I'm a young writer at twenty-one. I often find myself up late at night, in front of a story and working - or rather frustrating myself - over the next word to come up with, new ideas to stir into the boiling pot of idea brew.
Given the above picture, it was rare that I got the chance to stay out late at all. So tonight, when I actually had a legal reason to stay out, i went and dropped everything. School for the day, feeding my cats. . . hell, everything was pushed to the cornermost pocket of my mind.
The party itself wasn't much to speak of; but then when my father and I were driving out of the subdivision, on the way home, events began to pile up. The night slowly gained momentum, preparing itself to fling a fistful of confusion to the nearest person available.
There was a queue of around twenty cars lining up at the guardhouse, all waiting for their chance to slip past the security guards, maneouver into the streets of Ayala Alabang el konyo, and wallow in whatever sense of freedom that escape afforded them.
My dad slowly eased our beat-up '92 Lancer into the spot behind the last car in the queue. "They've had some cases of carnapping in this area," he said, scratching the area on his belly where his trash bag was supposed to be. "The last time your mom and I were here, it took us nearly two hours to just get out of the gate."
"Carnapping?"
"Yes, apparently. They bring carnapped vehicles in using a faked subdivision sticker manufactured by an underground sticker company - of course, they'd have to have connections since these carnappers are big time; they live in this subdivision - and then they probably chop them up. They're AIDS, getting into the peaceful system of Ayala Alabang and fouling up the atmosphere with their clandestine operations that don't really get detected because of all the sugar-coating these rich people are used to doing."
"Oh. The drummer of my band has an uncle who does something like that."
"Carnapps? Or AIDS?"
"No, they have this car shop, but then they scalp the cars they're fixing of the good parts and replace them with cheap ones. Then they sell the good parts to international smugglers, and the money they get from that they spend for smaller, faster, and lighter cars they use for motorized jousting."
"Jousting?"
"That thing they did back in the middle ages? Only they did it with horses?"
"Yes, I know that. But you must be joking. Jousting with cars!"
"Well that's what I'm told." And at around this part of the conversation, we're out of the subdivision, and steering into the toll gates of the south superhighway, and I was stuck with my thoughts on high-speed jousting at an avenue with the magnitude (speed-wise) of Ortigas at 3 am.
They were piling cars on top of each other at the junkyard near my house. 'They' were two kids who had free reign of the junkyard's magnetic arm.
My friend was waiting for me just outside my house when we got home. "We've hit an all-new high on the independent thought charts," said Paulette, following me past two Labradors that were trying their record best to break free from their leashes in order to pin me down to the ground and rain slobber on me. "It isn't enough that we have to work with dwindling ideas but now we have to work with dwindling ideas stored in a machine that's not quite willing to move."
I zeroed into my computer situated underneath the stairs, and switched the machine to activity. "Get lost, Paulette. I'm not working tonight."
My dad passed by, carrying a glass of water and a towel wrapped around his waist for form. "You're not sleeping yet?"
"Not yet dad."
"Okay then, could you wait up for your mom and your sister?"
I connected to the internet. The messenger - Yahoo! - was on.
"Where're the documents you're supposed to be typing for me?" demanded Paulette, who had gotten one of the monoblock chairs hovering like bad memories around the glass breakfast table and was now sitting beside me in my little nook.
I basked in waves and radiation.
Trish was online, picking her nose (or so her status said). "Hey dearie," I said. "How're things?"
"Fine right here," she said, with a wrinkled face. "Which is not to say that I'm doing fine, but just that the present situation as I speak to you, things are at a lull, therefore I can safely assume that things, myslef included although that might now be a reach, are fine."
No doubt everything was okay. "That's good to hear. Guess what?"
"No idea, what?"
"The highlights of my evening involve cars."
Her eyes widened. "Now that's fucking rare. The average of how many times I've ever heard you talk about cars is . . . . . . zero."
I shrugged for the hell of it. "Well, I'm not talking about cars in general. I was referring to highway jousting, carnapping, and junkyards."
