“The past is not the past. The future doesn’t exist. It’s a made-up idea. Every mapping what we do of the future is a fabrication of our imagination.” – Patrick Somerville
Marielle Gaston—fourth square on the third of many rows of faces staring back at Paul Benitez on Zoom—is acting out once more. There she goes again, Paul thinks, and he despairs a little, but he might as well get used to this by now.
There are days when Marielle sings Taylor Swift songs for no reason, but that’s easily remedied by muting her. There are days when she gets up and dances, and the effect is spectacular—and all that the rest of them on Zoom can do is sit back for a while and smile, until the girl eventually calms down. Today, Marielle Gaston bombs the flow of the lecture with incessant questions that have nothing to do with anything [“Sir Paul, but wouldn’t you call the ending of Crash Landing on You on Netflix a total bore?” things like that], and then fidgets with the switch of the lamp in her room so that one moment her Zoom square shows a dimly-lit girl who clearly has not gone out of the house in days, and the next moment, there’s just a gaping black hole. It goes on and on, and the flickering has become a nuisance, but Paul steels himself—because what else can he do? Ban her from the Zoom? God knows he tries his best to understand. Some of the others are sending him private messages while he persists to lecture on about metaphors and symbolisms in fiction writing into his laptop. Most of the DMs express annoyance, but quite a few have sent pressing information they think he must know: “She’s off her meds today, sir. Please understand.”
Of course, he understands. At 45, all he feels in his bones is a dank weariness that betrays all the patience he has swallowed in the past ten years of teaching, a decade without any sabbatical, and all the wear and tear of those years accumulating to this: the husk of a man who still must “understand.” And now there are new circumstances he must contend with: a pandemic has blown up and rerouted all their regular ways of doings things, which calls for an even more infinite source of fortitude and empathy—and he hopes these are things he still has the ability to replenish. But these days you don’t even have to remind yourself to be kinder to people. To be more understanding, to put yourself in their shoes—that’s what the pandemic has taught us, yes?
“I hope you’re okay over there, Marielle,” is all he says with all the understanding he can muster—and then with a sigh, which he tries his best to suppress, he goes on to discuss the slipperiness of symbolisms in stories, that it can be a trap if you look too hard for them if you’re a reader, and a contrivance if you’re a writer. But he also reminds them that a good close reading can always be productive in the appreciation of a text. “And if you’re able to supply the telling details as subtly as possible, then you’re most likely writing a good story,” he says. “We’ve discussed before the short story ‘Midsummer’ by Manuel Arguilla, right? I mean, what does that story even try to mean? Is it just about a girl with a water jug and a boy with carabao, meeting in a forlorn countryside? Many people seem to think so. Or is it so much more, if you learn to read properly between the lines? This is Arguilla, after all. Would he write a story that means nothing?”
He doesn’t have to answer this question. They’ve discussed this the day before. He had explored with gusto every single paragraph of the Arguilla story, reading it line by line, demonstrating the inherent eroticism that’s somewhat hidden in the text, taking apart the shifting points of view between boy and girl that betray the want in their glances—the boy Manong looking at the girl’s “single bodice instantly [clinging] to her bosom, molding the twin hillocks of her breasts warmly brown through the wet cloth,” and the girl Ading looking at the boy’s “two parallel ridges of rope-like muscle [sticking] out against the wet shirt, [his] muscles [rippling] all over his body…” And then capped it all by solving the narrative conundrum they didn’t even know was embedded in the whole thing: whose story is it? Some said the boy’s. Some said the girl’s. Marielle definitely said, “The carabao,” and burst out laughing. And only then did he lay the groundwork for Arguilla’s aesthetic choices for the seeming protagonist—the girl Ading scheming it all, laying out every single step to make the boy fall for her, until in the end, Manong has no choice but to “follow the slender, lithe figure to the end of the world”—discussing all these not through silly and unfounded conjectures but by using the very text Manuel Arguilla himself penned.
