Philippine Speculative Fiction (23 page)

Luz has picked up the phone and is punching a number.

“I told him if I slept with him, I’d crush his tiny little spine,” says Tai, her face flushed. She takes out a sheaf of brochures from the backpack she has left on the floor.
She places them on the table.

Luz is speaking quietly into the receiver as she looks at Tai’s large, avian eyes.

“We’re having a meeting next week. Come with us,” says Tai. “Our speaker’s name is Dominic. He’ll help you remember that what’s in our blood is stronger
than we think.”

“Some of us want to forget,” says Luz, hanging up the phone as the guards come in.

TAI SHIFTS INTO human form, pulling out a blouse and a new pair of pants from her backpack and putting them on. The guards knock on the door and tell her to hurry up. This part
always humiliates her. She needed to burst through her clothes and into natural form to make a statement earlier but now she needs to have human legs back on before anyone else outside can see her
and get her arrested.

On her way out of the building, she replays the glare Luz had given her before hanging up. There had been resentment there, anger at the fact Tai had something she doesn’t. Courage? A
clear conscience? Some clunky definition of freedom? Tai isn’t sure but she’s seen it nearly every time she goes pamphleteering. She knows it comes from their last remains of doubt.
It’s when that resentment flares that Tai knows what she has said or done has somehow sunk in. But that’s where it stops. Time drips like morphine, their anger melts, and Tai is
forgotten.

The traffic when she takes the bus is oppressive, demoralizing. Across the road, a sarangay in natural form puts his grocery bags down and pauses to slip a cigarette into his thick, bull lips.
He’s not wearing a license around his neck. People stare and the police officers nearby point at him but they don’t arrest him. The sun is too hot today.

Tai is aware she’s jealous of the sarangay’s level of defiance. Sometimes she thinks the point of the anthro license is just the sapiens’ way of dividing anthros. Give some of
them rights and none for the others, give them
classes
, and watch the fireworks.

Tai gets off the bus at City Hall, crosses the tunnel under Circle, and surfaces at Quezon Memorial. The monument is insouciant, asleep, and children on bicycles frolic around its feet.

Tai withdraws into the leafier, darker parts of the park where the ice cream carts wouldn’t bother her. This is where she goes when she feels her resolve dismantling itself.

Everyone in the union understands that you have to give it time when you’re dealing with an entire planet that has built their sense of normalcy on how different they are from you.
It’s good enough for Tai on most days, but there are moments when she needs more.

Nearby, where the rally stage had been erected two years ago, is a man wearing glasses on his paunchy, sensitive face. It takes a few seconds for Tai to realize, with a shot of horror, that
it’s Dominic.

He’s a short man when he’s on two legs. She has never seen him in human form before, especially at the union office, but she recognizes his face. Sapien clothes! Plaid longsleeves
and corduroy pants. Tai can’t be bothered to realize the hypocrisy of thinking this even though she’s in jeans herself. She’s not the head of the union. She’s not the one
with a quiet voice that shows its passion with words of conviction.

She doesn’t know if she should reveal herself. The embarrassment would be immense.

He’s limping right now like a man with a shorter leg. This makes sense. In the office, he goes around in siokoy form in a water tank placed on a large, makeshift segway. A siokoy’s
threat level is low enough for him to be able to get a license but he has opted not to because he doesn’t believe in having to get permission to be who he is. A part of his tail is mangled.
He says a human once tried to hack it away with an ax when he was sent to a school-run rehabilitation camp when he was young. Everyone has always tried not to stare. Despite his charismatic
speeches, he keeps to himself most of the time.

It’s been a rough day. Tai’s indignation gets the better of her.

“Dominic,” she says.

She’s right. The embarrassment is potent enough to take down a tikbalang. Dominic whirls around, stumbling on his bad leg. The expression on his face is crushing. He takes his glasses off
and wipes the sweat away, looking (Tai thinks numbly) like a human father about to lose an argument against his two-legged toddler about why they shouldn’t have another ice cream.

“Tai, I didn’t know you’re here,” he says and makes it worse.

Stop limping
, Tai thinks helplessly.

