Monstress (13 page)

T
he San Miguels hit my cousins hard; JohnJohn was passed out on the couch, snoring and wheezing with every breath, and Googi was on the recliner, mumbling as he dreamed. Above, the ceiling fan creaked slowly, and I lay on the floor with a pillow over my head, trying to drown out the noise. I didn't know any tricks to help me fall asleep, so I tried going over Uncle Willie's plan of attack step by step, the who-what-where-and-when of it all, but before I could hear his voice or see his face I imagined my own, and zoomed ahead to tomorrow, to that moment when I would meet the Beatles. We would stand together—John and Paul to my left, Ringo and George to my right—chatting and laughing the way new friends do. Someone would take a picture, and later I'd give copies to my classmates and teachers, mail some to the local papers, and frame one for myself, a thing I'd keep forever. But the original I'd send to my mother, with a note written on the back that said
Look at me now.
She hadn't seen a picture of me since I was twelve, and my changed face would startle her, make her wonder about the life she was missing, and fill her with regret.

My moment with the Beatles was clear; I could see it perfectly. What I didn't understand was how the battle against them would lead up to it, if the fight was meant to happen immediately after, or how we could go from being new friends to new enemies, or vice versa. And the greater mystery was where Uncle Willie would be when the picture was taken, if he was nearby and ready to strike, or somewhere else entirely, a place I didn't know. I thought I'd lie awake forever trying to figure it out.

T
he next day, the parking lot of Manila International Airport looked like a political protest: high above the crowds were banners and signs, and all you could hear was the noisy overlap of shouting voices. As our taxi pulled up to the curb, I thought that maybe Uncle Willie was right, that the Beatles really had said something so unforgivable to bring all these people together. But when I stepped out I understood what they were saying:
BEATLES WE LOVE YOU
and
BEATLES COME BACK
were painted in block letters on banners and posters, and weeping teenage girls screamed the same message. A line of arm-linked policemen could barely hold them back.

JohnJohn and I walked toward the entrance, but Googi turned to face the crowd. He threw his arms in the air and blew kisses, like they were gathered there for him. “I'm bigger than the Beatles!” he said. JohnJohn grabbed his arm, pulled him along.

Uncle Willie flashed his ID to security. “They are with me,” he told the guard, gesturing to the three of us. He'd given us security blazers and fake name tags before we left his apartment, and they'd seemed convincing enough when we put them on, but now, standing in the terminal, we looked like kids playing dress-up. Still, the guard let us through.

We walked past the duty-free gift shops, the airport bar, the departing gates. At the end of the terminal, Uncle Willie reached for his keys and unlocked a door that read
AIRPORT SECURITY ONLY
, and we stepped into a long white corridor. We walked single file, Uncle Willie, Googi, JohnJohn, then me, all of us silent. I looked back at the white emptiness behind me, and I had the feeling that the farther we went in, the more impossible it would be to get back. “Almost there,” Uncle Willie said.

He unlocked another door. We walked through and saw an escalator that led to Gate VIP, but before we went up, Uncle Willie gathered us together, and told us this was a momentous occasion, the first step in becoming truly honorable men. Then he opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy of
The Quotable Imelda: Famous Quotes from Imelda Marcos
. It had been required reading my freshman year in high school, an assignment I'd skipped, but Uncle Willie's copy was full of dog-eared pages, and the cover was tattered at the edges, like it was a beloved book he'd read over and over. “Listen to this,” he said, opening to a bookmarked page, “and let her words inspire you.” He cleared his throat, and began to read.
“The truth is that life is so beautiful and life is so prosperous and life is so full of potential and life has so much good in it, that I get bored and tired with ugliness, with negativism and evil and all of that
.
I start in the morning and I feel that we all have one thousand energy. In my case, I see a beautiful flower, a beautiful person, a beautiful smile, by that time I'm just about ready to take off! I have one million energy, no longer one thousand!
This is why we are a beautiful people, a people with love, and so we must live our lives in the name of beauty and love.
”

He closed the book. “Think about it,” he said.

I looked at JohnJohn, and all I wanted was for him to laugh, to make a joke about the First Lady, anything to break the stone look on his face that stays with me even now.