Now, Paul is not entirely sure if his students—over Zoom—entirely got what he wanted to say when he discussed the story the previous session. He finds that it is more difficult to convey the intricacies of literary art when there’s literally a gulf between teacher and student, their laptop cameras a flickering window that bridges, only to the best of common technology, the actual distance that separates them all. Because here he is in Bacolod—and where are the rest? At the beginning of the “virtual” semester he didn’t want to participate in, he found out some of these faces were in fact in various towns and cities in Negros Occidental, and also in Cebu, in Tagbilaran, in Dumaguete, in Iloilo, in Manila, some even as far away as Koronadal and General Santos City. It was strange at first to accept that this was his classroom now. It still boggles his brain at present—but little by little, he has come to accept the “new normal,” a term he detests. And yet at the back of his head, there is a question he has not really ventured to answer: What have we lost in the rush to embrace this stop-gap solution to a problem that defies solving? He has taught Arguilla’s “Midsummer” before in his Philippine literature class—and one reason why he relishes teaching it is the theatricality the piece gives him. In an actual class surrounded by bodied presences, he would use his voice, his body, his gestures to express the drama of the text, to flesh it out to students who might not have enough imagination to see the subtleties of printed words on a page: he would act out Manong’s innocent insouciance as he drags along his carabao, he would act out Ading’s sly fetching of the water from the well, and he would demonstrate the final reveal of the girl ensnaring the boy into her exquisitely designed trap of midsummer love. And by the end of it all, Paul Benitez would relish the applause he sometimes got at the end of his “Midsummer” lecture, and he would think: “Thank God for my theater background! And thank God I’m such a performative Leo!” But how do you do all that on Zoom? How do you engage with squares on a screen?
Now Marielle has turned on her lights again, and all of her face fills the entire space of her camera in forbidding close-up. “Sir Paul, Sir Paul, Sir Paul!” she says with her usual insistence.
“Yes, Marielle?”
“I saw this tweet the other day…” she begins.
Here we go again, Paul thinks.
“And it’s a meme, and it goes like this: a teacher in class tells everyone that the black window in the story they’ve read is symbolic of despair and of death. But they somehow manage to ask the author of the story, and the author says: ‘I just wanted the window to be black.’ What do you say to that?”
Count on Marielle the Mad to surprise with a probing question, Paul thinks.
He takes his time before answering.
And then he begins: “Like I said, symbols are tricky. And I always say, don’t hunt for them. And if you do, better make sure they are supported fully by the text itself.” He pauses. “I really don’t have a meaningful answer to this question, guys. Because most of the time, I like the great symbolisms I see in stories and how they illuminate the theme. The story means so much more because of them. But sometimes I do find some of them very…belabored. Especially if the author is too on the nose about it, and it’s just so obvious. So, yes, it can be a matter of skill.”
He pauses again.
“But since this is a creative writing class, and you’re all here trying to learn fiction writing from me—God knows why—let me share wih you something from my own experience,” Paul continues. “I once wrote a story about a housewife who is dealing with some domestic problems. She has a husband who just lost his job but goes out every day to pretend to go to work. She has a mother who lives with them whose slavish devotion to her religious rituals makes her unable to see the cracks in the family. And she has a very young son who has suddenly decided he’s an angel—and dresses the part, wings and all, refusing to take his costume off, or even go take a shower, because apparently angels don’t need showers!” He pauses, straining to see if they were listening. “When I wrote this story, all I really wanted to do was to write about a woman dealing with a willful child and a secretive husband. That’s all. As simple as that. Well, the story won some award, got published in a national magazine, and got included in some textbooks and anthologies—and later I learned that a teacher in Cebu, a friend of mine actually, was teaching it in her English class. She told me later that during one discussion, most of her students agreed that the story was a story about faith, all kinds of it, no matter how fractured. And I was like, what? I mean can you imagine that? Your teacher—Prof. Paul Benitez, a full-on agnostic—writing a story about faith? Get outta here!” He pauses once more, as if to take stock of insight he has gotten. “But I read the story again. And I could suddenly see what they saw in it—the child believing he’s an angel, the husband pretending to go to work while searching out leads in classified ads, the wife hoping all was right in their little world. They were all creatures of faith, really. And the way I described them all was really a kind of symbol-making to lay the groundwork for that theme of faith. But I did not set out to write a story about faith, and yet attentive readers saw it that way. Who’s to say they are wrong?”
