A PROPHET'S LIFE

An Autobiography by Yusop B. Masdal

(Unedited Version)

Preface

Chapter One. The Rising of The Dawn

I was born at around two o' clock in the morning of the seventy-second year of the
twentieth century, as I have been told by my mother. If hospital records would
concur, then this must be the fact. My mother once told me that she had a
reasonable difficulty in her labor that it took her towards the beginning of dawn
before I first breathe the air of this mortal world. That day, all Moslems went to
the community mosque because it was also the day in the Hijrah Calendar to be the
commemoration of the birth of Prophet Mohammad, the feast of the Maullud-din-nabi.

I had a very special affiliation with this coincidence because when there is
nothing more to say, I always mentioned to my friends that indeed I was born on
the day Prophet Muhammad was born. To be born in the day a known prophet was born
may be a sign of some bigger things for me ahead I thought, something grand that I
had a sentiment of grandeur because of the coincidences of my birth. There was
some sort of pride in this; perhaps I was just like any Christian born on the
twenty-fifth of December.

So I celebrated two birthdays each year. My aunt Minda would prepare me a feast
and my cousins would savor upon Chinese ramen and chiffon when April came. My
grandfather, Imam Unih, a Muslim preacher, on the other hand, would always hand me
some money to celebrate my birthday when Maullud-Din-Nabi comes which I always
used to buy lots of toys instead of a grand feast.

Mine was a very unusual childhood. As far as my memory takes me back, it had
seemed that the first consciousness I have gotten was to be a child living with my
grand father, those memories where my grandfather was always there when I was
still an infant. My grandmother, Hadja Daihanna, passed away when I was about
three year old or so that I really had no substantial memories of her except to
see her sitting stoically in her rocking chair for hours and hours, all day long
due to general paralysis. I remember quite well that in my pre-school ages, I
always dream about her (those dreams where I always fall from my bed; having that
feeling of falling endlessly from a cliff).

I dreamt that I was flying furiously through the woods terrified from being chased
by this being who looked like an old woman with graying hair l like wire fences on
her hair and she had wings blacker than the night. And it was really uncanny that
she looked like my grandmother, at least the stringed hair was similar as I
observed her when sometimes she let her long hair spread out in order to dry it up
after a bath. I had this kind of dreams and the winged old woman sometime had
companions and they kept on chasing me. In one of those dreams, I also had these
companions who looked cherubic and whose hair where curly like American babies. It
was because of these dreams that in my waking hours, I felt some discomfort every
time I stared at my grandma, though at that early age, I have learned to dismiss
those dreams to be merely dreams and nothing more.

I had this particular dream that left me really screaming in the deadest hours of
the dawn. Again as usual, I was speeding through the night forests being chased
furiously by those dark winged creatures that looked like my grandmother Hadja
Dayhana. I would bend my arms in front of my face in order to protect my body from
the branches of the trees that I went into in my flight from the flying specters,
speeding into nooks and caverns. As I escaped from the woods, I blurted into the
wide-open night sky and lost those who were chasing me. I was huffing and puffing
from the furious chase and flew to a nearby gathering of trees and there I found
my companions, those cherubim with faces of infants. Without speaking in words,
they instructed me to be quiet while we had a view of a assembly of people
encircling a huge campfire. They were all kneeling and I saw some familiar faces,
the ones who were chasing me, being part of the group, chanting and singing and
howling as they faced the burning woods in the middle of the circle. It was a
ritual. I was awe-stricken by the unusual event before us when suddenly, something
from behind us moved and the winged serpents found us again and we scurried
hurriedly, to flee again. When I woke up, I screamed my hearts out and my
grandfather had to make me drink cool tap water.

These were the familiar nocturnal dreams that I had when I was so young and
little. Each time I woke up, I always felt so surprised to find myself in bed
instead of the caves and forests that were inside those dreams, as if I really was
in those dreams that in fact whenever I fell in a dream, from trees and cliffs, I
also fell from my bed.

Of cherubim I always had memories the most vivid of which was me afloat the clouds
with many of them trotting throughout and food fell from the sky without end and
we held baskets to collect the manna from heaven. I remember these dreams for they
were happy dreams.

I died once when I was a child. I profess to these because now as I grew older, I
realized that memories are there to remind us of things that happened in the past
and not to put fabricated events in our mind. How could one for example imagine
past events that are so vivid that they recur incessantly whenever we see things
that remind us about such incidents, refreshing our memories towards the growing
years. For example, whenever I see rice fields I always go back to the days when I
and some other children would scour the wetlands and hunt for birds with our
slings. The smell of coffee now takes me back always to the moments when my
grandfather would always retreat to the front yards and sip hot ground coffee
while sitting in his rocking chair, wiling away the afternoon without uttering any
word while reading Arabic jottings he had written himself in miniature notebooks.

Dying was a matter of darkness. Death is all of darkness, just like sleeping. When
we sleep, we close our eyes and slip into darkness and unconsciousness sets in.
Such was dying. Darkness was like a tunnel, like being caught in the body of a
huge cannon. My body floated towards higher ground like a speeding rocket coming
out of the dark tunnel. I had a feeling similar to skateboarding and of being
carried in a Ferris Wheel, lifting my entire soul into a maze and into a circle.
At the end of the tunnel, I appeared so suddenly into the open air that made my
skin tremble a bit. And lo and behold, I found everything to be brighter than any
sunlight that I have experienced before. Above me was pale bluesky, a kind of hue
that was so sweet to my eyes and below me were clouds thick as foam. I felt a
sudden gush of joy that my heart flew and skipped a bit. In the air was the spine-
tingling sound of strings possibly that of a clarion or a banjo guitar and my eyes
swelled with tears as I felt an overpowering outpour of divine happiness. I
floated and floated, letting the wind control my body, leading me towards the
thicker clouds that lies ahead. Within the clouds appeared angels with curly blond
hairs and faces that one imagines the biblical David have. So handsome and so pure
in white raiment and wings so white as they flutter through the clouds. They
seemed to be full of jest, disappearing suddenly and appearing at the other ends
of the walls of clouds. As I hovered through the clouds, I could see a figure that
took to be the shape of a white castle, as I go nearer, I affirmed that they were
really castles afloat the clouds, my first sight of a castle with high turrets and
towers; years before I saw an illustration of such in children's books. Before I
could reach the castle, I suddenly woke up and found myself atop the table in the
living room of my Uncle Mameng's apartment, the eldest child of my grandfather who
we were living with, and I could see my bloated stomach as I regained vision
slowly and slowly. Initially, my vision was dull and could only appreciate the
sight immediately in front of me until I regained full view. I could see my father
worriedly scurrying near me but with a great sigh of relief in his face while the
others smiled. I heard the man whose name I could not really remember now, living
next door, saying to my grandfather, "See, I told you he would be alright". And
then I still remembered my grandfather's face with tears on his face. That was the
only time that I saw him cried and never ever again.

It was a fever so high that almost took my life in my infancy. I had frequent
fever attacks then that often, my grandfather would perform a sort of ritual with
a blade in one hand and a candle on the other, reciting Arabic prayers in order to
cure me of my fever. Of the many times that I remember him doing such ceremony is
how I reckoned how in my early years, I was often afflicted with high fever.

I felt so harassed by the heat every time during those bouts that my head was
aflame and my skin was torching. In such infantile consciousness, I always
remembered how my body was burning with extreme temperature that my consciousness
would somehow separate from my own body. When my body became numb and isolated,
the burning sensations were not as disturbing anymore.

My grandfather was a busy man that he had to be concerned with my frequent fever
attacks while at the same time lulling my grandmother away from her recurrent
malady.

Once I had asked my grandfather about my grandmother's weakness and general

immobility. He told me that it was indeed because of a disease that afflicted her
and that she would not be able to speak so well anymore. What I really wanted to
asked him was why she would scream at times into the midnight that everyone in the
house would be awaken. What kind of disease would let one scream into the night
was the thing I wanted to inquire upon. But as a toddler, I bet there are things
that we do not even know how to ask, when vocabulary would not be enough to
elucidate our inquiry. Everytime she was attacked by such "disease", Uncle Mameng
and the servants would come and help my grandfather calmed her down, to reassure
her that everything was all right. She was always murmuring about some person she
was afraid of; a one she calls "the jinn".

"There are no jinns. You are just imagining" my grandpa always assured her while
she would lay there wide-eyed and trembling. From the looked on her eyes, pity was
the natural thing I could feel for her. She was like a child afraid of something.

"I have checked the whole house and there was no Jinn around" my uncle would add
to further reassure her.

At times the attacked on her nocturnal sleep would be so serious enough that in
the stillness of the dawn, we would packed the necessities and head for the
hospital, staying there for nearly a week every time.

At such a young age, my grandmother's predicament affected me so much that I had

always hoped then that I was already grown up and be able to help her, wishing
earnestly to appease her. Those dreams of flying had made me somehow distant from
her, a little bit wary of her and somewhat disturbed that the winged old woman in
my dreams somehow looked like her. And yet, I felt so much for her. Besides those
were merely dreams.

Once I decided to investigate the cause or causes of the "weakness" of my

grandmother. I was relatively confident that I would find some answers however
tender my mind at that time. It was in the apartment's bathroom with its yellow
darkened light and perpetual wet floor that she had pointed to be the place where
she had seen the "jinn". The bathroom had malfunctioning equipment that always had
that pungent smell typical of aging lavatories, full of slime and fungi stuck to
walls and corners giving it a dark green shadow all over, from the floor to the
ceiling. What augments the general dimness was the decision of the household to
put a bulb of the weakest power that even at daytime, I would always feel like it
was already midnight whenever I enter it. There was desperation written all over
it that anyone who went into the toilet would realize immediately that it was a
place where the smell would remain even if best efforts to clean it up would be
undertaken.

As I relieved myself, I tried to stay longer when the apartment was quiet and
everyone was either asleep in the afternoon or were out for work. I examined the
ceilings for some clue and stared at the walls for holes and cavities to where the
jinn might be hiding. When I convinced myself at that time that there would be no
such signs of the unknown being, I stepped back and headed for the door. As I
turned my head, suddenly I saw in the corner of my left eye a huge shadow of a man
that goes from the floor towards the ceiling, the shape of its head folding into
the surface of the ceiling. The hairs at the back of my head stood up and I felt
my skin trembled. Despite such apparent terror however, I gathered all of my
strength to focus my stare into the wall but the shadow was not there anymore. I
went quickly outside and found the afternoon very still as usual.

I went to the garden in the front yard where I usually enjoyed my solitariness
when the sun was readying to fall towards sunset and played in the gardens,
picking some leaves and mangling some stems. My cousins would be asleep in that
hour of the afternoon while I did not developed such habit, allowing me so much
time alone to play with whatever my mind could think of. As I put some stones into
holes that I have previously dug in the ground, I pondered upon the shadow in the
toilet. Was it the shadow of the "jinn"? It was a huge being I thought and the
image of the shadow was vivid enough that I was able to surmise that it wore a g-
string garment on its body and had a strip of clothe wrapped around its head while
its hair was shoulder length, like an ancient warrior. He must have held spears
and knives but such things did not appear to me.