“This isn't about her,” I whispered.

“Then who?” he said. Before I could answer, he started up the escalator, Googi right behind him.

Uncle Willie was about to go up, but I grabbed his arm and held him back. “What if we lose?” I asked.

He blinked twice, like the question made no sense at all, so I repeated it, and followed it with more—what if the Beatles defeated us, and refused to apologize for what they'd said about the First Lady? What if the police arrived and threw us in jail? He could end up fired, and what good would he be to Imelda Marcos then? With every question I knew I might be sacrificing my only chance to meet the Beatles, which would be one of the great regrets of my life, but this was my last chance to save Uncle Willie, so I had to keep going. “We could lose,” I said.

“With you at my side?” He gently removed my hand from his arm. “Impossible.” He stepped onto the escalator, and I watched him rise up away from me, then step off at the top. Finally, I followed.

Gate VIP was a small square room furnished with a couch and two wing chairs, a Victorian-style coffee table in the center. To the side was a fireplace that didn't look quite real, and above it was a painting of a life-size Imelda Marcos, her head slightly tilted, her arms reaching out. “Run!” Googi whispered to me. “Before she destroys us with her one million energy!” I told him to shut up, but it really did look like those Imelda-arms were out to pull us into her, either to cradle or strangle us to death.

Uncle Willie called us to attention and reviewed the plan once more. As soon as the Beatles arrived, he would escort them to Gate VIP and have them proceed up the escalator. The three of us would begin the attack while Uncle Willie and his own security team detained the group's bodyguards. “And then finally, I will join you up here to crush the Beatles,” he said. My cousins nodded as if they were with him each step of the way, but I was fixed on the mess of paisley knotted at his throat, how wrong it looked in the daylight, and his cologne smelled sour and sharp, like vinegar mixed with rubbing alcohol.

“But who are we?” I asked. “What are we supposed to be doing when they arrive?”

“Just act like you're supposed to be here,” Uncle Willie said, pointing to my name tag, “as if you belong.” Then he shook each of our hands, wished us luck, and left.

Standing there alone with my cousins in a room meant only for the most important travelers in the world, I believed I was answering a call of duty. I kept my fists clenched and my head up, ready for the fight, but all we had on us was pen and paper for autographs, a camera hidden in Googi's pants pocket, and “Ticket to Ride” boomed inside my head.

W
hen I was a kid, Uncle Willie would bring me to the airport, and show it off like it was his. “You see all those people leaving and returning?” he said on my first visit. “I am the one who is responsible for them.”

“Where do they go?” I asked. I was seven, maybe eight years old.

“That way,” he pointed skyward, then moved his hand to the side. “Then that way.” I always assumed he meant to the States.

Uncle Willie lifted me up, brought me close to the window overlooking the tarmac. The glass felt hot against my forehead, and I could feel the vibrations of the planes' revving engines. But when their wheels left the ground, I had to look away; I couldn't believe that something so big and heavy could stay afloat in the air. I thought of emergency landings, of airplanes bobbing in the middle of the ocean, all the crashes I'd seen on the news. “Will you go, too?” I asked.

Uncle Willie shook his head, promising me that he wasn't going anywhere, that his job was to stay behind to make sure everything ran just right. I loved him for that. Growing up, I watched branches of my family break off as they headed to the States, aunts and uncles taking my cousins with them. For years my mother watched her sisters pack as soon as their husbands' requests for transfer went through, and fighting with my father was how she dealt with being left.
I'm stuck here,
she would say.
Why didn't you join the service like the rest of the men? Where is your ambition? Don't you at least want your son to be somebody?
My mother stood behind me when she said this, cupping my shoulders with her hands, presenting me as an example of my father's failure. He looked at me apologetically, but he never said a word.