Paul ends with a little sigh, barely audible. Something feels wrong, he thinks. Instinctively, he feels for his neck, feverish all of a sudden. He brushes away the stray thought that came—because, by God, he has a class to finish.
“I’m not sure you totally got that,” he says to all the squares on his laptop screen, “but I hope you do.”
Most nod, some of them mutter one thing or another, and Marielle screams: “Totally got you, Sir Paul!” Their teacher laughs, and then looking at the time, Paul finally ends the session: “Well, that was a productive one. I’ll see you again soon—and guys, please please take care of yourself, and don’t go out without wearing masks.”
It is December 2020, and the worldis slowly ending.
One by one, the squares blink off, even Marielle’s, and Paul finally clicks the end button, which sets off Zoom to start rendering his video record of the whole session. He thinks with some degree of distraction about symbolisms, how they can seem vital as shorthand for meaning in a text—but do they exist in real life? Is his face on a Zoom screen a symbol? [He’s trapped by life.] Is the rotating arrow of his video-rendering, which seems to take forever, a symbol? [He’s going nowhere.] Is the pregnant silence of his apartment a symbol? [He is alone.]
And then it hits.
Paul finds himself shivering—a sudden thing that makes him hastily leave the laptop on his desk, and proceed to curl under thick blanket on his bed at the opposite end of this little room in his apartment along McArthur Drive, a stone’s throw away from the University of St. La Salle. And before drifting off into restless slumber, he thinks: Is the sudden onset of chills a symbol?
The chills are not symbols, they’re symptoms.
The body ache comes with a thunderclap arrival of fever—so sudden that for Paul it feels very much like being a hapless marathoner dropped into a race that has already begun. This is no ordinary fever, Paul thinks. When he wakes up a few hours later from the ache that he feels deep down into the marrow of his bones—all he can think about is the word “ngilo,” Hiligaynon for that phantom discomfort that goes deep under the skin. His “ngilo” bones are all mashed up inside as if they don’t fit, the sockets and the ligaments reduced to mere suggestions. So, he lies in bed hoping for his body to find truce for respite. He sleeps fully for the entire night, and then the entire day.
On the second day, from out of the fog in his head, he remembers his classes—and he drags himself away from bed to email a short note to everyone: “Sorry, guys. I might be coming down with something. I can’t teach. See you in a few days or so.” He does not bother to wait for responses. He needs sleep.
The sleep he gets feels like a reprieve, but when waking comes, he is at it again, making desperate sense of the “misalignments” of his bones, but knowing full well it is all in his head. How can bones feel this way?
When two days stretch to even more days, Paul finds a routine: sleep, wake, urinate, drink the coldest of water, shower, and take Bioflu at safe intervals. He feels the need to combat the fever, and it feels good to go to bed with the glorious sting of cold water on his skin. But it is devilish quick comfort that is gone too soon, like the invention of Coke Sakto, but enough to remind Paul there is still a human animal inside his fever-drenched body, which he sometimes finds hurtling around his small apartment in a delirium. He forgets to eat, too tired to think of food.
He begins noting the symptoms he has—the details culled from Google—which distribute the manifestations on a day-to-day scale, a helpful map in a pandemic world swirling with disinformation. Paul fully knows he has hypochondriac powers to manifest symptoms in his body for assorted illnesses he doesn’t actually have—but this is beyond psychosomatic prowess; this feels real.
For Day 1 to 3: he has fever, check.
He has body aches, check.
But I don’t have dry cough! That feels like a beacon of hope, that perhaps this is just the flu—which he immediately doubts because he just got his flu vaccination only last September. Denial will always be a necessary defense, especially absent proper testing.
