The Tesseract (21 page)
Authors: Alex Garland
Vincente interrupted the priest again. “If God has put my dad in hell, the only way I’ll ever get to see him again is if I go to hell too.”
“Ah,” said the Father. “It seems I’m being slow on the up-take. Now I see where this is going.”
“You think hell has visiting days?”
“Son, a moment—”
“I doubt it does.”
“Son—”
“So if I do nothing wrong in life, I don’t get to see him again. And if I do something bad, I get to see him, but I also go to hell forever.”
“Son! Would you listen a moment!”
“Does that sound fair to you?”
“As I have already said, to find fairness in life you would need to know the—”
“Jesus
Christ
!” Vincente exploded. “I’m not asking about the mind of God or your fucking leg! I’m asking
you
if it sounds
fair
!”
The Father looked stunned. “I—” he said.
“Don’t ban us from the soup kitchen!” said Totoy.
“Yes or no would do it, padre!” Vincente shouted furiously, getting to his feet. “How fucking hard can that be?”
The Father was
an understanding and merciful man, so neither boy was banned from the soup kitchen, despite the
swearing and the food fight that Vincente’s hurled bowl precipitated.
“Don’t worry, son,” the Father said when Totoy went to see him the next day, full of profuse apologies on his friend’s behalf. “Of course you can both come back. You can come back anytime, and you’ll be made welcome. In the grand scheme of things, a food fight isn’t too bad…though I’d be very grateful if it didn’t happen again.”
He then added, “And, just so you know, I had a word with the Lord late last night. You aren’t going to hell, Vincente isn’t going to hell, and his dad isn’t either. You tell Vincente that. I don’t want you boys fretting about devils and the like, you hear?”
Totoy assured him that he wouldn’t fret about devils. And he didn’t.
Vincente, however, did. Every night for two weeks. What could you do? That was his nature.
Totoy sprang up
off the pavement.
“I’m telling you right now, Cente, I’m not going to spend the next month talking about how that cat got plugged. Okay?”
Vincente paused. “Let’s find a Seven-Eleven,” he eventually said. “I could use a Coke after all that running.”
There were no 7-Elevens. There was nothing. And walking seemed to lead nowhere, though there was no sense of retracing footsteps. Each boy privately wondered how they’d found their way to these streets in the first place. Particularly Totoy, who hadn’t been lost in the city for as long as he could remember. Getting lost was as unexpected as forgetting how to swim, mid-dive into the Pasig.
Vincente, for his part, was more bothered by the area itself. It was confusing to have stumbled across such uninhabited desolation in Manila. Not that desolation was a rarity, but you would find people living in it. Equally confusing, it was clear that the area had once—perhaps even recently—been full of life. The evidence was everywhere, in filth-blackened shop fronts, peeling fly-posters, and busted neon signs. Moreover, when they peered inside the buildings, bizarre details appeared. Through broken windows, restaurant tables with place mats and beer bottles could be dimly made out. One derelict bar even had a jukebox. It lay on its side, dusty but apparently intact, surrounded by crumpled drink cans and torn newspaper, like a Japanese treasure chest in a sea of cursed banknotes. It was hard to imagine why such reusable and recyclable assets had been abandoned rather than expertly stripped. It seemed as if, in the space of one bad hour, the nightlife had been chased away.
A similar thought had obviously occurred to Totoy, embellished with a characteristic spin.
“I’m keeping an eye out,” he said quietly, after they had gone the entire length of a street without conversation.
Vincente raised his eyebrows. “For?”
“The clown.”
“What clown?”
“The burger clown. I’m thinking he might be the reason this district is so deserted. Could be his hunting grounds.”
Vincente was content to let the oblique reference pass un-explained. He was feeling uneasy enough and didn’t need a grim Totoy fantasy to help him on his way.
The stretch of wasteground came as a relief. It was illuminated by a few scattered refuse fires and the moon, and beyond it an outline of low shanty buildings was visible. Some had lights burning, electric and oil.
“Looks promising,” said Totoy. “The squatter camp…”
“Uh-huh.”
“We could ask someone the way back to Ermita.”
“Nothing to lose.”
“So…”
“We might as well try it out.”
Halfway across, Totoy said, “It’s pistols.”
Vincente nodded.
“Loud.”
“Near.”
“Coming from inside a building.”
“One of those ones behind us.”
“Yep.”
The boys stood still and listened. The shooting came in rich volleys, and its echoes bounced off the buildings around the wasteground, snapping through their chests.
“That shot was louder.”
“Somebody’s screaming.”
“We should go.”
“Yeah. We should.”
1.
Like walking from the living room to the study, and switching on the computer.
Like walking from the desk to the window, and frowning at pinpricks of old light.
Underneath “
Stop procrastinating
” he had typed: “
Imagine an atom of hydrogen.
”
Imagine an atom
of hydrogen, Cente. The most basic atom: a nucleus with a single electron revolving around it. Then imagine that you have enlarged the nucleus by five million million, bringing it up to about the size of a one-peso coin. To scale, the electron would now be nearly two-thirds of a mile away.
Two-thirds of a mile between nucleus and electron, if the nucleus was the size of a one-peso coin. In an atom, almost nothing to see, even if you could see it. Mainly a void. So much room to move around.
So much room that if you fired a neutrino into a light-year-thick block of lead, there’d be even-odds that the neutrino would collide with nothing and pop out the other side.
