The Tesseract (19 page)

Alfredo hit the stop button on the Walkman and took off his headphones. Then he massaged his temples as if he were easing away a nagging headache. There was no headache, but he felt as if there should have been. Of the seven kids he regularly interviewed, Totoy was the one whom he most associated with headaches.

Totoy was so unlike Cente.

Alfredo stuffed his Walkman into his daybag and stood up. Looking around, he was disoriented by the darkness. The last time he had looked around, registered his surroundings, it had been to talk to Vincente. Then, Roxas Boulevard and the water in Manila Bay had been burning with a beautiful orange light.

“Light from the sun,” Alfredo muttered.

A passerby on the pavement stopped and turned, thinking he was being addressed. It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t, and that the slight man on the steps of Legaspi Towers was talking to himself. Or to the black sky, which was the direction in which his face was turned.

“Light from our nearest star, ninety-three million miles away.”

The passerby started walking again, a little more hurried
than before, as if alarmed by the statistic and the tone of extreme reverence used to speak it.

“Light from ninety-three million miles away!” Alfredo repeated loudly. He had seen the passerby in his peripheral vision, correctly guessed the nature of the man’s reaction, and been vaguely irritated by it.

“Traveling at an incredible one hundred eighty-six thousand miles a
second
!”

Cente, ask
simple questions.

What is light?

Light is a wave of photons that travels at 186,000 miles a second, until it hits our retina. At that point, light is stopped dead in its tracks and converted into an energy impulse, which is then translated by our brains into an image. This is the one time that light can be seen at rest—when we see it. Although another way of thinking about light would be that it can never be seen at rest. Move as fast as you like, but you’ll never catch…

This is the problem, Cente. Some questions, even simple questions, have complicated answers. Some things are too complicated to be easily expressed.

Why street kids?

Alfredo asked himself this question as often as his colleagues, friends, family, or anybody else. And he didn’t really have an answer. Or rather, he had several answers that were
neat and well argued, and perfectly rationalized, but were probably not true.

For example. It had been long acknowledged that there was a difference between Filipino and European psychology, in terms of social structures. Filipino psychology put a greater emphasis on the collective, whereas European psychology put a greater emphasis on the individual. Conveniently highlighting the difference, in the English language,
lonely
and
unhappy
were two separate words.

So some Filipino psychologists had argued that a direct application of European psychological practices would be problematic, and that a Filipino model would have to emerge from, and take into account, existing traditional practices. However, in the case of street kids, family and community structures could have been nonexistent from a very young age, which meant the kids grew up as alienated individuals, outside the group-emphasized collectives.

Here then, surely, was the answer to
Why street kids?
There was a gap in the academic studies of street-kid psychology, and Alfredo was filling it. Usually, when asked, this was the reason he would give as the motivation for his research.

Except it wasn’t his motivation at all. It was a reason his research might be useful, but it wasn’t what motivated him. The gap in research on Filipino street kids might have been comprehensively filled by every working psychologist in the world, but Alfredo doubted it would have interrupted his labors for more than a minute. So,
Why street kids?
remained.

An alternative explanation: Alfredo had grown up in Ayala Alabang, one of Manila’s wealthiest and best-protected sub-divisions.
In a city where the gap between the rich and the poor was wider than just about anywhere else on the planet, that was saying something. Something, in this instance, about the way opposites attract. About positively charged and negatively charged human particles. About the upper-class fascination with what might have been, but for the hand of.

But no, that wasn’t it either. Too obvious, too pat.

Anyway, the real question wasn’t
Why street kids?
, it was
Why Cente?
Why was Cente always on his mind?

And the answer, Alfredo knew, was going to be hard to express. If at all, it was going to be found in the statistics of cosmic distances, as bound to complexity as the light from that evening’s sunset.

Legaspi Towers was a tall building, thirty stories high, with a glass-fronted foyer, a polite concierge, and two express elevators. In the elevators the ride was often shared with late-middle-aged women with painted pink-white faces and gold jewelery. First three floors, shops and boutiques. Fourth floor, administrative. Fifth floor, access to an open-air swimming pool which observed a strict dress-code: no shorts or sandals. Sixth floor and above, the apartments, ranging from five-bedroom family flats to bedroom bachelor pads. The very top floor was taken over by a single penthouse suite. Alfredo’s home.

He walked quickly through the rooms, switching on lights,
disturbing the stillness that had greeted him as he came through the front door. Once the whole flat was glowing, he went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of mineral water. Then he went to the living room, sat heavily on his sofa, and clicked the answering machine on. He had one message.

“Hi, Fredo,” said the machine.

“Hi, Romario,” Alfredo replied blankly.

“Romario here. It’s four in the afternoon, so I guess you’re still out and about. Doing your stuff. Call when you get back in.”

For the next five minutes, Alfredo didn’t move a single muscle, except to blink and breathe.

This is the way it is, Cente.

The sunlight travels ninety-three million miles, at 186,000 miles a second. As it hits Roxas Boulevard late in the day, it makes the sky a deep orange. Earlier in the day, scattered differently off the air molecules, it makes the sky blue.

Light can never be seen at rest. Move as fast as you like. Start running, and keep accelerating until you’re racing across the solar system at 185,999 miles a second. Then look at light. Far from having caught up, you’ll discover that light is still hurrying away from you at the same frantic speed it was before. Moreover, your brain will have slowed down, and, to an
observer not quite able to match your pace, you will appear almost motionless, flattened, and rotated in space.

Return to Earth and check your watch. It will be set to a different time than those of your friends, family, or anyone you will ever meet.

Or maybe don’t return to Earth. Keep going. Nearly four and a half years later, you’ll reach Proxima Centauri, our solar system’s nearest star.

Alfredo found himself in his study. Found himself, because he hadn’t intentionally walked in there, sat down, and switched on his computer. As far as he was concerned, he hadn’t moved from the sofa and was still staring into the middle distance with a bland answering-phone message echoing in his head. The dislocation became apparent only when the computer’s screensaver kicked in and the middle distance became a hypnotic swirl of colored Mobius strips—a vision too extreme to ignore or pass off as hallucination.

The study was a place where Alfredo spent a good deal of his time, and had been lit very exactly. A pool of warm light from his desk lamp, bleeding into the corner shadows. An open door, so that the brightness of the living room was close at hand. Open curtains, so that the moon, stars, and shining city windows could play a similar role.

The study was also arranged very exactly, though it would have appeared as a stereotype of academic chaos to a stranger. Books and papers on the floor, Post-it notes all over the walls, fat ring-binder folders that hemorrhaged their contents wherever they lay. But naturally, this sprawl of information had a delicate order to Alfredo, in which the slightest interference would have been quickly spotted.

In contrast to the clutter on the floor and walls, Alfredo’s desk was a model of neatness. Apart from the computer and the lamp, only four objects ever found their way onto its surface. The first was a pen, for final editing of printouts. The second was a tray for unedited printouts. The third was a tray for edited printouts. The fourth was a framed photograph of his wife.

It had been taken nearly ten years ago, the day of her nineteenth birthday, six weeks before their marriage. She was wearing a blue T-shirt with the
Bench
logo emblazoned across her chest. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was pulling a parodied expression of a sultry American movie star.

The two other important features of the study were its hi-fi and the shelves of diligently labeled, chronologically stacked tapes that sat beside it. The hi-fi was never switched off. All day, all night, the red and green digital displays were in a state of readiness.

Alfredo glanced over at the cassette deck. In the machine was the tape he’d been listening to that morning. One of the earlier recordings.