Smaller and Smaller Circles (25 page)

41

About an hour
later, Jerome is still waiting inside one of the alcoves at the church of St. Francis of Assisi. It's oppressively hot, and no one has turned on the electric fans to keep the warm, sticky air moving inside the church. Why bother when the church is practically empty? There are only three or four other people scattered among the pews.

Sweat trickles down Jerome's nape, down his back. His undershirt is soon soaked, matted to his skin. He is thirsty again.

He sees a shadow fall across the pews in the nave nearest him and, seconds later, the slight figure of Mrs. Carlos. She must have dressed in a hurry, because she's still in her
tsinelas
, the worn red flip-flops she was wearing at the house.

“Mrs. Carlos,” he calls out, careful not to disturb the others. She turns and sees him. She's nervous; that much is plain. Her eyes dart everywhere, making certain she hasn't been followed, before she enters the alcove.

“I can't stay long,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “I want to know: are you really trying to help him?”

“Ma'am, even if you went and checked with my order right now, or with my university, you would know that I'm telling you the truth. I can give you the telephone numbers—”

But she waves the suggestion away. “There's no time for any of that anymore.” She looks at him ruefully. “You have a kind face. Do you teach? Young people? Boys?”

“I used to, yes.”

“Alex, he
. . .
Did I tell you he was a good boy?”

“Yes, you did.”

“You asked me whether or not he liked PE, or sports. He didn't. He liked to play when he was a child, but he was never really good at anything—basketball, badminton, none of that.” Now she's wringing her fingers together in her lap. “Something changed. Something changed him, when he was in his second year of high school.”

“What was it? What happened?”

She waits a moment: one final hesitation before the truth. “Sometime last year, he told us he'd seen his old PE teacher from high school. Mr. Gorospe. Isabelo Gorospe.” There's anger, old and deep, in her voice. “Tell me, Father, do you believe in evil? You must believe in evil—you're a priest, after all.”

Jerome has a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, a sense that he already knows what she's going to tell him next. “I do.”

“A few days—maybe a week—after that meeting, he said he wouldn't be able to see us for a while.” Her large, dark eyes, so like Alex's, are brimming with tears.

“Why? What happened between him and Mr. Gorospe?” Jerome asks.

“Flora!”

Jerome and Mrs. Carlos are both startled as Mr. Carlos rushes toward them. “What are you doing?” he demands, his voice echoing in the dome of the alcove. He turns to Jerome, as the other people in the nave glance over their shoulders at the commotion. “You again! Didn't I tell you to stay away from us?”

“Alex is in trouble. If Father Lucero can help him
. . .
”

Mr. Carlos takes her by the wrist and tries to drag her away, but she struggles. “Stop it! Stop it, Papa!” She wrenches free of his grasp, then runs to the back of the alcove, putting distance and a series of pews between herself and her husband.

“We didn't do anything,” she sobs to Jerome. “We didn't ask questions.”

“That's enough, Flora.”

“Mr. Carlos—”

“We sent Alex to a public school in Quezon City,” she continues, cutting Jerome short. “We couldn't afford anything better. When it all began—when he started changing—we didn't know what to do, who to trust. We were too poor, too stupid. How could anyone expect us to know? Who would listen to us?”

Mr. Carlos sinks down into a pew, cradles his head in his hands. “Mama, please.”

“Papa, don't you want to help him?” Mrs. Carlos asks her husband. He looks up and holds her gaze a long moment, their faces creased with deep-rooted anguish, pale with fresh fear. As Jerome watches, they seem to reach a wordless understanding, and then Mr. Carlos turns to him.

“He became rebellious,” he says. “Withdrawn. We thought he'd begun taking drugs, but physically he was the same—small but healthy. He came home late all the time, and we never saw him with friends.”

Mrs. Carlos sobs quietly, a leitmotif of misery to the numb drone of her husband's voice.

“Of course we started fighting. His mother and I would scream a lot, but we tried, we tried so hard to reach him. One day—” He chokes, and his eyes fill with tears. “One day I woke him up early for school, and I saw him. There was blood on the sheets, on his shorts. Not much, just spots here and there. But I panicked. Started shouting. He tried to get away, but I held him by the shoulders. I couldn't make him understand that I was trying to help him. I thought he was sick.”

Jerome puts out a hand, touches the man's shoulder gently.

“He begged me not to hurt him. He said he would be good; he would do what I wanted. Then he wriggled free and ran to the bathroom. He locked the door, but I pounded and pounded until it flew open. I made him show me.”

Jerome is stunned. He imagines that the scenario Mr. Carlos just described might have only served to exacerbate the young boy's trauma. But he cannot judge them—cannot be perceived to be judging them. “What did you see?”

