Monstress (3 page)

“Captain,”
I said.
“I—I'm frightened
.”

“Of what?
That demonic intergalactic menagerie of fanged creatures can't touch us.
Not now.
Not with only five minutes of oxygen left.”

“No.
That's not it.
I'm afraid of”
—I took a deep breath—
“of loving you.
Meteor analysis, moon colonization, those things are easy.
But not love.
Love takes work.
Love takes time and we're running out of it
.
”
I broke free from E. Noel's embrace, walked toward the observation window, in near-disbelief that these lines, the most beautiful I had ever spoken, were actually mine.

E. Noel put his hands on my shoulders.
“Lorena.
Of all the star systems I have explored, of every planet upon which I've walked
,
there is nowhere in the galaxy I'd rather be than here, on the bridge of
The Valedictorian,
looking into your eyes.
If this is my end, then it's more than I could have ever hoped for.”
He pulled me close against him.

“I don't know what
—
”

He put his index finger over my mouth.
“Ssshh.
Just kiss me, Lorena.
That's an order
.
”

The slick of saliva and flesh of his lips. The running of his fingers through my wig. Our chests and hearts coming together. It all thrilled me, knowing the camera was there to capture the moment.

Then someone started laughing.

“Cut!” Gaz shouted. “What the dang is so funny?”

It was Checkers. “Pardon,” he said, smirking. “Sorry.”

I let go of E. Noel. I walked off the bridge, toward Checkers. “What's wrong with you?”

“With me?” Checkers said in Tagalog. “Do you know what you look like up there? All that corny talk. All that overacting the American is making you do.” He shook his head, started laughing again.

“That's enough,” I said. But he kept going, and his laughter turned to cruelty: he said the scene between Lorena and Banner was utterly unbelievable, that no two people would say such meaningless things in what could be the last moments of their lives. “They would try to stay alive. They would fight. That's what brave explorers of outer space do, right?” He belittled Gaz's script, insulted my acting, poked fun at the fact that I was kissing an obvious homosexual. “On film,” he said, “you will look like a whore.”

Sometimes I wonder if he meant this as a warning, a last chance to save me from starring in yet another fool's movie. I didn't think this at the time. Instead, my hand went up, then lashed forward, a gesture I'd made dozens of times before in Checkers' films, and the other actor always knew the precise moment to duck. But this time, I made actual contact and inflicted real pain: I slapped Checkers hard across the face, and my nails left red scratches just below his eye. “Get away from here,” I said.

Checkers touched his face. He looked at the blood on his fingers.

“Get off the set,” I said it in English, so that everyone around could understand me, “and let me act.” Checkers moved away, still stunned, then left the basement.

Gaz called places. “From the top,” he said. We began again, but E. Noel kept stumbling over
“demonic intergalactic menagerie,”
and there were technical difficulties on the fifth, sixth, seventh takes. Only on the eleventh did we finally get it right: I took E. Noel's advice and pretended he was Checkers. When we kissed, I managed to shed one single, perfect tear, just as Gaz had written in the script.

“S
light problemo,” Gaz said the next day. “We're not done.” Checkers and I were packing for our flight back home. We hadn't spoken since I struck him, and he did not return to Gaz's apartment until early that morning. To this day, I don't know where he was the previous night, or how he found his way back.

Gaz explained the situation: “You're in the shot, Chex. When Lorena's running up the canyon, you're standing right there like this.” He got up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked around like a lost tourist. “I could try to write you into the script, but at this point”—Gaz sat down, started folding one of Checkers' shirts—“I need you to stay.” He was speaking to me. “A day or two, maybe three. There are some other scenes I'd like to reshoot. I'll even pay for your new ticket back. What do you say?”

H
ours later, we dropped Checkers off at the curb. “Happy trails,” Gaz said, patting Checkers on the back, “till we meet again.”

Checkers stared at Gaz for a few seconds, the way he did the morning they met, then got out of the car. “Five percent,” he said. “Don't forget.”

