The Tesseract (18 page)

Sure enough, by the time Vincente reached Legaspi Towers—where he turned left off the boulevard—he had made precisely one peso. And that peso hadn’t even come as a single score, but as two separate fifty-centavo pieces from two separate cheapskate drivers. Ironic, he commented to himself,
that the traffic jams had become less rewarding, given that they were heavier and slower-moving than they had ever been before.

Luckily he was given a chance to supplement his poor takings when he saw Alfredo sitting on the steps of the side entrance to Legaspi Towers. Vincente glanced at the skies and estimated he had a quarter of an hour in hand before it became vital that he find Totoy. Cutting it fine, he decided, but doable, as long as he didn’t get involved in one of Alfredo’s long chats.

Alfredo
was reading, peering at the words through round glasses, hunched over so that his slim body almost made a circle. He was always reading. Among his street-kid clients, the popular belief was that he was searching for an elusive gap that existed somewhere in his books, hidden between lines or letters. One that would allow him, once and for all, to crawl inside the pages and disappear.

“Hey, Fredo.”

Alfredo didn’t answer, making Vincente wait impatiently while he finished his paragraph. “Hi, Cente,” he eventually said, and carefully laid the book beside him.

“What’s up?”

“Not much. See you’ve met the Barangay Tanod.”

“Huh?” Vincente ran his fingers over his patchy scalp. “Nope, I did this myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yep. It’s all the rage. You’ll be seeing a lot of it soon, in the fashionable circles.”

“All the rage…” Alfredo chuckled and adjusted his glasses in a way that made him look older than his twenty-eight years. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not. It might be true, for all I know.”

“It isn’t,” said Vincente. “I was joking. Now listen, I’ve got a dream for you.”

“A dream? Sorry, but it isn’t your day today. You aren’t till the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m short of cash.”

“Come on, Cente. You know I have to keep a strict weekly rotation. It isn’t fair to the other kids.”

“My dreams are the best.”

“They are,” said Alfredo reluctantly. “Interesting, and well remembered…”

“So?”

“So, I do already have Totoy’s dream today…but…” Alfredo waved a hand. “That boy is useless. All he dreams about is guns and girls, and fighting battles in which he is the hero. And, needless to say, they aren’t even his real dreams. They’re his fantasies.”

“Really,” said Vincente, without interest. He had heard this complaint often before.

“Of course, that has some interest too. Seeing what he chooses to make his fantasies…But they’re always the same. Gangster dreams, war dreams, dreams with aliens in outer space. If there was some variety, I wouldn’t mind so much.”

“To be honest, Fredo,” Vincente interrupted. “I’m in a bit of a hurry, so do you want the dream or not?”

“I’m not sure,” said Alfredo. “I have Totoy’s dream…” But his hand was already reaching for the Sony tape recorder he kept in his knapsack. “Oh, what the hell. Go on then. Let’s hear it.”

“Good decision,” said Vincente. “You’ll like this one.”

The tape recorder clicked on.

“Okay. So I was standing by a sink…”

“Have you ever seen a fetus?”

“What’s a fetus?”

“A fetus…” Alfredo paused. “Similar to what you described. A very tiny baby. Maybe your mother or a sister was pregnant and lost the baby inside. Did you ever see anything like that?”

Vincente shook his head. “Not as far as I know. But I can’t remember them too well, so…Maybe.”

“How do you know how to resuscitate someone? Pushing on the chest, blowing in the mouth…”

“Seen it.”

“Did the dream feel like a nightmare?”

“Sure.”

“You woke up feeling?…”

“Bad.”

“And what do you think the dream might mean?”

Vincente laughed. “I know what
you
think it might mean.”

“Go on.”

“You think the baby is me, and I’m angry with my father for disappearing when I was so young. Or maybe you think the baby is Totoy, because I look after him sometimes.”

“Mmm…”

“But you are also interested in the sink. You’ve noticed I said it was stone, and there was plumbing, so you are wondering what that says about my upbringing. And my memory.”

“Yes.” Alfredo nodded. “You are absolutely correct. And as usual, your perceptiveness has confounded all my expectations, no matter how often I revise them.” Then he leaned forward and stared straight into Vincente’s eyes. “I should be used to it by now, Cente, but I’m not. I can never predict what’s going to come out of your mouth. You’re an endless surprise.”