“He was bleeding. He was sitting on the toilet seat, trying not to cry, but he was trying even harder to keep himself from flying at me. From
killing
me.”

Even after all these years, Mr. Carlos still seems shaken by the memory of that day. He keeps running a hand through his sparse hair, plastering what's left of it down onto his sweaty scalp.

“What did you do?” Jerome asks. “Did you tell anyone? Did you try to get help?”

A harsh little laugh. “Help? From whom?”

“You didn't tell anyone?” Jerome looks at the husband, then at the wife, then back again, trying to tamp down his disbelief. “Did you not understand how seriously your son was being hurt?”

Mrs. Carlos comes closer, her voice now eerily calm. “We were afraid. Nobody talked about such things back then.”

Jerome doesn't quite know what to say. “You pulled him out of school, at least?” They shake their heads. “So you let him stay there?” he asks, and he restrains himself in the nick of time from asking,
You allowed it to go on?

“He was on scholarship at Payatas High. If we pulled him out, we would not have had enough money to send him to school.”

“But the scholarships stopped anyway, right?”

They both hesitate. “His PE teacher arranged for him to continue,” Mr. Carlos says. “To this day, we're not sure how.”

A well-dressed woman—one of the few other people in
the church—gets up from her pew and walks toward the exit, the
clicking of her heels bouncing sharply off the walls and ceiling of the nave. Jerome waits until the sound has faded away.

“But the person who did this to Alex—it was the same teacher, yes? Mr. Gorospe?”

“Yes.” Flora Carlos reaches out blindly for her husband's hand, and he takes hers. “At the time, after Alex's grades started dropping and nobody would sponsor his studies any more, Gorospe came and talked to us. He said he'd take care of Alex, that he was just going through a normal phase that all young boys go through. Told us not to give up on our son.”

Mr. Carlos puts an arm around his wife's shoulders. “We were so grateful. It wasn't until years later that Alex told us it was Gorospe who—” and he stops; the words are just too horrific to say aloud, in a church, to a stranger.

Jerome leans back in the pew, taking stock of what he's learned. It's shattering: when the scholarships dried up, Alex's abuser had manipulated the situation, used the family's poverty and need to keep him in school so he would have ready access to him.

“You told me you haven't seen Alex in more than a year. That was around the time he'd seen Gorospe after so many years. Right? When was it? If you last saw him more than a year ago—that would have been around the middle of last year? May, June?”

“May,” she whispers.

“He told you that it didn't end well. And you
. . .
” Jerome pauses to consider what he'll say next. “You decided—again—not to tell anyone or seek help.”

They remain silent, but their faces say everything. Jerome understands, on an intellectual level, what they are feeling: love and concern for their son, shame at their inability to prevent or seek redress for his suffering, guilt at keeping their son's secret. But on an emotional level, he's surprised to find that he's angry with them somehow.

“That's why he said he wouldn't be able to see you again for a while. That's why you weren't surprised when I told you the police were looking for Alex.” He realizes now the implications of what he's learned. “If I went back to look for Gorospe—would I be able to find him?”

Mrs. Carlos shakes her head.

Jerome stands slowly. “Is there anything else you think I should know before I leave?”

Mr. Carlos also rises to his feet. “We did not want any of this to happen.”

Mrs. Carlos reaches out to touch his arm. “Father, if there's any way you can bring him home to us
. . .
We are not bad people. And whatever he has done, Alex is not a bad person.”

“You should talk to his friends. The ones who knew. The ones who
. . .
” and here Mr. Carlos's voice falters, and he takes a moment or two to regain control over it. “Alex wasn't the only one.”

Jerome nods. “I understand.”

He excuses himself, but the Carloses say not another word to him. They turn instead toward each other, lost in their private torment.

As soon as
he can get a decent signal on his cell phone, Jerome calls Saenz's faculty office. When he doesn't get an answer, he tries the phone in the laboratory.

“Saenz,” says the voice on the other end.

“I'm heading back now.”

“Anything useful?”

“A lot. Can you ask Arcinas to dig up whatever he can on someone named Isabelo Gorospe? He used to be Alex Carlos's PE teacher at Payatas High School.”

“Who's he?”

“If what Mr. and Mrs. Carlos told me is true, he might have been Alex's first victim.”

There is a moment's silence at the other end of the line.

“Tell me what you know.”

 

 

 

 

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

W. H. Auden,

“September 1, 1939”

42

Back at their
home, Flora Carlos is sitting on the bed in Alex's room, wide eyed and unblinking in the dim, yellow light of the room's lone light bulb. She has her son's photograph lying in her lap.

“Mama,” her husband says, stroking her back gently.

