I Got Flowers Today

By Soki Ballesteros

I got flowers today

It wasn’t my birthday or any other special day,
We had our first argument last night
And he said a lot of cruel things that really hurt me
I know he is sorry and didn’t mean the things he said
Because he sent me flowers today.

I got flowers today

It wasn’t our anniversary or any other special day
Last night he threw me into the wall and started to choke me
It seemed like a nightmare;
I couldn’t believe it was real
I woke up this morning sore and bruised all over
I know he must be sorry
Because he sent me flowers today.

I got flowers today

It wasn’t Mother’s Day or any other special day
Last night he beat me up again
And it was so much worse than all other times
If I leave him, what will I do?

How will I take care of my kids?

What about money?
I’m afraid of him and scared to leave
But I know he must be sorry
Because he sent me flowers today

I got flowers today

Today was a very special day!
It was the day of my FUNERAL!
Last night, he finally killed me, he beat me to death
If I only have gathered enough courage and strength to leave him
I would not have gotten flowers today....
 First, A Poem Must Be Magical
by Jose Garcia Villa

First, a poem must be magical,

Then musical as a sea-gull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering.
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What it seeks, like a bride.
And overall I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover.

Dust of Snow
BY ROBERT FROST

The way a crow

Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
BY ROBERT HERRICK

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

This Is Just To Say

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
 wrestling with words to free the mind: Creative writing and social
transformation
John Remil Teodoro

In the Philippines, one cannot put food on the table by just doing creative
writing. Being a poet, fictionist, dramatist and essayist is not a day job. Writers like
me do other more lucrative things, such as being a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor and
many other “real” professions that will afford us a decent life. We cannot even dream
of being rich unless we have a rich spouse or have some generational wealth to
inherit.

But why do we persist writing? That despite being part-time writers we still act
as if creative writing matters? Some would call it a mission or a passion, some may
call it advocacy, some may even call it a malady or a certain kind of madness, or just
simply self-flagellation.

I borrowed the title of this short lecture from a poem by Cirilo F. Bautista, a
Philippine National Artist and my teacher in poetry, titled “Addressed to Himself”
from his book The Cave and Other Poems (Ato Bookshop, 1968). Here is the first
stanza: “How hard I have made life for you, Cirilo, / Who wrestle with words to free
my mind;/Your various battles, you do not know.”

In this poem, the persona is the poet talking to himself. The poet-persona is
apologizing to himself for making his life difficult because of writing. To be a Filipino
writer is to be one with the struggles of the majority of the Filipino people who are
economically marginalized. It is very difficult for a writer to be an honest witness to
her or his milieu for the Philippines is led, or being misled, by a political and business
elite who are intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Another Philippine National Artist, Virgilio S. Almario, insists on the “necessity

of the imagination,” an “imagination-in-freedom” that inspired the 1896 Philippine
Revolution against the Spanish colonial power (The Necessity of the Imagination,
Filipinas Institute of Translation, 2014). For Almario, Philippine literature is founded
on the “literature towards freedom.” It is no wonder that those who revolted against
Spain were led by poets Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto, and were also inspired
by the two novels of the Philippine hero, Jose Rizal — the Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo.

Here is the fourth stanza of Bautista’s poem: “But learn to distrust language
that we/In constant dreams deem the only fact,/Kill it in seduction or heraldry.” Here,
the poet-persona reminds himself not to take language — or any products of
language — at its face value. Words can manipulate and can be manipulated.

This poem was written when there was still no internet. The poem’s warning is
now more urgent in the time of fake news peddled on Facebook, Twitter (which
recently metamorphosed into X), YouTube and many other social media platforms.
Election results can now be manipulated by hijacking the narratives in the
cyberspace. Politicians and businesspersons have troll armies to protect their
reputation and to destroy the reputations of their rivals. Many writers and
intellectuals are coopted by corrupt politicians. Some writers even become
propagandists or PR persons for the highest bidders. In learning to distrust language,
we should also learn to distrust our notions of the world and be self-reflexive.

Stanza 5 of the poem says, “So eagle-like you may invent your act;/Then think
you walk in a world of thrall,/Where Beauty walks too but does not look back,” and
the one-liner last stanza, “Crossing the foggy fjords of the skull.”

Wrestling with words may be difficult and in so many ways not so fruitful
endeavors, but creative writers should not give up if only to take a glimpse of that
Beauty crossing the foggy fjords of our minds. And perhaps, it will be the beginning
of freeing the mind.

And when the collective minds of the society is free, an authentic and inclusive
social transformation in the Philippine society have the possibility to occur.

Creative writing will only matter when it is transformative. It is only then that
the sacrifices made by writers will be worth it. When a literature cannot transform its
society, why bother to write at all?

Can literature, at this age and time, really change or transform society? With
what is happening in the world today — climate change, unjust wars, migration crisis,
political unrests, poverty in all its forms due to cold-blooded capitalism where the
rich become richer and the poor become poorer — as a writer turning 50 years old
this year, I have my doubts. But whenever I would give introductory lectures to my
literature classes, I would share with my students the classical notion of the function
of literature outlined by Quintus Horatius Flaccus or Horace a few centuries ago—
dulce et utile, to delight and to instruct. That reading and/or writing literature is
pleasurable because it is not only a means to our personal happiness but also for the
common good. As a writer I have no choice but to have faith in the power of creative
writing to shape society, because to believe otherwise is to question the validity of
my own existence.

So believe me when I say that I am most happy whenever I am wrestling with

words to free my mind because I am hoping and praying that maybe, yes maybe,
when a reader read my poem or essay or story or play, it will also free her or his mind
and will become a citizen of a free society. Or at least will be able to imagine a free
society.
With Honor
Excluded Middles
By AVERILL PIZARRO

