Philippine Speculative Fiction (16 page)

Franz Johann Dela Merced is a struggling comic book illustrator, wannabe philanthropist, and certified Australopithecus. He lives in rainy Vancouver,
Canada, pining for his glory days at the Ateneo de Manila University. When he’s not busy doodling, playing video games, or reading up on Philippine history, he spends his time dangerously
obsessing over tapsilog, gummi bears, and Up Dharma Down. He dedicates this short story to Armi Millare.

YOU MIGHT BE wondering why I have a third eye growing in the middle of my forehead. It’s a funny story, really.

Ever hear the one about the miracle of the water cross? I read about it in this old book by Ambeth Ocampo that I found floating the other day. Back in 1901, so the story goes, a fisherman in
Manila Bay saw bubbles rising and forming a large cross on the ocean surface. Awed by the apparently divine event, the fisherman took a sip from the strange fountain, and was shocked to find that
unlike the surrounding seawater, this stuff was fresh! Soon enough the entire town heard about it and, with the local priest’s blessing, headed off in boats to bottle up this
“miracle” liquid. A couple of days later, BAM! Cholera epidemic. Turns out the water was squeaking out of a busted sewage pipe running under the bay. Yum.

How about the one with the weeping statue? Enshrined in some obscure village in Olongapo was this porcelain image of the Virgin Mary, famed for its supposed ability to cry tears of blood. From
what I recall, a couple of devotees from the village went up to the shrine to pray, where they allegedly witnessed said phenomenon. So
of course
the first thing they did was taste the
so-called “blood” with their fingers, right? Soon after, they returned to the village in a delirious state, singing the Ave Maria in an “unknown tongue,” and everyone
promptly declared it a miracle. Cut to a week later, and—you guessed it—the local clinic was up to their elbows with a lead poisoning outbreak. They found out later that the
“miraculous” statue’s eyes were coated with a cheap lead-based paint that ran off in the summer heat, and, well… there you go. Mind you, I got this article off a sleazy old
tabloid from 1995 that I fished out of a ditch six months ago (right next to the gossip column and a “bold” photo of Ynez Veneracion to boot), so who knows how much of that was legit to
begin with?

I could go on and on about this junk. You tend to run into a lot of weird stories in my line of work. Here’s a good one: “Enchong Laway, celebrated faith healer from Bulacan, known
for curing diseases by making people drink his spit.”
Yecch
. Oh, and here’s one about some guy named Judiel who claimed to have “transubstantiated a communion wafer into
the literal body and blood of Christ.” Crazy, crazy stuff! I didn’t even know the Rizal Library collected stories like this in their archives.

If there’s anything I learned from all these little anecdotes about crying statues and Jesus Christ’s face showing up on various baked goods, it’s that obsessing over miracles
is our national pastime. The fact that we just dredged up an entire university wing’s worth of scholarly research on the subject is proof enough. Is it a statement of faith, or a sign of
desperation? I’ll leave that question for the philosophers. If nothing else, I also learned that we have a tendency to indiscriminately put things into our mouths. This is why we end up with
situations like the Buttonquail Fiasco of 2009. You remember that one, right? But I digress.

Now, you might
also
be wondering why a professional cameraman like myself is reduced to trawling floodwater in Katipunan for sunken documents. Well you know how it is,
pare
.
Traditional journalist work isn’t exactly in high demand these days, thanks to this whole “street journalism” movement going on. Who needs a pro with a fancy camera when news
programs can just take their footage from any kibitzing yahoo with a smartphone? To top it off, I still have twelve payments left on this Canon 2027 Hyper Mega HD+ (not to mention the additional
15k for the underwater lens and sonar), and I am
not
planning to go through yet another year on an all-ramen diet. Dredging may not be glamorous, but it pays the bills.

Still, you never know what wealth of information you can scavenge underwater nowadays. All those old articles I showed you earlier were just the tip of the iceberg. Our team already managed to
salvage half of the Rizal Library archives buried in the rubble, and the Jesuits were all too happy to pay us for recovering their collection of
Liwayway
magazines and rare first-edition
Nick Joaquins. I got some great footage of the ruins, too. And here I thought I’d never get to use the camera I just blew a year’s salary on! I’m basically a glorified part-time
librarian with scuba gear right now, but at least I still get to play journalist on the side. It’s better than nothing,
‘di ba
?

