These words you’ve taught yourself. Words that suddenly seem meaningless again.
And then you find yourself, at your sister’s grave site, full of rage. And then you find yourself climbing a wall across the street from the courthouse, and up a ladder, to the roof of an old theater. Let’s say from here you can see the garage where the bus pulls in from the county jail. From here you could have a clean shot.
He says it was consensual. He described it.
And let’s say you find yourself on the roof, holding a rifle, the feel of it like an old friend. Let’s say you can imagine the bullet hitting Reyes, and the image of him falling is so clear in your mind, it’s like a movie you’ve watched a thousand times.
You’re watching, you’re waiting for the bus to come.
What happened on the roof of that theater?
Let’s say you saw the man you used to be.
THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE
IT WAS THE YEAR I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometers downstream to the capital. Summer had limped to a close. I was nineteen years old and my idea was to work the docks, but when I showed up the man behind the desk said I looked scrawny, that I should come back when I had put on some muscle. I did what I could to hide my disappointment. I’d dreamed of leaving home since I was a boy, since my mother taught me that our town’s river flowed all the way to the city. My father had warned me, but still, I’d never expected to be turned away.
I rented a room in the neighborhood near the port, from Mr. and Mrs. Patrice, an older couple who had advertised for a student. They were prim and serious, and they showed me the rooms of their neat, uncluttered house as if it were the private viewing of a diamond. Mine would be the back room, they said. There were no windows. After the brief tour we sat in the living room, sipping tea, beneath a portrait of the old dictator that hung above the mantel. They asked me what I was studying. All I could think of in those days was money, so I said economics. They liked that answer. They asked about my parents, and when I said they had passed on, that I was all alone, I saw Mrs. Patrice’s wrinkled hand graze her husband’s thigh, just barely.
He offered to lower the rent, and I accepted.
The next day Mr. Patrice recommended me to an acquaintance who needed a cashier for a shop he owned. It was good part-time work, he told me, perfect for a student. I was hired. It wasn’t far from the port, and in warm weather, I could sit out front and smell the river where it opened into the wide harbor. It was enough for me to listen and know it was there: the hum and crash of ships being loaded and unloaded reminded me of why I had left, where I had come to, and all the farther places that awaited me. I tried not to think of home, and though I’d promised to write, somehow it never seemed like the appropriate time.
We sold cigarettes and liquor and newspapers to the dockworkers, and had a copy machine for those who came to present their paperwork at the customs house. We made change for them and my boss, Nadal, advised those headed to customs as to the appropriate bribe, depending on what item they were expecting to receive, and from where. He knew the protocol well. He’d worked for years in customs before the dictator fell, but hadn’t had the foresight to join a political party when democracy came. His only other mistake in thirty years, he told me once, was that he hadn’t stolen enough. There had never been any rush. Autocracies are nothing if not stable, and no one ever thought the old regime could be toppled.
We sold postcards of the hanging, right by the cash register: the body of the dictator, swaying from an improvised gallows in the main plaza. In the photo, it is a cloudy day, and every head is turned upward to face the expressionless dead man. The card’s inscription reads The King Is Always Above the People, and one has the sense of an inviolable silence reigning over the spectators. I was fifteen when it happened. I remember my father crying at the news. He’d been living in the city when the man first came to power.
We sold two or three of these postcards each week.
In the early mornings I wandered around the city. Out in the streets, I peppered my speech with words and phrases I’d heard around me, and sometimes, when I fell into conversations with strangers, I would realize later that the goal of it all had been to pass for someone raised in the capital. I never pulled it off. The slang I’d picked up from the radio before moving was disappointingly tame. At the shop I saw the same people every day, and they knew my story—or rather, the one I told them: a solitary, orphaned student from a faraway city neighborhood. “When do you study?” they’d ask, and I’d tell them I was saving up money to matriculate. I spent a good deal of time reading, and this fact alone was enough to convince them. The stooped customs bureaucrats in their faded suits came in on their lunch break to reminisce with Nadal about the good old days, and sometimes they would slip me some money. “For your studies,” they’d say, and wink.
There were others—the dockworkers, always promising the newest, dirtiest joke in exchange for credit at the store. Twice a month one of the larger carriers came in, depositing a dozen or so startled Filipinos for shore leave. Inevitably they wandered into the shop, disoriented, hopeful, but most of all thrilled to be once again on dry land. They grinned and yammered incomprehensibly and I was always kind to them. That could be me, I thought, in a year, perhaps two: stumbling forth from the bowels of a ship into the narrow streets of a port city anywhere in the world.
I was alone in the shop one afternoon when a man in a light brown uniform walked in. I’d been in the city three and a half months by then. He wore his moustache in that way men from the provinces did, and I disliked him immediately. With great ceremony he pulled a large piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and spread it out on the counter. It was a target from a shooting range: the crude outline of a man, vaguely menacing, now pierced with holes. The customer looked admiringly at his handiwork. “Not bad, eh?”
“Depends.” I bent over the sheet, placing my index finger in each paper wound, one by one. There were seven holes in the target. “What distance?”
“At any distance.” He asked, “Can you do better?” Without waiting for me to respond, he took out an official-looking form and placed it next to the bullet-riddled paper man. “I need three copies, son. This target and my certificate. Three of each.”
“Half an hour,” I said.
He squinted at me and stroked his moustache. “Why so long?”
The reason, naturally, was that I felt like making him wait. And he knew that. But I told him the machine had to warm up. Even as I said this, it sounded ridiculous. The machine, I said, was a delicate and expensive piece of equipment, newly imported from Japan.
He was unconvinced.
“And we don’t have paper this size,” I added. “I’ll have to reduce it.”
His lips scrunched together into a sort of smile. “But thank God you have a new machine that can do all that. You’re from upriver, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Which village?”
“Town,” I said, and told him the name.
“Have you seen the new bridge?” he asked.
I