MANILA, Philippines — Let me just come out and say it, so we can get it out
of the way already — graduating with honors is overrated.
I graduated from UP Diliman a year ago with a degree in Philosophy, magna
cum laude, and this is a lot less impressive than it sounds.
For one, my class, the Class of 2011, produced 21 summa cum laude, 215
magna cum laude, and 794 cum laude. The feat isn’t exactly extraordinary if 1,000
other people in the same room can do it too.
At the University graduation, only the summa cum laude get to sit on the
stage with their parents, along with the members of the Board of Regents, former
presidents and faculty.
Magna cum laude get to sit in the front rows, but it is not a big enough
achievement — our parents have to sit at the back under the hot sun like everyone
else.
Of course I wanted to graduate with honors, and it felt good when I did.
Sometimes, it still does. My parents like telling their friends about it, and so do my
aunts and uncles. Fortunately, as far as I know, none of them had a tarpaulin printed
out and hung at the municipal hall.I have to admit — magna cum laude looks very
good on paper. Most people are immediately impressed when they hear about it —
and one of them, my current boss, was impressed enough to offer me a job.
But that’s about as far as graduating with honors has taken me.
It got me into a job, but staying in the job, and performing well in it, is a
different matter entirely. That’s a fact that people often miss: it doesn’t make you
better or smarter than anyone else. It means you got better grades, but it says little
about your intelligence, ability, or lack thereof, because most people who graduate
with honors intend to graduate with honors but don’t intend to learn.
It’s easy to go through college taking all the easy professors and getting all
the free unos, and graduating with a summa or magna or cum laude following your
name. But this doesn’t mean you learned well, nor that you made the most of your
opportunities, and this does not prepare you in any way to meet real challenges.
Most of the time it’s an investment in image rather than in substance, and it is
a dishonor to the University that took time and money to teach you. It is easier to
graduate with honors than to graduate with honor.
This is a lesson I first learned in UP.
On the first day of class, a Literature professor had asked us to introduce
ourselves to her by submitting a list of all the real books we had ever read in our 16-
year lives. “Don’t tell me you were valedictorian, or an awardee this or awardee that,”
she said rather crossly. “Don’t tell me you were editor-in-chief of your high school
paper. Guess what--we all were. Now tell me the books you’ve read when nobody
asked you to and I will judge how well-prepared you are for this class.”
 We were all frightened.
Today, though, she is still one of my best teachers, and that was still one of
the best classes I ever took in my life.I find that working is much the same. In our
office especially, my boss has a habit of hiring honor graduates. Everyone is summa,
magna or cum laude. Or a lawyer. Or has a master’s degree in something from
prestigious universities here or abroad. It doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t
determine the quality of your output. I came in as a fresh graduate, armed with
honors, and I had to start from the bottom of the food chain, learn everything as I
went along, and learn fast. Sometimes, the philosophy has helped me. The books I
read in my spare time have helped me.
But I find that what has helped me the most in my job is not the cerbral
knowledge I gained in my fours years in college, not the stuff that got me through
exams and gave me good grades — it’s all the things and disciplines surrounding
that, outside that, beyond that.
It’s the coolness under pressure, the habituation to deadlines, the initiative
and foresight picked up from doing volunteer work that you get through experience,
and by watching older people do something well.
It’s the clarity of mind and the determination to work well and hard even when
a professor is discouraging or angry or aloof, and you don’t hope to get a good mark
anyway, but you want to be able to say you gave it the best you have.
It’s the willingness to get your hands dirty and to give more than the
minimum because you believe in the innate value of honor and excellence.
It’s all of these and more — the elements of a good education, about how well
you learned, including, especially, from your failures — and such things just cannot
be measured by numbers.
***
The true-er measurement of one's achievements lies on his ability to rise
above adversity--whether he graduated with honors or not.
Being honorable is different from graduating with honor.
 LIHAM NI PINAY MULA SA BRUNEI
Elynia Ruth S. Mabanglo

Ako’y guro, asawa at ina.

Isang babae—pupol ng pabango, pulbos at seda,
Kaulayaw ng batya, kaldero at kama.
Napagod yata ako’t nanghinawa,
Nagsikap mangibang-lupa.

Iyo’t iyon din ang lalaking umuupo sa kabisera,

Nagbabasa ng diyaryo uma-umaga.
Naghihintay siya ng kape
At naninigarilyo,
Habang kagkag ako sa pagitan ng kuna at libro,
Nagpapahid ng lipstick at nagpapatulo ng gripo.
Hindi siya nag-aangat ng mukha
Umaaso man ang kawali o umiingit ang bata.
Hinahatdan ko siya ng brief at tuwalya sa banyo,
Inaaliw kung mainit ang ulo.
Wala siyang paliwanag
Kung bakit hindi siya umuwi magdamag,
Ngunit kunot na kunot ang kanyang noo
Kapag umalis ako ng lingo.
Ayaw niya ng galunggong at saluyot,
Kahit pipis ang sobreng inabot,
Ibig pa yatang maghimala ako ng ulam
Kahit ang pangrenta’y laging kulang.

Ako’y guro, asawa at ina.

Isang babae—napapagal sa pagiging babae.
Itinakda ng kabahaging
Masumpa sa walis, labada’t oyayi
Kahit may propesyo’t kumikita ng salapi.
Iyo’t iyong din ang ruta ng araw-araw—
Kabagutang nakalatag sa kahabaan
Ng bahay at paaralan,
Ng kusina’t higaan.
May karapatan ba akong magmukmok?

Saan ako tatakbo kung ako’y malungkot?

May beerhouse at massage parlor na tambayan
Ang kabiyak kong nag-aasam,
Nasa bintana ako’t naghihintay.
Nagbabaga ang katawan ko sa paghahanap,
 May krus ang dila ko’t di makapangusap.
Humihingi ng tinapay ang mga anak ko,
Itinotodo ko ang bolyum ng radio.

Napagod yata ako’t nanghinawa,

Nagsikap mangibang-lupa.
Noon ako nanaginip na nakapantalon,
Nagpapadala ng dolyar at pasalubong.
Nakahihinga na ako ngayon ng maluwag,
Walang susi ang bibig ang isip ay bukas.
Aaminin kong ako’y nangungulila
Ngunit sariling kape ko na ang tinitimpla.
Nag-aabang ako ng sulat sa tarangkaha’t pinto
Sa telepono nabubusog ang puso.
Umiiyak ako nung una,
Nagagamot pala ang lahat sa pagbabasa.

Ito lamang ang sagot,

Bayaang lalaki ang maglaba ng kumot.

Kung Ibig Mo Akong Makilala,

Ruth Elynia Mabanglo

Kung ibig mo akong makilala,

lampasan mo ang guhit ng mahugis na balat,
ang titig kong dagat–
yumayapos nang mahigpit sa bawat saglit
ng kahapon ko’t bukas.

Kung ibig mo akong makilala

sunduin mo ako sa himlayang dilim
at sa madlang pagsukol ng inunang hilahil,
ibangon ako at saka palayain.

Isang pag-ibig na lipos ng lingap,

tahanang malaya sa pangamba at sumbat
may suhay ng tuwa’t ang kaluwalhati’y
walang takda–ialay mo lahat ito sa akin
kung mahal mo ako’t ibig kilalanin.

Kung ibig mo akong kilalanin,

sisirin mo ako hanggang buto,
liparin mo ako hanggang utak,
umilanlang ka hanggang kaluluwa–
 hubad ako roon: mula ulo hanggang paa.
DIFFERENT BOWL OF ‘GOTO’
Carlo Hornilla

It was a rainy June afternoon in my first week in a part-time job somewhere in

Ortigas. My supervisor, perhaps pitying the fresh-from-Ala-eh-country newbie,
invited me to eat out with him.

“Do you eat goto?” he asked as we got into the company car. I nodded
enthusiastically.

I consider myself a goto authority. My father, a pure-blooded son of Taysan,

Batangas, put me through two years of college by cooking goto for all sorts of
people—security guards, truck drivers, construction and factory workers, drunkards,
gamblers, and such. Papa cooks our product, manages the store, and chats with the
customers; I scrub bowls and utensils stained with sebo (beef fat) and laugh at their
bawdy jokes.

Our store is not much—tiny, sawali-walled, with a malfunctioning TV set intended to

entertain those who sit at our three makeshift tables. It’s a place that only we blue-
collars can call comfortable. Still, Papa and I manage to scrape out our everyday
expenses from our goto earnings.

After some time, however, I felt that we could not go on with this kind of living, that I
should do something to improve our situation. So shortly after my 20th birthday, I
set out for what I believed was the proverbial land of milk, honey, and money: Metro
Manila.

The metropolis bore down on me like a sack of hard and heavy firewood. My Tagalog
is loud and thickly-accented Batangueño, and I felt inferior. Footbridges are unknown
in my rural upbringing, and at one point, I was forced to pay a fine of P200 to an
officer for jaywalking. The claustrophobia I’ve never known to exist within me was
brought to the surface by MRT rides. My cheap pair of leather shoes did not
withstand a leg-deep flood. One time, I woke to find that my favorite pair of slippers,
which I had left just outside the door, was gone. Stolen.

Even so, I could not bear to go home with nothing to show for my “adventure.” I
needed to stay, to earn and save money.

