Dwellers (9 page)

Two servants dragged the sugarcane farmer in front of us. Auntie stepped forward and asked in a clear, crisp voice, “What is your name?”

The farmer said his name. Auntie glanced over her shoulder, and Grandfather looked at her and shook his head.

“When did you start working for us?” Grandfather asked him. The farmer replied, and Grandfather scoffed. “You’re off by about eleven years.”

“What is your daughter’s name?” Auntie asked. The farmer couldn’t reply.

“Why do you continue to lie, Manolo?” Grandfather said.

Manolo, my Father’s youngest brother. One of my uncles. But I knew him as a tall young man with the sarcastic grin, the rebel at the dinner table who kept ruffling Grandfather’s
feathers. He was definitely not this old man with the sunburnt face.

Manolo’s body was found in one of the sugarcane fields three days ago.

“You couldn’t blend in,” Auntie said. “The farmers gave you up.”

“It was an accident,” my uncle Manolo said through the old farmer’s mouth. “Father.”

“An accident that you find yourself in someone else’s body?” Auntie said.

Manolo ignored her. “Father,” he said. “Just let me go. Let me leave the estate. Let me live my remaining days as this old man. No one has to know.”

“The old man knew, Manolo,” Grandfather said. “His daughter knows. His
grandson
knows.”

“It was an accident!” he said. “I swear to you.”

Later, when we were old enough and brave enough to talk about it, Louis and I decided that Manolo had planned to take a younger man’s body but ended up with the old farmhand by mistake, so
it really was “an accident.”

He tried to run, that fine morning in the garden. Manolo bolted to the trees, nearly dragging the servants with him. Auntie lifted a finger, and we heard a soft crick, like the sound of a gate
swinging shut or a twig split in half, and Manolo fell on the grass.

“Return the body to the family,” Grandfather said, and we walked back, dry-eyed, to the main mansion. Breakfast was waiting.

GOSSIP CIRCULATED AMONG us cousins about our uncle, speculations on why he did what he did: he met a girl in the town proper, he wanted to move to Manila, he learned that he had
a tumor in his brain and would be dead in a fortnight. We never found out. It didn’t matter. What he did was
wrong,
and if we did the same thing, Auntie would break our necks and our
family wouldn’t even shed a tear.

LET’S SAY MY name is Jonah and he is Louis.

Even here, in this story, I can’t make myself tell you our real names.

16

TEN YEARS AGO, the estate was bigger than this city. Bigger than this city twice over. Five families lived on the estate—my grandfather’s sons and daughters, and
their spouses and children. My grandmother had passed on when Celeste was still an infant. I have no memory of her. Leonora, Auntie, lived alone in a house near the farmers’ housing complex.
My father was the eldest, and our family lived with my grandfather in the main mansion. My uncle Manolo was unmarried, and so he also lived with us. When he died, my father turned his room into an
adoration chapel.

Surrounding the main mansion were the vast sugarcane fields. A sugar mill. Our own little hospital, a marketplace, a church, housing for the farmers, even a school for their children. It was its
own country. Grandfather ran it the way it was run by his father, and his father’s father: like a welfare state, providing free food, education, and healthcare to everyone employed within its
confines. But for many years, Grandfather ran the sugar mill at a loss. Fortunately, he had other investments, other businesses outside the estate, and the money coming from those ventures
sustained the family’s sugar business.

Most of the house servants, the farmers, the grounds superintendents, the gardeners, the drivers—my Grandfather’s longest-serving and most treasured employees—knew what our
bloodline could do. But they kept this information to themselves either out of loyalty or fear.

CELESTE, MY SISTER, was the eldest. I was born two years after her, and my brothers, the twins Paulo and Samuel, were born twelve years after me. I always thought of the twelve
intervening years as my parents’ period of rumination.
Should we have another child? Should we try again?
They answered yes and they had two in one go. Everyone in the family was
delighted. They said the bloodline never had twins before and it could be a herald of good things to come.

EVERYTHING HURTS IN hindsight.

LOUIS IS THE only son of my father’s brother—my grandfather’s second son. We were all homeschooled, my siblings and cousins and I, with Auntie as our
governess, helped by several hired tutors. It’s not like we were cooped up in the estate like prisoners all our life. We went on trips, sometimes abroad, and homeschooling was the best way
for us to remain on schedule.

