Now he was dead, though, and her perspective was collapsing. She wanted to call out into the night, to summon the secretary back to the house, to ask him to stay awake in the kitchen, shooing away ghosts while she slept. She knew, however, that her shouts would produce only echoes, and the last thing she wanted was to hear her own voice, especially when she knew it would be tinged with the most useless kind of panic. So she closed the door and reentered the cabin. Evolution despised emotion, which explained so much about life and those who lived it successfully. Now, though, it was as if the film were being shown backward, legs devolving into fins, lungs into gills. It wasn’t pain and it wasn’t fresh, but it was as unpleasant as anything she could ever remember feeling, which was why she allowed herself the queasy liberty of finding her father’s tiny, pine-paneled bedroom, of lying down on his bed, of taking a sip from the bottle of brandy the secretary had left unfinished. The view from his coffin, she realized, must look similar to what she was seeing now: wood on the ceiling, wood on the walls, wood all around.
She spent the next day wandering the landscape, acclimating herself to the thin air and the way the tree line seemed hand stitched on the mountainsides. Then she began to work alongside the secretary to liquidate his estate. There was the subdivision and auction of the hemp fields just outside of Steele, North Dakota; the disbandment of WXRP, a radio station that broadcast one-man comedy hours from a lighthouse on the coast of York, Maine; the emancipation of nearly three hundred sled dogs in Cripple, Alaska. When the transactions were complete and the funds had been transferred, she read the telegrams with a cold eye before crumpling them in her fist and tossing them into the pines, wishing the news they contained were meant for someone else.
Soon there was only one remaining task: the resolution of a trademark dispute concerning the aborted cigar company in the Philippines.
“I’d be happy to press forth,” the secretary said, “and notify you when everything has been resolved.”
“No,” she replied after a moment of deliberation. “I’ll manage this one myself.”
She gave the secretary his last paycheck. Then, for the sum of fourteen hundred dollars, she booked a seat on a DC-4 from San Francisco to Manila.
On the plane, which was different in every way from the cargo ship that had once taken her and Anders in the reverse direction, she tried to prepare herself. It would be upsetting, most likely, to see Manila again after eight long years, to witness the near total destruction she had read about in the papers. But the shock of actually arriving there, of seeing animals in the rubble fight for what she hoped was not a human bone, was terrorizing and instructive in a way she never could have foreseen. She learned the manner in which her own tragedies compared or did not. She learned the completeness with which landscapes could dematerialize and reconfigure. She learned how to take reliable refuge in smoke and drink, lighting cigar after cigar, pouring glass after glass of lambanog, the local coconut wine, as she wrote and received her telegrams from the lobby of the Manila Hotel, which, although it had been torched by the Japanese upon their retreat, remained partially open for business. When her correspondence had been read and attended to, she would roam the broken city and see something that, for the first time in nearly a decade, she could imagine wanting to understand.
So she did her homework. First, she returned to the manor and the mango orchards or, rather, to what was left of them. The manor was now a pile of bombed-out masonry. The fountain in the courtyard was dry and filled with soldierly remnants: condoms, cigarettes, machine-gun cartridges. The orchards were cratered and patchy, the surviving trees visibly disappointed by the burden of continuing to fruit.
“Where,” she asked one of the locals in an ugly mixture of English and what little Tagalog she remembered, “is your most beautiful bay?”
The journey from Manila to Donsol took two days by bus. In Donsol, the beach was littered with what looked like fishing shacks but that on closer inspection turned out to be ticket kiosks for sightseeing trips into the outer bay.
“Butanding,” one of the tour guides explained.
She didn’t understand but bought a ticket anyway. Minutes later, they were afloat, just her and the guide. Their brightly painted pontoon boat was little more than a canoe with wings. It was late afternoon. Her legs and back still ached from the bus’s hard, tiny seats; her stomach still wobbled from the twisting country roads. The light was slanted, tropical, the beach fluttering like a white ribbon in the distance. When she saw the huge shape in the water below the boat, she thought she was hallucinating until the guide began to yell and smile.
“Pagsisid!”
She looked down at the water again. The shape was coming closer now, its size four times that of the boat, its darkness punctuated with thousands of white dots, its rearmost section tipped with what looked like a gigantic scythe. The guide shoved two objects in her direction: a pair of goggles and a curved length of bamboo with a rubber mouthpiece on one end.
“Pagsisid!”