At two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Max, the average of all mediocre success, experienced the lowest point of his music career: Nothing dramatic like being kicked out of a record label’s office under a pouring rain or receiving threats from an irate landlord about an overdue rent payment, but after years of constant struggle, and after many nights contemplating whether he should quit, he’s past thirty now, his batchmates have cars or mortgages, and these thoughts inspire him to write a song about having no car and not affording a mortgage or hum a ballad about dead music careers and, momentum recovered, he’d forget about quitting until his next low point and the pattern repeated itself; keeping his music alive for more than a decade — until that fateful Tuesday at two o’clock when Max found his spirit truly, and completely broken, and he decided to quit fighting the uphill battle of becoming a full-time musician.
There are a lot of casualties in this battle. Those who don’t have the heart and resources to continue pursuing music (or any art) drop out and succumb to a life of bills, a life of credit cards and health cards, maybe kids, and two-week vacation leaves every year; a life of “stability,” forever yearning that glorious moment on stage with fans screaming and light streaming and money pouring in, and making peace, however reluctantly, with the fact that those will never happen in this lifetime.
But Max has fought the good fight. Max is a warrior. He’s tough and persistent and he can take punches. He knows and understands the truth about making a living out of one’s art: There is only bad luck in failure; there is misfortune in not trying. So he tried very hard and for very long, but even the toughest warriors will break under a torrent of bad luck. Makina nga, napapagod. After more than a decade of playing gigs at empty bars, hosting performances mostly attended by friends, and sending demos to music labels that ignored or rejected his emails, Max felt he had enough of this doomed pursuit.
The tipping point was the “alternative hip-hop” artist, Reika.
That morning, Max entered the Big Music recording studio to finish the vocals for his new album. Normally, Max self-produced his songs in his apartment, but he felt that, what the hell, he has never recorded in a “legit” studio so he might as well try now. Then a friend who knew a friend arranged for Max to have his new album produced by Big Music, one of the country’s biggest recording studios, and the stars in heaven aligned for Max as he and the studio’s mixing engineer hit it off during their first meeting; leading the pros at Big Music to record, mix, and master all five songs of Max’s album at a big discount that ate just enough of his savings to leave a month’s worth of rent. Max was recording his final vocals that morning when the mixing engineer said, “Actually, Reika will be arranging her new song here later. Since you’ve never seen other pros arrange, do you want to watch?”
The nineteen-year-old De La Salle University undergrad, Reika, captured commercial deals after her first song went viral on TikTok. She has since signed with Warner Music Philippines, one of the major labels that ignored Max’s demo submissions.
Max immediately accepted the mixing engineer’s offer. And at two o’clock that afternoon, Reika entered the studio; slim, fair-skinned, straight-haired, and wearing an oversized shirt, a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, Guess denim shorts, Armani sneakers, and two assistants by her side. Max looked at her and saw in her skin, her face, the beauty of a life free from financial worries and career failures. She looked so pretty, like the heavens were smiling when she was born, showering her with gifts of genetics and generational wealth. Meanwhile, Max felt that he was simply born and no one, not even the nurse, was smiling.
Then he watched her sing and arrange music and Max realized the heavens blessed her with talent, too. How can the universe be so…imbalanced?
That Tuesday, while observing Reika work with the pros at Big Music, Max remembered the first time he listened to Can You Feel The Love Tonight. Songs blossom depending on their arrangement, and Elton John originally sung Love Tonight with a piano, a small orchestra, and a humming choir in the background. It was a “Disney song” and it sounded like one. Then Max found Boyce Avenue’s Love Tonight cover, and the band kept the piano but ditched the choir, the echoing vocals, the background instruments, and instead sung it as an intimate duet with pop balladeer Connie Talbot. Suddenly, lion kings and jungles and the Walt Disney logo faded from the picture and Max discovered the love in the love song and, in his mind’s eye, he found himself in front of a piano at a grand luxury hotel, his fingers pressing the keys, his mouth and his eyes and his heart speaking in melodies to the person he would spend a lifetime with. (Even if, at that moment and until now, Max was single).