We were also taught—

I don’t know what to call it.

Tricks?
We were also taught tricks, like the symbol on the piece of paper. Like Louis’s perimeter fence. For our protection.

WE WERE NEVER taught the stronger spells. Like taking over bodies. Grandfather talked to his children about it, showed them our ancestors’ notes, the terrible things that
had happened because of it, hoping to dissuade them from even trying. And yet, look what happened to Manolo.

These handwritten journals were still in the library, hidden, restricted, closely guarded, in its bowels.

They should have just burned those journals after Manolo died, but my Grandfather was a champion of Family and History.

THIS WAS HOW I had always pictured my life: My education at home would end at the secondary level, though the tutors would start teaching me finance, people management, and the
structure of the family business when I turned 15. I would take an extensive trip around the estate and, eventually, leave to see our offices in the province and in Manila when I turned 16. I would
move to the city to work on my college degree. While taking classes, I would work for the company so I’d know more about the family business. I would get my diploma at age 21, return to the
estate, marry one of my cousins, oversee whatever part of the business my father would entrust to me, live in one of the mansions, have children, and die.

It was the only life I knew and the only life I’d learned to want.

In the year I turned 16, the year I was supposed to leave the estate for college and the larger world, my grandfather died.

It was like a siege ring closing.

17

GRANDFATHER WAS A healthy man. I’ve seen him felled by a fever at least once or twice in my lifetime, but even in his late 60s he would still go jogging or biking around
the estate with his dogs, saying hi to the farmers and making his children nervous. As he got older though, he started complaining about aches and pains in various body parts. His hip, his joints,
his head, his eyes. He started walking with a cane.

The year I started learning about income tax, one of the servants found him on the floor of his bathroom, bleeding from a head wound. He said he had slipped. He disliked doctors and hospitals,
and allowed only Auntie to tend to his wound and his aching hip. He insisted that he just needed to lie down to recover his strength. His self-imposed bed rest stretched to two days, then five,
then eleven. He got angry whenever my father and his siblings talked about getting a doctor and eventually banned them from entering his room. His grandchildren were welcome, however, and my
cousins and I visited to keep him company. Louis and Celeste, along with my other older cousins who were already in college, returned to the estate whenever they could.

I read books to Grandfather or we’d read to ourselves, quietly, him propped up on the bed and me on a chair. I was halfway through
Lord of the Flies
when he realized he was too weak
to even sit up.

A LOT OF things went wrong, all at once. He was like a machine with failing gears. First his kidneys, then his liver. The doctors and nurses came then, along with the dialysis
machine. The pain medication. Louis and I would sit in grandfather’s bedroom, the twins on our laps. One night, Louis was explaining to the twins what he does at the office in Manila
(“assisting with business development and risk management”—effectively putting the twins to sleep), when Celeste walked in. It was a Saturday but she had Saturday classes. We
didn’t expect her.

“What are you doing here?” Louis asked.

“How is he?” Celeste said, shedding her backpack.

I jumped when I heard Grandfather answer. “Alive,” he said, though his voice betrayed his frailty. “Still alive, Celie. Come here.”

Celeste sat on the bed and kissed his cheek. Grandfather’s hand rested on Celeste’s arm, fingers trembling like paper fluttering in the wind. “Good,” she said. She looked
back, saw that the twins were asleep, and said, “Look how sick you are, Lolo. Explain to me again why Auntie can’t heal you.”

“I am old, Celie,” Grandfather said. He sounded jovial, but I saw him withdraw his hand from Celeste’s arm. “This is what happens when you grow old.”

“Not if Auntie can help it.”

“Celie,” Louis said. “Let Lolo have his rest.”

“You can’t interfere with Life’s natural process,” Grandfather said, serious now. “You know that, Celeste.”

That was another thing he was a champion of: Life’s Natural Process.

“You mean God. God’s will.”

“Yes, Celie.”

“But it’s okay to learn how to draw a symbol to put my noisy roommate to sleep,” my sister said. “So are we or are we not supposed to interfere with Life’s process
with these spells or not? This family confuses me.”