So he finally calls the health center of Barangay 17, as directed by all the emergency pubmats posted on Bacolod Facebook, and he gets a chilling response: “Sir, naubos guid ang aton testing kits—we are still waiting for new supplies—so all we can recommend to you is to quarantine for two weeks, and to get in touch with us if things go worse. Since we cannot test you, we cannot take you to the quarantine center, so all we can do is to ask you to say home, and monitor things.” Dammit.
He messages his classes again, and also his department chair, and explains his dilemma and makes hard choices regarding requirements with the term about to end. He messages friends he has previous plans to have Friday dinner with in a new restaurant that offers alfresco dining, and cancels it. He messages his brother to convey his apprehensions—essentially alerting next of kin. He messages his boyfriend Adrian to update him about the slow ravages to his body. All these while swimming in delirium. No one says, “It must be COVID-19,” always something else—Plus you’re not coughing! they offer. Denial is vital for one to live. He tells them he will be monitoring things in self-isolation, and hoping for the best.
Adrian messages back: “Can you still taste things?”
Paul gets up, and looks for the best and strongest flavor on his pantry. He eagerly messages back to Adrian his find: “I can still taste Nutella!” That exclamation mark he feels in his voice is all of Paul’s ragged happiness distilled to punctuation form.
The delirium takes him places, most of them dark.
When the ache is too much and he cannot sleep, despite the fever which rages on and off, Paul binges on YouTube videos and all manner of Netflix shows, without really following for the most part what they are all about—needing them only as background noise to assure himself he is still tethered to this world. When he does drift off to sleep, he sometimes finds himself waking with a start—as if startled by some nightmare he cannot remember.
Once he catches himself writing on a piece of paper: “I am no longer going to resist. Let it all fall apart. Let the wolves come. Let it all rot.” WTF? He wonders what it is all about. Is it something he heard from a YouTube video essay, or a Korean TV show? Is it the beginning of a story he has forgotten to write? Worse: is it a hasty confession he has no recollection of making? But it sounds just about right, that declaration to surrender.
Wolves, he thinks. That’s a metaphor right there. And so is rot.
He has missed writing. It has been such a long time since he has written a passable story. Sure, there are all those pandemic essays he churned out when the whole world started to end last March, which he posted on Facebook for all to read and find common grounds for commiseration—but fiction? That kind of writing has taken a back seat, and now refuses to come out even when bidden.
Truth to tell, writing has taken a back seat even way before the pandemic. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” That famous quote from George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman comes to him like a taunt. But Paul begs to disagree: he certainly can, but teaching made him a definite can’t. When he finally earned his MFA more than a decade ago, his department at the university was eager to revive its moribund creative writing program—and put its revitalization on his shoulders. In the beginning, he did so very eagerly and faithfully, but when he asked the department to hire other teachers to share the load—“I can’t possibly be the only one to teach these kids everything!” he said in exasperation—he was told there was a freeze in hiring because of the ongoing shift to K-12, and besides there was retired Prof. Leticia Luzuriaga who could be brought in to teach all the poetry classes on an adjunct capacity. So Paul soldiered on, “for the love of the alma mater,” he bristled. He soldiered on, even as there were more creative writing students to teach each coming school year—plus all the students in the theater program who pursued an elective in playwriting. Even as the years made his back break with all the workshops he had to facilitate, even when he surrendered what free time he had to attend to the enormous task of teaching, reading all student manuscripts [for his fiction, and creative nonfiction, and playwriting classes], workshopping, and workshopping the revisions—sometimes up to three revisions total. This did not take into account all the general education classes he was bound to teach: world literature, Philippine literature, research writing. Plus courses on postmodern literature and contemporary criticism [and sometimes classical criticism, if Prof. Luzuriaga declined to teach it for one reason or other]. He was encouraged to take his Ph.D. overseas—but the department continued to pile on more classes for him to teach, to which Adrian had casually commented, “You have to learn to say no.”
But Paul is a Leo—how does a Leo say no?