"Junkyards fascinate me," she said. A friend went online, and I exchanged pleasantries with him before going back to Trish.
I fetched myself a glass of water from the fridge. I was struck by a wave of mental nausea, and fretted about the missed hours of education for fifteen minutes. The things you can think of while getting a cup of water, let me tell you. Fifteen minutes of thinking can send a person careening into mad frenzied tantrums, especially if you're worrying about something as life-threatening as school or a faulty iron lung.
"You're not working," said Paulette from her nest beside the computer nook. "Why don't you get to work and save yourself the trouble of rushing things at the last moment."
The most expressive emotion on a woman's lips is a pout. On the right person, it can make you fall in love, can cause your body to go into an adrenalin rush of comic book heroism, a single dose of superman steroid. On others, it can make you want to punch their faces in.
"It's funny how many philosophical insights you can get from something as simple as kids playing with a magnetic arm in a junkyard," said Trish.
"How the hell can you get philosophical insights from juvenile delinquents?"
A pout. "Try to stop for a moment and ponder how the reckless management of a magnetic arm can convalesce itself into a life situation and lesson. If you pile up cars helter-skelter, it will undoubtedly topple down; it needs proper arrangement. It might seem helter-skelter, to see a tower of dead automobiles looming in the sunset, but with the right amount of planning, the situation could be the most beautiful sight in the world."
"Will you quit bothering me, Paulette?" She threw a pillow at me from the living room couch. That girl was nothing but broken glass on my lawn.
My mom arrived at around two-ish. I didn't notice how the time had gone and left me witless, staring at the screen as two friends went from romantic to downright scandalous. "Hey mom. How was the dancing?"
My niece was hanging onto my mom for dear life. She was asleep.
"Hey Martin. Could you go get the bags?" She slowly lay the girl down on the couch. Paulette moved to the other couch and fiddled with her mobile phone.
The bags consisted of fresh Mindoro rambutan - a bountiful bagful of the hairy fruit - a gigantic box of Toblerone, an even bigger cache of fresh salmon meat, and a new batch of towels and an umbrella.
Mom was tired out. "I can't believe you and your dad had to go on ahead. You missed your cousin's dancing."
"She has great legs," I said, appreciating the gravity of my loss.
"Is that all you can say about your cousin? How great her legs are?"
"Mom, I haven't seen her for ages. What else am I supposed to say about her?"
My mom had this curious habit of ruffling her hair when she was tired, ironing out the neurons dying of age, stimulating clogged veins. In reflection, maybe this is why grown-ups are more organized than kids; there aren't any dead cells to hinder the flow of information, no gummed-up plumbing to dredge.
"Could you fix the fridge so we can stuff everything your aunt brought over into it?" she asked me.
"You go on up, I'll take care of this." Systematically, the rambutan and the toblerone were the simplest to handle. The rambutan wouldn't fit into the fridge any way you tried to get it to, so the basket stayed outside, with the coffee. And the toblerone box went into the fresh foods storage (there was enough space in the bin to hold three heads of cabbage and two eggplants, with extra room to spare). The real tough puzzle was the box - although the term was roughly interchangeable with miniaturized crate - of salmon.
My mother watched me struggle with the salmon and the assorted meat we kept in the freezer. "How many classes did you miss this morning?" she asked, yawning.
"Just two," I replied. I took out the ice trays and removed the cubes into the ice bin, creating more space in the freezer that was already packed to the ribbing with assorted other processed meats.
"Can you make up for those classes?"
The tupperware of cold cuts had to go to the back of the freezer if I were going to maximize space. So there it went. Which moved the half kilo bag of french fries to the front line. But the crate was inside the freezer; a tight squeeze, but it was in.
"The way he's not even working on his writing, I'd doubt it," snorted Paulette.
The freezer door woudnl't close. The frozen hunk of fries was in the way. I flicked sweat beads forming on my brow away. The fries would have to be defrosted.