I miss the idle life in Batangas—days spent with easy labor, easy talk with people
you’ve known all your life, nights spent with friends under skies full of stars, the
sound of cricket wings and bamboo creaks lulling you to serenity. Simplicity…
It was still raining when my supervisor and I arrived at his favorite eatery. I waited
expectantly as he ordered two bowls of goto. I was excited, and nostalgic. Why,
come to think of it, I had lived a week without a staple in my gustatory life.

But when the waitress served us our order, along with a platter of tofu and little
pieces of cold calamansi, I felt insulted.

“But sir, this is not goto!” I told my supervisor.

“What? Why? What do you mean?” he said, surprised at my outburst.

“This—a bowl of rice porridge with a few slivers of ox tripe on top? This is lugaw!”

It was far from the goto I know – a rich stew of beef fat, heart, blood, liver, intestines
and tripe, kept on a slow simmer over a low fire, flavored with chili, ginger, onions,
fish sauce and roasted garlic.

“No. This is goto,” my supervisor insisted. “Taste it. If you don’t like it, I’ll order a
different dish for you.”

I forced myself to swallow a spoonful. Well, it tasted like lugaw. But then, the warmth
of it, the plainness of it, was so suited to the rainy weather that it was more than
enough to warm my insides and indulge my wanting tongue.

“Bonn,” my supervisor said as he squeezed calamansi over his bowl, “this is the goto
I’ve known. This is the goto here in Manila. I know this is different from the gotong
Batangas you know, but you’re in Manila now. You should expect a different bowl of
goto.”

He smiled at me and closed his eyes to say grace.

I suddenly understood the point of this invitation, this goto discovery, and the life
lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn. We have to eat the bowl of goto that we
are served, even if it is not the one we are accustomed to. The same can be said of
life. Live the life you have, not the one you had. Embrace today. Embrace change.

I said my prayers and thanked God for the bowl of goto in front of me.
 TO KILL A CHICKEN
George Deoso

One Sunday, after a brief visit to my godfather’s farm in Pampanga, we went home
with a hen straight out of his chicken coop, one of the many he maintained. We
transported her in a box along with another hen, which was to be for our neighbors
who had also been invited to the farm and whose car was used for the trip. The box
was crammed in the car’s rear compartment along with some plastic bags full of
other farm goods. Muffled scraping noises were heard from the box during the
three-hour trip back to Manila, as if the hens inside were trying to peck their way out.

When we got home, the first thing my mother and father did was to find a place
where the hen could stay before being butchered. Our sad little veranda filled the
bill. Not that it was unkempt or abandoned, but that it was hardly the most
appealing part of our house. Objects waiting to be used — a water hose, a plastic
chair, plastic basins, a thinning detergent bar — were kept there. The hen was
nestled among these objects, and she seemed not to mind. She just stood there after
my father set her down, and looked up at the four of us — my father, my mother, my
sister, and myself — as if to say: This is it? Fine. Leave me alone now.

Of course, the hen wasn’t arrogant. She didn’t have a right to be, for a number of
reasons. First: She was dirty and stank to high heavens. She had left a chicken coop
but the smell stuck to her grimy white feathers and anyone could smell chicken
droppings within several feet of her. Second: She’s a bird, and having a bird brain
never guaranteed anyone or anything intelligence. And third: She’s a mere ingredient
for tinola. Any pomposity she might have had would end up anyway in our bellies,
never to be noticed again.

Actually, despite the unpleasant smell and appearance, the hen had her redeeming
qualities. During the days she lived in our veranda, not once did she bother us with
noise we had come to expect from chickens. We were not dragged out of our sleep
by some crowing, some tiktilaok! that she might have been suppressing since she
arrived in our house. One would’ve forgotten the hen’s existence had she not been
put in our veranda, where it was impossible not to see her as one entered or left our
house. Also, she didn’t try to escape. She only stood, or sat, where she was placed,
laying her silent clucks where we wouldn’t hear, like deftly concealed eggs.

I named the hen Knorr, as a sort of joke.

And so Knorr lived. For several days. My mother would feed her moist cooked rice
and, later, when my mother noticed Knorr wasn’t fat enough for our pending tinola,
some pellets that were supposed to put a bit more meat in her. Whether or not Knorr
gained weight wasn’t a concern for me. I wasn’t even concerned with the hen herself.
Naming was just about the best display of affection I could ever show her. And the
few times I got a glimpse of her whenever I left the house, there was always that
calm, that silence. It almost felt like the passing of a cloud, a small mute patch of
storm cloud, in our veranda.

Came the next Sunday. Knorr had been living for seven days under our roof, and on
the seventh day she was to rest, as God did. She would be laid to rest finally, in our
tinola. But first, we had to kill her.

For that, my father initially sought my sister’s help because I was just having my
breakfast then, having gotten out of bed late, as usual. But my sister made it clear
that she would only put her hands on the chicken once it was cooked.

And so it had to be my hands.

“Hawakan mo diyan, kuya,” my father said, indicating one of Knorr’s wings and her
feet.

I held her. Though my father had washed her with tap water, still the smell of chicken
dung wafted from her feathers as she struggled under our grip. I turned my face
away, to avoid the little rain of water she unleashed as she made those sudden
jerking movements, which I assumed were her brave yet vain attempts at escape. My
father held her head with one hand and a small sharp knife with the other. With
steady hands he slit her neck. I didn’t see how the blade was buried in her, but from
where I stood I saw a small stream of blood pour from her and onto a cup set in our
kitchen sink.

How did it feel to take part in the killing of a chicken?

To feel that small, defenseless living thing struggle under your iron grip?

At first, there was an element of excitement in the knowledge that you could snuff
out life, or help to do so, in a matter of minutes, or seconds. To snuff it out, like the
flame of a candle with a rumor of wind from your lips. Easy-breezy. All you needed
was the right creature, an inferior being that couldn’t fight back. Of course, in some
other cases we would be urged, in our defense, to tell others that it fought back, so
we had to kill it. So we had to be gods. Gods of death to devour the dead, to live by
the flesh of the dead.

That afternoon the tinola was finally cooked after a week of fattening up our captive
hen. As was expected, it was delicious. Was it because of the papaya we got as well
from my godfather’s farm? Was it my mother’s cooking? Was it because of the
poultry feed Knorr consumed prior to being slaughtered?
I remember looking at my bowl. I had one of the wings; it must have been the one I
gripped that morning. Then I remembered Knorr’s struggle.

Something in it suddenly struck me — an epiphany, if you may. What if Knorr

struggled, not because she was expecting to break free from us on her own? What if
this struggle was her own helpless signal for help? From me, or even from my father?
From ourselves, her murderers?

But one thing was clear: We didn’t notice. We were cowards, my father and I. We
were not brave enough to stop each other, to stop ourselves, from slaughtering her.
From using our iron grip. From turning her into tinola.

And so we went on eating. Went on sipping the broth and chewing on her fat,
cooked flesh.

Knorr was brave to struggle; she was strong, to some extent. Against her we were
weaklings, unable to fight off our own power and hunger.

We have our own chickens to slaughter inside us.

 ANIMALIA
By Wilfredo Pascual

1.

One night in 1979, my father saw a bat inside the bedroom. My young parents
turned thirty that year and I was twelve, the oldest of three children. We had just
moved into my grandparents’ two-story house in the central plains of Nueva Ecija,
Philippines, after my grandparents had migrated to the United States. There were six
empty bedrooms in that house, but my father preferred that we all stay in one room.
He tore down the wall of two adjacent rooms upstairs. On one side was my parents’
bed and on the other side their children’s. Between these two areas was a twelve-
inch portable television on a table pushed to the wall. Next to it was a huge altar that
housed a tall, framed image of the Virgin Mary and her child Jesus. We were
watching television the night my father saw the bat and the lights were out, which
was probably why we failed to notice the arrival of our leather-winged guest.