He knew he loved to teach—but he was exhausted, and gradually he realized all the coursework he had to manage made him sacrifice the one thing he promised himself he would never abandon: to write. And he knew the secret to writing: persistence. You have to persist, to continue to write, despite setbacks—that’s the only way to court the muse, or else it abandons you. But when was the last time he finished a short story? A long time ago, he didn’t even want to count the years. And sometimes, while workshopping the third draft of a short story by a student who was still unwilling to heed the remarks from the previous session, he would bristle quietly: I’m giving up my own writing to attend to this shit you can’t even bother to revise? He’d feel guilty afterwards—but the secret sentiment remained. Still, he soldiered on, and some of his students’ success—a publication in a national magazine, a Palanca award, an acceptance into a national workshop, a self-published chapbook, an acceptance into the Virgin Labfest—became the only marker for his own success; not altogether a bad thing, he decided. He was genuinely happy for them and was in fact instrumental in them pursuing these opportunities by sending them links to various literary calls for submissions, with one commanding line from him: “Do this.” But what of the short story collection he had been promising himself to finish since he finished his MFA? What of the memoir he’d been mulling over for years now? What of the first draft of his novel that was languishing in one of the folders in his laptop, labeled with such optimism: “Novel to Revise”? He felt exhausted.
And then the pandemic hit—and there was the added stress of having to contend with the impersonality of distance learning, of having to suddenly produce lecture videos for all his classes, of having to deal with the dread that he was carrying on as if things were fine even when the world around him was ending. For a while, when the pandemic began, he was actually strangely comforted by the idea that the world had come to a stop—he thought of the sudden worldwide quarantine as a chance to rest! That was how exhausted he was.
Then there was the chairperson in his department, a sly and balding little man who walked with a limp and taught linguistics and had a not-so-secret vendetta for the creative writing branch of his fiefdom—simply because no one was really taking his classes, and viewed the rise in enrollment for creative writing with gimlet eyes. He was the one most insistent in not hiring new faculty to teach creative writing with Paul. And Paul had been humiliated by this little man in other subtle ways before. Now the latter is responding to Paul’s latest email about coming down sick with one dismissive line: “Are you sure you’re really sick?”
Paul wants to scream in frustration, but his mouth is dry and tastes of ashes.
The taste of cinders in the mouth is definitely a sign.
Paul reminds himself that the jar of Nutella is still there in the pantry, ready for another taste test, and perhaps lonely for bread in equal measure. [He has not eaten bread for some time now.]
He used to make jokes in the beginning months of the pandemic that the reason why he and Adrian were gaining weight, aside from the prolonged [and mandatory] sedentary existence, was that they were eating as a barometer of health. “I can taste this fried chicken! Thank God.” “I can taste this lechon! Thank God.” “I can taste this green pro-biotic shake! Thank God.” There’s some truth to that, Paul thinks, because in the absence of mass testing, all they can do is to provide their own road map to the uncharted terrors of 2020.
But it is easy to ignore the semblance of ash in his mouth. Fevers bring that on, Paul thinks. On the fourth or fifth day of his quarantine, finally remembering to eat, he opens the take-out box of Tuscan chicken he ordered through Grab. This is his favorite meal, but he finds himself staring blankly, in feverish delirium, at the crispy brown tenderness of the meat glistening in oil and herbs. He digs in. One bite, two bites. It tastes like wet cartolina. It is unbelievably unappetizing that by the fourth bite, hunger for Paul feels like the better option. He throws away the Tuscan chicken.
It is time to retake the Nutella test, Paul thinks. He gingerly spoons a dollop, and takes it. It is squishy mud on his tongue, absent of all its sweet hazelnut chocolate come-on. That full stop is sadness. Fuck, he thinks.
Paul goes back to his feverish sleep, like he has lost a battle, but tells himself he is full and content on four bites of cartolina chicken and some spoonful of cartolina rice.
He still sticks to a fulfillment of his new routine: sleep, wake, urinate, drink the coldest of water, shower. Because routine is good, he thinks, but you also cannot ignore a growling stomach. He stumbles on a converse mystery: hunger pangs and loss of appetite can, in fact, occur at the same time.