Good odds of survival, if you are a light-year-thick block of lead, trying to blow your brains out with a neutrino gun.
Good odds of survival too, if you are a suicidal neutrino, jumping off the thirtieth floor of Legaspi Towers. You’d hit the pavement and pass straight through it. Pass through the pavement, earth, rock layers, the whole planet, and keep right on going.
Good odds of suicide survival for the unthinkably big and the unthinkably small.
You might hope that the same would be true for a girl jumping off the thirtieth floor of Legaspi Towers. With all that space, with all that void and room to move around, you might hope the girl’s atoms and the atoms of the pavement might conspire to let her safely through.
It seems reasonable enough. But it turns out that, for the thinkable, the odds are bad.
Alfredo wiped
sweat from his upper lip. “Stop,” he said, and hit delete.
Alfredo decided to ignore today’s Totoy tape. At some point, he would have to go through it more carefully, when he was dealing with the conscious narratives of breakdown and change rather than the unconscious ones. But for the moment, he couldn’t be bothered. Instead, as usual, he chose to concentrate on his star pupil.
To the extent that Vincente was the pupil, at any rate.
In neat capitals, he labeled Vincente’s tape, #43,
DYING
/
DEAD BABY, CARELESS FATHER.
The conversation was still quite fresh in his mind, so rather than listen to it immediately, he thought it might be better to go over some previous father-related material.
“Father, father,” he muttered, squatting by the shelves, running his finger down the Vincente recordings. Out of forty-three taped conversations, there was a lot of father-related material to choose from. At #4, his finger dithered, and at numbers 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 36, and 37
it dithered again. Finally it backtracked, and settled on number 29.
#29,
RUNNING MAN (VERSION 2)/ FATHER-HELL.
“It’s not the first time you’ve brought me this dream.”
“No. But it’s the only dream I could remember this week.”
“I see…”
“Do you not want to buy it?”
“Why would I not want to buy it?”
“You complain about Totoy’s dreams always being the same.”
“That’s a little different. Actually, I’m interested that you’ve had this dream more than once.”
“Oh, well, I’ve dreamed it a lot more than once.”
“Regularly? Every week, month…”
“Sometimes I have it every week. Sometimes I might not have it for a while.”
“And for how long has this been going on?”
“I’m not sure. About a year.”
“About a year…Really…”
“Why?”
“Well, we’ve been seeing each other for about a year. And while you were talking about the dream, you mentioned that it was based on a real incident. But you also said that the incident happened two years ago…so I’m wondering why the incident has suddenly become important to you.”
“Hmm…”
“Tell me why you think it might be important.”
“You tell me.”
“I’d like you to try first.”
“Fredo, we’ve been talking for ages today. I’m tired. And I want to find Totoy before it—”
“Gets dark. Okay. So…it struck me that the man lacks a kind of street knowledge, and for that reason you are sure he will be caught by the street gang. And in a way, you feel good that if you were in his shoes, you would be able to escape.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You also emphasize that this man is quite well dressed and that he’s carrying a bag with him.”
“Yes.”
“So…doesn’t that make you think of something? Or someone?”
“No.”
“Come on, Cente! It must make you think of someone.”
“It makes me think about the guy I saw being chased.”
“Fine. But someone else too. Look, we’ve been seeing each other about a year. Then, in the last year, you start having this dream about a guy who lacks street knowledge, is well dressed, carries a bag…Why are you laughing?”
“You. You think the guy is you.”
“Is that such a funny idea?”
“Well dressed?”
“I’m expensively dressed.”
“You are?”
“I…What about the bag?”
“It was a briefcase. Not a sack.”
“This isn’t a sack!”
“It certainly isn’t a briefca—”
“Shit,” said Alfredo, hitting the pause button on the tape deck. He counted the rings of the phone, feeling irritated with himself that he’d turned the answering machine off.
After twenty rings, it became clear that Romario wasn’t going to give up.
In general terms, they shared nothing but a school, and that had been long ago. They liked wildly different music, films, and books. Romario talked in clipped, blunt sentences, while Alfredo tended to discover what he was saying as he was saying it. Alfredo had been born into money, and Romario had made it. When Romario had been sowing his wild oats, Alfredo had been married. When Romario had found the love of his life, Alfredo had stumbled out to his apartment balcony to find himself loveless.
For these reasons and more besides, the friendship, whenever it was analyzed, left both men in a state of mild surprise. This was reflected in the amount of time, over the years, they’d spent discussing how they had met, and why—after having met—they hadn’t immediately turned around and walked off in opposite directions.
For a few seconds
, Romario seemed too disgusted to speak. Then he said, “
Paré
, what’s the point of pretending
you’re out when you know I can see your apartment lights from my office?”
Alfredo stalled with a cough. “I forget that,
paré.
”
“
Bullshit
,” Romario barked. “You don’t forget at all. You want to know whether I’ll keep ringing or not.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s like the way you never phone. You
never
phone! Who phones who? Always it’s me who phones you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You want my opinion? You’re testing me. If I didn’t phone, I’d fail the test, and you’d probably leave it six months before you got in contact.”
“No,
paré
,” said Alfredo firmly, settling himself down on the sofa and tucking the receiver under his chin. “I wouldn’t leave it six months. But that’s good about the test. You’re probably right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
“Maybe you should’ve been the shrink and not me.”
“Maybe.”
“You pass the test. I’m glad you keep calling.”
“You should be.”
Alfredo smiled. “I am.”
