Barely disguised
Bwahahahahahar! This is a short story I wrote a looooong time ago for a creative writing class. A series of writing exercises that turned into a short story of sorts (Guy de Maupassant would kill me for mangling the form, but heck - it squeaked me through). This, along with another story (which was political, the exact opposite of what this one is in language, tone and imagery. maybe next time I’ll post it here) got me into the 1996 Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete. Maniwala sa hindi, I was already in KMU then, and my co-Fellows , after the workshop discussion, couldn’t believe I wrote this.
Forgive the pedantry, forgive the cloying corniness (i was young!), but really, truth is stranger than fiction.
This is for Novaleeh, and for friendships that flourish through time and under any weather **********************************************************************
Through a Cliche and Back
Cynthia so far
It had become a habit with her — asking questions.
As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning, she would ask herself, “Why do I have to get up?”
On her back, fixedly staring at the watermarked ceiling above, she would determine her reasons as to why she should leave the comfort of inanimation. Three reasons, at the least. She needed to come up with three reasons; anything less she considered invalid. And they had to be important, too; “of bearing and meaningful purpose.” Otherwise she would discard them; and then she would remain prostrate on her bed: the over-stuffed, ashen gray pillows barricading her in, and her thoughts swiftly forming around all she knew of Sylvia Plath.
What did she consider important? Vague yet concrete things. Abstractions manifested in psuedo-solidity — a plasma formula — as soon as they were expressed in the spoken word and in the gestures of the few individuals she toook pains not to be indifferent to.
Mostly, however, she found the importance she continually sought in the silent wakefulness of her immediate world, inhabited by singular, simple truths and subjects. She was a detail person, and firmly believed that the fine-print of things will reveal whether or not anything or anyone should be considered worthy. It was in the fine-print - the essence of what makes one be; the essence of what one truly is.
She had already finalized her definitions of genuine meaning and worthiness, words to her synonymous with importance, and purpose. She had even constructed a mental syllabus of definitions : importance was beauty and awareness; purpose was alternatives and action.Importance was a fragile-stemmed flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Purpose was the yearing to transfer that flower to a patch of warm, living earth; a longing coupled with an intention and a plan.
To her, an individual became important the moment he or she noticed what was usually ignored and considered inconsequential. To her, an individual gains ascendancy of spirit when he or she seeks to rediscover what has been forgotten; or redeem what has been ridiculed. Thus the neglect of the slighted, apathy towards the ignored and the taken-for-granted, were the sins she considered most abominable.
As for herself, she called herself simply “human.” She found conviction and strength in the word; yet at the same time she acknowledged its conceit and weakness.
Wasn’t it true that to be human was to be powerful and foolish at the same time? An arrogant atom in the infinite universe -by itself both nothing and everything because all the universe was composed of other atoms; and so no single atom was ever extraordinary. Yet the atoms of different elements were of varying compositions of neurons and electrons: each atom having its own unknown potential, and when split and shattered…
That morning, as soon as consciousness returned after a night of temporary death, she asked herself, “Why do I have to get up today?” She expected a tumult of answers to surface from her inner being and propel her into movement. The intangible string of connected ideas and proposed actions, set goals and sought-for ideals — stretched taut and twined around the all-too ethereal pillar labelled “life” — were what she used to guide her through the currents of reality. Guided thus, she could move. She expected answers.
To her amazement, she found none. There was only silence from her thoughts. Not a single word, not even a hollow or paltry response. Instead what came to her were feelings. Feelings of the drowning: despair and inevitability. Certainty of a tragic conclusion. Defeat and exhaustion. “What is wrong with the world today, I wonder?” she asked herself. “I couldn’t possibly be feeling this way because of my own doing.”
2
Today I have just woken up and I feel dead. It is funny, considering that last night I felt so alive. Or at least I knew I was alive and was glad for it. Now, well, I think I’m alive, but I’m not quite so sure.I don’t know. There is a difference between thinking you know something, and knowing that you do know something. Am I alive still? If I am, then why do I feel dead? That is, I feel nothing. Dead people feel nothing,and that is how I feel. Hmm, that is most interesting. “Nothing” is actually “something.” Feeling nothing is feeling something. I feel something. Does that mean I’m alive? Enough!
I get up, and head for the bathroom. The mirror reflects a smiling, pink face; and it is face I do not recognize. Whose is it? Is it mine? Pink is a happy color, and a smiling face is normally associated with happiness. Am I happy? If I am , then why is there a jagged hole somewhere in the center of me? Where I usually keep my supply of pure, unadulturated happiness. And now my supply is being depleted in trickles. But if I’m happy, that means I don’t have to worry about the pain. Isn’t happiness, more than anything else, just the absence of pain? Jesse Templeman in “Postcards from the Edge” said that. Blue shirt, faded jeans, a dead pair of sneakers — Christ, they smell. I believeI’ll worry about the pain later, when I’m unhappy.