The next day, he tries another favorite meal: chicken inasal, the pecho cut, from Manokan Country. It tastes like four-day old thick-crust pizza, with no toppings, left out in the sun for far too long. Paul wants to choose hunger, but he knows he is playing a dangerous game: he has to put in something in his stomach besides all the water he is drinking. He takes the inasal, and eats, whispering to himself: “Swallow, no matter what, and hold it in.” He lasts five swallows, not without effort, but his body is regurgitating the blank vileness of what he is eating, threatening to push the last bite of chicken up his throat, while he desperately wills himself to hold it down. He considers five swallows a success.
The sense of taste is a peculiar thing, Paul thinks. And like all things most vital in our lives, we take it for granted and its absence becomes a gaping void we are surprised could thoroughly disorder our world. He has not appreciated before that taste is very much our gateway to sustenance, without which hunger might as well be as alluring as Piolo Pascual.
He ticks one more symptom down: loss of taste, check. But this one has always been his secret indicator to panic.
And then comes the loose, watery stools. Check.
Isn’t low blood oxygen common by the seventh day? According to reports, this is when people start to die, or get taken to the special ward in the hospital where they get intubated to fight for dear life. He tries his best not to panic. I have a novel still to polish! he thinks, before succumbing to another round of restless sleep.
When Paul finally emerges from the two-week quarantine, he has lost several pounds, and wants to eat. A subdued Christmas is in the air. Adrian takes him down to eat in a new open-air restaurant that is out of the way. He knows Paul wants to get away from the suffocation of a confining apartment, made more confining by strict quarantine. He knows Paul wants to forget the unending tiresomeness of all those days of fever and strange bones and ageusia—which, thank God, his boyfriend has been spared from anything more serious.
“I never got tested properly for COVID-19 though,” Paul tells Adrian.
“That isn’t your fault. Bacolod ran out of tests.”
“But that’s the thing. How am I to know it was in fact COVID-19 that hit me?”
“But what else was there?”
Adrian is right. At least Paul can now finally taste, fully, the inasal he has ordered.
Is that a sign? Paul muses.
But who cares now about signs? He is sick of signs. Life’s real twists—a decade of burnout culminating in a pandemic—should be enough of signposts to tell him what he must do.
“I think I need to quit teaching,” he tells Adrian between bites of inasal.
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. But I’m really not happy anymore. The idea of teaching again actually makes me nauseated.”
“Are you sure about this? I mean, this is a bad time to quit gainful employment. Are you really sure?”
Paul is quiet for a while. “No—,” he says, “but I feel I must. Don’t you ever get that feeling once in a while where jumping into the void is the scariest thing to do, but also the only thing you feel you must do?”
“Well, I jumped into a relationship with you,” Adrian says, smiling. “Honestly, I’ll go wherever you’re going.”
Paul thinks that sweet, and blushes. “Don’t follow me, Adrian,” he says. “I don’t even know where I’m headed.”
“Nonsense,” Adrian replies. “We make the path as we go along.”
Corny, Paul thinks, but the thought calms him. It also feels true.
The path things take is never written in stone. In the days of his recuperation, and before the new semester starts after the end of Christmas break, Paul sends in his grades for the semester just past—and a letter requesting a year’s sabbatical. He thinks doing it this way, instead of outright resigning, will ease his exit, and not overly unsettle the sly little man heading his department. The little man does not even respond in full, save for a curt letter acknowledging Paul’s request—and promptly hires a recent MFA graduate from the program, known for his vile politics, to take Paul’s place in the faculty.
No one is indispensable, Paul laughs when he finds out, not even me—but the last ten years suddenly feel hollow. He cannot help but commiserate that he worked his ass off for years, for all of it to end in this anti-climactic feel.
He feels fine, Paul tells himself, but deep inside he knows life is changing in a fundamental way he cannot even begin articulate. He finds an online job as a virtual assistant to an Australian businesswoman, which pays just enough, and uses the rest of the time getting back to writing—which is excruciating. It feels as if writing has totally abandoned him, after years of abandoning it himself.