“We’re teaching them for your protection,” Grandfather said. “Not for you to abuse.”

“So there are loopholes.”

I lost my temper then. I asked her what she was doing, but she ignored me.

“Pain is not natural,” Celeste told Grandfather.

“Oh?” Grandfather said. At this point he was still humoring her.

Celeste said, “You know there’s a way to escape this. Tito Manolo knew, but you were too stubborn to understand.”

I went rigid. Louis stood up, Samuel sleeping in his arms. “Celeste,” he said. “Stop it.”

“Why are we even given this ability if we’re forbidden to use it?” Celeste said. “What’s the point?”

“You would kill a person,” Grandfather said, “in order to continue living in a new body?”

“I go to the sugar mill,” Celeste said, “get involved in a terrible accident, break both of my legs. Nearby is a farmer with no family. An orphan. No roots in the world. Wants
to die anyway. You wouldn’t let me take over his body? You’d let me suffer and die with broken legs because of Life’s Natural Process?”

Grandfather was getting angry, his face going red, eyes bulging. But instead of shouting at Celeste to get out, he started to cough, a dry, hacking cough that sounded like thunder. Louis grabbed
Celeste’s arm and dragged her away, calling for the nurses. I followed them out of the room. Paulo woke up in my arms and asked why we were fighting.

18

WE STILL DON’T know how our uncle Manolo got his hands on the journal of forbidden spells, but we know Celeste found it inside the mansion when she helped Father clear
Manolo’s bedroom of his belongings.

She showed us when Louis confronted her after her outburst in Grandfather’s bedroom. We had already tucked in the twins and we were standing just outside their door, in the dark hallway.
The mansion was silent, save for Grandfather’s dogs barking at each other downstairs. People had gone either to bed or to pray in the chapel, like my parents.

Celeste opened her backpack and took out a small leather-bound book that looked like it had been unearthed from a grave.

WE LOOKED. OF course we looked. We were scared but we were curious. Story of all of our lives, right?

WE LOOKED AT one page that night, the one with diagrams and nearly incomprehensible words, and slept fitfully, waiting for Auntie to drag us out into the garden. When she
didn’t, when we woke up in our beds still alive, we read the rest of the journal, paying special attention to the instructions.
Best done in a supine position
, it said.
Relax
,
it said.
Think of the blue sky.

THREE OF GRANDFATHER’s dogs died. He got better. But you know what they say, right? That dying people get a little better before the end? Before long, we could hear him
calling the names of his parents. They died during the Japanese attack on the estate in the Second World War, but during those last few nights they were in the room with him.

Celeste wanted to help Grandfather, but the rule said the person leaving his body should be willing. And Grandfather wasn’t willing.

WORK IN THE sugar mill screeched to a halt when Grandfather died. We held the wake in the main mansion, the coffin at the foot of the grand staircase surrounded by light and
flowers. All the workers in the estate waited in line for hours to view his body and pay their respects. I never saw Auntie cry, though at the burial she stood for a long time by the coffin, as
though committing Grandfather’s face to her memory before they shut the lid and lowered him to the ground. He was buried next to his parents in the middle of the estate cemetery. We buried
him on a dry, windy day, the dust mingling with our tears.

FATHER TOOK OVER, reluctantly. He was the eldest but he wasn’t a very efficient businessman or a very good leader. He didn’t muster the same respect Grandfather
received effortlessly. His soft voice and restless eyes didn’t easily command respect. Louis’s father, who was given free rein to oversee business operations in the city even while
Grandfather was still alive, would have been the better successor, but he was not the eldest.

Grandfather was the glue that held everything together, or else the shield that kept corporate machinations at bay. We controlled banks, a bus line, and a telecommunications company, the
lifelines that kept the estate alive and allowed Grandfather to give our workers what they needed to lead a comfortable life. Just three months after Grandfather died and my father started
attending board meetings, the takeovers began. Some politicians were involved, scumbags my Grandfather slighted by refusing to fund their reelections or some other damned thing. You know how this
works. Investors lose trust, the family loses credibility, stock prices take a dive, and the monsters waiting in the wings take center stage.