I walked with Checkers to the entrance. “You'll be okay, right?” I said. “It's just a few days.” I fixed his collar, smoothed his hair. I leaned in to kiss him goodbye, but stopped at the sight of the scratch marks on his face. They had scabbed over, and I traced over them with my finger. “Fool,” I said, shaking my head and weeping, “look what you made me do.” He grabbed hold of my wrist, put my hand to his lips, and instead of kissing it, he simply breathed in through his nose and mouth, as though I were air to him, his only oxygen. Then he let me go and went inside.

Gaz handed me a tissue when I got back in the car. “What's a few days?” he said. What he couldn't understand was that Checkers and I had never left one another before, and on the way to the airport, I'd daydreamed for us a lovelier farewell scene: just before takeoff Checkers exits the plane, dashes across the tarmac to get to me. We kiss so long and hard, hold each other so tight, that there is no way we can ever be apart.

G
az finally titled the movie
The Terror of the Fanged Creatures,
and the morning after we finished shooting, Gaz showed me the screenplay for his next movie,
Pasadena RollerWars.
“I'm still looking for my BB San Juan,” he said. “The tough and sexy heroine of the deadliest rink in town. Think it over.” I called Checkers and told him all the things Gaz told me: that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities really are once-in-a-lifetime, that another American role would be good for my career, that we could always use the money. “I'm doing this for us, right?” I said.

There was a moment of silence on Checkers' end. I thought we had been disconnected. “CocoLoco wants me back,” he finally said. “They read
Dino-Ladies Get Quezon City
and they want me to direct it. They said if my old movies can conquer Hollywood, then my new ones can double-conquer Manila. It's unlucky for you that you're not around to star in it.”

I had burned the only copy of
Dino-Ladies
years before, but I let Checkers talk his talk, because it was better than the truth—I could see him sitting on the couch, in his boxer shorts and dirty undershirt, waiting amidst his mess for my return. “Your chance came again,” I said, “congratulations.” Then I hung up, found Gaz sitting in his kitchen staring at the Hollywood morning, and told him yes.

After
RollerWars,
I did two more films for Gaz:
The Twisted History-Mystery
and
Jesse: Girl of a Thousand Streets.
Altogether, they took almost three years to shoot. Checkers and I spoke less, rarely returned each other's calls, and I learned not to miss him by reminding myself that I was a working, professional actress in America; back home, I didn't know what I was. I never returned to find out.

But of all the films I did for Gaz, only
Fanged Creatures
is remembered. I saw it again, just last year at the Silver Scream Theater in L.A., almost twenty years after its original release. I sat alone in the second row; behind me an audience of college students mocked and hooted throughout, laughing especially hard during my kiss with E. Noel. But that scene still moved me—what did those young people know about the world ending all around you?

Overall,
Fanged Creatures
was still impressive: the plot was fast-paced, the camerawork was steady, and our reaction shots conveyed all the fear and dread Gaz hoped for. But the back-and-forth shifts between his film and Checkers' footage was rougher than I remembered: bright Technicolor pictures alternated with yellowish, grainy ones, and Checkers' monsters moved in a dreamy slow motion: the Squid Mother's tentacles flowed around her like the tails of kites, the Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen glided through the air like a leaf in the wind, Werewolf Girl looked almost lovely as she bayed at the moon. It had been so long since I had seen myself this way that I was secretly mournful at the end when, after Captain Banner manages to restore power to the engines, Lorena presses the button that drops the nucleotomic bombs on Planet X. “There you are,” Gaz whispered to me, the night of its premiere, “obliterating yourselves out of existence.”

But what stayed with me then, what loops in my head even now, is what I didn't see in the movie: that scene in the canyon, the one Gaz said Checkers ruined. I saw it only once, right before Gaz edited it out: on hands and knees I struggle uphill, a filthy, sweaty mess—my wig is a nest of pebbles and leaves, dirt smears my face, neck, and space suit. But it makes no difference to Checkers. He comes to me with open arms, like I am a thing of unequaled beauty.
On film, everything looks real.
It was true: it did look like Checkers meant to help me up, to pull me to safety, and rescue me from that most hostile of planets.

