I tell him it’s much brighter in this part of the world. Bigger and brighter.
It’s the only one I’ve ever seen, he says. I wouldn’t know the difference.
* * *
By the time they’re brought here, Eddie & the student have already been tempered earlier, passed on from camp to camp. We’re in the middle of nowhere, a ghost town, the fields scorched black, burnt spears of bamboo jutting out of the ground where a few huts used to be. At night bats swoop from a mountain cave close by, clouding the sky like a storm & filling the air with the stench of guano. They’re bloodsuckers, they’ll tear apart anything in their path. Even the lieutenant stays indoors when they wake, rabid with an ancient & vicious hunger.
Eventually we’ll be shipped to Manila, where Eddie says the privileged ones go. In Manila they won’t touch you so much, because people will know. Reporters, Amnesty International, that whole shit.
I’ve seen scars where other soldiers cut them up or burned them, bumps in their arms & legs where bones have broken & healed. At some point they’ve confessed everything these guys want them to confess.
Things are slower now. They’re no longer useful. Nothing more will be taken from them.
Neither one talks about it much, but the damage has been done: they’ve already betrayed a father, a brother, a friend.
* * *
Once in a while Eddie’s jacking off & we can hear it & the student whispers, Knock it off, & Eddie whispers, Why don’t you try it, faggot.
I think they’re both about as old as I am. The student was picked up the day the president declared martial law. Before he came here, his life was pretty normal, cramming for an exam, going to a movie, getting to first base with a girl. He & Eddie talk about it all the time. The stories are all the same after a while. They’ve run out of new things to say. When something new happens, like the dog & the bitch & the soldier hacking the dog’s dick off, they talk about it for days. Pretty soon the story gets exhausted, neither of them wants to hear about it anymore. They don’t say it, but I think they know that in the act of telling, something is always given up. Something withers away.
* * *
Rain patters everywhere, drumming on the tin roof of the barracks. It sounds like something enormous has crashed through the atmosphere, & its wrecks are falling over our heads.
“And life is not so ample.”
I’ve been trying to remember that poem but the rain jumbles the words in my head. If only I can remember it, I’ll be all right. Tomorrow, this afternoon, in a couple of hours, someone will come. This is not happening. & suddenly I’m okay. My entire body is changed. I feel a kind of lightness I can’t explain.
Then the hours pass, the days pass, & I dread the prospect of tomorrow. I force myself to recover that buoyancy. Sometimes I succeed. I’m also aware that this emotion is tenuous, even phony. One single word, one unguarded moment, will send me crashing back to earth.
* * *
Some newfangled thing called the compact disc is predicted to change the way we listen to music.
Somebody’s invented “electronic mail,” but whether people will actually use it remains to be seen.
A first-class postage stamp is still necessary, & costs 8 cents. That’s how much it cost the US government to serve John Lennon & Yoko Ono their deportation papers in New York City.
John & Yoko, no one’s going to step all over you. You will live forever. We are not all fucked-up assholes. Trust me.
“We’ve got a few things to learn about the Philippines, lads. First of all is how to get out.”
That’s John Lennon in 1966. The Beatles had a rough time here that year. Lennon said he wanted to drop a hydrogen bomb on it.
But 6 years on, nobody talks about how bad the Beatles had it. Not here. There’s a constant effort to erase memory. No day is connected to the next. No event is caused by another. Everything is taken as it comes.
Bahala na. It is God’s will. This is how everyone survives.
* * *
All through the scorched fields the wind sends a long, inconsolable howling. No ammunition, no dictator, can challenge a typhoon. You sit out its rage for as long as it takes. You stay still while the entire world spends its fury. You respect what is stronger than you.
The typhoon’s trampled everything in the vegetable plots. The guy with the Uzi brings our food, a muck of rice & salted fish dumped in a pail, from which we scoop our share. We drink tap water brought in a plastic bucket. Flies float on the water. Eddie can endure anything, but not this kind of shit. They beat the crap out of him until he simmers down. Eddie’s tantrums always work. After he calms down the guy with the Uzi shares some of their food. Eddie gobbles it greedily, & with his cheeks stuffed with food he mumbles, We’re not dogs, we’re people just like you.
* * *
Bobby Fischer has defeated Boris Spassky for the world chess title. Remember this.
Pink Floyd has started recording their 8th album. It’s going to be called The Dark Side of the Moon.
Apollo 16 has brought back rock samples from the Descartes Highlands.
Remember, remember.
Because no winds blow on the moon, the tracks left by Apollo 16 are going to be visible for another million years.
* * *
Eddie doesn’t know that his people fought us at the turn of the century. All he knows is that we liberated them from the Japanese, & that Americans have lots of money.
The student tries to educate him. We share the same space, at least for now, but we’re still divided by our histories, our countries’ politics, everything that would have divided us even as free men. It’s no use.
Eddie picks up a few big words from the student but he has no idea what they mean. He tells me, candidly: It’s good to know even imperialists can be jailed by our president. What do you know, Americans aren’t so special after all.
* * *
It’s not always hostile. The student wants to know what I’m doing here, where I come from. He wants to know what kids are really doing in America. If people really like Nixon. If we really think we’re going to win the war in Vietnam. He wants to know what I’m scribbling all day & all night in my notebook, what I say about them. For all his suspicion & vitriol against me & what I represent, he’s still concerned that what I say about them doesn’t make them look bad.
* * *
May 1970, demonstration to protest the draft, 4 students killed at Kent State University.
June 1970, the US sets voting age at 18.
End of June 1970, I arrive in Manila. I’ve just turned 18.
Soon after, a typhoon hits the country, flooding rice paddies & villages & killing thousands of residents. Aid is sluggish & slowed by government corruption. Hundreds die of hunger & disease. Students storm the president’s palace. Police arrest demonstrators during riots in Manila. Things get so fucked Marcos & his family are forced to flee in a helicopter, only to come back when the army finally gets everybody out of the way.
If things go well around here, credit is given to God. If things go bad, a lot of people get blamed, but lately it’s us Americans. They don’t really say it to your face, & even the Communists follow certain rules of courtesy. Americans are an abstract concept, like God. But I’ve learned one thing living here for the last 2 years. Everything I say has to be sugarcoated, a form of flattery. Anything less will be too American, therefore offensive.
So this is what I tell Eddie &