My father stood and turned on the lights. No one spoke as we watched him walk
towards our side of the room and stand facing the wall, his eyes fixed. Without
turning to us, he quietly told us what he saw: “Paniki.”

We slowly walked to the wall, looked up and saw it too, the tiny bat, its body no
more than three inches long, clutching our yellow curtain with its clawed leather
wings. We stood there, puzzled, knowing how impossible it was for the bat to have
entered through the windows. The tall window frames were covered with screens of
fine wire mesh to protect us from mosquitoes. It was built with tiny openings just big
enough for our arms to reach outside and pull the frosted glass panes, and all these
tiny openings were locked that night.

My father turned on the lights. We saw another bat crawling on the floor. Quickly, we
looked around and to our horror we found another on the bed headboard, on the TV
set, the study table. I turned to my father but he quickly left the room. When he came
back, he was holding a broomstick. I couldn’t imagine killing all of them but I also
didn’t know how else to drive them out of the room. Next thing I knew, my mother
was armed with a long-handled plastic dustpan, my sister rolled a newspaper, and
my brother raised his hand holding a ruler. I grabbed one of my rubber sandals.

I looked around and decided on one near the door, its clawed wings clutching the
doorknob. To avoid breaking anything in the room, we first brushed the bats away or
flung and tossed them. We hit them till they were thrown crawling on the floor where
we crushed their slender bones and bludgeoned them. Soon the bats were darting,
swooping, swirling and looping in the air, wing to wing. The bats heated the air with
their body temperature turning that cold night into hours of humid killing. We didn’t
know where they were coming from. We found them behind curtains, on ashtrays.
Finally, my father saw a bat’s head protruding from a crack below the air conditioner,
the mammal squeezing itself, forcing its way in. He bashed it and finally corked the
tiny opening with the bat and what remained of its crushed head dangling.

After several more hours, it was over. Pale with exhaustion and disbelief, we stared at
the dead bats that littered the bedroom. We scooped them into sacks and garbage
cans and threw them outside.

Many years later, I read about bats and remembered that night. I wondered how the
tiny creatures made sense of their ultrasonic cries, bouncing hard and fast, providing
a picture of our bedroom, their cries too loud and high beyond human hearing. Did
they follow one another, parent and child? But I thought if their hearing could tell the
difference between the solid echoes bouncing off electric posts and the light fluid
echo of a falling leaf, surely they could echolocate pain, fear, and death. I remember
one of them opened its mouth again and again and I knew it wasn’t snarling. It was
making sounds, yelling, shouting, and listening to echoes because it knew no other
way to find its place in this world.

I will always remember that night when we killed the bats because that is how I later
came to realize why some stories would never be silenced. Humans don’t hear well
enough. But that’s not the point. Each waking moment a voice screams, sometimes
whispers, and a story bounces back against a landscape, a political event, and the
whole of humanity and what it fails and aspires to be, all of these echo back to the
source, year after year—amidst typhoons, migrations, fiestas, death, revolution, and
romance—and it is all that matters.

2.

What’s your most memorable meal? The question was posed one rainy night in 2012
in Colombo while my friends and I were enjoying Sri Lankan dishes in a hotel. When
my turn came to share my story, waiters in orange cotton shirts were serving us
wafer-thin, bowl-shaped pancakes made of rice flour, coconut milk, and palm wine.

It will never happen again, I began, this lunch I had in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. I was
working at the university-based freshwater aquaculture center surrounded by man-
made ponds, tanks, and rice paddies. My job was to help edit the proceedings of a
Southeast Asian conference on rice-fish farming. This was in the late 1980s. Around
that time a British scientist from Swansea was conducting initial genetic experiments
on tilapias. He was feeding them estrogen and androgen in the ponds, reversing
their sexes in a matter of weeks. Male tilapias are bigger and grow faster. The idea
was to make them all male to address the problem of hunger in the developing
world.

One day a typhoon hit the central plains. I was at work, but nobody thought of going
home. We were used to it. As students, we would brave the deadly wind and run
along the university’s main avenue lined with mango trees, the whirling leaves and
twigs whipping our faces. Branches snapped, flew, and hit the pavement and
buildings with loud cracks. We picked up green mangoes from the ground and filled
our bags, occasionally pausing to grab a bite of the fruit, its sour, tart taste giving an
extra kick to our howling harvest. We had no thought of the sobering headlines the
following day—the destruction, the flooding, the drowned.

I was looking out the window when a group of excited students from the College of
Fisheries barged into the office. They were very wet and carrying bunches of green
mangoes. Something was happening in the ponds, they said. We rushed outside, no
umbrellas or raincoats, straight into curtains of downpour. In the field we saw the
laborers running back and forth. The wind whipped the flooded ponds and the sex-
reversed tilapias had escaped. They were jumping all over.

I thought of catching them but had no idea what to do after that. Throw them back
to the pond, I suppose. But we already looked like we were walking on water. Most of
the staff ran back to the main building for shelter. I didn’t. I followed the others, the
students and laborers who ran to a tiny wooden shelter, its rusty corrugated iron roof
rattling violently.

There were probably half a dozen of us inside. It was warm and smoky. On the dirt
floor, somebody was cooking steamed rice, fanning flames under the blackened pot.
Another was busy peeling green mangoes and cutting slices into a plastic bowl.
Another opened a can of mackerel. Over low fire, they grilled fish rubbed with rock
salt. I stood there, shivering, wide-eyed like the others. We huddled in that tiny
square of earth, staring at the biggest tilapias we had ever seen.

There weren’t enough tin plates for everybody, so I had to use the cover of the pot.
JB, one of the students, grabbed the only spoon we had and scooped out rice from
the pot and served it on my “plate.” He had taken off his wet shirt. He had smooth,
dark skin. His chest glistened, his biceps looked like the solid muscle of a fish
struggling against my grip. He popped a crunchy slice of green mango into his
mouth and chewed its sourness with relish. I felt it in my mouth, sharp and tart. I
gulped. Meanwhile, the wind howled and the walls shook. We poured the mackerel
mixed with vinegar and chopped onion over our rice.

We ate with our fingers, our bodies and faces covered with mud. JB turned to me and
offered the transgendered tilapia. Our eyes met. I did not even look at the fish as I
tore a piece of its steaming flesh and tasted it. It was delicate, soft and moist, flecked
with rock salt and burnt scales. It melted in my mouth. Meanwhile the waters rose. JB
and I were still eyeing each other. Nabokov once said that only one letter divides the
comic from the cosmic. This is it, I thought. I am going to die; desire and disaster in
one bite, my transition marked by the reversal of the laws of nature, the waters
obliterating all borders, turning females into males and men into ghosts of their
former fish selves.

3.

In 1994, a group of British and Japanese entomologists invited me to see their work
in one of Thailand’s national parks. We entered the forest at night, climbed a gentle
slope and emerged into an impressive clearing, an immense plateau. In the middle of
this field was the project area, a grid that consisted of what looked like rows of small
tables covered with white cloth. Some of the tables were lit underneath. I never
understood what the study was about. But I remember the site’s lambent glow and
the hushed voices as the scientists identified and counted the insects drawn to these
squares of white light, rows and rows of them.