The Brothers

M
y brother went on national TV to prove he was a woman. I don't know which talk show it was, but the episode had a title that kept flashing at the bottom of the television screen:
IS SHE A HE? IS HE A SHE? YOU DECIDE!
The show went like this: a guest would come out onstage, and the audience would vote on whether or not she was the real thing.

They came out one at a time, these big-haired and bright-lipped women, most of them taller than the average man. They worked the stage like strippers, bumping and grinding to the techno beat of the background music. The audience was on its feet, whistling and hooting, cheering them on.

Then came Eric.

My brother was different from the others. He was shorter, the only Filipino among them. He wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens. His hair, a few strands streaked blond, fell to his bony shoulders. He was slow across the stage, wooing the audience with a shy girl's face, flirtatious, sweet. But he wasn't woman enough for them: they booed my brother, gave him the thumbs-down. So Eric fought back. He stood at the edge of the stage, fists on his hips and feet shoulder-width apart, like he was ready to take on anyone who crossed him. “Dare me?” he said, and I saw his hands move slowly to the bottom of his T-shirt. “You dare me?”

They did, and up it went. The crowd screamed with approval, gave him the thumbs-up. Someone threw a bra onstage and Eric picked it up, twirled it over his head like a lasso, then flung it back into the audience.

I looked over at Ma. It was like someone had hit her in the face.

He put his shirt down, lifted his arms in triumph, blew kisses to the audience, then took a seat with the others. He told the audience that his name was Erica.

He'd left a message the night before it aired, telling me to watch Channel 4 at seven o'clock that night. He said it would be important, that Ma should see it too. When I told Ma she looked hopeful. “Maybe he's singing,” she said, “playing the piano?” She was thinking of Eric from long before, when he took music lessons and sang in the high school choir.

I reached for the remote, thinking,
That bastard set us up.
I turned off the TV.

That was the last time I saw Eric. Now he's lying on a table, a sheet pulled to his shoulders. The coroner doesn't rush me, but I answer him quickly. “Yes,” I say. “That's my brother.”

E
ric's life was no secret, though we often wished it was: we knew about the boyfriends, the makeup and dresses. He told me about his job at the HoozHoo, a bar in downtown San Francisco where the waitresses were drag queens and transsexuals. But a year and a half ago, on Thanksgiving night, when Eric announced that he was going to proceed with a sex change (“Starting here” he said, patting his chest with his right hand), Ma left the table and told Eric that he was dead to her.

It's 6:22
P.M
. He's been dead for six hours.

“We need to call people,” I tell Ma. But she just sits there at the kitchen table, still in her waitress's uniform, whispering things to herself, rubbing her thumb along the curve of Eric's baby spoon. Next week she turns sixty-one. For the first time, she looks older than she is. “We have to tell people what's happened.”

She puts down the spoon, finally looks at me. “What will I say? How can I tell it?”

“Tell them what the coroner told me. That's all.” He had an asthma attack, rare and fatal. He was sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park when his airways swelled so quickly, so completely, no air could get in or out. As a kid, Eric's asthma was a problem; I can still hear the squeal of his panic.
Can't breathe, can't breathe,
he'd say, and I'd rub his back and chest like I was giving him life. But as an adult, the attacks became less frequent, easier to manage, and he deemed his inhaler a thing of the past. “The severity of this attack was unusual,” the coroner explained. “No way he could have prepared for it.” He was dead by the time a pair of ten-year-olds on Rollerblades found him.

The look on her face makes me feel like I'm a liar. “He couldn't breathe,” I say. “It's the truth.” I go through cupboards, open drawers, not sure what I'm looking for, so I settle for a mug and fill it with water and though I'm not thirsty I drink it anyway. “He couldn't breathe. And then he died. When people ask, that's what you say.”

Ma picks up the spoon again, and now I understand:
“Ang bunso ko,”
she's been saying. My baby boy, over and over. Like Eric died as a child and she realized it only now.

T
he morning after the show, my brother called me at work. When I picked up, he said, “Well . . . ?” like we were in mid-conversation, though we hadn't spoken in six months.

“You grew your hair out,” I said. “It's blond now.”