“I was giving pamphlets,” she says. “To a place for mutagenic operations.”

Dominic winces like any unionist. This makes Tai feel better.

“I was tired and I needed some fresh air,” says Tai. “I came here so I can be reminded of things.”

“Really?” Dominic shifts his weight and starts rolling up his sleeves up to show very human forearms. “I’m here for the same thing too. Kind of.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The head of the Cavite office died yesterday,” he says. “Romualdo. Shot through the head.”

The afternoon sun comes down in hazy slits under the trees. News that isn’t news. “Which party does the killer work for?” asks Tai.

“Suicide,” says Dominic, staring at the dust motes dancing in the light. “Left a note. He died from a tiny little nine-millimeter.”

Tai allows some time for silence. “Are you sure?”

“He was a kapre. You’d have to be very close to Romualdo to use a gun that small on him. And on his head.”

Tai isn’t convinced. News that isn’t news.

Dominic straightens himself. “You know that old myth about what happens when an anthro dies? When their soul leaves this planet, it gets a little colder here because there’s a bit
less anito fire to go around with. Good against global warming.” He smiles broadly at Tai. “Romualdo would’ve liked that. Everything he ate was organic.”

Later Tai takes the train home. The moment she locks the deadbolt of her apartment door, she throws off her clothes and once her bra hits the floor, she transforms.

She wants to get into a fight. She doesn’t know with whom. So she dives into writing a press release for the union’s public meeting next week.

She’s deep in the middle of a mental diatribe when Dominic rings her phone.

“It was good seeing you earlier,” he says.

“I’m sorry about Romualdo.” She really is.

“Can you come to the union office tomorrow?” he asks. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Good news?”

“Potentially for everyone.”

They hang up and Tai finds out she can’t concentrate on the press release anymore. She goes to the living room and discovers someone has thrown an egg against one of the windows, the yolk
leaving a runny stain. People know what she is. She’s never hid it when she’s at home. She doesn’t draw the curtains shut. Every little bit helps.

She’ll clean the splattered egg tomorrow. She turns the television on.

LUZ ARRIVES HOME to the smell of her mother frying shallots and garlic on the pan. She goes to her bedroom, closing the curtains before she undresses herself. Her father had
died of a stroke years ago and there’s only herself and her mother in the house now, but she locks the door out of habit anyway.

Neither her father nor her mother are anthros; it was a recessive gene that decided to buck the trend when her turn came. Her telling them had been a whispered affair steeped in guilt when they
caught her in mid-transformation. Her father had said, “Turn into human form when you’re in public so you don’t rub it in anyone’s face. Don’t make life difficult for
us and don’t ever let me see you that way again,” and that was all there is, but her mother, a soft-spoken woman always plagued with migraines, gradually stopped speaking with her.

After the operation, Dr. Cardoso said she could pay everything back, including the flight to Penang, by working as his secretary. At least her mother could look her in the eye now.

Luz sits down on her bed and reaches for her shoulder bag. She had thrown the brochures away when the girl had left but she kept one for herself. It says she can meet other anthros in natural
forms in a safe place, license or no license. Free food, free coffee, music and all-day talks. It sounds like college to Luz. She had tried joining the university organizations before and
didn’t enjoy them.

Tomorrow she will treat her sapiens friends from high school to dinner and they will talk about sapiens problems and she will listen and nod and sigh and she will learn her role from them and
play it well.

TAI DROPS BY the union office in the evening, her garuda feathers molting a little on the wooden floor. Dominic is alone and back in his water tank in siokoy form. He has lost
the discomfort of the other day and replaced it with a self-satisfaction that shows in how smoothly he moves the segway to open the door for her.

“Beer and pizza,” he says, gesturing at the table. Tai hands him a copy of the finished press release.

“This is exactly why I want to do this one on one with you,” he says, glancing quickly at what she has written. “And why I want you to be the first one I talk to.”

“Did they find out who killed Romualdo?” she asks.

Dominic’s face falls a little. “He killed himself, Tai.”

Tai breaks off a slice of pizza and doesn’t answer. Dominic rests his waterlogged arms on the rims of the tank. “I like your work ethic, Tai. I wish the union weren’t voluntary
so I could bring you in as an employee. The best I can do now is just trust you.”