I kept on digging holes and putting stones and coins into them and then covering
back the holes, ironing out the surface to look as if the soil were never
disturbed. Such was the kind of solitary games I played. I have reckoned then so
early in my life, when I dug up the stones and coins the day after, that plants
and trees could grow from the ground and flowers multiply too; but stones and
money would not.

I had perhaps had a very strong desire to tell my grandfather about the shadow but
somehow I did not had enough inclination to put them into words while my
grandmother kept wailing in the middle of the night every now and then. Then after
a while, her predicament eased towards serenity that she just stared and sat in
her rocking chair until she died in the hospital one day while I was looking after
her. My Aunt Julpa cried first and asked me what have I done that she died. Of
course, I did not know what to say but her asking was etched so much into my mind
that every now and then I would ask myself if indeed I had done something to
hasten her death. But as I child that I was then, the disturbance of Aunt Julpa's
inquiry just faded into memory till now that I earnestly attempt to recollect
those events so far into my childhood.

There were a lot of card games played while the family was mourning the death of
Hadja Dayhana and the smell of brewed coffee permeated as the men would take turns
in making the coffin. They were in jest as they kept on putting one up against
each other about who is the better carpenter. My father attempted to drive a nail
into its rightful place but the rest laughed that Salip Hussin could never become
a sharp carpenter. This had somehow eased my apprehensions about Aunt Julpa the
day before. Every one was in a light mood that everything must have been all right
and done with. Dying in the latest of ages seemed to be most acceptable to all.
But when my grandmother was finally rested to the ground, as the men held her body
so gently and tucked her into the crevices of the ground, almost everyone was
teary eyed and Aunt Julpa was even talking to my dead grandmother while we throw
soil to cover the grave, about why she had to leave, about her being not able to
come and visit her frequently. How could she talked to a dead person I thought?
Would her cries and words be heard and not flow into the rural wind of
Taluksangay? This had somehow recuperated the apprehensions I had about her.

There must something in my grandmother that gives spark and liveliness to the
house that after she died, there was a gradual silencing of the household and
everyone was more incline to frown, more inclined to be introspective that
conversations became lesser and us children played lesser games, as if a great
lonely shadow was cast over the household. If anybody missed her among the members
of the house--including the servants--no one could tell, the least myself. It was
the newfound serenity of the surroundings that everyday I had wished that all
those who played card games in the mourning of my grandmother would come and
played those card games again and again, to make the noise stifle the sadness of
the gardens and of the front yards, to fill the air with coffee smell again and of
rice cakes. But this was never so. And so in the afternoons, I kept playing in the
garden, careful that the traces of stems mangled and flower picked would not be
apparent enough less my Aunt Nene would call upon to inquire upon the suspects and
then the guilty malefactor, which would be either one of my cousins or me. I went
about to pretend that I was like the older men who did the coffin thinking that I
might become a good carpenter, unlike my father. It was in sunny days that I loved
to play alone in the yards when the air was a little yellowish and everything
seemed to glow, like the image of those pictures not developed properly and
everything in the picture would be bright yellow. I smelled the air and they were
thick that almost I could see the wind swooping by, and caressing my hair so
gently. I smelled such air so smoothly they seemed to be delicious, like chicken
or chiffon cake thickly covered with butter. In one of those sunny afternoons, I
had looked towards the sky and observed the sun. I tried to examine if the sun had
come nearer towards the ground that everything looked brighter. And my mind got
stoned when suddenly the clouds move so agile that a hole in the sky formed, like
a gate opening. And then I saw a very colorful image coming into the center of the
hole. What a beautiful kite it was I said that it had the bluest of blue and the
greenest of all green. It was a horse with the head of a woman with its hand
waving at me. A kite would not do such things I told myself. And the gate in the
sky closed and the technicolor horse disappeared.

I wanted to ask my grandfather if kites could stare back and waved at us while in
the sky but somehow, I did not ask anymore. It happened in those very early years
where my vocabulary was not yet efficient to elucidate every thought I had then.

Chapter Two. Into The Great Wide Open

When finally I was of school age, my mother got me back and started living away
from my grandfather. It was hard at times to be away from my grandfather since I
got so used to be with him. The giddiness and wonderment of childhood might have
staid off these longings for my grandfather that I easily readjusted to newer
surroundings. When I was with him, I played with my cousins, when I was with my
mother I played with my sister and two brothers. Children always play it seems.
They were built and created for to play and nothing more that games was like a
narcotic to every child's longing and impartibility. Old habits did not die down
that in the afternoon, on Saturdays and Sundays, I would earnestly find some
solitary moments and played with "unreal" friends. I would climb trees alone and
fish with a crude hook and line equipment in a nearby pond. My mother was living
in the house of our grandaunt, Hadja Saniya, and it was an old house with a
colonial built. In that place, there was some woods full of banana trees and a
guava tree in the midst of it, near the pond were tadpoles litter it to the hilt.

The guava tree gave me a view from above and I had always liked the air up there.
I would climb it and stayed up there for hours that I could not almost feel the
afternoon passing by until twilight comes and all the children were up playing
hide-and-seek or cherry base, a game where one would guard a post in order that
the others would not take and conquer it by surprise and win the game.

One day while darkness crept slowly into the night, I was in a hide-and-seek game
when suddenly, as I looked into the area full of banana trees, while hiding from
my seeker, I noticed a little distortion in the trunks of the banana trees, and as
I stared lengthily towards the woods, I noticed that a group of persons were
looking at me. Some were standing while a couple was sitting in a kneeling
position. They were all staring at me. They looked unusual that they had skin
gleaming like bronze and their body sizes were relatively small like children's
body and yet their faces looked old. I should have been scared and immediately run
away but they seem to have put me in a trance that fear was absent in me at that
moment. I remember it now so vividly, as I try to recollect these past events. I
could even describe to you how one is put in a trance. As I looked at them, my
head felt a gentle swelling, painless and smooth, as if the rest of me
disappeared, except my head and my feet did not feel the ground. Again, my
surroundings became yellow and everything seemed to glow despite the lateness of
the day. My sight became sharper and I could hear my heart pounding and my body
seemed ethereal like I was a spirit floating above ground. The one person sitting
kept on signaling to me that I should approached them, because perhaps of the
trance that I was put in, I headed towards the woods slowly, into the thick
groupings of banana trees. As I pierced through the woods, the surroundings became
brighter and ahead of me was a pathway in the forest, and I could see many of them
at each side of the pathway, hanging from trees and huge stones. They all held
palm leaves in their hands and shook it that collectively they made a swooshing
sound that is gentle to the ear. Nobody spoke to me and nobody touched me. After a
few meters of going forward, I stopped abruptly without deciding on my own, and
turned back and into the games that I was playing with the other kids. It was a
transition so smooth that I could say that time stood still and the event suddenly
disappeared from my mind, never able to tell it to any of my friends or to my
mother about the particular strange occurrence. It was only later on in life, that
the memory kept coming back every time I walked into some woods with the same
landscape and contour, feeling déjà vu every time, and vividly recalling details
of such event. It must have been a dream. It must have been not. But dreams I
could really recall to be dreams no matter how vivid they were and the forest
incident was never a dream. In fact I had a dream once, about three years ago that
was so vivid and yet I fully recognized it as merely a dream, not a memory of past
events. In that particular dream, there was also a pond. I found myself in the
middle of a wasteland, with red cracking clay all over, up to where my sight could
reach. And then there was the pond that was unusually situated near a sloping hill
and the air was yellowish and the sky a bit red, bleeding into many hues and
concentration of red. There were no trees or a single bush in the arid ground
except for a leafless tree protruding at one side of the shore of the pond and the
wind was very still and motionless and the only sound I heard was the poundings of
my heart. If you could perhaps imagine Mars and its landscape, that was how the
dream looked and felt like.

The pond was of fair size in a shape that is almost perfectly circle. It was a
small pond indeed with a radius not more than ten meters. I climbed the barren
tree and sat there looking into the water, undecided about my next move. I could
see the water inviting me to jump, almost feeling the coolness that it harbored;
the dewy color of the water was refreshing to the sight. There was some life in
the pond that I felt it could talk and communicate as if it was a creature on its
own, with a head and a torso, and the tentacles of an ancient mollusk. I stood up
from one of the tree's branches and dived into the water. The splashing sound it
made as I entered the water reverberated throughout the heavy air that I could
hear it rumbling even while I was deep into the water. Such sound made me reckoned
that the pond was deep, so deep in fact that I kept going further and further into
the water and I could not see ground. As I went deeper, there was exaltation
inside me, a sudden gush of joy that became more and more prevalent as I dived
deeper and deeper. But even as I go further into the water, I could find no end,
as if it was a bottomless pit. I was insisting to lunge deeper when suddenly I
felt a hand grabbed my body and pulled me towards the surface. When I reached the
surface of the water I realized that I could not swim that the man who grabbed me
had to help me reach the shore. There were actually two men that helped me get out
of the water, as I lay there gasping in the banks. I examined the two men and
observed them carefully and to my amazement, they both looked like me. They were
my twins if only in that particular dream.

I sat there at the pond's shore while the two men stayed in the water, so expert
in their swimming prowess that you could not tell from the surface if they are
really moving their hands and feet to wade above the waters. That was the time
that I saw this vision of an old person who looked like an old woman in a very
long white dress. She looked so old that I had initially thought of her to be a
ghost but despite such apprehensions, I could not move and continued to stare at
the apparition. She approached me slowly as she floated through the wind, her feet
entirely above the ground. As much as I thought that she was approaching me, as
much farther she had become. It was completely a distortion of physics and of
sight. She moved away from me, hovering towards the top of the nearby hill. A
smile was pasted on her crinkled face that somehow I felt reassured that she meant
no harm. She pointed towards the tree and through my mind, she instructed me to
dive once more into the water. And so I recreated my previous dive and the sudden
gush of happy emotion was there again as well as the temptation to go deeper and
deeper. To seek the ultimate depth, the bottomless pit. The water offered such
narcotic feeling that the two men had to grab me and pull me up before I go so
much deeper and became lost into such very fearful depth. Every time I reach the
shore, I dived again and then dived again until I was able to swim on my own,
having gained the patience not to go deeper into the water.

And the dream went into a blur. The last recoverable image I have got of that
dream was the old woman dancing atop the hill, while floating, and swaying her
arms sideways and roundabout, as if ordering the wind and all the elements to
move, and the air moved. In fact the entire atmosphere was in a whirl.

If dreams could be so vivid, nothing could top that particular dream where even
when years had already passed, I could still remember the details, and the
minutest of emotions that I felt. It was one of those dreams that once I woke up,
I had the feeling that I had been transported from one place towards another
instead of the general feeling of waking up.

Of dreams and of past memories therefore I have a healthy recognition and have
reasonable distinction.
It was also in my Hadja Saniya's front yard that I also had another experience of
trance. Again, we were playing a catch-me-if-you-can as twilight was already heavy
into the night that it was only the full moon in the sky that gave us sufficient
illumination. When the moon was full, us children would play into the night and it
was sort of a ritual for us every time the moon appeared at its fullest. Before
night came, the older children would inform all of us that the moon would appear
in the night so we had to prepare for the night games. They say the night was full
of monsters and ghosts but when the moon was full, even the olds would be in the
yards to enjoy the mystic of a moonlit night.