It must be providence that you and Tintin moved to Canada when you did. God’s wrath really went all-out here,
as in
. Thanks to last year’s one-two combo of Super Typhoon
Poltooters and the big Marikina quake, half of the roads in Metro Manila are completely wrecked, and the rest are submerged entirely under thirty-five feet of floodwater. The poor urban
infrastructure isn’t helping matters either. Although now that I think about it, that’s not much different than how it was before you left, is it? It looks like all of the city’s
urban planners already gave up and left the country long before you did.

The traffic here is worse than ever, if you can believe it. Naturally, the government rolls out its usual catch-all solution—build EVEN MORE FLYOVERS! Surprising, I know. I swear to God
you wouldn’t even be able to recognize EDSA anymore. Those ugly stretches of concrete obscure the sky like some sort of jungle canopy, covering everything below in permanent shadow. The
flooding’s gotten so bad on the ground level that the only other way to travel around is by
banca
. I did hear that the Department of Tourism is planning to tout us as the new Venice,
although I reckon the strong smell of sewage might give us an edgier appeal. We might have better luck attracting the so-called “slum tourism” crowd like they did with the favelas in
Brazil, but I find that a little distasteful. No thanks.

Now I know it sounds like Manila’s gone all
Akira
on you, and those broadcasts you see on TV probably aren’t helping. You’d think a catastrophe that caused fifty-two
thousand casualties would cause the city to devolve into a society of cannibals and doomsday cults, right? It always looks worse from an outside perspective, doesn’t it? But you know how it
is around here. In the life of Juan dela Cruz, this is just another bullet point in a long list of misadventures.

Just a couple weeks after the disaster, people were already building makeshift houses out of random flotsam, using the top of fallen billboard ads as buoyant platforms. It wasn’t long
before these floating shantytowns started popping up by the dozen all over the metro. In no time flat, people were already going about their lives as if nothing happened. Pedicab drivers now make
their rounds as gondoliers, and street kids everywhere swim about in the murky waters like they always do during the rainy season. And the best part? In the midst of all the bickering, gossiping,
backstabbing, and scapegoating, the masses have once again resorted to miracle-watching as the opiate of choice. Already, rumors about the next orally ingestible miracle are making their rounds,
bringing hope to this bleak and Dennis Hopper-less version of
Waterworld
. It’s funny how people still look to the heavens for divine providence, even though their view is completely
blocked out by those hideous concrete skyways.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose
.

Then again, who am I to talk? I’m the second-rate journalist who thought he could make it as the next Howie Severino. More importantly, I’m the guy who thought he had a chance with
Irma. I still do. You remember her, right? The girl I’ve been in love with since grade school? Look at us now. She’s the lead vocalist of Up Greg Down, and I’m just a nobody with
an overpriced camera. And yet, I
still
keep hoping against hope that we’ll eventually end up together. Now
that
would be a miracle, wouldn’t it. What were we saying
about faith and desperation, again?

Oh yeah. You wanted to know about my third eye, right? Well… I was about to get to that.

So a few weeks ago, I decided to flex my journalistic muscles a bit and started interviewing people for a little documentary side project. I began by collecting sound bites from random
bystanders, you know, just to get a general pulse on the current social climate. Anyway, I got the usual “God will provide” and “it’s the government’s fault”
comments, until I ran across this interesting tidbit. “It was raining fish from the sky,” this wide-eyed old lady from Quiapo recounted, “strange fish of a like I’ve never
seen before.” The omen supposedly manifested above the EDSA Shrine, where she and a bunch of other people were attending this underwater prayer rally being held by charismatic religious
leader Brother Bello. How that could have happened with all those flyovers blocking the sky, no one could say. However, a dozen other people who showed up at the rally corroborated her claim. Some
of them even claimed that the fish “glowed with a divine light” as they fell. Everyone was attributing the phenomenon to Our Lady of EDSA which, despite being almost entirely submerged
and covered with rust, still loomed over the area like a silent guardian.