I brush my hair : 40 strokes for a healthy scalp. Pain and happiness just don’t mix - and feeling these two things at the same time is really schizophrenic.Where’s a rubber band when you need one? I smile, and a single, blue tear runs down my cheek. Nothing can ever compensate for the lost of a happy fact.
3
Outside in the supposedly real world
“You’re late!”
“I know.” Pause. “I’m sorry.” Pause. Pausepausepausepause. The sun shines a brilliant warmth and two girls begin walking across the university’s famed and infamous sunken garden.(Actually, it was merely a square, man-made land depression with each side spanning a hundred feet, and overrun by grass and weeds kept clipped short by occasional mowing.)
Both have just turned twenty, but neither like to be referred to as a “woman,” saying the word is “so loaded with meaning, “ and is actually “a title of sorts, entailing heavy, important responsibility.” In any case, both have decided to remain girls until they reach thirty - or at least until such time when they feel worthy enough to be called women.
The first girl was Cynthia, dying shoes and all. The other was her friend Helene. Helene was petite, and her brownish-black hair that stopped short of reaching her small ears did nothing but further accentuate her petiteness. And where everyone else had eyes, Helene had two windows of deep brown, where if you dared peer into, you can see a landscape of kindness and freedom.
A performance artist in the theatre of life, Helene performed always as herself, sincere and original. Her originality even made them walk across the garden that was not a garden, indifferent to the heat beating down on their heads, with a slowness that showed not laziness but contemplation. It was as they were figuring out the answers to some of the world’s most crucial questions.
Cynthia turned to Helene. “Don’t you think it’s interesting how some people never think of anything else but themselves?” Her tone silently vicious, ironic.
“ I mean, are they really interesting people? Are they really interesting? Are they real? Are they people? Who cares? The topic is not interesting.”
Helene took the hint and didn’t ask her friend what the matter was. “I’m dead,” Cynthia said.
“Oh,” Helene dead-panned.
“When did you die?”
“Yesterday. Last night. Or maybe it was early this morning. I died in my sleep. When I got up this morning I found out that my soul had left my body.”
Helene grinned. “I thought you didn’t believe in the soul. Now I know that you do.” She stopped in mid step and knelt to dislodge a pebble that had managed to get stuck in her sandal soles. Her sandals were plain, tan, boring, and expensive. She looked up at Cynthia who stood before her, trying to stare at the midafternoon sun, “Have you done an autopsy yet?”
Cynthia, still trying to stare at the sun but failing, glanced down at her friend with streaming eyes,
“No.”
They resumed walking in silence. Then with her eyes on the dried-up grass before her boring shoes, Helene said “ I suppose the cause of death is a triviality - the kind that insists on being important.”
Cynthia nodded, and after a moment’s thought, added “Actually, it’s a cliche.I experienced one of the oldest cliches in the history of the English speaking world. “
“So how are you dealing with the experience?” Helene asked.. “I am reacting in a way typical of those who have suffered the same cliche — which is to say I am not fine.”
They had reached the rim of the-garden-that-was-not-but-was-really-just-a-land- depression-overrun-by -grass -and- weeds.
Cynthia began to climb, grabbing at the nearby scraggly growth, and Helene followed . Barely had they gotten out when Cynthia, in a voice seemingly lost, said “Dialectical materialism states that matter exists before consciousness. I think that’s pretty smart.”
She pointed to a nearby tree. “ Imagine thinking a tree pink some time before you see one, and when you do see the tree and it’s green — you’d still insist that it’s pink because trees , as you’ve thought up in your head, are supposed to be pink. That would be dumb.”
Helene did not turn to her friend. She knew better than to do so. She knew that when Cynthia was in that particular mood colored blue, it was best to let the blue clear and pale first before asking anything.
Without warning, Cynthia grabbed Helene by the shoulders. “I need a drink!”
“What - beer, gin, or tequila?”, Helene asked. “”Actually, water. My throat feels so dry — freaking sun.”
Outside, in the supposedly real world, two girls searched for a bottle of mineral water priced under P10.
4
Sobriety and Drunken Thoughts
“Isn’t it particularly depressing how everything has already been done; how everything has been said; how everything has been felt and experienced, by everyone else?”, Helene asked. She shook the beer bottle and peered into its dark sepia depths.
“All we can hope for now is to do, say, feel and experience those same things in a different way. We can only hope to duplicate in a creative way.” Helene took a gulp and grimaced. “I hate this stuff.”
“Why drink it then?” Cynthia asked. “Because, like what those mountaineers said about climbing Mt. Everest, it’s there.” Helene smiled.
“Nothing. I’ve been acting like a character from a Milan Kundera novel. Walking around with a flower held in front of my face, happy about how beautiful, how real the flower is.”
Cynthia looked at her friend and pulled a face. “Then the flower wilts and dies."
