. She swallowed hard and forced herself not to cough it up. The steak went down and stayed down.
“Yum,” Greer said.
* * *
? ? ?
On the train platform on Sunday morning, waiting for the 10:04 to take them back to the city and the final days before the first summit, everyone turned on their cell phones again and watched them stutter into service. The phones lit up, the apples popped in, and the Loci team peered with great interest at what they had missed in their absence. They turned away from one another and stalked the platform, listening to voicemails and reading messages.
Greer saw with confusion that she’d received thirty-four voicemails and eighteen texts since she’d arrived at Faith Frank’s house. It made no sense, but there it was, an extravagant cascade of urgency, almost all of it coming from Manila.
SIX
The Ninoy Aquino International Airport at sunrise had an impossibly long line outside the entrance, leading up to the metal detectors through which every person had to pass, not just those who were flying today. Cory Pinto, crying for the past couple of hours in spasmodic waves, shuffled in along with everyone else, his eyes burned into little embers. He was trying to keep it together, as people said, but it wasn’t working very well.
Once he was through the detectors, a voice on a loudspeaker whispered something about flight 102, and Cory knew he had to move fast. He pushed through the people standing in bunches ahead of him, saying to them, “Excuse me! Makikiraan po!” but nobody moved. People stood seven or twelve deep, clutching luggage or backpacks, or in some cases a loose congregation of boxes bound with tape.
Cory had no luggage; he’d forgotten to bring anything. All rational planning had fled from him after the news arrived in the middle of the night. He’d gotten the call, and then he’d stood in the living room of his apartment and said to McBride, his roommate, “I have to go.”
McBride, whom he had known slightly at Princeton, though they were in different social groups and would never have been friends, looked up from where he’d been half conked out on the leather sofa with its rounded arms and cold slippery surface, replaying old missions of Red Dead Redemption on the Xbox that he’d had shipped there from his parents’ house when he’d first been hired by Armitage & Rist.
“What?” McBride said. “It’s three in the fucking morning. Where you gonna go, man?” Music came from his butt-ugly speakers, which always reminded Cory of a housefly’s eyes, each one with a round black convex circle at the center. Pugnayshus’s silly rap lyrics played:
I saw you sittin’ there at the Korean foot spa
I saw you sittin’ there with all’a your chutzpah
Their third roommate, Loffler, fresh from a finance degree at the Wharton School, was asleep in his room, which always reeked of the cheap weed that he had purchased on a trip to Sagada and riskily brought back for all the roommates to partake of. They were all earning so much money, and while they didn’t want to throw it around and expose themselves to danger, they didn’t want to be miserly either. They lived in this cushy high-rise in the Makati district, away from the crowded streets, letting themselves rest in the deep, silk-lined pocket where the expats lived and worked and played and spent their money.
“Something happened,” Cory said flatly.
“That’s about as nonspecific as you can get,” said McBride. “You want me to guess?” Cory began to cry again, his face corrugating in pain, and of course McBride didn’t know what to do. “Help me out here,” said McBride. “Somebody die back home?”
Cory nodded his miserable face.
“Like your grandma or something?”
He shook his head no.
When his cell phone had rung in the night, Cory had sat up in bed and seen his parents’ number. It irritated him that they had trouble remembering the time difference between the East Coast of the US and Manila. Now his entire night’s sleep had been wrecked by the ringing phone. He spoke into it in a tight, unfriendly voice, wanting to convey to his parents that he was grown now, that he had responsibilities and needed his sleep. But his father was crying and saying the most insane thing in Portuguese, “Sua m?e matou seu irm?o!”
“What?” He must have translated it wrong. “What are you talking about?”
“Your mother killed your brother.”
His father’s voice came out in frightening anguish as he told how Cory’s mother, backing out of the driveway, had accidentally run over Alby, who had been playing there, unseen. Alby’s back had been crushed, a bone breaking off and entering a pulmonary artery. He’d held on for a while, but in the OR in Springfield he had died.
“What? Are you sure?” Cory asked pathetically, raking his hair in the dark, then rubbing his face, trying to find something to do with his now flapping, now flying-away hand.
“Yes. She did this,” his father said. “I can’t look at her.”
“Where is she?”
“Sedated. They gave her a shot.”
“All right. All right,” Cory said, trying to think. “Maybe you need to be sedated too. I’m going to the airport now. I’ll try to fly out in the morning. It’s night here. It’ll take me a whole day.” Even as he said this, he couldn’t imagine looking at his mother again either. Cory pressed his phone between his hands and then called the airline, sitting and listening to a scratchy brass instrumental version of “The Strong Ones” that ran in a loop. After he made a reservation he called Greer, who he needed now in a new, adult way. It was as if he actually thought she could do something. But the call went straight to voicemail. “Where are you?” he said into the phone. “I need you.” He had never said those words to her. Love, all the time, but need, never.