“Extensions,” he said.

“They look real.”

“They're not.” He took a deep breath. “But the rest of me is.”

It was a little after seven. I was the only one in the office. Not even the tech guys were in yet. I turned and looked out my window, down at the street, which was empty too.

“Goddamnit, Edmond,” my brother said. “Say something.”

I didn't, so he did. He said he was sorry if it hurt Ma and me, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I showed the world what I'm made of.” He said this slowly, like it was a line he'd been rehearsing for months. “What do you think of that?”

“I saw nothing,” I said.

“What?”

“I saw nothing.” It was the truth. When Eric lifted his shirt, they didn't simply cover his breasts with a black rectangle. They didn't cut to commercial or pan the camera to a shocked face in the audience. Instead, they blurred him out, head to toe. It looked like he was disintegrating, molecule by molecule. “They blurred you out,” I said.

I could hear him pace his apartment. I'd never visited, but I knew he was living in the Tenderloin in downtown San Francisco. The few times he called, there were always things happening on his end—cars honking, sirens, people shouting and laughing. But that morning, there was just the sound of us breathing, one, then the other, like we were taking turns. I imagined a pair of divers at the bottom of the ocean, sharing the same supply of air.

“You there?” I finally said. “Eric, are you there?”

“No,” he said, then hung up.

And that's how it ended, for Eric and me.

I
go to my apartment to get clothes, but stay the night at Ma's. My old bed is still in my old room upstairs, but I take the living room couch. I don't sleep, not for a minute. Before light comes, I call Delia in Chicago, but her fiancé picks up. I ask for my wife, which irritates him. But technically, I'm right: the divorce isn't final, not yet. I'm still her husband, and I won't let that go, not until I have to.

“No message,” I tell him, then hang up.

Somehow, I'm wide awake all morning. Driving to the funeral home in North Oakland, I don't even yawn.

Loomis, the man who handled Dad's funeral eleven years ago, waits for us in a small square of shade outside the main office. He's heavier now, his hair thinner, all white. Back then he walked with a limp; today he walks with a cane.

“Do you remember me?” It's the first thing Ma says to him. “And my husband?” She pulls a picture from her wallet, an old black-and-white of Dad back in his Navy days. He's wearing fatigues, looking cocky. His arms hang at his sides, but his fists are clenched, like he's ready for a fight. “Dominguez. First name Teodoro.” Loomis takes the photo, holds it eye level, squints. “I do remember him,” he says, though he saw my father only as a corpse. “And I remember you too.” He looks at me, shakes my hand. “The boy who never left his mother's side that whole time.”

That was Eric. Ma knows it too. We don't correct him.

The funeral doesn't take long to plan: Ma makes it similar to Dad's, ordering the same floral arrangements, the same prayer cards, the same music. Only the casket is different: Dad's was bronze, which best preserves the body. Eric's will be mahogany, a more economical choice. “It's all we can afford,” Ma says.

Later, Loomis drives us through the cemetery to find a plot for Eric. We head to the north end, pull up at the bottom of a small hill where Dad is buried. But his grave is already surrounded, crowded with the more recent dead. “There,” Ma says, walking uphill toward a small eucalyptus. She puts her hand on a low, thin branch, rubs a budding leaf between her fingers. “It's growing.” She gives a quick survey of the area, decides this is the place.

“But your knee.” I point out the steepness of the hill, warn her that years from now, when she's older, getting to Eric will be difficult.

“Then you help me,” Ma says, starting toward the car. “You help me get to him.”

B
ack home, Ma calls the people we couldn't reach last night, and each conversation is the same: she greets them warmly, pauses, but can't catch herself before she gives in to tears. Meanwhile, I get the house ready, vacuuming upstairs and down, wiping dirty window screens with wet rags, rearranging furniture to accommodate the foot traffic of all the guests who will pray for my brother's soul. This will be the first of nine nights like this.