“You always say that.”

“Well, what do you want me to say? You always surprise me.

“Give me my money, please.”

“Exactly,” Alfredo said delightedly, switching off his tape machine and reaching into his pocket for some change. “QED.”

From his new vantage point—perched on the bamboo scaffold outside what had been a pool hall until it was bought by developers a few months before—Totoy spotted Vincente jogging toward him. Gleefully, Totoy realized that as long as Vincente didn’t cross the road, he would pass directly under the scaffold, which meant he could be leapt upon from above and surprised. One of the advantages of being small was that leaping on people wasn’t too dangerous for your victims.

Not that he did it very often. Vincente was practically the only person who could be relied upon to take the surprise with good grace. He might say, “You know, you’re going to have to be careful doing that. One day you’ll be too big and you’ll break my neck.” But that would be the extent of the disapproval. And anyway, Totoy suspected it wasn’t disapproval so much as a reassurance that his size was only a temporary condition.

Vincente, for his part, had seen Totoy as soon as he had rounded the corner of Nestor Redondo Avenue. He was well used to scanning for Totoy on walls, trees, and lampposts, and the quick silhouette on the scaffolding had not been difficult to identify.

It had, however, left him with a small dilemma. The first level of scaffold planks was a good six feet off the ground, which seemed high enough for the ambush to involve a potentially
painful velocity. On the other hand, there was Totoy’s disappointment to consider, and the whole issue of friendship.

There were
no solid facts, only clues.

Vincente had arrived in Manila around five years ago, on an air-conditioned Kaplaran bus. He had been with his father. He didn’t understand why the two of them had left their home in Batangas to come to Manila, as nobody had explained it to him. Neither did he expect that he would ever understand. Quite soon after arriving in the city, perhaps within twenty-four hours, his father had vanished.

Like everything from that time, the circumstances and memory of the vanishing were vague. Sometime during the morning, or the afternoon, his father had bought him a soda and told him to wait near some traffic lights while he went off to do something. Hours passed, and his father didn’t return. By the time night rolled around, he had become a street kid.

The clues. Air-conditioned buses were more expensive than non-air-conditioned buses, so it didn’t seem likely that he had been brought to Manila to be deliberately abandoned. His recollections were of a home life that was happy and perfectly comfortable. Indeed, of above average comfort. Their house had been on the outskirts of a town, made of concrete, and two stories high. They had a color television, metal mosquito netting on the windows, and a carpet in one of the rooms.

So it was unlikely that the abandonment had been the result of financial trouble, as was the case with some of the other kids
around. But it was also unlikely that the abandonment had been the result of a lack of love. In Vincente’s recollections were several images of his parents hugging him, kissing him, and being generally affectionate.

Nowhere in Vincente’s recollections were the names of his hometown or barrio, or his surname. Alfredo told him that he might have lost these biographical details as a consequence of the trauma of losing his family, although he admitted he wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Alfredo was surer about Vincente’s period as a mute, which he said was
certainly
a consequence of the trauma, and a not uncommon consequence at that.

The reason Vincente’s self-imposed silence hadn’t continued indefinitely had been Totoy. At the time he met Totoy, he hadn’t spoken to anyone for at least a year. Then, walking near the Intramuros ruins one evening, he had paused to lean against a tree. A rustling in the branches alerted his attention, but not enough to make him check the source of the noise. So he never saw the tiny figure in the leaves, lining up its target, preparing to pounce from above.

Beneath the bamboo
scaffolding, Vincente lay on his back, knees bunched up, too winded to do anything but gasp. Totoy sat at his side, waiting for him to get the breath to talk. But when Vincente’s breathing returned to normal, he still didn’t say anything. He just remained on the pavement, staring up at the sky.

“Maybe I’m getting too big for jumping,” Totoy prompted,
disconcerted by the silence. “What do you think, Cente? Do you think I’m getting too big for it?”

Vincente’s mouth stayed shut.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do it anymore,” he continued, his anxiety increasing. “In case I break your neck.” He lifted his T-shirt and looked down at his taut stomach. “I could be putting on weight. Maybe I’m too big and heavy these days. What do you think, Cente?”

“Cente!” he added in final frustration. “Say something!”

“Okay,” Vincente said. “What do you want to do tonight?”