The Tesseract (9 page)

Within the stone walls of the mausoleum, generation after generation of Don Pepe’s family. Behind the cast-iron fence, an army of ancestral spirits, seething in the still air around the tomb, peering out of the statues’ eyes and impregnating the clipped grass under their feet.

Sweating in the tree line
that bordered the cemetery, along with the rest of his family and everyone else from the
barangay
. All of them invisible, Jojo guessed, to the cluster of elite mourners that stood by the mausoleum’s gated entrance. Black-suited, stiff silhouettes around Don Pepe’s coffin, apparently so grief-stricken that they were beyond screaming or crying.

Which was eerie. Jojo had never seen such a quiet funeral. And he wasn’t the only one to find it uncomfortable, because when the priest had begun talking, somebody had let out a short wail, “Ay-ay-ay,” bursting out of a clump of ferns to Jojo’s left. Probably Tata Turo’s wife, judging not by the wail’s startling loudness but by the way it had ended. A muffled yelp as Tata Turo grabbed his wife by the throat and clamped his hand over her mouth—a noise that most in the
barangay
had heard before.

Jojo’s mother sighed
, shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and wiped at her face with a handkerchief. Her shirt, brilliantly white that morning, was now clinging to her back and stuck all over with leaves and small twigs.

He looked up at her and she smiled. “Are you okay?” she whispered.

Jojo nodded.

“Not too hot?”

“No.”

“Not too tired?”

“No.”

“A little bit hungry?”

He thought for a moment. “No. Really.”

“You’re being very patient. The funeral is nearly over now. If you can hold out a short while longer…”

“Yes. I can.”

“Good boy,” she whispered, with the faintest note of surprise in her voice. Then she wiped the handkerchief over her face again. “Good boy.”

A low amen drifted
across the headstones, then rippled around the tree line. The priest had finished his speech, and Don Pepe’s coffin was being carried through the mausoleum’s doorway.

Suddenly, Jojo felt his father’s hand on the small of his back, propeling him forward. Not understanding, he dug his heels into the earth.

“Move forward,” his father hissed, and pushed harder.

“Why?”

“Move forward!”

Jojo continued to resist. They had been hiding in the leaves for hours—since long before any of the elite mourners had
arrived. Over all that time, no one had spoken a word above a whisper or made a movement any more violent than brushing away a fly. It made no sense to now burst out of that hiding place, into the bright light.

“Why?” Jojo repeated, turning to his mother, appealing for help. But she had the same look of urgency as his father. She motioned with her arms.

“Go on, Jojo!”

“I’ll be seen!”

“Yes!” said his father.

“Jojo! Do as you are told!”

“I’ll be
seen
!”

“Yes! We want Don Pepe to see you!”

“Don
Pepe
?” Panic-stricken, Jojo looked back to the mausoleum. He caught a last glimpse of Don Pepe’s coffin, just before it disappeared inside. “But he’s dead!”

“Dead?” said his father incredulously; then he had pushed a final time. Much too strong for Jojo to resist, at that age. Unable to do anything about it, he had stumbled out of the shelter of the bamboo sprays.

The sensation of isolation and stark visibility was overwhelming. The sky was vast and cloudless. Dry grass crackled beneath his bare feet. The sun was hot on his neck.

Jojo’s parents
had been right. As the doors of the mausoleum had closed and the mourners had turned to begin filing out of the graveyard, Don Pepe’s head had inclined in his direction. Always recognizable by his erect posture and the rhythm of his
stride, and—now—by his long black hair. And though Jojo couldn’t see Don Pepe’s eyes, that slight tilt of the head was enough. He knew the mestizo was looking straight at him.

Moments later, others had come out of the tree line, but they had missed their chance. Jojo had been first. He was the only one to be noticed, and remembered.

Hair black, then gray, then black, then gray. Fat-Boy’s hands and life, taken by a Kastila plantation owner with eyebrows as white as seagulls, cut by a young man with a red mist in his head. Panding, a stooped figure in a doorway, too frail to run errands for himself, in the grave by the time Jojo was five or six.

Don Pepe, always, but a mestizo only once. The last Don Pepe had probably never known his mother. Never married, because he felt he never could. Maybe he reasoned: One more dilution and the blood will be gone. A desperate trip to the mother country, already too old and too late.

“Here,” he would spit from the backseat of the Mercedes, “you have only…”

Here, you have only Filipinos.

“The mestizo had no son.”

Jojo repeated the words several times. The only ears that
might have heard him were deaf or dead, but the words were worth saying all the same, to feel the speech vibrate in his throat and to know his tongue had formed the sounds.

“He’s dead.”

Meanwhile, Teroy reloaded their guns again. He also was mouthing. Probably curses and promises: what he’d do to the sailor for shooting his boss; what he’d do if the sailor was unlucky enough still to be alive.

“
Paré
,” Jojo said as his pistol was thrust back at him. “We don’t have to do anything to the sailor…I think we should…could just…”

Teroy kicked open the bullet-riddled remains of Mr. Sean’s bedroom door.

“…leave.”

Then Jojo was standing alone in the corridor, staring at the smoke and dust his
kumpadre
had disappeared into.

In turn
, the mestizo stared at Jojo, his eyes not quite as sightless as his driver and bodyguard had assumed. He was beyond movement, and beyond much in the way of thought, but he had an idea of what had happened to him over the last few minutes. He was also, through blurred and blackened vision, still able to see.

See Jojo hesitate before following Teroy.

Dimly sensing what the hesitation meant, the mestizo felt angry. An indignant command rose inside him, but lacking the strength to burst through the bubble of blood on his lips, it remained contained.

Or—perhaps not. Perhaps his power was in some way serving him. Because a few seconds later, his driver slipped through the Englishman’s doorway.