I examined the bugs, though I had no clue what I was looking at; they all looked the
same. After a while I got bored and decided to explore the rest of the clearing. I
walked slowly towards the horizon, marveling at how this plateau on a hilltop could
stretch so far. I may have walked a hundred meters away from the project area when
I saw something that made my heart stop. What I thought was land extending far
into the horizon turned out to be a thick forest canopy. I was, in fact, already
standing on the edge of a ravine. I must have stared at the lights so long that it took
a while for my eyes to adjust and see things as they were. I easily could have fallen
over the edge.

I looked back and saw that my companions had followed me. With the illuminated
field behind us, we stood on the edge of the ravine surveying the forest canopy, as if
we were standing on a shore looking out at a vast phosphorescent ocean. I can’t
remember who turned to whom first, but at some point we all looked at each other
nervously. “Don’t move,” somebody whispered.

We all felt it. A mild tremor. Don’t move? Shouldn’t we be moving away from the
cliff? But we stayed there, motionless. We heard rustlings in the forest canopy.
Branches cracked. Treetops shook. Down there, something huge and noble moved
and left us breathless. The earth didn’t tremble. What we felt turned out to be the
vibration made by a herd of elephants communicating with one another, a rumbling,
low-frequency sound an octave lower than the human male’s voice. We felt it
drumming our chest.

4.
When I was in college, my father opened a beer garden in a vacant lot right next to
our house. He called it the Plaza Azucena Grande—its specialty: dog meat. Every
afternoon the cook hung dead dogs on hooks and blowtorched them. After scraping
the burnt fur, he grilled and chopped the meat into bite-sized pieces. He added
vinegar, onion, and calamansi to make kappukan; or potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots
simmered in coconut milk to make caldereta; or the dog’s blood for dinuguan. The
Azucena became a popular meeting place for the military and politicians who arrived
in the evening with their handheld radios and guns.

One time I found a dead dog inside our freezer at home, its body curled, fur scraped,
the leathery white skin frosted. Its eyes were an opaque, glassy blue-gray, its half-
open mouth resembling a grin. It was repulsive. Sometimes it sat right next to the
frozen chicken. I wanted to protest but canine consumption was not unlike the reality
I grew up with in a town marked by the violence of small-town politics. The laughter
and smiling faces disturbed me, the reassuring images of family and friendship
played against a backdrop of guns and dog carcasses.

I feared my father, dogs, and guns. When I was a little boy, armed men and two
fierce dogs guarded my grandfather’s house at night. Their names were Ali and
Queenie. They were kept in a cage and my cousins and I would dare each other to
stand in front of them and brave these dogs. The sight of us made them leap and
snarl death to our faces. Our presence drove them wild. I wondered whether that was
how they were trained to become ferocious.

My father also had a small dog with fluffy brown and black fur he named Bracky.
Bracky wasn’t kept in a cage but chained in front of the house. It was my duty to feed
him. Sometimes my father would unchain him and I would run back inside the house
in fear. From the window, I would watch him run around the garden. He ran in a big
circle along the walls and the gate, claiming freedom and dominion over our house.
When my father called for him to be chained again, Bracky never protested.

The year after my father opened the beer garden, he was diagnosed with ALS
(Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a progressive neurological disease. It paralyzed my
father’s digestive and facial muscles. His motor movements degenerated. His eyes
stopped moving and his voice became garbled. Later, he developed his own sign
language, which took a while for me to understand. When he asked for my mother,
he would cup both his palms over his chest, indicating, I realized later, women’s
breasts. The disease had no cure, so my family went to church together, something
we had never done before. My father asked us to pray the rosary. My mother hid his
gun.

One day I saw my father kneeling in front of the grotto in our front yard. I left him
alone and went back to my room. Moments later I heard Bracky’s cry. I was about to
go out to see what was happening when I stopped. I listened carefully to this
tormented bellow. It began to sound less like Bracky and yet it did not sound human
at all. It was my father wailing.

My father was sent to the United States to seek better medical care. Being the oldest,
I was left in the Philippines to manage our properties. Although our farm yielded a
record harvest while my parents were away, my inexperience and irresponsibility left
us bankrupt that year. I easily gave in to the farmers’ requests for loans. Their
children were always sick. I would give them money and lose track of it in my records.
I hated harvest season. It was hot, and the rice husk made me itch. I went to the rice
fields wearing headphones. While the rice threshing machine ran, I sat in a corner
and read a book. Later I became restless. Sometimes I would go away for days
climbing mountains or visiting friends in the city. One day I returned home and
learned that the cook had left Plaza Azucena Grande. We had to close it. A few days
later, Bracky died. Somebody poisoned him, I was told. We buried him in the
abandoned beer garden.

After my father died, there was very little to remind me of my father’s first and last
trip to the United States except a box of documents and letters. I was left alone with
it, his medical records, notes on his recommended daily diet, get-well-soon cards
from loved ones, letters, including the last letter my father signed, waiving the
airline’s responsibility if something happened to him on his flight back home. I would
go through them whenever I got lonely. One morning I found a cassette tape in the
box. It was a recording of my family reciting the rosary. We taped it the night before
my father left for the US. When I played the tape I realized that along with our
prayers, we also recorded Bracky barking and howling in the background.

I have this one gentle memory of Bracky before he died. I was sitting on the patio
when I felt something hairy brush my legs. I jumped when I saw him beside me. He
raised his head and looked at me. I waited for him to snarl and bare his fangs but he
just lay by my bare feet. My skin felt his warm fur. My heart raced as I touched him.
He closed his eyes. I rubbed his fur and patted him. He turned on his back and raised
his paws. I touched his belly. I felt a gentle rhythm there, something stronger than
the violence and fear that bonded us. Consider the loved one that mysteriously
drives you to unexplainable loathing and fear. With my father’s dog, it was easier—
but with my father, love in its most mysterious way was a harder lesson to learn. I left
the Philippines two years after my father died. I have been away for more than
twenty years now. I used to make regular trips back home and I would ask people
about what truly happened back then. On one of my trips, the caretaker of the family
ranch told me a story. During those desperate months when my father was losing
hope in finding a cure, the caretaker referred my father to a faith healer. The cure the
faith healer recommended involved a ritual. A stray dog would be captured and
wounded with a small cut on its leg. Blood should trickle and only then would the
dog be let go. The evil spirit that caused my father’s suffering would be attracted to
the dog’s trail of blood and follow him and leave my father alone. What struck me
was what the faith healer said about the dog. “There will be no healing,” he said,
“until the wounded dog returns home.”

5.

It was getting dark in the Sierra Madre mountain range, the Philippines’ oldest forest.
The three of us emerged from ancient trees and giant ferns and found ourselves
along the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A storm charged from afar,
the horizon occasionally lit in spots by quiet lightning. Raindrops dabbed our faces
like electric jolts. “It’s too dangerous to climb down to the beach,” the guide said. I
was disappointed: we would not see the sea turtles. But I did not argue. It was too
risky. My guide’s wife tagged along to pick ground orchids in the forest and she was
pregnant.

Meanwhile, the sea turtles were returning to their places of origin to lay eggs. Recent
advances in satellite transmitters and genetic analysis have allowed scientists to learn
more about the turtles’ astonishing memory. I wondered what it would be like to be
born with an inner compass, to always feel the earth’s magnetic core. Sea turtles
have been around for two hundred million years. In evolutionary terms, they are far
older than birds and dinosaurs. They are notoriously myopic and are guided by light
and darkness. Scientists are beginning to wonder how sea turtles are able to detect
magnetic fields, since oceans and coastlines have unique magnetic characteristics.
Some scientists have speculated that the magnetic location of home is imprinted on
sea turtles’ minds. It’s possible that they are also guided by scent, waves, taste, and
visual cues to the beach of their birth.