The extra playing time we've got made us giddy and a little bit livelier. Every
one seemed to laugh and snitched, until we were all laughing incessantly as we go
running in a circle continuously and I started to hear laughing voices not of my
friends but of some other persons'—old persons'. I stopped moving while the others
kept running in circles, and the laughing voices faded as if I became suddenly
deaf. And I stood there petrified and my body moved independently of my will until
I was positioned apart from my playmates and gazed towards a guava tree whose
leaves was crumbled due to the coolness of the night. The night became a little
bit darker and my friends disappeared into a blur, as if I was the only person on
earth that night. There was a red flickering light in the middle of the guava
tree. The spark of light flickered so slowly as if someone was blowing it again
and again. I squinted my eyes and I saw a figure of a huge man with the head of a
horse, and the flickering light was at the end of what looked like a huge cigar. I
could see figures in shadow because the tree was just about twenty meters away
from where I was standing. The figure then changed into the figure of an elephant.
After a few moments, I saw the shaped of a whale, then a horse head again, then of
a monkey. The shape kept on changing and changing. The occurrence took about
nearly an hour but when it ended my friends was still running in circles. I felt a
sudden loneliness that I started to cry for no reason at all. I saw my mother
coming after me and asked what was wrong with me. The other kids said that we were
just playing. My crying caused the disruption of our over extended play into the
night. Somehow, I could not remember telling my mother or anyone about the strange
figures I have seen. Funnier still, when the day after came, nobody mentioned to
me that I acted queerly by just standing there and crying so suddenly. Just like
those other strange memories, I always failed to tell anyone for reason that is
perhaps beyond careful remembrance. It may be perhaps the feeling I had then, even
up to now, that no one would believe some queer stories anyway that it was not
worth telling in the first place. Such memories faded in my head as the years went
by, to recur as deja vu in later years.

All these experiences had one major tread that are similar to all and that is the
feeling of entering into another dimension, penetrating an invisible wall that
divides this world from some other parallel existence. I have a great feeling that
those events were planned by some supernatural beings, as a way of introducing
their presence here on our material world, to declare that they are here.

2.1.

Hadja Saniya was unlike other elders we had. The more she got older, the sharper
she had become. She had been tending a store and kids like us could not touch the
goods as easily, in order to put some candies into our pockets without paying for
it. All day long she played solitaire and was all too engrossed in it. I have
learned one lesson or two about playing cards from her. At age six, I was already
crazy about solitaire. At age nine, I was already gambling with the older cousins
and uncles, playing poker and baccarat.

She never spoke much but she was always ready with the broom every time we did
some mischief in the house, even those malefaction we did outside whenever news of
such reach the house. One afternoon, words got to her that we took some bits of
pork meat from some neighbors grilling a whole swine. I did not have so much
beating from anyone as much as I had from her. That was my first religious
lessons. Moslems do not eat pork she screamed and gnashed and from then on, I
never touched the meat for a long, long time.

Her house would have been so grand when it was newly built as if centuries ago.
While I was scrubbing the floor and wiping the dusts from furnitures, I imagine it
to be a classic house made of wood, somehow Spanish in architecture but always
remind me of American houses that I often see in the movies, just like the one in
American Psycho. Her husband died years back that we did not really saw him alive
but his picture hanging in the living room reminded me about how handsome he might
have been, a man pure in Middle Eastern blood, leaning to the Turkish rather than
Arab. He might have been a cinch with the ladies in his younger days. I imagined
their stories of adornment. Perhaps, he was a handsome young man then, setting eye
upon a fair Samal lad, and some other girls. He must have been a rich man to put
up such a house. In Moslem wedding engagements, at least to those who were
prosperous, all the matters are never settled in one sitting, at least not in one
grand ceremony, merely climaxing upon such explosion of merriment and celebration.
There would be the engagement procedures where the family of the male would bring
all kinds of sweets and delicacies wrapped in colorful packages. In recent times,
they used colorful cellophanes and Japanese paper when in the past they have to
make use of carefully garnished garments and expensive silk from china. The china
man brought these things and porcelains in exchange for the gold of the local
tribesmen. There must have been a lot of gold vein in the area of Zamboanga that
there were old pictures of Samal tribesmen flashing those teeth that glitter even
if the photograph were in fading black and white.

Imagine yourself in a stock exchange as quoted prices flew by here and there and
you would be able to feel how the parties negotiate for the amount of dowries to
be taken by the family of the would-be bride. The spokesman for the male party
would offer all the things that were superfluous like four heads of cow or a
pocketful of pearls and morsels of gold. The father of the bride-to-be would of
course negotiate for a better deal until the two parties meet at one delta of
understanding. About a year after the agreement, the wedding ceremony would take
place and in those olden days, it would last almost a week of merry making and
festivity. The gongs would reverberate throughout, day and night, insistent and
almost to the point of annoyance to the neighborhood. The best dancers would be
invited to take turns, as the bride and groom are kept apart until the last day of
the ceremony. There was the persevering smell of rice cakes and pastries made of
mustard and egg, the kind that I always look for whenever I am in such activity,
identifying the area of the kitchen as early as possible and then reconnoitering
the area like a vulture. I usually fill my stomach with a lot of native coffee as
the supply was bottomless and unending and every adult would took notice that such
young child would spoil himself with nerve wracking amount of coffee.

Even in her fading years, Hadja Saniya looked fair that there was no doubt that
she had deserved such grand wedding from the "Turkish" suitor.

Years after, the house of Hadja Saniya was graying and the paint on the walls
subsided that there was an apparent darkness everywhere. When night comes, the
darkness is more pronounced as silence complements the general dimness. The smell
of old wood always lay heavy upon my nose that every smell of wood reminds me of
the house. Dirt stuck to the decades old walls invites me always to stare at them
and I reckoned then that the dark stains on them formed the shapes of men and
other unlikely beings. The house was alive I thought then and it breathes into our
lives every moment we happened to be there. In the night, these shadows become
sharper that I thought I saw the shade of an old woman always while the lights are
out and I lay there trying to find sleep, turning in my bed while cuddled inside
heavy fabric, sweating profusely from fear of shadows.

I would sweat so heavily from warmth as I resisted the terrifying shadows of an

old woman sitting just at the foot of my bed. There were times that the fear ate
so much into me that I screamed and cried in the middle of the night. My father
thought I was just missing my grandfather that at midnight, they would deliver me
to my Uncle Mameng's house nearly ten kilometers away.

Of course, I would have to be back with my mother when school finally opened. The
shadows finally came at lesser frequency and besides sleeping together with my
brothers kept me somewhat reassured. If that old woman would strangle me, at least
I would not be the only one to be strangled.

I could not tell if those shadows were really ghosts or spirits but I felt so sure
that they breathe a life and they were unmistakably the shape of human beings.

My real sighting of a ghost came years later when I was just about ten or eleven
years old. I could remember some particulars as I relate this to you now. It was
near midnight, on one weekend, when most of the members of our household stayed
wide awake to watch a television special; it was a late night movie if I am not
mistaken.

Usually when the night comes, I had felt dutiful always to check the back door if
they were safely locked and shut tightly. That night, before I sat to watch the
show, I reconnoitered the kitchen and locked the door after reassuring that every
chore in the kitchen has been done. As the show started, I felt a strong urge to
relieve myself that I headed for the comfort room, situated just to the left of
the kitchen. As I turned towards the direction of the kitchen, I saw a figure of a
woman in white gown, with her hair down to her knees, walked pass the hall leading
to the kitchen.

" Is someone still in the kitchen?" I asked.

"Everyone is here. Why?" quipped my Aunt Coney.

"I just saw a woman in white walked by in the kitchen hall!" I exclaimed.

"Do not kid us like that." She warned.

"Really. I did saw a woman"

We all stared at each other and after a moment, we all scurried for the main
bedroom. Every one was blaming me for playing some wicked game on them and I kept
on denying them.

"It must be your imagination." they all indicted me.

Half an hour later, we were back in front of the television while I was feeling so
sick already from fear. I had no choice but to join them in the living room
otherwise I would be alone in the room.

While the television was glaring, a sudden wind blew forcefully from the window
and rain poured instantaneously as rumbling thunder shook the house. It was just
another bad weather, as we disregarded the weather's tumult and stay stuck to the
television show. Perhaps the wind was so whipping that small bits of stones were
thrown at our direction, entering thru the window.
"Damn it. Someone is throwing stones at us," Coney said and we all peered into the
window to investigate the malefactor and we find exactly nobody outside as more
bits of stone came at us. The sound of thunder became extremely forceful that the
lights went out. By this time, I could already feel the fear that had enveloped
not only me, but also the rest of them; fear has a smell I realized that moment.
In the middle of the living room, a small whirlwind was lifting the small stones
towards the ceiling in a circular motion and while the stones circled above
ground, the wind suddenly stopped and the bits of stone fell simultaneously to the
ground. We all screamed and run to the bedroom.

It was strange that the day after, no matter how patently strange the experience
we had the night before, everyone was merely jesting about it while Hadja Saniya
simply dismissed it as the playful imagination of our minds, us who were still
tender in the head. She was deep in slumber when the strange happenstance
occurred. Even those who were present in that strange occurrence simply forgot
about it, never mentioning it again. My Aunt Coney just did not talk about it. My
brothers Nasrullah and Akmad and my sister Rimaisa just went to the yards and play
the usual games, as if nothing happened. If I remember well, my cousin Nimfa and
Mernisa was present then and similarly, they never took it so seriously despite
the common terror we had felt that night. Where in contrast, that unusual night
were etched forever in my mind.

The eldest who was there was Aunt Coney. I had expected her to convince the others
that some spirits really played fun on us but she acted as if the strange night
was merely a usual occurrence, and did go on with the ordinary chores, as if
nothing happened, as if she was expecting such things to happen ordinarily. After
that night in fact, she had slowly gained isolation from the rest of us, at least
it was how I have observed her to be. She would walk along and would give me that
iniquitous stare that I felt somehow uncomfortable that she had suddenly become so
mindful of my presence that she would shout at me easily if for example I happened
to touch the expensive jar in the living room.

I reckoned that she had blamed me for that strange occurrence in that one strange
night.

Chapter Three. The Mystical Old Man

You could fall in love in such tender ages this I realized when I stepped into
first grade. Those feelings might have been merely infatuations. I was not sure.
Nothing is so certain with emotions especially that of a child.

I could always write "C-H-A-I-R" or "U-M-B-R-E-L-L-A" when our teacher instructed

us to identify things on the board. That was how Julie chose a seat beside me. She
was like a leech poring into all the answers I have got on my paper while I was
always ever willing to share them. She was there with her angelic face looking
perpetually it seemed at my paper. In such closeness, I could study the gentle
features of her face, the wide-eyed girl who also happened to be a neighbor of
ours although their house was far enough that she was not with the regular kids I
play with every afternoon.