Paul begins to lose his hair. He finds hair everywhere in his apartment, in clumps, on his pillows, on the floor, in the bathroom drainage. It will be months before he considers it a problem. “You need to see a psychiatrist,” Adrian tells him—and without telling Paul, because he knows this pesky Leo will be eternally stubborn about seeking help, he manages to book an appointment with the only good psychiatrist in Bacolod, which was a feat: Dr. Marjorie Ibalon’s appointment book was full, scheduled to the brim with patients, most of whom have suddenly sought out mental health help as the pandemic rages on.
That first session, Paul doesn’t really know what to say, except to give details that make up his utter lack of concentration, especially when it comes to writing. By the second session, he learns to relax, begins to talk more about his life, the things he finds challenging. “Do you think I need meds for this, Doc?” he asks.
“It’s too soon to tell,” Dr. Ibalon tells him. “Let’s talk some more.”
He likes that. Paul likes the idea that this psychiatrist is not one to readily diagnose him with some god-forsaken mental disease, and leave everything to prescribed psychotropic drugs. By the third session, he gives more: the highs and hopes of teaching, the crushing burnout, the realization he didn’t want to teach again, the horror of his hair falling out. It feels good, Paul thinks, these regular sessions affording confession.
“You have adult ADHD, Paul,” Dr. Ibalon finally tells him at the end of the fourth session. “But I’m not inclined to give you prescription for meds yet—unless you feel you need it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Paul says. “But truth to tell, I think my hair has stopped falling out.”
“That’s very good!” the doctor says.
Paul says goodbye, and when he goes to the clinic secretary to settle his payment for the session, he finds Marielle Gaston seated on the waiting room couch, watching him, smiling.
“Hello, Ms. Gaston.”
“Hello, Sir Paul! I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Well, I’m here.”
“Thanks for the passing grade by the way! That was so gracious of you, even when I was so disruptive in your class.”
“Well, the pandemic has taught us to be very understanding of people.”
“And we share the same psychiatrist, too!”
“Yes, it appears that we do.”
“She’s good, isn’t she?” Marielle says. And then a segue: “There’s a coffee shop downstairs, Sir Paul. Is it all right if I invite you for coffee? I just wanted to tell you something.”
I have all the time in the world, Paul thinks.
Over coffee, he looks at Marielle more intently. Gone is the vacant look that sometimes crumples into mania. Gone are the fidgety ticks. Gone is the tendency to suddenly sing and dance. And it is strange to see someone who has long been a small square in your laptop screen suddenly become real, fully fleshed out.
“You have no idea, Sir Paul, how something you said before you disappeared on us last December kept coming back to me,” Marielle says.
“Oh? What did I say?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about Ading, in Arguilla’s story.”
Ading, Paul thinks. And Manong following the slender, lithe figure to the end of the world.
“What did I say?” Paul really wants to know.
“I just found it interesting how intentional she was—how she set everything into motion, how the whole story was all about her planning things until what she wanted became real.”
Marielle continues: “And that got me to thinking about stories in general. Because I seriously did not think that story was about Ading when I first read it. I really just thought it was a meet-cute story about nothing. But how you talked about it, you made me see what a fantastic writer Arguilla was, putting all of that in very subtle ways—and you made me see what it means to be a good reader, too, to look deeper, to find meaning. It made me seriously think. About stories. About writing. And about life, too. I mean, I was all about my life having no meaning at all, but you made me rethink that. Which is why I’m here, seeking psychiatric help for real, and not just taking meds.”
Paul stays silent.
“What I really mean is,” Marielle says, “thank you. You’ve been a very good teacher.”
Paul Benitez wills himself to stay composed—goddamit.
“Thank you, too, Marielle,” he says. “This means a lot.”
They say goodbye at the curb fronting the building the clinic is in, Marielle taking the jeepney home. He watches the jeepney accelerate in the wide and dusty stretch of Lacson Street, Marielle’s figure at the back of the jeepney growing smaller as it speeds away.
I can write about a crazy girl like that, Paul thinks. And she won’t just be a symbol.
And suddenly he feels calm. He feels very calm. He feels that he can suddenly write all the stories he wants, even in the very face of this slowly ending world.