How do you store a multitude of knowledge and never lose it across continents and
a lifetime? What does it take and what does it mean to be tuned in constantly to
home, to always retain the elemental signatures of open waters, to hear coastlines
inside you? My own memory fails in comparison. It retains selectively, vanishes in
parts, mutates. And yet I know of astounding instances in my life’s shifting
geographies and my own mercurial identities when a familiar breeze or a particular
freshness bursts on my tongue, or when a pounding rhythm jolts me—moments
when I would tell myself: I know this!

6.

Amid the glare of the afternoon sun in San Francisco I walked towards the plaza at
the corner of 16th Street and Mission. I was about to cross an intersection when the
traffic lights switched. I’m not sure if it was the pedestrians’ urgent rush to cross the
street, but at that point something launched a flock of pigeons into the air. The
flapping of their wings startled me. I couldn’t tell which direction they were coming
from but it felt close enough that I thought they were going to fly straight at me. I
closed my eyes and felt the air ripple in front of my face. As soon as I opened my
eyes I saw what to me appeared like a dream. All at once, the street turned into a
canvas of streaming shadows, giant flight patterns gliding over concrete, cars, and
people. The birds swooped to the ground and it transfixed me, how their rushing
shadows grew bigger on asphalt, then smaller, a dark path that constantly changed
in size and shape. My eyes followed it until everything else faded and all I could see
was a breathtaking ribbon of spectral navigation. It soared and then disappeared. I
can’t remember how long it lasted but after a while it came back and swept me
again, this looping reel of projected flight.

In the 1970s scientists attached magnets to pigeons’ backs to study their homing
ability. In another experiment, they glued a battery-operated wire coil on their heads.
It’s still a mystery. Presumably the cells or something in the cells swivels like iron
filings do in response to a magnet. Some scientists claim that they have found
magnet receptors in the upper bills of pigeons, while others suspect the magnetic
information is located in the ears. The biologist Bernd Heinrich wrote all of this in his
book, The Homing Instinct. He said that animals “seeing” a map of the magnetic
landscape could be literally true. He noted an experiment done on Australian
silvereyes: under bright blue light, the birds oriented along the east-west compass
direction, under green light they reoriented toward west-northwest. Studies indicate
too that pigeons have 53 neurons in their brain that respond to magnetic fields.

7.

One night, my co-worker and I went hiking on a hill overlooking Tomales Bay, a
historic spot in the Bay Area where a wireless telegraph station was built in 1913 to
receive transmissions from across the Pacific. On a moonlit pine tree meadow, we
encountered a mule deer standing a few yards away from us, perfectly motionless.
We remained still, hearts racing, seeing wildlife so close. Why didn’t it move? Surely,
it must have detected our movement, heard our approach. My co-worker said it
didn’t see us; it saw the light coming from our headlamps. I wondered how the deer
saw the world. I thought of the rushing headlights on the road. In 1920, the naturalist
Joseph Grinnell observed a new source of fatalities in industrialized nations with their
new automobiles: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of roadkill in California alone.
Grinnell wanted to understand the unpredictable behaviors and adaptations that
occur when geographic barriers and ecological niches open up. I’m also drawn to
such strange encounters, where they take place—shores, port cities, and highways—
what goes on inside us, and what we turn into at the moment of contact.

At the San Francisco Zoo, I found myself in a dark room with the aye-aye, a lemur
known as the world’s largest nocturnal primate and considered a bad omen in its
native Madagascar. Some villagers kill the aye-aye on sight and display its carcass to
ward off evil spirits. At the Doelger Primate Center, a few aye-ayes are cared for on a
reversed light cycle. I visited the primates during the day, which was “night” for them.
I couldn’t see anything inside the viewing room. It was pitch-black. I groped for walls
and lost my balance. Part of me wanted to leave but the guide encouraged me to be
patient, to let my eyes adjust. I felt the metal railing and held on to it. Gradually my
vision adapted and I became vaguely aware of a new way of seeing. At first I noticed
shadowy greens and blues floating like a hologram. Later, I noticed the same color,
but with lighter, almost phosphorescent hues. Finally, I could almost make out a glass
wall and the branches behind it. I stared long enough at the canopies until
something moved and began to take form. For a long time, naturalists debated what
to make of this creature that looked like a cat but had teeth similar to a rodent’s and
a tail like a squirrel’s. It uses its bony, elongated middle finger to hunt, tapping wood
up to eight times per second, searching for grubs through echoes. But unlike my
incandescent moment with the mule deer, I couldn’t tell exactly what I was looking at
behind the glass, or if anything at all stared back at me. I waited and waited, and it
became clear to me—I wanted the aye-aye to see me too.

We all carry a personal wilderness inside us. And then there are these corners in time,
the edges of place where contact with unfamiliar realms is inevitable. We render the
rest of the world mostly with eyes closed, drawn to what blinds us in stories, and
sometimes we do survive each other’s way of seeing, even thrive in the aftermath.
After much time passes, we wake up to the remains of these extraordinary
encounters—a cryptic litter of bright bones: obsolete technologies, abandoned
buildings, misplaced ektachromes, encrypted files, strands of DNA … The immense
loneliness of ruins, arcane fragments, and loose threads keep me awake at night.
What had been broken becomes eternal; it latches itself to other things. The wayward
universe of the past is my new wilderness and it tugs relentlessly, this epic finding of
a rightful place. It won’t let go.

8.

Bernd Heinrich wrote that the earth’s magnetic fields flip on average once every half
million years. This magnetic flip can occur in the span of a century and mess up
everything. Just like that. All rules could change.

It was dark on the Philippine mountain trail. The guide and his pregnant wife walked
fifty meters ahead of me. They each carried a burning torch to light their way. I was
exhausted, not just from the hike but from lack of sleep. I couldn’t keep up with the
couple. To make matters worse, the trail was strewn with the catastrophic aftermath
of a recent typhoon: collapsed mountain walls, loose soil, giant boulders perched in
the wrong places, trees uprooted. Some parts of the trail had gotten erased. My legs
were weak and my eyes were getting heavy. I could barely make out the trail. Ahead,
the couple lit another torch and left it burning on the trail. After some distance they
would light another and again leave it there. I realized that they were creating a trail
of burning torches to light my way. This got me worried. We could start a wildfire on
the mountain. But they couldn’t wait for me anymore. I needed to rest, so I lay down
on the rocky trail. I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw the couple
kneeling in front of me. The guide raised the burning torch, the light falling on his
face and on his pregnant wife holding a giant bouquet of yellow orchids in her arms.
You have to keep going, the guide said softly. Five minutes, I muttered, and closed
my eyes.

In the old days in my hometown, virile men and wise women, young and old, would
go to the river on weekends to catch fish. I was very young then, maybe four or five. I
have a crisp memory of them grilling fish over fire pits made of river rocks. “Call your
father,” somebody said. “It’s time to eat.” I found my father along the riverbanks,
foraging in his underwear. “Look,” he said, lifting a big wet rock. He showed me
something underneath it—a gelatinous mass. He scraped it using his hand and asked
me to look closer at the frog’s eggs. “Open your mouth,” he said, and I ate it, fresh
and wild, straight from his glistening fingers to my hungry bird throat.

TO GRIEVE IS TO CARRY ANOTHER TIME

MATTHEW SALESSES

1.

I have been reading books about time: theoretical physics, evolution, parallel
universes. Recently I realized that I was reading them because I wanted one to tell
me how to go back in time — to before my wife died of cancer.