Julie had a face of dolls my cousins used to play and she wore dresses like those
dolls wore. With flowers and sunbeams in them embroidered like badges. Her hair
was always prim and her shoes shiny. When rainy seasons came, she was the only
child who carried to school an umbrella made for kids while we carry the larger
ones, whose length were nearly our heights, making us looked laughable and tragic
it seems.
Even in the gardening activities, I would be the one toiling for her that it felt
good to be so needed while she enjoyed being so dependent. At that age, the
littlest of vocabulary in our minds never allowed us much conversation that what I
did was merely stare at her face and wonder how it attracts my attention so much.
In the afternoon, I would go home ahead so that I could again examine her face
while she walked past Hadja Saniya's house.

One day she shook the entire class as she narrated to us, while we were playing in
the fields, how she had a dwarf friend that she had put in the bottle. I inquired
so earnestly if the dwarf was still there and said that in fact she had spoken to
one of them that morning.

We all grouped around her for dwarf stories and she would tell them with so much
energy that she sweated sometimes.

From then on, she was full of dwarf stories that my classmates proceeded to
disregard her. Perhaps, bandwagons were a fact of life even in our tender ages
that even I started to isolate her. She became bitter and always in argument when
we chided her about the dwarfs. Until one day one of the dwarfs died and it seemed
she never spoke again and became all the more introspective and isolated. In the
second grade, she had changed classes but I continued to examine her face whenever
she was around. As she grew older, the dresses she wore disappeared and started to
wear jeans and t-shirts, and before we knew it, she had developed lesbian
tendencies and became silent.

When I entered high school my grandfather took me back and paid for the expensive
fees of my catholic schooling. He had become weaker and weaker that perhaps, he
needed someone to tend over him when weakness consumed him altogether. He had
bouts with asthma that often, we both slept in the hospital for days. The hospital
became my second home during those years while I struggled with my studies.

In his healthier days, he would give me Arabic lessons and great myths of old.
Being a Moslem preacher that he was, he was always writing some Arabic scribbles
into his minute notebooks and I would ask about them.

"It is the mysteries of the world." He would always say. I wanted to ask if for
who does he writes it for when almost nobody could understand Arabic but I did
not.

I would observe him scribbling all afternoon like a well-versed scholar on

composing his post-graduate opus. He had an apprentice whom he always consults
every now and then, a young preacher named Abirin, who was also our relations. I
would go along with him to these frequent visits and indeed they compared notes. I
observed so keenly how they relate and strangely enough, they do not speak as much
to each other but they would smile and grunt as if they understood each other. One
time, they had this ritual where they lit up a candle and Abirin was holding the
Tasbi, the Moslem prayer beads, and held it up that it lay there static in a
hanging position. There was no one around except the three of us. Both of them
continue to mumble Arabic verses that they both seemed to fall into a trance,
including me that my sight got plastered into the hanging Tasbi. Then all of a
sudden, the beads swayed back and forth, about forty-five degrees from left to
right. Then it went forth in wild circular motion without the hands of Abirin
moving. Then if stop so abruptly that even at that age, it must have been
impossible. When after a while, the Tasbi stopped completely in a forty-five
degrees position, for a bout sixty seconds and this had astounded me so much for I
know this is not how gravity actually works. My hairs stood up and felt a sadness
so deep that I wept there so hard, and tears flowed from my eyes like a river.
Both of them pacified me telling me that "it's alright. It's all right. Stop your
crying". And they were both smiling at each other without conversing in dialogues.

One of the manuscripts that Hadji Unih was writing one afternoon was a wide paper
with shapes in them. It was so wide that he had to fold it before tucking it into
his black leather case. In the middle of it all was a circle and at each side was
three rectangular shapes. At each corner was a triangle and within the shapes were
Arabic verses. I was particularly mystified by the work that I asked him its
meaning and consequences. "It's the mystery of our existence," he would vaguely
answer again. I imagined those writings to be charms that I had a keen eye on
them, coveting them in my heart that I planned to tuck them away. I daydreamed
that they would give me powers of the supernatural kind. One that could make me
disappear perhaps and become invisible or one that would afford me extreme luck
and plow in mountains and mountains of money and other riches. But it was only
after he died that I have got hold of the paper that I wanted most. Not by
stealing it away as I had planned but by just appearing in my sight several nights
after he had died. All his garments and materials were distributed among the
relations including all his writings and paraphernalia. It was only the one that I
converted much that I found in the empty closet that we both used to share. I was
so consumed with sadness that after putting the paper in my bag I just forgot
about it and did not mind it much until years later. His death meant that I had to
go back to my mother and started the "silent years" of my life.

The death of Hadji Unih was like the world falling down on me. I awoke to a newer
set of reality where the very person that almost became everything to me, to be
the father and a mother, to provide every garment and every toy, suddenly
disappeared. My body became literarily wobbly that uncertainties of future things
cast a huge gloom into my mindset.

I became the more introspective and the change was so abrupt that my classmates
once took notice of this change and ask if something wrong was happening to me. I
said there was none.

As I visited his tomb every now and then, I would take a stone from the surface of
the ground where he was buried thinking and hoping that his spirit would into the
stone and guide me throughout my life. I would be like a man gone out of his head
as I spoke to him while my words just flew into the wind. Extreme introspection
was the consequence of his death to my person but sadness was not so. A week after
he died, my mother and many others would still cry, especially my mother who even
months and years after, she would wake up in the middle of the night to sit by the
dimly lit kitchen of Hadja Saniya and cried. But I did not cry as much. Weeks
after his death, I was playing basketball with so much fire that I excelled in it.
I cried once and then never again. My body became lighter that despite the abrupt
change in the things that I have, as compared to the things he had been affording
me, I never cried so much over him. As if somebody was lifting me up and protected
me from longing so much for him.

And yet, the lack of things was a something that I had to struggle with and took
me a long time to adjust.

Years later, he would appear in my dreams. One of those dreams I quite remember so
well. We were walking along the bridges and planks of a Moslem community by the
sea, like typical communities of Samals. It was unlike any community that I see or
that I have been. As we were walking, his footsteps became faster and faster,
leaving me a little behind and struggling with my own footsteps. Then he walked
faster that the distance between us became wider and wider until he ran suddenly
forward. I was teary-eyed calling out for him, not to leave me behind. I could see
him run and suddenly dived into the water below and swam towards the deeper sea. I
was flooded with tears as I ran after him and I also jumped into the water. I
struggled to swim as water poured in through my mouth and suddenly he appeared
from under and carried me while he swam like a swooping tornado. When we were in
the middle of the sea, he suddenly became a crocodile. I did not mind it so much
as the ride gave me a serene exaltation, and a wide grin was on my face. The dream
ended as we approached the beautiful orange sunset against the blue horizon.

Chapter Four. Invincible Hours

In a Jesuit institution, one appreciates the love of God and of country because
the insignia in our school uniform boldly states "pro deo et patria" a latin
phrase declaring "for god and country". I had always stared at that insignia and
studied every detail of the design. The very minute I got hold of that high school
uniform, I felt ecstatic because for every child, Ateneo was a dream school, it
was where the rich men's children gained their education.

Truly indeed, there were lots of them rich kids in their huge basketball shoes and
rubber wristwatch protruding gravely from their little gangly arms. I could see
that even in appearance they were different from each and every one of us. They
always had skin so fair and tinges of foreign look.

My first day in school was not a good memory. I had bought this orange pants a
month ago thinking these were such garments the hip American kids wore, those
Bronx black kids used when they were break dancing. I was a huge follower of the
strut and breakdancing movement that caught the whole world at that time.

While we were in the flag ceremony, some kids from behind snickered and I heard
him mentioning the color of my pants. I should have been gone to the city jail
instead of school he said. I heard that because they meant it to be heard so I
felt so conscious and sweated for the rest of the ceremonies. I tore that pants
later on so that I could use that at home, at least, my money did not went for
naught.

In my college years, I stayed with Ateneo and planned to master politics or

literature when some student assistant led me to my scholarly perdition.

" You are taking A.B. Political Science while others are struggling to enter
nursing" the student assistant from the admission office quipped as if she was so
bored with her job that she could not help but interfere in some poor lad's
career.

" What's wrong with the course", I answered.

" You have a very high entrance score and you could take just about any other
course", she suggested and I thought she was waiting for my acquiescence with
bated breath. I could see the white of her eyes as she stared worrying for my
life.

"I am planning to enter law school" I said, " It is just a preparatory course"

"You could take Accountancy then" she insisted and added " it has law subjects in
it"

I examined the curriculum and indeed four entries there read "Business Law". As if
just to do away with her pestering, I agreed and sign in with the batch of people
who wanted to count other people's money.
At home, I reconciled my earlier decision with the uncertainties of the future. I
assured myself that it was for the better because if things would not work out
right, I could always slide into counting money in banks or some institution. I
could even go on business myself and be proficient with money. But it turned out;
accountancy was not just about counting money. It was full of worksheets after
worksheets that test the patience of the students, while it was supposedly to be
merely a stepping-stone for me towards another course. I lacked the patience and
discipline that I performed miserably at school. I did not decided to change
course anymore because I felt my intellect were enough to wrestle the course even
with the minimal attention to it. Whoever says that an accounting class was not a
bore must have been a fanatic of numbers. We always had to determine the money of
some Mr. X or Mr. Y and see if the profits he raked in were properly reported or
not. Then Mr. Z somehow had this factory and we must advice him at what price to
sell his goods. Then there were the banks that we had to reconcile. It was a
merciless subject that I never really cared if banks reconcile or just kept on
kicking at each other's butt.

I spent a lot of time in the library instead. While my classmates was carefully
putting entries into their ultra-neat worksheets, I dived into the world of
Russian literature- of Feodor Dostoyevsky and of Tolstoy- and into those American
textbooks who were not wanting in graphics and designs, full of school yards and
prairies and colonial houses made of Oak.

I joined the school paper to further stifle the general boredom of classrooms. I
must have questioned enough inquiries as a reporter that in my senior years I took
the rein as the Editor in Chief. I learned to make more poetry because the ones
submitted were simply crap. Well, not all of them at the least. I would hide in
some other name to fill a section full of serious literature. Each issue was
always a labor of love that I would stay alone in the pressroom up to the late
evening to get some editing done.

I kept the greater load of the works, burning hours after hours doing the dirty
stuffs, integrating issues with more than two of my pseudonyms. I kept every
member of the publication at bay. I was not a good administrator despite my
writing skills that a friend declared that the publication was a one-man magazine.
I sort of took offense at that, but it somehow gave me a feeling of invincibility.

Chapter Five. The Man In The Moon

There was a time when my grandfather was telling me the story about "the man in
the moon". In moonlit nights, long after my grandfather died, I sat and merge with
the cold wind and studied the geography of the moon's surface. He called the man
Taberlok, a scary name I surmised then. He rode the sky in a magic broom and had a
pointed trumpet-like hat. He comes down once in a while my grandfather said,
looking out for kids who did bad things and taking them away into some other
world, never to return again. I shriveled at the proposition that I gained some
distrust against my grandfather. How wicked Tamberlok was I thought for children
only wanted to play and laugh all day long.

But Tamerlok was not a one-dimensional freak after all as my grandfather

continued. On the other hand, according to the old man, a good kid was given a
wild and happy ride across the stars and beyond. And it would be a very enjoying
ride my grandfather always reassured me.