At the time, I was probably starting to feel that the rest of my documentary was going nowhere, so I decided, why the hell not? I’ll check it out. This could be my big break, and if it
turned out to be nothing, maybe I’d at least get a big laugh out of it. So off I went.

It was last Friday when I decided to go. While it was hard to tell from under the imposing shadow of the flyovers, it was a bright and sunny day. I rented out a banca with my camera in tow, and
headed straight for EDSA Shrine. The sunlight filtering through the gaps in the concrete cast reflections on the surface of the water where the crowd gathered. It was strangely beautiful, in a way.
It was the middle of Brother Bello’s homily, and the people joined him in swaying as they bobbed up and down in the water. And then, it happened.

Splish.

Splash.

One fish. Two fish. Three fish. Four. Soon, thousands of live fish started raining from the sky. At first I thought the sunlight was playing tricks with my eyes, but each fish was definitely
surrounded with a warm radiance, almost like a halo. As soon as the creatures hit the water, the crowd immediately and frantically dispersed. Some came prepared with nets, but others just grabbed
the slippery critters with their bare hands. Soon enough, all of the fish were gone, and the people happily swam back to their respective shanties floating nearby. It wasn’t long after that
when the delicious smell of fried fish started permeating the air.

I rowed towards a nearby shack with a billboard that said “Alvin’s Carinderia,” where a jolly, middle-aged fellow was grilling his catch of the day. When he saw my banca
heading for his diner, he hollered out to me. “You want some, boss? Fifty pesos
lang
. I’ll even throw in a bowl of rice and some
achara
!” Taking him up on his
offer, I docked my banca and plopped myself down on the wooden bench in front of his eatery. He immediately laid down a plate with a heap of freshly cooked rice, a spoonful of achara, a dollop of
Mang Tomas sauce, and of course, one of the expertly grilled critters from before as the centerpiece. The fish still had an odd glow about it, and I hesitated at first.
This is your big
chance
, I quickly reminded myself.
If you can’t be Howie Severino, maybe you can be Anthony Bourdain instead
.

So, I steeled myself and took a bite. It wasn’t exactly the “divine” experience I was expecting, but it was… nice. The meat was flaky and the skin was delightfully
crispy. It tasted kind of like tilapia, but with a strange sort of kick to it. I managed to finish the entire plate. Satisfied with the meal as well as the day’s events, I headed back to my
apartment in Ortigas and took a nap.

I woke up at 6:00 PM, right when
TV Patrol
was coming on. As I got up from my couch, I felt a weird lump on my forehead. Thinking it was an overgrown pimple, I went for my bathroom
mirror to examine it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that my “zit” was growing eyelashes. And it
blinked
. Then, as if on cue, a news flash started blaring on TV. The footage
showed a truck driver caught on camera illegally dumping contraband off the side of the decommissioned Ortigas-San Juan flyover. As in,
the flyover that runs above the EDSA Shrine
.

I’m sure you can guess where this is going. The man was working for a local importer who wanted to get rid of a bad shipment they got off a seedy fishing operation from Taiwan. The
contraband was revealed to be thousands of live, overgrown anchovies, highly mutated from long exposure to radioactive runoff from a sunken nuclear submarine off the coast of Vigan.

Well,
crap
.

As I stood there dumbfounded, the “Mga Kuwento ni Marc Logan” news segment came up on TV. You remember that guy who does all those funny stories about bodybuilding grandmas and cats
singing “My Humps,” right? So there he was on TV doing a feature on the people who were stupid enough to eat giant radioactive anchovies, all in his patented singsong delivery. And who
else could he be interviewing but Brother Bello himself, who appeared to be growing an extra arm on his torso. “The better to praise the Lord with,” he said. Well, I suppose
that’s one way of looking at it. I always did say that a good journalist could use an extra eye or two.

So, uh, there you have it. Life goes on, I have an extra eye growing on my forehead, and I’ve been hearing rumors that the
pandesal
from Oliver’s Panaderya in Mandaluyong
were starting to look an awful lot like Jesus recently, so I’m gonna go check it out tomorrow. I have a good feeling about this one.