In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges our concept of time. Time
passes more quickly the closer one is to a gravitational mass (like a planet or a star or
a black hole). This fact is popular in science fiction. A space traveler might return to
Earth to find that her friends and family have aged more than she has. Even at
different altitudes on Earth, time is different. Rovelli writes that if identical twins
separate early in life and live one in the mountains and one below sea level, then
they will find in old age that the one below sea level has aged more, being closer to
the center of the planet.

Time, Rovelli claims, is not linear. It is a gravitational field. If he is right, time is like
everything else in the universe and must be made up of extremely tiny particles.
There is no past or future; we only experience it this way.

So why, my grief asks, can’t we change times simply by changing our perceptions?
Rovelli suggests that our linear experience of time is due to thermodynamics. The
second law of thermodynamics dictates that the total amount of entropy in the
universe can never decrease, only increase. For us, or at least in our section of the
universe, time operates in only one direction.

As consolation, Rovelli offers the mind as a time machine — we travel via memory.
This is a disappointing compromise. In mourning, memory is only another cause for
mourning. It does not change time, only reminds one that time has passed.
2.

I was adopted from Korea when I was 2. As an adoptee I grew up with a constant
awareness of two times: one in which I lived and another in which I would have lived
if not for my adoption. The latter time was always with me — people often reminded
me that I was living a borrowed life. Either they told me to “go back to my country”
or they demanded my gratitude for sharing theirs.

I had been told that my birth mother was likely a prostitute, and that in my non-
adopted life I would be poor and hungry and likely a prostitute too. As a child I tried
to imagine myself in this second scenario, not because it seemed better, but because
I wanted to belong. I imagined a me the same age as I was, whose birth mother had
kept him even if it made her life more difficult. I doubt I knew what a prostitute was
— I knew only how people looked at me when they said the word, like I should be
afraid of myself.

In the worst fights with my parents, I would threaten to return to Korea to my “real”
family. I was really asking for reassurance that I had one. My parents would tell me to
try it, to go back if I wanted to. They knew I could not. It wasn’t like going to a
friend’s house — I didn’t know where my birth parents were in Korea, or even who
they were, or how to speak to them.

3.

This summer, when my wife died in her Korean hometown, I held her lifeless hand
and thought: Let me go back just one minute. I thought: Don’t leave me yet. Stay
here. To touch her still body, completely different and yet barely changed, was to be
aware that a moment is all that stands between life and death. Time was the only
distance; life felt close by. It seemed as if the only reason I couldn’t go back in time
was that I didn’t know where time was.

After the funeral, I would play with our kids in the apartment we’d rented, and feel
her presence in the other room. I would be about to call out to her when I would
remember who I was now. What I mean is: I didn’t remember that she was dead, I
remembered that I was alone.

In a way, a marriage is two people living in a single time. You learn each other’s
schedules, when to call, when to eat together, who picks up the kids on which day,
who has an appointment when. Strangers constantly ask you to tell the story of how
you met, so that the past becomes the time in which you didn’t know each other.

When my wife died, my life was thrown out of time. My past didn’t seem to connect
to my present. How had the last 13 years turned me into an only parent of two
young children, owner of a house in the suburbs of a Midwestern city with a job that
paid too little to send the kids to child care? It didn’t seem possible that I’d made
those choices. I would never have made them alone. My life only made sense if my
wife was alive.

4.

Memory is essential to storytelling because stories exist in time. If one were to read a
novel random page by random page, the novel would not have its intended effect.
The effect comes from the order in which you read its words: a reader must
remember what she has read before and make connections to what she reads next.

Without memory the sentence you are reading now would not make sense. By the
time you got to the word sense, if you did not remember the words before it, you
wouldn’t know what sense referred to.

Our linear experience of time, combined with our selective memory, means that as
we live, humans construct ongoing stories about who we are. That is: our memories
influence our present actions (you don’t stick your hand in the fire twice) and likewise
our present actions influence our memories (sticking my hand in the fire was not in
vain: it taught me something).

Each recollection of a memory — a process called reconstruction or sometimes

reconsolidation — changes that memory. In her book Reconsolidation, Janice Lee
writes about the risks of remembering her deceased mother: “The emotional or
psychological state you are in when you recall [a] memory will inevitably influence
the reconsolidated memory. Recalling a memory during these stages of inadequacy,
repentance, sought-after impossibilities . . . may be dangerous.”

When your beloved dies, your memory is at risk. Your past no longer fits your story
of who you are. In order to change your story, you must change either time or
memory.

At first, when my wife died, I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the ways I had failed
her. Failure was a logical story that led from my married past straight to my widowed
present. How did I get here? I asked my wife to move to America, where we don’t
screen for stomach cancer. I taught her that hospital visits are expensive and to go
only in clear emergencies. I mistook her cancer symptoms for morning sickness. I
caused stress that exacerbated her illness.

Freud’s idea of healthy grief (mourning, as opposed to melancholy) is the process of

removing your desire from a lost object and reinvesting that desire in
something/someone else. This definition suggests that to grieve your beloved
healthily is to change your love for her. Grief often causes survivors to forget the face
of the dead. That face belongs to a shared time that is lost when the beloved is lost.
To remember is not to time-travel; it is to alter how time feels.

5.

The feeling that your life is not your life is the premise of many stories — Total Recall,
Atmospheric Disturbances, ME, The Doppelgänger. Why does this feeling occur?

In Atmospheric Disturbances, the narrator is convinced that the woman who claims
to be his wife is not really his wife, that his real wife has gone missing. The belief that
a loved one has been replaced by an imposter is called Capgras delusion. It was first
identified in 1923, when a psychiatric patient claimed her husband and children were
“the object of substitutions.” In Atmospheric Disturbances, the narrator’s search for
his wife results in his entanglement (or his belief in his entanglement) in a secret
society that fights wars in parallel universes.

In our quantum world, the multiverse is a natural leap from Capgras delusion. To
think you have entered a parallel universe is a tidy solution to the problem of your
missing reality. One of the most interesting aspects of Capgras delusion is the
element of love. Usually it is not a stranger who has been replaced, but a beloved. In
the 1990s, psychologist Haydn Ellis and others theorized that Capgras delusion is the
result of your mind recognizing a face without feeling the love that you normally
associate with that face.

Love is how we know we are in the right time.

6.

Capgras delusion is like an extreme mirror to imposter syndrome, which is the feeling
that everyone else sees you as an imposter. (They don’t believe you’re a physical
replacement, only that you do not belong where they are.) In imposter syndrome, the
subject himself is the one in question. The subject himself does not feel loved.

This kind of perceived inadequacy often comes up in my Asian American Studies

course, especially when my students of color talk about their mostly white school. I
understand imposter syndrome as a professor of color — and as an adoptee. The
more you feel that you are an imposter, the more that feeling affects your behavior.
As a child I became good at math because I was told that real Asians were supposed
to be good at math.

In Asian American Studies, my students talk about imposter syndrome as dangerous

to their sense of self. If an Asian American kid is supposed to get perfect grades, for
example, it becomes a failure of self to get a B. You build your story of who you are
around the story of who you are supposed to be.
As a kid, the boy I saw each day in the mirror was white, not Korean — I couldn’t
have described my actual facial features. I wasn’t looking in the mirror for something
I recognized. I was looking for something that belonged in my life. I knew that I was
supposed to look like my parents and friends.

An image, like a memory, is not about accuracy; it is about value. We fill up an image
with what we believe is important about it. If that image appears without its value, as
in Capgras delusion, we can’t recognize it. It doesn’t fit our story: it is out of time.