As I grew older, I reckoned this tale to be purely made up but somehow I kept
staring at the moon when the moments were perfectly at hand. I had hoped very much
that my grandfather was the real "man in the moon" in order that he may come and
took me a ride across the meteors and along side those speeding comets. If he was
the moon man I thought, I would gain the wild and happy ride, because I had been
generally good with him, at least as I had believe then.

When he was alive, he would always take me with him whenever he had to go downtown
or visit some relations. It was a happy walk always that before we went home, we
passed by the store to buy some toys or new garments.

At times I stared at the moon so fervently that at one time or another, I saw a
face with a huge grin pasted on it. The moon was sometimes a person, living and
breathing. They say when it was at its fullest, ghosts and winged serpents would
appear and roam the sky and the earth, but to me, it was another chance to summon
the man in the moon.

I called upon the spirit of my grandfather also whenever I pray, after calling out
to God. It was extremely difficult for me to memorize those Muslim prayers that
after trying my best, I gave up and decided that I should settle with the prayer
of the beads which only three words were muttered in Arabic. I conformed then to
the idea that every prayer, as long as it was genuine, was good enough. There was
this Tasbi that my grandfather had which I kept until now as a remembrance and I
used it in my nightly calls to Allah. Since he died, my night calls gained
sufficient frequency. I called on Allah and confessed all the things in my heart.
The things I did in the day and all the things I did not. I felt so sinful then
that not at one instance merely that tears would flow down easily from my eyes. "I
am despicable", I admitted always. I call upon God and sometimes I could
interchange Him with my grandfather unknowingly that my tone for my meanderings
were indistinctive, regardless if I was confessing before God and summoning my
grandfather.

Chapter Six. The Rose Bud

I met Evelyn during my first years in college. Our family moved house towards a
neighborhood that had once been familiar to me. The old apartment where Uncle
Mameng's once rented was just nearby. Lustre Street felt familiar, there were
those stark reminders of those adventures I had in Childhood. There were the
chronic water ponds were fishes used to roam and we'd fish like there was no
tomorrow. The rice fields somewhere in the out backs of the houses on stilts
seemed barren now, but in the past, wild birds dotted them that I had slingered
quite a number of them.

I never had a girlfriend since that time and it took me quite a number of nights
thinking about my move. The neighborhood friends were too urgent that I had to
save some manly honors. There were not a few times that I sipped a bottle of beer
before I would speak to her. And some nights it was not merely sipping, but I was
already half-conscious from beer.

There was nothing I thought I was best at but at making love letters and I wrote
them in stationeries I burnt with cigarettes to heighten the effect and then I
wrote her poems.

Poets have privileges that others do not have so perhaps when I finally got her
acquiescence I celebrated my poems, almost putting them in plaques.

I wrote poems that were somewhat surreal; the kind only the poet knew the exact
meaning and nobody else. They were erotic at times, but adventurous at most. There
was the poem that I remembered the most and it was like magic that until now, I
remain its most ardent admirer, though it may look I am the sole admirer. That
poem was the "Rose Bud" and it goes…

Set your fodder widest

Like an ocean of yellow poppy field,
On an orange farm
That once ruled
The mazes of my perverted dreams.

Here I stand,
A smirking child
Lost in the underground caves
Where I set my Indian soul free
Always upon your magnificience.

You offer me your oriental meal

Flavored with salted tenderness,
Laced with diamonds of
Hopes and promises.

When you tamed a whispering storm,

The moon was a scarlet fire.

Aziz accused me of inventing some poem that was heavy on drugs and perversion. I
said it was only in his mind. I explained that the poppy field is the beauty of
the farm I used to see in pictures of Europe. They must have been tulips, but I
preferred the poppy flowers.

Poems are always misunderstood. Mine were not exempted.

Chapter Seven. The Accidental Politician

Law school was both a destiny and a curse. The first appreciable words I heard
from my father was "you would be a lawyer when you grow up" and stuck to my mind
like mildew on wet rock. If he were a warlock, it would have been the curse from
Gods. But since he was not, then it must have been destiny.

The minute I stepped into the halls of the University, there was a realization
that every other hour I have spent in classrooms were for the sole purpose of this
endeavor, to learn and argue for somebody else's tragedy. Sighing as if a great
thorn in my heart had been plucked out and yet sighing, or rather yawning that the
specter of boring classrooms would still be there to haunt me. It had become the
wildest of my ambition to finally find myself free of blackboards and teachers
mimicking textbooks. And in my first year of law school, my patience was gravely
questioned; my discipline doubted thinking it would be another four years of
classrooms.

To make matters worse, my law years overlapped with Satan's wrathful stranglehold
on me, stifling my attention rules and procedures as the scourge of depression
sent my emotions into ecstasy, and then sadness, then everything in between.
Again, I merely traipse along periodic examinations and semestral breaks and along
summers and make-up classes and completion tests. The years in the University
would have been mostly plain and sordid, until I got myself entangled in student
politics.

I was riding the seaside highway towards school while heavy in my mind was whether
to skip the class or not. My decision to attendance led to a lengthy conversation
with a classmate that was himself harboring a hard decision to make, that is,
whether to run for another term as President or not.

"This is a good proposition," he said. Teng Catong is a miniature national

politician who takes his politics so seriously that it pores out of his skin.
Elections were his staple, the lifeblood that makes his spirit rise and gain him
some shine in his face. If orations were an Olympic sport, he would have
represented Philippines.

"Any good proposition is good to hear," I said, pinching in some bravado, upon
speaking to one who is full of politics.

"I am sure you could do it," he sort of whispered to me and that was the time I
realized that this may be something beyond jest. I felt some sinister.

" If I can do it, then I will do it," I answered with bated breath, somehow
recognizing that the proposition would demand so much from me. I thought perhaps
this was a business proposition and he needed some capital, which I do not have
really.

" We need you run as President for our party" he muttered casually,
psychologically assuring me that it would not be so much of a big deal.

I regretted my bravado soon after and smiled so hard I thought I would laugh. He
must have been joking I reckoned then and my mind rushed for excuses.

"I do not have the resources"

"We have the resources"

"I won't win. I have no previous reputation."

"You will win."

The following day, I submitted my application with the dean of student Affairs and
rode the campaign trail thinking I was merely in a movie and everything was merely
an acting job. And most of it were actually acting job for someone who does not
have much time in the past speaking in front of crowds. I would scurry to imagine
Jose Rizal or Ninoy Aquino. If I had then the proper equipment, I would have
studied their movements and actuations every time I prepare to speak, like
basketball coaches do. In my mind was a playground, and I was the master of my
speech, the director of that movie. I became Gandhi and then Marcos then Pilate,
sometimes all of them at the same time. "Lend me your ears.." were words I learned
in school; "bring me your votes" was the phrase I learned in the field of
political battle.

When the counting came in, the lights went out and Teng was almost shouting at me
to make the rounds and guard every vote. He was holding his personal tally sheet
as sweat poured all over him. He shouted like he was my master and I was merely a
confidant. I did not say anything although I wanted to appease him that losing
would not be the end of the world for me. It was then I realized that my defeat
would be the world falling down on him. It was much of his election as mine. When
the smoke got cleared and every bullet was shot and every cannon fired, I got away
with the most minimum of votes and worry overcame me rather than elation. But it
was a show all along until the very end that I jumped as Teng and my other
teammates hugged to the air. I smiled but did not laugh.

Running for the topmost student post was one thing and winning was another. It was
purely bravado that got me embroiled in such very alien endeavor. I would not
worry much anyway for winning is not one of my expectation. You see I was a
complete nobody then. I had not anticipated governing that my losing would just be
another day for me. But I won and worried so much about governing.

The summer after such election, I fell into an abyss and that made everything
worse. I have to deal with a major depression while preparing for my reign as the
University president.

Depression is like water. You could not get hold of it. You grasped it into your
hands and they just melts away. It is also like upon a darkened room that the
darkness would be so unkind that you would not know where the chairs and tables
are, not even the way out. I bet our soul is like a ship and mine was the Titanic.
I hit an iceberg and got sunk into the deepest of the icy Atlantic water. There,
in the most desolated of the ocean's bed, nothing lives except some freak
creature, staring at you every now and then. The coolness of the water would not
support any moss, not even some anemones. I remember again that dream of mine
where I repeatedly dived into a pond, where I dove deeper and deeper and had no
such temerity to rise up again. My anxieties had gotten so worse that to compare
me to a shipwreck was an understatement. Depression was like that, you have
worries and could not point out to the source of these worries and you end up just
letting go of any resistance and wallow in sadness and general bowing gait that
paints the darkness of my life then.

I carried on with routines of governing when there is not much to govern except
that you are being expected to make something move and live, like a magician.
Student politics is not similar to the usual politics we have where everywhere and
everything calls for action and work, work and more work. In that set-up, you have
to create work it seems not so unlike of milking a male cow. So I had concerts and
essay writing contests and everything in between. If history truly judges the rein
of student presidents, then I must have not deserved a single jottings or a blot
of ink in the history books.

Chapter Eight. My Pen, The Arrow

In my senior years in law school, an old friend, Aziz Mustafa called me up and
inquired if I needed a job. The offer was like that of Marlon Brando's, it was
hard to refuse. Working for a foreign-funded institution is like a baptism of
fire, threading another dimension of existence. My hands were so full I choke on
paperwork virtually. There is this braggadocio in me that always get me into the
prying pan. I never learned it seemed. Serving the second half of my presidency,
tackling the end years of my law school, and eating up paper at work—all of them
almost at the same time—stretched me up like a rubber band in order to clip
bundles and bundles of papers. I was always up and about, always on the run it
seemed. If I find myself sitting in a corner at that time, that would have been a
minor miracle. Even at home, I would take work and finish it there because there
was a time that regular office time could not accommodate them. There was madness
in activity, so much activity it seemed that you could imagine me like a crazy
wheel rolling and rolling until nothing is there to roll for. My nerves were full
but it did not snapped because somehow, I felt at ease with furious activity that
inactivity was then a hellish idea. I bet when the juices gets going, work becomes
more and more palatable.

The money was so good that I stayed in my job even if I had consequently has to
take the bar examinations to gain my lawyering license. And besides I was married
already then.
I did not last in my work. There was a parting that was both hurtful but at the
same time relieving. For almost two years, office work had gotten so flat that
with more personnel coming, the load got lighter and lighter until there is
nothing more to do except watch for the clock's small hand to approach five o'
clock. And the days grew longer that we always joke around that somehow there must
be some fantasy company we could work in that every day was salary day. At the
beginning of the day, we wished it were already twilight. At the beginning of the
month, we would wish it were nearly halfway through. At least not all of us felt
that way. Or perhaps some were just not as honest about being disturbed of the
almost fatal routinariness of day jobs, especially government jobs.

But work is work and a job is a job. Without it, there is no sense that you find
yourself suddenly idle and not earning the usual things. Besides, who could go
against that unwritten rule where it seems that humans were created merely for the
purpose of growing up until you could work and then die? There were times when I
was too uncomfortably busy that I used to daydream how my world could be so
wonderful if I could spend every day of my life just sitting around in front of my
computer and make that proverbial "great Filipino novel" and watch over my kids
when I am not scribbling anything. Alas, writing a novel was so much easier to
imagine than do. It was like putting up a rocket ship or assembling a nuclear
bomb. I tried to make some upstarts but nothing came about not until years later.