“I hate the way Filipinos die,” Eric once said. It was the week of Dad's funeral. “Nine nights of praying on our knees, lousy Chinese food, and hundred-year-old women keep asking me where my girlfriend is.” The businessmen were worse. On the last night of Dad's novena, one guy—he said he was related to us but couldn't explain how—tried selling life insurance to Eric and me. He quoted figures on what we could get for injury, dismemberment, death, and even took out a pocket calculator to prove how valuable our lives were. “Promise me, Edmond,” Eric had said, “when I die, take one night to remember me. That's all. No old people. No kung pao chicken. No assholes telling you how much you'll get for my severed leg.” He came close to crying, but then he managed a smile. “And make sure Village People is playing in the background.”

“ ‘YMCA'?”

“ ‘Macho Man,' ” he said. “Play it twice.”

He started laughing. I started laughing. The house was full of mourners but we stood our ground in the corner of the room, matching in our Sears-bought two-piece suits, joking like the closest of brothers. But now I know we were wrong to talk like that, as though I would automatically outlive him. I was five years older than Eric, and he was only twenty-six.

Brothers are supposed to die in the correct order. I keep thinking:
Tonight should be for me.

B
y six, the house fills with visitors. A dozen or so at first. Soon it's fifty. I stop counting at seventy-five.

Strangers keep telling me they're family. They try to simplify the intricate ways we're related: suddenly they're cousins, aunts and uncles, the godchildren of my grandparents. None of these people have seen Eric in years, have no idea of the ways he's changed. All they know about my brother is that he's dead.

Twice, an old woman calls me Eric by mistake.

When a neighbor asks, “Where's Delia?” Ma answers before I can. She's embarrassed by the idea of divorce, so she says that Delia is on the East Coast for business, but will be here as soon as possible. I wish it were true: I keep checking the door, thinking Delia might walk in any moment, that somehow she found out what happened and took the next flight out to be with me. Eric's death would have been our breakthrough, our turning point. I try not to think of tonight as a lost opportunity for Delia and me.

At seven, we get to our knees, pray before the religious shrine Ma's set up on top of the TV—a few porcelain figurines of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, laminated prayer cards in wood frames, plastic rosaries. On the floor, an arm's reach from me, in front of the TV screen, stands an infant-sized ceramic statuette of Santo Niño, the baby Jesus Christ. All good Filipino Catholic families have one, but I haven't seen ours in years. He still looks weird to me, with his red velvet cape trimmed in gold thread and a crown to match, silver robes, brown corn silk hair curling down his face past his shoulders, the plastic flower in his hand.

When Eric was small, he thought Santo Niño was a girl: I caught him in his bedroom kneeling on the floor, and Santo Niño was naked, his cape, robes, and crown in a small, neat pile by Eric's foot. For the first time, I saw how he was made: only the hands and face had been painted to look like skin; everywhere else was unglazed white, chipped in spots. “See,” Eric said, his finger in the empty space between Santo Niño's legs, “he's a girl.” I called him an idiot, tried to get it through his head that he was just a statue, a ceramic body that meant nothing. “Santo Niño is a boy,” I said. “Say it.” He wouldn't, so I took the Santo Niño from Eric, held him above my head. Eric jumped, reached, tried to get him back, knocked him out of my hands.

Ma heard the crash, ran upstairs and found pieces of Santo Niño scattered at our feet. Before she could speak I pointed at the pile of clothes on the floor, told her what Eric had done and said.

I tried putting Santo Niño back together in my room, and listened to Eric getting hit.

But my brother had a point. This second Santo Niño, the one Ma bought to replace the one we broke, does look like a girl, with glass-blue eyes, long black lashes, a red-lipped smile, offering a rose. When everyone's eyes are shut tight in prayer, I reach out, try to take it. It's glued to his fist.

W
hat started as praying is now a dinner party. Ma makes sure the egg rolls stay warm, that there's enough soy sauce in the chow mein. I hear her swap recent gossip with neighbors who moved away long before, watch her hold the babies of women who grew up on our street. In the Philippines, my parents threw three to four parties a year, and Ma boasted how her wedding was the grandest her province had ever seen. She promised equally grand weddings for us. But I was twenty-one when Delia and I eloped, and she gave up on Eric long ago. Funerals and novenas, I think, are all Ma has left.