An adoptee like me can look in the mirror and see not the image he sees, but the
image he wants other people to see when they look at him. Viewing himself as an
imposter, he can fill up his image with imposter values. He might be able to love
himself only by replacing his image of himself with the image of other people’s love.

But, as my Asian American Studies students say, it is dangerous to think of yourself

as someone you are not. When the cops show up, you have to remember what you
look like.

7.

The stress of multiple stories is the stress of living in two times at once. A
psychologist friend does her research in a “time lab,” studying how bilingual people
experience time differently from monolinguals. Bilinguals, she says, are often late. It
takes a bilingual person more time to process information. “You can’t turn off
language,” she tells me, and the language(s) you speak impacts your internal “clock.”

In order to understand any symbol you have to recall its associated value. In order to
understand a word you have to recall what the word means. The example my friend
gives me is the word “peacock.” When you read “peacock,” it takes longer to process
than when you read “man,” since you have fewer episodic experiences with the word
“peacock.” For a bilingual person, those episodic experiences are split between two
languages.

Each and every word, each and every symbol and image, has to be processed
through memory and so has a small effect on your sense of time. Why are bilinguals
often late? Their time ticks away little by little. When they live and work among
monolinguals, bilingual people also have to keep track of other people’s time, which
means more processing. It sounds exhausting.

Our memories are supposed to fade. We are supposed to forget. There are some
people whose memories never seem to weaken — like Jill Price, who describes the
condition as “maddening.” In 2017 Price told The Guardian it was “like living with a
split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of
memories.” For sufferers of perfect memory, the past is not recalled — it seems to
play out alongside the present. The cost, for Price, is that painful events from the past
continue to torment her. In some interviews she says she wishes to be normal and in
others she says she wouldn’t trade her memory for anything.

8.

Once in a novel I wrote that my 22-year-old protagonist wanted more than anything
to be old, to look back at his life and know everything had worked out. When you are
young the future stretches endlessly before you, full of possibilities. Now I am 37,
with two kids, and the thought of the future exhausts me. Every day I want to quit the
time I am in and join my wife. Every day I want to rest.

Maybe if I were older, or younger, my body could accept the situation more easily. At
night, thinking about everything I should have done, I can barely sleep. In the
morning my body aches as if it held someone all night.

The first thing I bought after my wife’s funeral was a massage chair.

When I was 23, I went back to Korea for the first time since my adoption. I took a job
teaching English. I flew in before a major holiday (I didn’t know this at the time) and
everything was closed for days. The school housed me in a love motel, where the TV
got two channels, both soft-core porn. I wanted to give up, I wanted to go back to
knowing what to eat and how to communicate: I wanted to return to America. It
seemed clear, at last, that I belonged 14 hours to the west.

And then I showed up for my first day of work and met the woman I would
eventually marry.

Marriage is what allowed me to live in one time, rather than one time in which I was
never adopted and one time in which I was. I married a Korean woman, as I might
have done had I never left Korea. Yet I met her while teaching English, which I could
do because I had grown up in America. We made a shared life, a Korean American
life, and now that shared life is the time I carry.

In my dreams, I go to that other time. I dream that my wife is still in the middle of
cancer treatments, that it is still conceivable she will come out of them okay. I don’t
dream of a time that has never existed — I don’t dream of her recovery. I dream of
taking care of her. I dream that our shared time has simply gone on.

Then I open my eyes, and the present is pain. I keep my other time close for as long
as I can before I forget my dreams.
 SELF-PRESERVATION
George Deoso

I learned to tie a hangman’s noose on my 21st year. The steps were on the internet:
videos, diagrams, how to use it, how not to fail at using it, what it is for. I made it out
of a blanket, and when I stood before the staircase railing, I suddenly thought how it
would be better to celebrate my birthday with an ice cream instead.

In truth, I was afraid and was certain that it would hurt. No one hung himself without
the body flailing. At least according to all the videos I had viewed so far. One article
said asphyxia hurts and the body dying always guarantees pain.

So there’s that: pain and fear. Things one wouldn’t live without, things I’d be glad to
do away with. I have long been certain of the cause. We just didn’t have enough
money for a shrink to formalize everything, put the affliction on paper and prescribe
the usual detours around self-destruction. Also, no one wants a suicidal son.
Especially one who’s bad at being suicidal.

What a secret, then, to keep in your early 20s. Then you realize that it is a secret of
those in their 20s, and of course that doesn’t make you feel any better. You brave
through, though, and realize more things that still won’t make you feel better, but
will make you stay anyway.

For example: my first plane ride. I made it a point to miss my parents’ wedding
anniversary in Iloilo because they would take the plane. Little did I know that months
later, I had to ride one anyway to attend a writers’ workshop.

First flight: Manila to Dumaguete. Not bad, ideally. Except that once I was settled on
the seat, a window seat, I couldn’t help but think of all the people I might have
wronged and if they had forgiven me, or if those who claimed to love me would visit
my funeral.

The usual things to think about as the steel bird accelerated on the runway, carrying
you and your fears with it, as well as your hope that the pounding of your heart
would convince the plane not to nosedive.

After some moments of air turbulence and a few hours later, the plane landed in
Dumaguete. There, I met new people, went to new places, felt as if life was more than
what it appeared to be.

Not that I hadn’t thought of other methods. Crossing the road at the wrong time,
jumping from a certain height, oxalic acid, you name it. All defeated by fear, which is
mine but which I want to disown. Eventually, as with anyone drained of hope, I
turned to religion. One night, I knelt and made the sign of the Cross. Please let me
sleep tonight, please let me not wake up tomorrow.

Of course, defeat pegged me to life. You stay because you discover new things.

There was an earthquake once and I was in the office. Once the oval hardwood table
began trembling and displacing things, my officemates held on to it until the room
stopped moving. They stood then and waited, the PA system promptly brought to
life by announcements.

I had my earphones on and was pretending to have felt and heard nothing. Minutes
later, the aftershocks followed, and when the second one stopped, my officemates
stood up.

“Where are you going?” I asked, removing one of the plugs from my ear.

They looked at me as if I was drunk.

“We’re going out,” they said, “Didn’t you feel anything?”

I might have said yes to them. I couldn’t recall now. What I knew was, I was trying to
play cool, and treat the danger and potential fatality as a bitter pill you had to take
on a daily basis.

One night, my father asked my mother to find a certain document, an old NBI
clearance form. She didn’t find it, but from an old black bag, she retrieved packets of
Kodak negatives, still in their yellow envelope.

“These are your pictures,” she said, “when we were living in Makati.”
We’ve been in Quezon City for almost 20 years now. In the pictures, she said I was
two years old, an age where memory and the need for reasons served little purpose.

She handed me the strips. One by one, I held them against the light, and saw
outlines of my supposed self more than two decades ago. In these, I was sitting on a
staircase, I was standing on a tiled floor, I was shoving a cone in my face, I had a cap
on, I had suspenders. I was a child. Not something you usually thought about.

I asked my mother if I could bring some, so she gave me a couple of strips.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll find a place where these could be developed.”

We could give copies to those who’d show interest, these pictures of a child.

“You have to take care of them,” she said. “Those are the last ones.”

When I went to my room to search for a folder, I saw my shelf and thought the better
of it. I have a graphic adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” huge enough to cover
the length of the strips. I placed them between separate pages, closed the book and
slid it in my bag.

I didn’t know how they would turn out. I might not find a place that could handle
such artifact. Tomorrow, I would see, and I guess I wouldn’t mind waking up again,
and again.