Delusion I had hoped then could propel me towards success in literature. I had
believed that my intellect was adequate to harbor such ambition, sadly, intellect
and grammatical skills were not enough to get me going towards endless and lonely
nights by myself, writing and imagining, the sort fiction demands. I had fully
realized then that there is more to me that writing demands, something ethereal
and incorporeal, one that could not be seen; some call it inspiration and it was
inspiration that I lacked then.

I tried giving life to an otherworldly tale of two-lovers separated by time. I

called it "Black Sea, Dark Night", the way old writers thought of fancy but
concise titles like "My Brother, The Executioner" of F.Sionil Jose or "The Joy
Luck Club" of Amy Tan. More of it, it was a title that came to my mind whenever I
pondered upon the darkness of depression. I had learned so well that writing from
the heart is the sole highway towards affective writing and I could not be genuine
I would not find no parallel in my life to the things I write. It was about Peter,
an adolescent struggling with the same depression problems I had who suddenly saw
a creature of the night, a vision of an old man with a decrepit hat. The spirit
would talk to him and proposed that he do some favor for a task only he could do.
Peter would not know how to tackle this quandary at first for no one would believe
his tales, when almost everyone he knows he had this mental or behavioral
problems; until someone did and the story goes on and on until the final journey
into the spirit world and back and the final task accomplished to appeased the
spirit. What task was this did not materialized in the story, I could not even
invent one until now that it is such of essence that a spirit would go to the
extent of contacting a half-deranged boy. Although the tale would take me into the
ancient warrior days of Zamboanga, towards the colonial days of Spanish
Conquistadors, it stopped when the tribal chieftain was about to declare war upon
the much stronger Spanish soldiers and I left it at that. Until now, Black Sea,
dark Night is still yearning for its ending but you would learn later on why It
remains eating dust somewhere in one of my attaché cases.

Stephen King might have invaded the crevices of my veins that I had this
inclination to write about the things that feeds our fears. There is something
delicious in testing the limits of our nerves. The more we fear the more we scurry
for the mysterious. Like eating pepper; the more it stings the more we crave.
I remember that before there was "Black Sea, Dark Night", I had this short story,
again with a fancy title. I called it "The Southbound City of Iceberg", a tale of
an imaginary beast lounging beneath the city under ways, in sewages and giant
canals, pulling down each victim one after another, one by one that as the
disappearances became more frequent, the "beast" would go on a very lengthy guilt-
trip. What if men finally knew about his existence? And although it was merely a
beast it had the proper intelligence to regulate its mayhem. It ended just that
way, although every possible circumstances was scrutinized by the "beast", to the
worse where mankind would pour all its resources, the fighter planes of America,
the satellites of China, the tanks of Great Britain—all at once coming to the city
of Zamboanga hunting for its own mischief and blasting it towards perdition,
turning into pulp or pulverized like crisp biscuits.

The "beast" would stare upward the sky and got disturbed by the moving starlights
that it did not suspected at once to be man-made, until later on it surmised that
men had invented eyes in the sky in order to hunt it. It had surmised that before,
man had no such equipments to search for misfits of nature now it has meteor-like
gadgets to roam the sky as searchlights. The "beast" was an ancient creature that
slumbered for thousand of years, only to wake up to a cacophony of downtown
lights, rock music, honking jitneys and television. The world was never the same
it had determined. Even at night, the streets were brimming with clarity making
its haunting all the more difficult.

And yet, despite this difficulty, the thirst for flesh and blood was overpowering
that day in and day out, it would peer from the dark crevices of the street, in
some isolated nook or corner of the city, finding out if it could be lucky at any
time, that someone had drunken too much or got too much honked by drugs in the
head, to walk alone by some abandoned alleyways, and then go for the kill. It
could get luckier it thought, if some lovers who lacked patience would abuse the
darkness of bushes and wayward trees, to do the unthinkable, where the beast could
go for a double kill.

As days went by, newspapers started to report these mysterious disappearances and
so the "beast" finally went into the guilt tripping I mentioned earlier. Men are
now more sensitive to this untoward incidence, that every crime has its record and
every sin has its public board. The "beast" hated the modern man all the more. It
had delusions of murdering the city inhabitants all at once, wrecking havoc like a
crazy evil god, flooding the ground with flood. Luckily for the city, it inhibited
itself. Thanks to the things it sees on television. Those weapons of the modern
man were so different than those it had seen before—those spears and daggers—even
those catapults were no matches.

It ended when it decided not to devour as much in order that it would not be
indicted by man that in my fantastic mind, the "beast" is still out there, pulling
down its victim one by one.

The "beast" story was somewhat lyrical and honest. It was then the first and only
tale that I had completed. It was flowing since it was all about my struggle
against "Satan", that beast of a menace that keeps pulling down young men and
women, leading them into some dirty and stinking abysses of life, and never to get
out again.

I simply lost my manuscript that was why it did not go all the way to the papers.

But material things are not to be fret up, especially when these things could be
created. If I lost it, I thought I would just make another one then. A better one,
it must be.
This better one did not materialize and the tale of that doggone "beast" is like a
lost child whom I wish to be reunited in the future.

Oh, I lied about completing just a single work. Remember the dream of the pond?
The moment I woke up from that dream, I could not stop the itch to write and
document it for I had no such other dream that could be so vivid at that. I
remember so well the caking red clay to where the dancing old woman floated above.
Even the color of the dewy water was stained like rust in my mind that every time
I think about it, I could feel the sharp and crispy coolness it brought my skin. I
documented every moment, every emotion and every color of the environment. The sky
was red, bleeding towards horizon and the air was heavy and so still, and that my
breathing was the only sound I heard most of the time. In fact there was that
conversations with the other two men present that I forgot to mention. As I came
out from the water, I remember being a little aghast at the interferences of the
men who looked like me.

"Why don't you leave me alone", I almost shouted at their faces.

"You could not go deeper. You would not be able to come out", one of them said,
with a worried look in his face that tells some grave worry or concern.

I looked at them and hissed and I almost sneered. What could have gotten in their
heads that they burden themselves the issue of my well-being? These were very
particular dialogues and emotions that I have captured in writing "The Pond" then.
I remember how surreal was the world that I painted in that story, responsibly
truthful to the happenstance in my dream of the pond.

Then perhaps by now we recognize that my dreams, my memories and my fiction had a
heavy thread on them; all are surreal. Perhaps, we could add my life to that.

Chapter Nine. When The Dead Came Marching In

There was one fish story that brought me to the very ends of the world it seems,
so far away that running water does not exist and a paved road is an alien
concept.

My cousin King came to me on a warm day, the kind of day that my head is loose and
every idea could grow and expand into some humongous concept. The kind of weather
that the breeze is almost thick you could see them pass by, making you light
inside and cheery. It was this cheeriness perhaps that took a bite into
salesmanship, an amateur one that I realized later.

"I am busy with some business prospect," I mentioned to grasp some talking points.
King always seeks tutoring with his school assignments.

" That must be a good prospect," he condescended.

"What do you know about silk?" I asked. Perhaps he must have known some who could
give me some idea.

" Not much" he said. He seemed to know nothing. Bet that's why I was always ghost
writing his report.

"It's something we could grow from silkworms" I answered my own questions. "We
have to nurture worms and the most part of the work is growing hectares and
hectares of mulberry trees to feed these worms."
"Oh" he exclaimed and I felt hopeful." I know such worm. I saw some huge ones in
the beaches of Tawi-Tawi. They sell well."

He was talking about some other specie of worm.

"Why don't you try dried fish?" King suggested later on.

"What about them?", I asked.

"They cost half as less back at home."

I went for the calculator and grinned at the prospect. A week after, we were
heading for the islands, about two boat-rides away, three hundred miles downward,
and near the Malaysian border.

Banaran Island is place rich in lore, the ones you hear from the elders whenever
they visit us. I had been there once but that was way back in my childhood. There
was one ghost story about the place that I could not forget. When we were kids, my
two brothers and me and my sister would always seek some retelling after retelling
about such particular incident from the visitors from down south. As children, we
craved for fear and scurry for more mysteries. The scarier it gets, the more
attentive we became. It was like eating pepper; it hurts to eat more and yet
wanted to eat more and more. At night, after we took our meal, we washed our
bodies from sweat and put on fresher clothes and then we troop into the living
room where the available storyteller would be waiting for us.

One night, they always started the story, when ships and boats was not supposed to
sail anymore, when the air is so fragile and the wind was harsh, a ferry sunk on
the way to Banaran from the main island of Bongao. All those aboard did not
survive the tragedy. This accident had happened about two decades ago and it had
caused so much distressed to those whose relations were part of the doomed voyage
and due to the large number of victims, the sinking of the ferry cast a huge
shadow over the entire province of Tawi-Tawi and would be remembered as a
sorrowful time for the area for years to come.

Island life then might have been darker without electricity, and lonelier without
the touch of modernity that every death lays every possibility of otherworldly
apparitions and the wanderings of ghosts.

Then came the night when the wind whistled and overhanging clouds made the night
more sinister. When the dogs howl started to howl incessantly, the elders in the
island would call for their children the doors and windows were so locked that
even air could not come in.

The yards have become empty and even cats would scurry for safety. Not even
crickets were brave enough to serenade the eerily hushed night. It was a night
that humongous clouds would cover almost the entire sky. Everything you see would
be cast in shadow and the stars were all absent. They said that it had become so
dark that when they look towards the sea, they could see nothing but darkness. No
glow of the sea would reflect and the waves did not made a sound the way they
usually make.

The island folks first heard the sound of drumbeats reverberating through the cold
and wet atmosphere. "Tom…tom…tom…tom…" The beat did go until it got faster and
faster. They could feel the air get thicker they said and the smell of decay
became so overpowering according to one account that their stomach would ache,
urging to regurgitate.
Some peek into the darkness to investigate the source of the drumbeats and as if
in a sudden, the yards became illuminated, as if the sky parted instantly and the
moon belched out its head. The moonlight gave those few brave souls the undeniable
sight of a parade of people going in circles in the middle of the community plaza,
walking in a line. Most of them have limbs unattached and their faces were white
as chalk. The leader of the parade was in fact a headless drumbeater carrying his
own separated head. The children cried when they heard some of their fathers and
mothers wailing and shouting. They scurried into corners as if it would be of much
help to them. They hide in thick fabrics and sweated horrendously. The men were
ready with their bolos anticipating any physical attack by the limbless walkers.

No such attacked occurred as they sighed every time they tell and retell the
haunting. The drum beatings carried forth through the dawn and many were not able
to sleep that night. They said the ghosts was somehow taunting them as the
beatings would suddenly stop and then came back again gradually, slowly and then
frantically. The sounds of the drums were suddenly loud and then suddenly calm.

When the morning came, the entire island populace was awestruck with fear that
nobody spoke much. The children were kept inside their homes most of the time even
when the sun is blazing in the sky. Many went to the nearby cemetery to make some
offerings while the men embarked on a lengthy prayer session so arduous that it
started just after sunrise and ended when midnight was already around the corner.
The air was so full of the smell of burnt sulfur, as the prayers involved the
burning of small yellowish stone-like bits of sulfur.