Reika’s arrangement painted pictures in Max’s mind and stirred in his heart an undercurrent of emotions that came in waves, in layers, and mere words would only subtract to the feeling. Listening to her work, Max found the beauty he had always strived for but never reached.
After the session, Reika thanked everyone in the studio and made small talk with Max, saying she would listen to his songs on Spotify, too when she would have the time. Then her assistants ushered her into a waiting Lincoln Navigator, where she smiled and sparkled and waved to everyone goodbye. It must be nice being a saint in heaven, Max thought. It’s hard being a good, glowing person on the muddy floors of Earth.
Max walked slowly on his way back home. He watched the brightly-lit streets, the people passing, the couples walking hand in hand, the restaurants playing soft music, winking with lights and life as patrons poured in. Max stared at the descending sun which had cut the sky in shades of orange and pink and blue, and he thought; “I’ve had a good enough run, haven’t I?” Though major labels ignored or rejected him, and he never experienced “touring” or getting paid at least five figures for anything that involved his music. He did enjoy (most of) his time playing at bars and university fairs. The handful of fan messages he received on Instagram carried him through nights of apathetic audiences and meager tips. What more could he ask for?
Then Max found himself out of the streets and inside a building lobby. One moment, he was walking alongside the shops of Maginhawa in Quezon City, passing by paper lanterns glowing in red; the next moment, he was inside a beige-colored lobby of a corporate-looking building. Max blinked thrice. Was he so deep in thought that he didn’t notice entering the wrong place? But where was he? Then he noticed that, ahead, at what looked like a reception desk, a woman in a gray suit was beckoning him.
“I’m so sorry about the recording session!” The woman exclaimed when Max reached her. The woman introduced herself as Ilana, and she explained that she works for a department of The Universe that receives requests from struggling artists.
“Whenever someone says things like, ‘Please make me win the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards, oh, Universe!’ We’re the ones who receive those,” Ilana said.
Max stared at her. He was thinking of her name, pronounced “ee-lah-na” which, in Max’s native Kankanaey tongue, means “they’ll see.”
“I know it might feel overwhelming,” Ilana continued, “but I don’t have much time since we’re short-staffed. So I’ll cut right to the chase: You weren’t supposed to be at Reika’s recording today. That’s why we brought your soul here. Someone made a mistake somewhere and, because of what you saw, you’re now making a decision that’s not supposed to happen until much later.”
Her last statement made Max pay attention. “What do you mean it’s not supposed to happen ‘until much later’?”
Ilana smiled in a way that, Max imagined, a doctor might show to a patient before injecting the poor soul with euthanizing drugs. “If you hadn’t seen that recording,” she replied, “you would have remained blissfully ignorant. And you would’ve continued making music.”
Max sighed. “But even if I continued, I’d still quit in a few years because all my efforts are futile. Is that it?”
Ilana thought for a moment. She checked her watch, frowned at it, then she looked back up to him and smiled. “Can I offer you a drink? We have a nice bar around here.”
The bar had a speakeasy vibe; the kind of watering hole frequented by people with edgy tattoos and film cameras. A man who appeared to be in his late sixties, dressed in a white shirt, tie, and suspenders, approached them quietly and Ilana made a motion and he nodded in response. He started making drinks.
“I ordered the house specialty. It’s worth a try,” Ilana said.
Max observed the bartender. “One doesn’t enter The Universe’s bar every day,” he shrugged. “I’ll take any drink you’ll suggest.”
The drinks arrived and Max and Ilana clinked glasses. “Cheers.”
Drink in hand, and her eyes trained on a vague point in between Max’s nose and eyes, Ilana started talking about the two worlds. Max couldn’t remember the exact way she explained things, but he found her making a lot of sense. From what Max understood, there is the world of the Greats, and the world of the Rest. These worlds exist on the same planet but they are, as the words suggest, worlds apart. Citizens of each world see each other often but they live in separate realities.