"Well, I'll have to try one way or another, won't I?"
But if the fries were defrosted, they would surely contract some form of salmonella infection that would probably be killed when they were deep-fried later, but then the very idea that you were eating food that had contracted salmonella one way or another was disquieting. Thawing was out of the question. I shifted the ice bin's position.
"I'm going to sleep." Mom went up the stairs, carrying my niece.
I thought I detected a note of sarcasm in her voice, just as I thought I detected some change in the stubborness of the freezer door's adamant refusal to shut completely.
"See?" said Paulette, stretching on the couch. "Everybody's worried you're not working as much as you should."
At last I managed to stuff the crate of salmon into the freezer without any problems, after shifting the bag of frozen fries from this position to that position several times. "Management of everything is crucial for survival," said Trish, when I got back to the computer.
"Maybe. But is management the most crucial thing in living? Or surviving, for that matter?"
"Maybe you're just trying to get yourself psyched up to put your affairs straight," replied Trish.
Paulette was back on the monoblock. She was watching me intently, a pout on her face, probably thinking that her complaints and sidecomments weren't really working, probably wondering what to do next, probably stewing in her own rage, probably thinking of ramming her head into mine just to get me to work. Which wouldn't have worked, no matter how hard she tried. I would have just killed her.
"If our obligations were only manifested as physical beings," I told Trish, "how easy it would be to just grab an icepick and stab it continuously, just to clear up the todo list."
"Hun," was her reply, "even junkyards don't have the capacity to destroy cars just because. They have to get them arranged first before their compaction machines and furnaces could start the deconstruction process, and even that won't push through if you don't take the car apart first. You have to tackle things one by one, not as they come."
"You'd get knocked off your horse if you did that," I replied. "Maybe jousting was the most logical of all sports. You always had to take on opponents who were directly within your sights."
"You either get knocked off your horse and nurse your wounds for another fight, or you knock the other guy off and steel yourself for a tougher challenge, faster charger, stronger armor."
"Will you excuse me for a moment?"
I picked up Paulette and threw her to the ground. I reflected on how her silence was beginning to annoy me, just how much I wanted to break her, pin her down to the kitchen floor, cut her to pieces with the famed bread knife my father loved so much. She was random detail in my life, the stealth attack on my personal psyche that knew exactly how to get in without having to try too hard, her words and actions veiled with a false coded message that slipped past my defenses unnoticed. She was my cancer cell, she was the sugar-coated HIV nucleotide.
She looked up at me with venom in her eyes and hate on her lips. But she'd stopped speaking, and she wasn't about to begin again. Her silence was enough to wreak static in my peace of mind, to destroy the calm and clarity of my otherwise systematic world. I dragged her to the kitchen, brought out the serrated bread knife, and proceeded to cut her up. A friend told me once that the meat was softest at the joints, not because it was truly soft, but rather due to the presence of a skeletal synapse between two different pieces of bones. This was applicable to almost anything, as I discovered; the process of cutting Paulette to pieces took no longer than thirty minutes.
Her pieces were impressively tiny, now that they were torn apart and packed neatly into a plastic garbage bag that I unceremoniously dumped in front of the house with the accumulated garbage boxes and cans that were waiting for the garbage collectors' early morning run. The entire operation had been bloodless. My dad's bread knife was good steel.
"You had to off Paulette again, then?" said Trish when I got back.
"Yep. Third time this week."
"Hell. Your life sure is infested with the strangest imaginary women on the face of the earth."
"What's stranger is how these women affect the way I think, the way I feel. Imaginary as they are, everything feels very real to me."
"Oh jeesus. So you're stuck with me tonight eh?"
"Yep. But Paulette'll be back tomorrow."
"Isn't she always?"
I opened a word document I was supposed to be working on. I quietly resolved to catch up on the classes I had missed.
I disconnected from the net without saying goodbye. I had work that needed finishing, schedules that needed rearranging, a life that was waiting for me to return.