The shock in their faces was so apparent that in a matter of hours, most of their
countenance shrunk and withered so gravely. They were bowed and their heads
stooped all day long, a sign of surrender to the menace of the unknown. There was
no knowing what was to come really. Most of them until that time had not really
fully believed in ghost but since that night, their greatest fears came true.

At first, they said, the parade of dead people came every now and then, especially
while the moon was full or at least fairly illuminating. Then they came less
frequently, sometimes catching them by surprise. The parade would announce its
haunting by the sound of drums, starting rhythmically slow until it gets faster
and faster as children cried aloud and the dogs howled into the night wind. It was
really very fortunate that the dead persons physically harmed nobody although the
emotional injury was so palpable.

The parade of the dead, some told us had successfully lessen the island population
by at least half. Many left their homes to seek some habitat in nearby islands and
Banaran became the more silent. Many houses lay empty and were allowed to wither
by themselves.

Most of my relatives, as we were told, decided to stay despite the haunting, for
they said, they would never know another place aside from Banaran where our
forefathers settled and died through the years.

Chapter Ten. In the Middle of Nowhere

It was a huge disappointment to find out that although dried fish processing was
rampant in our island hometown, there was just too much buyers of the goods that I
could not possibly penetrate the cartel in so short a time. Traders from as far up
north in Pagadian City, about five hundred miles from Zamboanga, would come and
negotiate with the local fishermen and cornered the market there. I was advised
that seizing a sufficient amount of the goods would entail some patience and a
lengthened stay in the islands. This was an untenable idea for me. The urban man
in me would be so hard pressed to slide into the virtual desolation of rural life,
to be "the man called Friday" and away from the honking noise and pollution of the
city. While the serenity of the islands provided me a great breather, it was
imaginable for me then to succumb into general silence of a rural environment.
There would be just too much silence that it would border the deafening.

The wide and miles and miles of stretch virginal beaches consoled my frustrations
and led my mind away from the profits that I nearly counted already and yet the
ones that would not be obtaining, at least not with that trip. We took small boats
and scoured the nearby islands. The breezy seascape had regained my trust in
nature, quelling every suspicion that nature has finally and absolutely lost its
battle against the industrial advancement of humanity.

There was this over-stretched patched of sand in the middle of two islands that
really caught my amazement. It was not of course very unlikely that such natural
accumulation of sand would concur in an area full of shores in the first place;
but have you heard of a beach in the middle of the sea? One could not help but
surmised that Atlantis might have been similarly situated as that particular
beach, once rising to the surface before it got sunk into the pit of the ocean.

I walked almost the length of the half-mile patch of the whitest of sand and
wondered why nothing grows except some marine plants attached like mildews to
rocky corals. I picked some shells and stones and felt somewhat mesmerized that
there were sea stones that were embroidered with the most perfect shape of a star.
My cousin King told me that they sell well with Japanese tourist, the ones they
make into beads. My eyes squinted to examine the stones more forcefully and I
almost concluded that God must have some industrial factories up there that stones
like those could be sculptured with some design that only machines could afford.
The perfect symmetries were there and the lines were straight.

I stared upward and the sky was clear of any cloud and it was the kind of place
where you could view the entire sky from one end, towards another, at any angle
you gained sight. Funny that I felt reassured that in that place, I would not hear
the sound of radios, nor the cacophonic slur of television, neither the honks of
cars and motorcycles. There was no smell but the salty fragrance of the sea and I
was assured that any fumes or dusty accumulations of factories would never ting
the air. No matter how trivial was such realization but I could not help
appreciating the newfound belief that despite of everything, there is still a
place where the hands of urban life, with its many gadgets and equipments and
convoluted industrial mazes, could not reach.

Chapter Eleven. An Old Warrior

My paternal grandfather was my namesake or rather I was the namesake of my

grandfather. I never saw him alive. He died when we were infants. There was one
very old black and white picture that I once got hold of in my childhood years and
I had felt strongly that it must have been my grandfather Yusop that was
positioned in a kneeling position. I was not able to reaffirm and verify that
notion with anyone but every time he comes into my mind, I saw him as that one man
in that old picture.

After scouring the islands for supplies of dried fishes and finding none, I went
to visit his tomb feeling perhaps like it was to console him since I did not meet
him before. I had always thought how it was very ironic that the old man to whom I
was named for was one that I did not meet even for once before.

But my father and aunts had good stories about him; how he became the richest man
in the province; how he trailed the Malaysian borders to buy imported cigarettes
and selling rice to Malaysian Chinese in the island of Labuan, merely an overnight
boat ride from Banaran Island.

How I thought he was such a man of character that he gains these lore and tales
from the ones who survive him. And then I felt the heaviness of the name; the name
of the old Yusop they always mentioned.

There was the heavy name on the side of the tomb and there were others, the
brothers and sisters perhaps. They all had the title of Salip, the one I suppose
to have but do not use. That was to identify the bloodlines of the heirs and
descendants of the Caliphate of Arabia, the relations of Mohammad, the great
prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, him that was born in the day that I was born
or the other way around.

There was violence in the history of old Yusop, or was it of the father of old
Yusop. Banaran Island was the place of exile from nearby Sulu town where someone
was killed, by vengeance or by mischief was an issue that was never retold. This
was the issues of old rekindled by persons suddenly appearing in our lives and one
that exemplified to me the delta of every human being, that always it seems people
part ways only to meet at some point in the river of life, and the world is but a
very small place to live in.

Chapter Twelve. My Mind is A Desert Sometimes

Business acumen is never the automatic mark of every person that I realized upon
my return from the islands. I sat for almost an eternity inside my desolated room,
back to the drawing board it had seemed, and asking the gods of fate of all things
that I must deserved. I was some guy who has no luck, one person that Rod Stewart
did not sang about.

My writing hit a blank wall, a cul-de-sac, the story that I started-that is, Black
Sea,Dark Night—lay hanging like a piece of painting half completed. I could see
the beauty of its mysteries and the stark philosophical investigation into the
darkness of depression and the imagined revelation of a spiritual world somewhat
subsisting parallel to that of what we have in this earthly existence.

I could not make money grow by themselves. My dried fish venture staggered like a
herd of wild stallion falling from a high cliff. Plants and flowers grow but money
does not; a lesson of a child that recurred to me that time.

My law education opened a brief sight of opportunity, so minimal that if my back

was not pasted on the wall, taking the bar would have been the least of my
options. I never had confidence on my legal knowledge, not with an education
fraught with the deadly menace of depression and general disinterest to classroom
sessions.

Despite this quandary, the seeming hopelessness of it all, I took the trip to
Manila to take the bar examinations and changed my life forever.

Chapter Thirteen. Fleeting Clouds in The Night

San Beda might have been somewhere in my past memory if only memories were so
affirmatively credible every time. The minute I went there, I thought I had known
just how those gothic buildings would have looked like; as if I had previously
walked those high-ceilinged halls before, where my shoes would click and clack
like horses' hooves. I felt a little de ja vu as I roamed those halls with their
handsomely checkered floors. I must have loved temples and mansions in my past
life.

So much of the past was in my mind.

I burned candles for nearly four months in order to refresh my grasp of those
mountains and mountains of law books, as if I had any grasp at all. I rented a
room less than a kilometer away from San Beda and for most of my stay in Manila; I
must have walked the length between the law school and the boarding house a
million times over.

I felt comfortable the minute I stepped into my boarding school. My room was
overlooking the busy street of Legarda while facing the northern sky.

At night, I sat in near the window and watch the motorcars speed through the
street below. I relaxed my tired mind by listening to my Walkman, letting my
consciousness slip slowly into sleepiness.

As I gazed towards the night sky, a very bright star near the sky summit always
took my attention. Every night, I could see that star at the places it usually
appears, treading the same path in the sky consistently. I had realized then that
navigation thru the guidance of those heavenly bodies could be so accurate that
even in the ancient times, men find faraway places by merely staring at the night
sky.

It is one those nights typical in Manila, windy and wet. The clouds would move
easily that they have patent fragility. The clouds were too dynamic that I
indicted Manila to be a place of queer weather. I thought that back in Zamboanga,
the clouds never moved like this. I pitied the Manila indeed, always struggling
against typhoons and hurricanes. A city with the burden of being the capital of a
nation and at the same time bugged with hellish winds.

One night, the movement of the clouds started to move so queerly that I decided
that was not the weather anymore. The thin clouds would seem to break out, then
close in again. Sooner, I thought I saw the shape of a man. Then there were the
winged horses. Then there appeared also a shapely woman in white gown.

I retreated back to my room thinking my mind merely needed rest. Too much reading
may have affected my visions that I started seeing things.

Inside my room, I sat in front of my study table and proceeded to read. My head
started to move independently, sideways then all around, until it got plastered
facing the wall. I could see shadows and then figures began to move. The shape of
a boat took shape and at both ends were two little beings that looked like the
form of aliens usually depicted in movies, hairless heads and thin body
structures. Again I questioned my senses and proceed to the living room and gasped
for air. I started to worry then about my sanity. In my past readings, seeing
things is a symptom of schizophrenia. This may be it, I thought. I was already
losing my mind.

I recollected myself and began to calculate my entire person. How does an insane
man think and behave. Am I of the unusual behavior? I had also asked myself. Do I
talk senselessly? Am I still able to acquaint with the usual people I know?

After such inquiry, I concluded so determinedly that indeed, there is no marked

changes in the way I behaved and relate with others. I am still able to have the
common notions and senses. If I were not insane, then only one thing was
deductible—the visions is a reality that I must accept. I tucked my thoughts
through a deep sleep, hoping somehow that whatever defect of mind that bothers or
would be bothering me would soon go away.

And yet, the night after, I looked at the sky again and the clouds behaved as
usual—so fleeting and fragile—and the bright star that I have mentioned earlier
shone the brighter than the night ago.

When the clouds began to form figures again, I did not retreat anymore to my room
and instead tolerated what was then to me was a huge stage show in the night sky.

As I trained my sight so carefully, in the middle of the sky appeared a figure of

a person with wings extending towards its sides. It was an angel, as we know them
through stories and movies, cloth in a long white garment and wings so white that
it almost shone. Such image stayed there for a long time that it had seemed that
it had merely served a center point of the entire visions. At the farther left of
the sky, I saw clouds in the shape of a ship of the ancient form, with huge mast
and sails, voyaging towards the eastern side of the sky until it faded as the
clouds soon disintegrated into thin parcels of smoke. Then I saw the figure of a
man, also sailing by from the left of the sky heading to the right. Despite the
distance, I could see that the he looked like a Chinese man with a headgear, and
he was smiling. If Genghis khan were photographed before he died, the man would
have resembled him. That was the thought that immediately came into my mind.

I returned my attention towards the middle and there were the winged horses
trotting the center of the sky, in circling motions, so steadfast and so
gallantly.

Those were my initial visions.

The night after, the visions became more lucid that the angel in the middle of the
sky showed me a dance that was somehow familiar and yet altogether unique.