The Englishman’s room had been shot to pieces. He had escaped by smashing through a wall; then he had run down the line of rooms parallel to the corridor. These rooms had had their own walls smashed out—for no clear reason besides the Patay’s internal collapse—leaving a broad segmented passage that, to Jojo, looked oddly like a backbone.

At the far end of the passage, Mr. Sean was visible for a brief moment before he turned back into the corridor. Teroy wasted no time giving chase. Jojo was a footstep behind. Loyalty to the seething air around Don Pepe’s mausoleum, or to his bodyguard friend. But committed, now, either way.

The stretch of wasteground opposite Patay was illuminated by refuse fires and the moon, glowing through a methane haze. Behind him, Sean could hear his pursuers, firing their pistols, stumbling over the same rubble that he had been stumbling over less than two minutes before. He could also hear the screams of a dying man in Patay’s lobby. Rather than take the chance that the shaven-headed concierge would try to block his path, Sean had shot him.

Over the wasteground, he took random lefts and rights into
narrow slum alleyways and side streets. This, Sean had known, would be his only chance. Alejandro Street, Sugat, Sakit, Sayang, no chance. Too broad and open—alleyways and side streets would be his salvation. And baptism in an open sewer covered by loosely laid boards.

Incredible, Sean thought, as he lost his footing and slipped into the three-foot-deep liquid-filled trench.
Incredible
. It shouldn’t be like this. At such moments, one should be as surefooted as was necessary, just as one shouldn’t have to worry about itches. Adrenaline
should
provide.

The bottom of the trench was like greased glass, and as soon as his shoes found it he slipped again. For a blind second, he was fully submerged. Then he was on his knees, hands and elbows gripping either side of the sewer.

“Fuck,” said Sean, after he’d wiped the shit from his eyes.

Two figures were standing a few feet away. Joe and Teroy; they’d kept equal pace through the lefts and rights, and now they’d caught up. He was dead.

But a heartbeat later, he was still alive. So—not Joe and Teroy, because he’d have been killed already, or at least wounded. And after another wipe, he saw that the figures were much too small to be men. They were boys. Two street kids, watching him with startled and serious faces.

A clatter of boards snapped Sean back into action. This
was
Joe and Teroy, and they were close. In the same alley.

Sean hauled himself up and out.

More lefts
and rights, and he still hadn’t lost them. A couple of times he thought he had, and both times he’d been wrong. He’d slowed down to catch his breath and think about his bearings, and heard them immediately, hot on his trail. Near to vomiting with exhaustion, Sean had been forced to start moving again. Not running anymore, because he couldn’t, even to save his life. Clumsy, stealthless, moving was the best he could do. But at least Joe and Teroy must have been tired as he was, because they didn’t appear to be gaining.

And this had been going on for some time now, long enough for them to leave the slums and enter a new neighborhood. Middle-class—streets only slightly wider, but lined with individual houses rather than a mesh of shacks. Not so much corrugated iron. More greenery by the roadside. Would have been pretty in the late afternoon, a low orange sun catching the blossom that spilled over the fences.

A lot of blossom around. So much that it wasn’t just on the trees and strewn over the tarmac. It was in the air.

The view outside the kitchen window was full of color. Tarmac still blue and grass still green, even though the sun was almost below the horizon line and the sky was red. Anywhere else in the city, a red sky would have washed out the colors like a sodium lamp, but not here. This was a good neighborhood, with separated houses and broad clean streets, and color that could survive the loss of light for longer than seemed natural.

“Blossom,” said Rosa, brushing at the soapsuds on her
wrists. It had hit the trees on Adonis Avenue last week, bursting over the fences like a snapshot of a waterfall.

“Clean,” she added a few moments later—a reminder to herself that the plates in the sink were as clean as they were ever going to get. Absently turned and wiped in the cool sink water for the last ten minutes, the last dried rice grain had given up its grip on the china some time ago.

In fact, a double reminder. The plates were clean, but the kids weren’t, and ideally she wanted them bathed and in bed—if not asleep—before her husband arrived home. Rosa pulled the plug and watched her handsome reflection until the whirlpool sucked it down. Still a few years to go until she inherited her mother’s white, rather than silver, hair.

Raphael
, six, and Lita, eight. Raphael—fuzzy school crew cut, round face, big serious eyes, and eyebrows that dipped in the middle. Even when he was smiling, his eyebrows left him with a slight cautious frown. Lita—eyebrows exactly the other way around. Upturned, so that even when she was sad she looked like she might be about to break into a surprised laugh. An exceptionally pretty little girl, as her grandmother Corazon liked to point out—probably too often for Lita’s own good. If Lita was going to turn out as beautiful as it seemed she might, the less she knew about it the better. At present, she appeared perplexingly unaware of her ability to manipulate anyone over the age of thirteen, and Rosa hoped she would stay that way.

Better to show her admiration and affection for her children with a hand through their wet hair and a thumb rubbed over their foreheads to clear a stray rivulet of shampoo running too close to their eyes.

“How’s the water?” asked Rosa.

Lita nodded. “Good. Not too hot.”

“No,” Raphael agreed. “Not too hot. Even when we climbed in, it wasn’t too hot.”

“I notice you haven’t asked for your duck.”

“Hmm.”

“Would you like it?”

“Well.” Raphael shrugged. “Okay.”

“Only okay? Not so long ago you wouldn’t take a bath without it.”

“Yes. That’s true. I would like the duck, please.”

Rosa handed him the yellow toy, and he dropped it between his crossed legs. Almost immediately it toppled over on its side, then began to sink. The two halves of the plastic mold had gradually split at the base, releasing the sand ballast in small quantities each bathtime. For a few months, grazing your back as you lay down in the tub had become such a feature of family life that Rosa almost missed it when all the sand was gone.