Tai smiles at him through the pizza. Now this was the siokoy who had spoken so well in Quezon Memorial two years ago, not the man she had met yesterday.

He weighs her reaction and says cautiously, “I want to get a mutagenic operation.”

Tai thinks she’s heard wrong and he has to say it again.

“I don’t understand,” says Tai, her shock swallowing her words.

“I’ve thought about this for a while already and it’s just better for the organization,” Dominic says. He lifts his tail and it sloshes some water out of his tank.
“It’s difficult moving around a segway like this all the time when there’s work to be done on land. It slows me down.”

Tai stares at the stump of his tail. He’s not telling the truth. It’s betrayal. “Does this have anything to do with Romualdo?”

“Of course not,” says Dominic quickly.

“He’s found his way out,” she says, “and now this is yours?”

“Don’t talk about him that way,” he says.

“You’re the one who keeps saying he killed himself,” she says, making words out of the fevered buzz beginning to cloud her mind. “Where’s the honor in
that?”

Dominic reaches for a beer and pulls the tab with a nervous flick of his webbed fingers.

“Where’s our streets full of anthros, Dominic?” she asks, her voice loud. “Is it really so bad to be us?”

Dominic launches into a speech about priorities but Tai doesn’t hear him. The buzz in her mind has turned into a squall, primal and ancient. Something tells her that she should switch to
human form right now for her own safety, but she squashes the thought. It’s disgraceful. The anger swallows her like a snake, covering her in a foul blackness.

HIS FACE, THE boyish pudginess showing through the gills, suddenly disgusts her. She remembers the egg she had cleaned up from her window this morning, the way it had smelled,
dried up on the window pane. Like an entire race of anthros eating themselves from the inside and vomiting themselves out. Then she feels Dominic reach his hand out to touch her on her right
wing.

The contact is electrical. She throws out her wing and hurls Dominic across the room.

The tank crashes, glass and water everywhere, and the siokoy is flung against a heavy, concrete cabinet. He hits his head on the edge and his eyeglasses fall off his face.

He falls heavily on the floor, eyes bulging and unblinking, his head a lumpy shape from the impact.

The beer can spins around in the space between him and Tai and spills foam. Outside, a car beeps its horn.

Please, please
, she thinks, but Dominic doesn’t move.

Tai is shaking. She steps away from the murky tank water beginning to spread. One of the segway’s wheels has fallen off. Dominic’s gills are still.

Buried underneath Tai’s shock is still that shameful urge to change into human form now, to wear its cloak of safety and invisibility on her shoulders.

SOMETIMES SAPIENS THROW around a crude joke about what happens when you sleep with a garuda. Something about the bird’s massive cloaca exploding and staining everything
in the room.

The real story is that when garudas mate, unwary of their own strength, their wings unfold to their true lengths and destroy anything not large enough to contain them, someone’s house,
someone’s heart.

TAI STANDS IN the middle of Dr. Cardoso’s empty reception room and her human face is blank, a sure sign of trauma.

“We’re closed,” says Luz, switching off the lamp on her desk for full effect. “Come back on Monday.”

“I don’t have Monday,” says the girl, her eyes crumpling, and in a spasm of nervousness, she transforms into claws and feathers. When she realizes this, she changes back to
human form, shivering.

“Dr. Cardoso has left,” says Luz. The girl’s lack of control makes her sick. “I can schedule you for a consultation on Monday, that’s the best I can do.”

The girl repeats that she needs the operation now. “That’s not possible, even if Dr. Cardoso is still here,” says Luz. “The operation is done in Malaysia and the waitlist
is half a year long.”

Tai transforms again and rises to her full height, obscuring the ceiling light. Luz is reminded how high garudas are on the Very Severe list. “Where does he live?” asks Tai.

“Whatever reason you have for needing the operation this quickly,” says Luz, threading her arm through the handle of her bag, “I’m sure it’s not that
bad.”

“I can crush you into a bag of broken bones,” says Tai softly. “You’ll curl up and I can stab you until you get smaller and smaller and you stop moving.”