The angel spread its wings again and again and I just stared. This particular
vision was so clear that some tears flowed from my eyes as I realized that the
visions had already transgressed the bounds of reality, as I know it then. I
became so concern that one of my companion in the boarding house might come and
find me in such unusual condition—staring vehemently at the sky while my eyes were
wet with tears. One of them, Alexis, was just nearby at that particular moment,
reading in the living room just outside my room. In later times, I had felt the
notion to tell Alexis about the vision since he was the closest to me--sharing the
room I had-- but most of me relented because again, that would only propel the
suspicion of insanity. In the mind-numbing mad rush towards the bar examination,
many had lost their minds in the past.

So I just stared at the angel and marveled at the sight. I could feel a little
rising in my emotions and a general feeling of gratefulness.

The angel kept on spreading its wings, again and again; that I thought it wanted
me to follow such movement. My head nodded independently. I took this as an
instruction so I spread my arms while being so wary that some of my mates would
suddenly come in towards my direction and deduce insanity.

Then the angel's arms showed as apart from its wide wings. It swayed its arms
towards the right side of its body in a circling motion and I followed it. Then
its arms went back to the middle of its chest, while its palms were open, and then
I followed suit. The arms swayed to the left of its side, and I also followed
suit. After a while, the Angel moved its arms in circling motions that were so
complicated that I was not able to follow it as it slowly faded away.

That part of the vision was the mesmerizing of all for it was the one that
exhibited a lot of movements that naturally ordinary clouds could not do. This is
perhaps more coherent than the vision of a bearded man sitting on the throne.
About the bearded man, I saw a huge throne and the man sitting on it. If my
notions were not wrong, I reckoned it looked like Jesus Christ in clean white
raiment. But this vision was static compared to the dancing angel where there was
dynamism of mobility that had clearly erased whatever doubts I had of the
phenomenon.

The morning after, while still embraced the foggy streets of Manila, I recreated
the dance I had witnessed the night before. I planted my feet in a fairly wide
position and swayed my hands from left to right, just like the angels did. I did
the routines as far as my memory could serve me right. Then after a while, my
hands started to move by themselves that on its own it had seemed, my hands
repeated the complicated movements that the angel made, the ones that I was not
able to follow well the night before.

The dance drew some lightness of being inside me that it felt good always to
recreate them. It was sort of habit forming, an addictive action. There was such
lightness of being that I felt floating above air when I walked. I felt my hands
and I could feel some force in it, a trapped wind beneath my palms that whenever I
held my hands against a surface, I could feel a palpable force underneath, a kind
of a magnetic force. And my body started to move queerly at times, a sort of an
independent force was controlling my movement and from my mouth the sound of a
bird's chirping came out too often. I would sway to one side and to another
without intending to move. I would walk into directions that I never intended to
head.

There was a visible smirk on my face whenever I walked the streets or the hallways
of San Beda. The phenomenon of angels had given me such giddiness that humored my
mind to no end. How could such things happen? I asked and meandered upon myself
and why of all people it had happened to me? I must be the "chosen one" I was
tempted to deduce. For what purpose that I was chosen was not yet apparent to me
at that time.

The review for the law examinations had gotten more intense. By the end of July,
all the students were priming up for the big month, which was September.

I had been tenacious with my reading in order to recompense for the poor quality
of my law foundations, the result of boredom and frequent inattentiveness at
school during my college years. As September approached, I even forgot to eat at
times.

The "night calls" of the angels somehow tempered the rigidity of readings. And
because of the queerness of my body movements, I felt so strongly that I gained
the attention of many. They were good attentions although I could feel some look
that decided that I had gone haywire in the head. Most of the attentions however
were of the inquisitive kind; the way one looks upon an exploding mystery. In the
library, when I thought no one was looking my way, I would sway my hands to
recreate the dance of the angel. The dance always relieved me of stress,
especially when my readings became so ardent and straining. Obviously, some of the
students noticed me that some of my acquaintance started to inquire about the
strange movements I made with my hands. I felt embarrassed by the inquiries so I
had no recourse but to explain it. I could not explain it to them as factual as
possible for I felt it would be too much for them to accept and then it would only
lead them to the belief that my mind had already succumbed to the pressure of the
bar preparations. So I put up a comfortable lie. I told them that I was a
practitioner of a Chinese form of meditation and I sway my hands in order to
relieve me of stress.

My comfortable lie might have been convincing that instead of shying away from me,
most of my acquaintance became interested in the movements of my hands. They
wanted me to teach it to them. I said I had no luxury of time to become their
Chinese meditation master. They liked it many condescended because of the harmony
and synchronicity of my palms swaying thru and fro.

Some threw me a disconcerted look. Some stares were stained with disparagement.
And then there were those with amazement in their eyes.

I seemed to be easily get blown by the wind that I had to readjust the angle of my
footing or walk in order to evade the whipping of heavy breeze. When I stood
still, some force was tugging me towards some direction that perhaps many observed
it so keenly and decided fairly that I was not just making them up.

The inquiries about my condition had become more prevalent but still, I had not
yet gained the proper mindset to divulge the truth about my visions as the cause
of these strange movements. I continue to hide under the lie of a Chinese
meditation. Perhaps, my lie was somehow weak in some point, there were gossips
going around that I was really going haywire in the head. The talk spread like
wild fire that it had reached my hometown of Zamboanga. Apparently, one of the
barristers preparing for the examinations was my town mate. I did not know her so
much because she was from the lower years though her face was familiar to me. I
received messages in my cell phone from friends back in Zamboanga, advising me to
slow down and take some breather. I felt disturbed by the gossips running around
in San Beda and as far as back home. But I easily set it aside for I felt that
someday they would know the truth about all these matters.

Chapter Fourteen. The Bright Star

I saw her when the sky was fraught with stubbles of clouds heavy with rain. There
were shadows all over Manila and the grounds were wet, some areas were even
flooded. To see her face was like a touch of sunlight on my skin after a thousand
years of darkness.

I did not know her by name then so I my mind was laden with schemes and designs on
how to gather that much sought after information. Would I say, "You seem to be
familiar to me. Have we met before?" Or would I start by saying, "My heart
trembles every time you pass by."

I never had a viable scheme in my mind and I was not really so smooth about these
things so I decided to barricade her passage and directly asked her name.

"I have forgotten my name back in the house," she told me with crazy grin pasted
on her face.

"How sad that a name could actually be forgotten" I retorted with my eyes pleading
for mercy.

"Are you free for lunch?" I propositioned.

She said "No!" resoundingly. "I had to sacrifice for my readings"

I felt the world crumbling down on me. If I were no careful then, I would have
wept like a child.
How could a person be so merciless? What level of cruelty did humanity attain that
a woman like her could disparage my dignity as I a lay there a victim of apathy.

I was back at my schemes—planning strategies and maneuvers—From the divine towards

the mundane. I dreamt even of pulling her arms so suddenly and kissing her lips
while I catch her fall. But I decided strongly against it. I could not survive a
lawsuit while I am far away from home.

She was crystal amidst a lotus pond. Whenever I thought of her, I thought about
the brightest star in the night sky where the angels use to appear. If the symbols
in the sky were all so favorable to me, she must have been the bright star guiding
my way through the night, a beacon of light to this wandering soul.

As each morning comes, I would whistle to the very thought that she might be
coming to the library. I picked a spot near the hallway, where I could see every
one coming up from the stairs towards the library, and I would encamp myself there
praying I would be the first to see her face while the sun rays were still fresh
in the morning. My heart would leap from exhilarating gladness whenever she
appeared out of the stairways but she would not respond to my stare and attention,
she would always be looking in some other direction, with an ardent façade of
nonchalance.

By the way her snout would pout, I could tell that she had been running all her
life. Perhaps, myriads of men pursued the trail towards her graces, asking for
deliverances and divine relief, only to face that perilous façade of nonchalance.
And now she is running away from me and I decided I would not let her run a single
step further.

I continued to monitor her movements right to the very breath she would spew. I
have mastered her routine that even when she would sigh, I become witness to such
godly demeanors of a goddess—an untamed spirit caught in the whirlwind of
innocence. I have recorded every time she walks the hallway right to the very
minute and I also know when she would decide to head for home. If stalking was a
craft, I might have become a doctor practicing such occupation.

I did not heed any signs of disaster that one day I felt so bull headed. I
followed her towards the school cafeteria. If I could not date her by persuasion,
then perhaps by trumped up circumstances would I be able to sit beside her, and
ask her name.

She walked alone that day and I found this to be most in my favor. After ordering
her food, she sat in one empty table near the doorway. I followed her and without
hesitation I sat in front of her.

"Could I sit here?" I asked for permission.

She did not utter any word and proceeded with her food as if I was not there.

I sat there and stared at her face for moments that had seemed to last for an
eternity. I felt nothing and disregarded the environment, becoming entirely
oblivious to anyone in that cafeteria. For me, the world was hers and mine alone,
trapped in that space and time. And time did stood still and everything becomes
her, her angelic face, her skin so tender like a child, and her eyes that reminded
me that magic must have been a reality easy to accept.

"From what school are you?" I asked, not relenting with my stare.
"Some school" she answered without changing her nonchalance.

"Are you from Cebu?"

"Yes. I am from Cebu."

I was a little bit shook off by her bullet type answers, stifling my spontaneity.
I spooned my meal without really caring if it tasted good or bitter. My mind
rushed for some topic—not easily discouraged by her apparent disinterest.

"You know, I was once in Cebu during the Sinulog. I had experienced the first
street party in that place…somewhere in the place they call Quezon Boulevard..."

Suddenly, as if the gods of love answered my call, she stared back at me.

"It's Osmena Boulevard..." she corrected me.

The look in her eyes, as she stared back at me made me weak in the knees and I
gasped for breath.

"I had to go," she said.

"I'll go with you"

"No. You stay here."

I thought tears would flow from my eyes but luckily it didn't. I picked my
backpack and it felt like I was carrying a ton of load on my back.

To give some distance, I went to the comfort room. I knew there were a lot of
people present in that cafeteria and they have witnessed the misfortune of a
luckless soul. I did not want to go out of the comfort room but I had to. She
would slipped away I reckoned and must accept that fact. I went back to the
library feeling like my world was about to end. I went listlessly with my readings
hoping somehow that the ground would open up and gobble me up. I must have hoped
for once in my life that there would be an earthshaking earthquake in that
godforsaken part of the world so that my misery would end without the least effort
on my part. I had also wished that it rained so hard that the streets would be so
flooded that we would both be trapped in that godforsaken library. Maybe she would
ask for my help and then I'd carry her off like a valiant prince through mile deep
floodwater.

I put her away from my thought but she would not let me. Every time she passes by
through the walkway of the library, she continued to bedevil my thoughts. Her hips
would sway and my breath would stop. She would glide through the floor like an
angel lost in that godforsaken place.

I went through self-exorcising the bewitchment of her charm on me. I would think
of myriads of thoughts in order to quell my passion for her. I would stare at
other girls passing by thinking I might have some fancy on them and forget about
her completely but nobody was like her.

I stopped going to the library for about a time but my mind wandered whenever I
thought of her. Nothing goes into my mind but that momentous stare she had on me.