In the world of the Greats, an 18-year-old undergrad writes a poem and wins a Palanca; an unknown singer releases several hits and earns an eight-figure net worth; a Harvardian drops out of college and builds the world’s biggest social media platform; and a person who works hard and smart actually gets the rewards they believe they deserve. Ilana explained that everyone knows everyone in the world of Greats: They’re interconnected, one way or another, by family, friends, alma mater, neighborhoods, country clubs. Citizenship in this world is acquired by birth and by fortune. Now and then, an outsider — an immigrant from the Rest world — gains entrance, but a closer look often yields one of the strands of connections mentioned above. These immigrants are rarely fully-fledged citizens of the Rest, and they only appear to be part of the masses because humans can’t get enough of the obscure-to-legendary narrative illusion. Of course, Ilana explained, there is a third way to gain citizenship: Death. Some former inhabitants of the Rest died, and a random act of luck plucked their souls from obscurity and dropped it into the opposite world, where their previously neglected works suddenly gained popularity and their names are spoken for generations.
“Right,” Max sighed. “So I’ll never amount to anything more than I am now?”
Ilana considered it quietly. “One of the Laws of the Universe is the Law of Probability. The probability of a citizen changing worlds is low. But not zero.”
Max gulped his drink and sighed again. He looked at his glass, which was almost empty. At least the drink tasted nice, he thought.
“So I’m here now because the universe made a mistake, and it wants to fix that by reminding me that I’m a mere citizen of the Rest?” Max said more to himself than to Ilana. “And that I should know my place and be grateful I can make music, even if they’re mostly failures, and I’m lucky compared to my friends? Because I know those things already.”
Seeing her glass empty, Ilana took Max’s drink and gulped the rest. “I wish I can give you something more. But the universe doesn’t feel the need to compensate anyone,” she sighed. “In Filipino terms, it’s like…PLDT. Customers can complain about the crappy internet service and comment all-caps on every PLDT post on social media, but we both know nothing will amount to that. PLDT will continue to operate the PLDT way because what else can the people do? Go to Converge?”
“As if that would make a difference.”
“Exactly. Now and then, the universe heeds the plea of certain people. But usually, it’s pleas from citizens of the Greats.”
Max nodded. “PLDT responds fast only if it’s a celebrity making viral tweets about having slow internet.”
“Amazing.”
“It happened to three, maybe four A-list celebrities. True story.”
“I guess that’s to be expected.”
Max looked up to the bar’s ceiling and he found there wasn’t actually a ceiling, but a sky filled with strange colors he’s never seen before, which was a weird sensation; seeing colors one never saw. “I get the feeling you didn’t have to buy me a drink just to say all these.” He glanced back at Ilana. “I’m not any happier about what you’ve told me. But I appreciate you being nice.”
Ilana smiled and raised her empty glass. “Actually, my job does include buying you one drink. But not another.” Then she motioned to the elderly bartender. “Another round, please, on me.”
After Max took a sip from his extra drink, a thought nudged him. “How about you?” He asked her. “Are you satisfied with your present position? Don’t you want to be more than what you currently are?”
Ilana thought for a moment. “Maybe it’s because I was created specifically for this purpose, but I’m fulfilled where I am. Also, I can’t speak for other workers but, unlike you, we’re not human. We don’t feel the usual human urges that lead to unhappiness.”
It was dark and raining hard when Max noticed he had been standing, spacing out, under a waiting shed on Esteban Abada, five minutes’ walk away from his apartment. Since when did it start raining? Wasn’t he watching the sunset just moments ago? But then again, one of the things he learned after moving to Metro Manila is the moodiness of the weather. Rain in the metro is like a love affair; sudden, short, and fleeting or torrid and flooding with heavy casualties.
He watched the rain pour heavily on the shed’s roof, the water reflecting streetlights and billboards, and he imagined Reika and the heavens smiling on Reika, and his music career that no one seemed to smile about. He watched the rain and thought the rain looked nice on the surface of the city. Underneath his shirt, inside his chest, Max felt a certain warmth and coolness; a feeling, a sense of certainty. Like something inside him, something not quite part of his organs but part of him nevertheless, has made a decision. He wasn’t sure what the decision was. But somehow, he felt an inner calm.