“Helene, I feel sad.” Helene didn’t speak. For once, a plain statement! , she thought.
“Let me guess - it’s a cliche?”
“It plain worries me, the way I am affected by all this.”
5
Bits and Pieces of Brain Splattered Across the Pages of a Journal
Have I lost the ability to think? I think I have. My fault, my fault, my fault. Shades of Kurt Cobain who committed suicide at 27. But it is true - I guess everything is my fault.Never should’ve let things go out of hand. But then, hey - wasn’t everything under control before? I’m 20. Seven years to go. He asked me if he was wasting my time. I said no. How could he possibly waste my time when I did not give it him — to waste or whatever — in the first place? My time is my time, and I do what I wish with it. And if I wished to waste it with him, I would. And then, since that time, which was owned by myself, was wasted with him, it will turn out to be not wasted after-all.I don’t have all that much time, I realize that. So I don’t waste time with people whom I think wasting time with is really a waste of time. Gad I feel wasted all of a sudden. Funny how serious I consider life is. I mean, in a world where death is taken lightly, is life something of consequence? There must be something wrong with me. Sincerity in every endeavor. Even in killing, be sincere. The world has too many phonies and fakes. He once told me, or rather accused me of rationalizing everything to fit my purpose. I suppose that’s a rational thing to do, don’t you think? Some days I just want to lie down and just…lie there. Waiting for whatever to happen whenever and react only then. When the people closest to you lie, life becomes unbearable. I felt so depressed today. I sat in the sunken garden, enjoying the sight of small school children playing tag across the shorn grass, and began to think how beautiful it is to be a child, running across shorn grass, laughing and laughing and laughing. My life right now is a floating, relative concept –I don’t where it’s at, and whether it is a good or wretched life will depend on who’s making judgments. How I wish I could just get up and leave. If only I wasn’t so tethered, connected, anchored and attached to so many things, to so many people. If only I didn’t know how to feel. Problems start from feelings, I think. Thinking is so much better a life process than feeling. But I could be wrong in that thought. There are still hitches in thinking - -especially if you’re not a particularly good thinker. At this very moment I want to find a tree and lie under it. A nice, sturdy tree with spreading branches, casting a shadow as big as a happy feeling. Every waking moment after an exhausting sleep is a return to my suicidal beginnings, which , being of a suicidal nature, never were beginnings but endings from the start. I’ve accepted that I was born to die, and given the short walk between life an death, I’ve figured I better make the most of the trip. Last night he told me about Lorena, and it was the first time I had heard of her. It’s been three months since we first became friends. Why only now? Why now when I’ve just included him in my list of important things? He could have told me He should have told me. Why didn’t he tell me? My journey into a cliche and back. A literary and literal victim like everyone else.
6
Cynthia So Far
Life, death; the processes of living and dying, and coping with both. Major cliches these concepts are, but they are the main topic of general outlines of each existence. And what’s an interesting subtopic?
The telephone was never much of an interesting device to Cynthia. A useful tool, that was what she thought it was, and there were all these ads from AT&T and PLDT to attest this truth — kudos to Alex Graham Bell for inventing such a useful instrument! During emergencies and crucial moments when the quick exchange and dissemination was needed, there was the good old telephone. Regimes founded, blocs dissolved, ties broken and newly established in the worlds of politics, economics, science, and war. What a wonderful, useful invention!
But what role did the telephone play in Cynthia’s life? What a silly question, and notice how it pretends to be profound!
Cynthia began her journey into a cliche because of the telephone. Or to be more precise, because of a telephone call. Rrrrrrrrrrrring! the telephone went; and Cynthia thought she had no other option but to lift the reciever off its cradle if only to silence the annoying rrrrrrringing and to hell with what the voice on the other end had to say. Cynthia was in a not-so-communicative mood.
“Hello?”
“Uh, good evening (for it was evening - nearing morning, if the truth were known. Twelve AM was then not so far away). Uh, may I speak to Cynthia Alcantara please?” Strange voice. Whose was it?
Not Eric’s. Not Mike’s. Not Elias’ — all friends and brothers of Cynthia.
“This is Cynthia Alcantara; who’s this?” Not that I care who you are, she wanted to add, but out of politeness and conventionality’s sake I asked… “I’m Jeffrey Ruiz. We went to the same campus journalism seminar sponsored by .. I handed you a Coke… We talked about Isaac Asimov? And dialectical materialism? And the possible connection between skateboarding and national democracy?…. I remembered you said you lived in Pasay, and I looked in the phonebook…”
And thus started the cliche. Through the telephone. Nothing extraordinary, nothing stupendous. Juvenile and strictly high-school. She found him funny, interesting, smart. General descriptions. Nevermind the wealth of feeling and thought she found in him. Nevermind the long walks they took and long talks they shared. Nevermind the sincerity of the situations she found herself in with him. Cynthia always got suspicious whenever she felt happy. So nevermind. Cliche.#