“Was it a mistake?” she asks him, anxious to the point of panic. “To talk to that priest? You think it was a mistake, don't you?”

“Mama, I don't know what to think any more.” He sinks down beside her, then lies back, staring at the ceiling, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “You realize he's never stayed in this room? All these years we've had this house, he's never slept here. I don't even know why we kept this room for him.”

“Because he's our son. Our only boy.” She turns to him. “What if he never comes back to us? What if we lose him?”

“Mama, I think we lost him a long time ago.”

She grimaces. “Don't be silly. That's not the same. If he is responsible for what happened to Gorospe—to those boys the priest was talking about—God knows what might happen to him.”

Mr. Carlos doesn't answer, and so she smacks him hard on his thigh in frustration. “I'm serious. If they catch him, if he goes to jail
. . .
I suppose if I had to, I could live with that. But what if it's worse? What if—” and she shudders in horror, leaving unsaid the worst that she thinks can possibly happen.

He turns to his side, rests his head on his arm. “What do you want us to do, Mama? What
can
we do?”

When he looks at her face, it is hard, determined. “He needs us.”

He sits up and then tries to put his arms around her, but she struggles.

“No. He has been through enough already. Do you want him to go to jail?”

“But Mama, it was you who—”

“No.” She spits out the word fiercely, resolutely. “You call him. His number is by the phone. You go out there, and you call him now. You tell him they came looking for him.”

“Mama, stop,” he protests, when she starts pushing him off the bed, away from her.

“You give him a chance to get away,” she says. “He did it; you and I both know he did it.” When she hears herself say the words out loud, she is ashamed, and she claps a hand over her mouth, as though she has said an obscenity. Then she starts pushing him away again. “Go. Call him. You do this for him. You do this one thing for your son.”

He stands, staggers through the door and heads toward the living room. He is wondering why his vision has suddenly become so blurred. When he puts his fingers to his eyes, they come away wet.

Jerome is so
wrung out when he gets back to his quarters that he calls Saenz and asks to meet up the next day instead.

“Do you mind?”

“No, no. I understand. You've told me everything I need to know. Are you all right, though?”

“I will be. I think I just need to
. . .
” Jerome pauses, stabbing the surface of his wooden desk with the tip of a ballpoint pen.

“You're angry,” Saenz says.

“I guess I am. It's all so
. . .
senseless. All this blood and suffering. The man should have been locked away decades ago,” he fumes, and Saenz knows he's not talking about Alex. “If he had, who knows? Maybe none of this would have happened. I don't know. There are days when it's a struggle even to keep the faith.”

“Go and rest, then.”

“Thanks. See you in the morning?”

“You forget, we've both got big department meetings in the morning and I've got a make-up class after lunch. Can't wriggle out of any of them without getting into trouble.”

“Afternoon then? Around three?”

“Good, off with you now. And remember that prayer from the Sarum Primer.”

God be in my head, and in my understanding
. . .
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
Jerome hangs up, then takes a shower and goes to bed. He falls asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.

He begins to dream.

In the dream, he is in a cold, dimly lit place—a garage or a warehouse, or maybe even a gym. When he looks up, he sees a number of small, shrouded figures hanging from a ceiling he cannot see, the figures swaying ever so slightly, wrapped up in heavy cotton gauze.

The faces are also wrapped. Thick bands of electrical tape cover the linen where the eyes and mouths should be.

When he turns around, he sees a small boy sitting on a toilet bowl. He is completely naked, his head resting on his knees. Blood is running in thin, dark, glossy streams down the sides of the bowl. Jerome feels himself walking in dream-slow time toward him.

The boy looks up, and Jerome sees his own thirteen-year-old face streaked with tears, a contorted mask of unnatural hate.

“I see you, Priest,” the boy says coldly.

The phone in
Alex Carlos's apartment rings six, seven times before he's able to pick up. Very few people know this number—Alex doesn't like phones or phone calls—so when it rings, he knows it cannot be good news.

It's his father.

He lets the man ramble on a bit without responding: something about coming home, something about being sorry for everything that happened to him. He can hear his mother's voice in the background, and she's weeping. He's tried to detach himself all these years, from his memories, from them, but he knows he can never get away completely, even though he's found a way to cope, however temporary.

His father says something about a priest coming to visit, about the police looking for him, and that's when he sits up and pays attention. “A priest? What did he look like? Tall, thin? No? No, that's the other one. Never mind. Where is he now? What did you tell him?

“Stupid. You stupid, stupid people.”

He yanks the phone out of the jack and hurls the entire instrument against a wall. It breaks apart into about a dozen pieces, big and small. He moves closer to the wall, gets down on his knees to examine the broken casing, the fragments of metal and plastic.

He should have done this a long time ago.