Frantically he kept calling back and speaking in a louder and louder voice to her recorded voice, then hanging up. He texted her multiple times too, saying, “Call me,” but got no reply. There was no way he could leave the news about Alby in a recorded message, no way he could say the words into empty air. He needed Greer to be listening in real time as he spoke them, so that as he exhaled the facts she would inhale them in a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Call me, please,” he whispered, as if maybe modulation would somehow get her attention. “No matter what time. Something really, really bad happened.”
When there was still no answer, he remembered that she’d told him she was going away to Faith Frank’s house for the weekend, and that she would be out of cell phone range. Faith Frank, who was like a superhero to her. You would think someone as powerful as Faith Frank would be able to get a signal at her house. He paced the small room, which was a stew of his belongings, the wastebasket frothing over with papers, and empty bottles of San Mig Strong Ice standing together on the bureau. The whole place was overcome by a general sense of disorder and reek, all of which would be dispensed with by the housekeeper, Jae Matapang, who cleaned up after the three high-paid young Americans who could not take care of themselves. “Boys,” she sometimes said, shaking her head when she showed up and looked around the apartment. “Always make such a mess.” Yet she never seemed displeased.
In the darkness, his stomach cramping, Cory slipped out of the drawstring bottoms he’d bought at the Greenbelt Mall and dug into a drawer to find some boxers. Jae took their laundry to a room in the basement that none of the men had ever seen. “Hey, Jae,” the three guys always said, handing her their things, and she silently accepted it all, washing their pee-and semen-dashed underclothes and ironing their shirts so they could show up looking impressive and confident at Armitage & Rist’s office in the Rufino Pacific Tower, the tallest steel-framed building in the Philippines.
Cory thought it was entirely likely that he would become a mad person at age twenty-three, and would wander the streets of Manila. Jae would see him out there and would feel bad, thinking, One of the messy boys has become insane. The tall one!
Because he had no time to look for anything else, Cory slipped into a pair of black dress pants that were heaped on his desk chair, and then he jammed his passport into the front pocket of his pants and headed out the door. Riding to the airport in the back of a cab with a broken seat belt that lay uselessly across his lap like a flail arm, he watched as the sedate burble and glitter of Makati receded.
He hadn’t gotten used to life here yet. From the start it had been unfamiliar. As he traveled to the Philippines on Cathay Pacific not long after college ended, the flight attendants had welcomed him like a long-lost friend. He lay down and found that he did not seem out of place, or like an impostor. Not only that, but his long self seemed not too long for that sky bed, which was like a cradle that rocked him as they crossed the ocean.
So Cory Pinto, from Macopee, Massachusetts, ate various pieces of dim sum as well as a minute steak; he ate without worrying about how much he was eating. Life at Princeton had set him up for his new life, which had even started to seem earned, though at other moments he knew that he had earned nothing. Distantly behind him came the moans and discontents of economy class.
In Manila, an apartment had been found for him and the others. The building had an absurd name, the Continental Arches. Makati was a wealthy, cushy zone, but once he stepped outside the district he was in fast-moving Manila, which was its own trip. Most of the people Cory encountered there spoke excellent English, but still he tried to learn Tagalog, because many locals didn’t speak English well, and he wanted to not be a snob when he went outside of his little hive; he wanted to make an effort. Once in a while he and his roommates would go out on the town drinking in local bars and eating cheap meals in dives in a particular area that the orientation materials from Armitage & Rist had specifically warned them to avoid.
They rode on jeepneys, those half-bus-half-jeeps painted wild, bright colors and sprayed with graffiti; sometimes they featured illustrations of devils or eagles and were accompanied by words or phrases like MONSTER-MOBILE, or JESUS LOVES ME SO HARD, or MISS ROSA AND HER BROTHERS. Inside, passengers sat on two long benches facing each other, knee to knee, and were taken on a shockless, bouncing ride wherever they wanted to go in the city. “Bayad po,” Cory said nervously the first time he rode one, passing his money forward. Later on, it all became easy and almost natural.
Manila had impressed itself upon Cory in light and heavy ways: the wealth that was concentrated in Makati; the K-9 teams that sniffed around the cars entering the driveways of the top hotels, trunks popped so security guards could look inside with flashlights; the exotica and the twisting extravagance of the foliage; the fish stands and the fruit stands; the fragrant food at even the tiniest little joint; the beautiful children running everywhere; the shocking poverty; and the malls, God, the malls, where so much activity took place because they were air-conditioned and the air outside was air-conditioning’s opposite. Manila could be a kiln, and they all baked in it together.
But now, after months of being there making money and eating adobo and crispy pata and staying out late partying with clients, far from Greer, who was waiting for him while she lived her own life in another city, here he was in a state of unmanageable grief, roaring in a taxi with a broken seat belt toward the Manila airport to fly home to be with his family because his brother was dead. He was glad there was no seat belt; he didn’t even want one. “You can crash this car if you want,” he said to the driver. “I don’t give a shit.”
“What do you say?” said the driver, looking in the rearview mirror to assess the situation.
“You can drive straight off the road. I want to be dead. I want to die.”
“But I don’t want to die,” said the driver. “I think you’re a crazy man,” he added with a tense laugh. But his curiosity bested him, and in a milder voice he asked, “Why do you want to die?”
“My brother was run over by a car and killed. My mother was driving.”
“I am sorry,” said the taxi driver reflexively. “Your brother. A little boy or a man?”
“A little boy.” Cory recalled his brother’s intelligent, animated face, knowing it would de-animate and recede over time. It would have to.
“Oh, that is terrible.” Then, without a word, the driver pulled onto the shoulder of the highway. The sky held a smudge of incipient sunlight. They sat together in the unmoving car and the driver pulled out a pack of Jackpot menthols and tipped out one to Cory, who took it from the slot in the plastic partition. The driver slid him a lighter, then took it back and lit one for himself too. In silent misery they smoked.
The night turned to morning, accompanied by the taste of a proffered menthol Jackpot cigarette that still stayed on his tongue as he moved through the airport terminal to travel home. This time, no business class seat was available, and the firm probably wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. He would have no bed to cradle his tall and suddenly fragile self. Cory sat in the only seat he could get, in the very last row by the toilet, a middle seat where he was squeezed between a big meaty man and a big meaty woman. He was wedged there, crying and watching a Filipino movie without the subtitles, because he figured it would fill his head with words he couldn’t follow, and fill his eyes with brightly moving colors and flashes of flesh.
There were no deaths of children in the movie, only drama that involved love and marriage and infidelity and sex, always sex, which interested everyone on every continent. Then the movie was over and he was back to himself, lodged unhappily in the narrow space between his seatmates. One of them—he wasn’t sure which—smelled of spice and yeast and something a little disturbing and unnamable. But he had been crying so hard and had been releasing such toxic, alarming chemicals that for all he knew, it came from him.
* * *