The year I turned twelve, she finally got to go. Her younger sister sent her a ticket with a small note attached that said
For your VACATION USA!
and my mother started packing that same day. Tourist visa only, she assured me the morning she left. I wanted to see her off at the gate, but a sign read
NO WELL-WISHERS BEYOND THIS POINT
, and the guard refused to let me pass. I wanted to tell him that the sign didn't apply to me, that I didn't wish my mother well at all, that in fact, I wished her a terrible trip, a time so awful she would take the first flight back to Manila. But my father reassured me that tourists couldn't be gone forever, that she had no choice but to come home. I took that technicality as my guarantee for her return, but six months later, on the back of a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, I learned that the visa had become a green card.
The weather is good for my health, for my skin,
she wrote.
You should see how well I look
. My father gave it a glance, said, “Her life,” and handed it back to me, then left to play mah-jongg at the corner cantina. Uncle Willie was there, and he told me not to worry. “She's away,” he said, “for now.” But that was just another version of the truth, an easier way of saying,
She left us.

I thought leaving was a terrible thing, the saddest of acts, something you do to the people you love.

But in junior high school, Uncle Willie got me a part-time job at the airport helping passengers with their bags. While I dragged and pushed along heavy luggage, they would walk ahead of me, fanning themselves with their tickets like they were flaunting their travels. I never checked their destinations; all I knew was that they were leaving for someplace far away, and that their eventual return would be a triumphant one, like astronauts coming back from outer space. I daydreamed myself into those airport reunions I witnessed throughout the day: I would get off the plane and find my family waiting, their arms spread out in welcome, my cousins asking question after question, everyone impressed by the way I'd changed.

When I finally took a monthlong trip to visit my mother in California for my fourteenth birthday, my homecoming was a disappointment. Only Uncle Willie was waiting for me at the airport, and all he asked about was my return flight, whether or not the service was satisfactory, if I was able to sleep away the long hours to make the trip feel quicker than it was. “It's good that you are back,” he said, loading my bags into the trunk of a taxi. He paid the driver and told him to take me home. I rolled the windows down, and the backseat filled with a mugginess I hadn't really noticed before. It clung to me, and all I wanted was to feel cool again, the way I did in California. When I got home, no one was there; my father was out, and JohnJohn and Googi didn't collect their souvenir T-shirts until the following afternoon. For the next month, I slept through the day and paced the house at night, restless and sweaty, my body and mind still on American time. Back then I thought it was the seventeen-hour difference that inverted my days. Two years later, in that moment when Googi tapped me on the shoulder and twice whispered, “The Beatles are coming,” into my ear, I knew that jetlag had had nothing to do with my ruined sleep.

W
e heard voices below. From above we watched Uncle Willie direct the Beatles toward the escalator. As planned, there were no porters to assist them with their luggage, and I heard Paul complain about the weight of his bags. “Porter shortage in the Philippines?” he said.

“No porter?” Ringo asked. “I'll take whatever's on draft, then.”

Uncle Willie hurried them along. As soon as each Beatle was on his way, he looked at us and nodded
. It's up to you now
was what I read in his face, so I shut my eyes, trying to remember the plans he drew on the tabletop the night before, the
X
's and arrows indicating who and where we were meant to be. But all I could picture was Uncle Willie's reflection in the glass, shadowy on one side, full of light on the other; there one moment, gone the next.

Then the Beatles finally came. Before that day, I'd known them only as a single sound of blended voices among guitar riffs and drumbeats. I would play their records and watch the needle curve along the grooves, then try to work my own voice into their harmonies. I always sang in secret, embarrassed by my voice; when no one was in the house I would sit on the floor next to the stereo speakers, belting out their lyrics like they were truths about myself. And now they were here, and they were real, entering my life one by one as the escalator steps rose and vanished into the floor: Ringo, then Paul, then George, and finally John, who was holding a Super 8 movie camera, and filming every moment. Each Beatle was dressed in bright, loose-fitting shirts that seemed to change color with the slightest movement, and when they stepped closer, I saw that their skin was the same way. Their white English faces were unexpectedly tanned, pink in the cheeks and red at the ears from the Philippine sun. It was a sign of their travels, evidence of a bigger world, proof that you could move through it and keep it with you. I remember standing there by that fake fireplace between my cousins in our borrowed blazers and fake name tags, thinking,
This is it. This is the real thing. This is what it means to be in the world.