JUNE 9, 4 a.m.

Another night of bad dreams and now, thirty minutes later, I'm in Katipunan starting this Blog. Outside, the rain is froth; atomies reaching the workstations whenever somebody opens the side door. A really odd time to be in this Internet Cafe. My stomach has turned to a prune; I could sense all the unlucky, sour things that want out as my skin continues to goosepimple. Suddenly, I feel like the neo-Judaeo-Christian god from one of my father's stories. "Usually in a good mood," he told me, "but sometimes the weather or the traffic gets to Him. Every few weeks, at odd times, a grudging visit to zoos or to deserts, Internet cafes or underfunded public parks. There, he revises the script of the world; changing the measures between zebra striations, or digging underneath the dunes, reshaping the forms of the tesseract or scrawling new cryptic messages against rest room walls. By these, empires would rise and be toppled, continents split, plagues released."

But nothing so underhanded from me at this hour. It is now 4:24. The hundred Pesos in my wallet would last until eight. Perhaps, I shall even finish that letter to the College of Engineering's College Secretary. At the moment, all it has is the trite: "Dear Sir, I am blank with student number blank" which is how most letters of appeal in the University open anyway. Before each semester, hundreds of us Galvanis defibrillating our academic lives, starting it just like that. (How many of our works still lie unerased inside the Shopping Center's computers? Once, before her suicide, Olivia and I even thought about collecting.)

I remember that day—in June of last year. Having nothing important to do but wait for some papers, we sat for hours beside the vending machine in front of the Main Library, drinking Milo and coffee, observing the people going in and out. There was a stifling heat. Later on, in the afternoon, it rained with the sun still shining. We were two cunctators; after the rain, the occasional wind had a persistent tinge of vomit but from us, there was no idea of budging.

"Rom," she said "maybe they've got it all wrong. The Hindus and the Buddhists, I mean. What if reincarnation works anticlockwise? And being reborn means bursting farther and farther into the past. We're here now. But are our history books actually our prophecies? Then, maybe, we'll still have to deal with everything we've read about. We're going to look up and worry about where Skylab falls; or get conscripted on opposing camps when World War II comes. Add three centuries more of Spanish occupation for this country. There's a renaissance and the Black Death in Europe. Mongols fighting samurais in Hakata province. Or we could be in Pompeii just before Vesuvius. Then, on to meeting Christ. Never mind there being more humans alive at this moment than all the dead combined. The mathematics can actually sort itself out by—heck, I don't know. Maybe egos would just fuse and fuse until everybody's just a dozen people in Chad."

It seemed Olivia had more to say about that, but she paused, turned to me. "You look a bit harried. So, what's wrong?" said in such a nice singsong tone. She still had such unerring powers of observation—at one point, there were five people in my life who made me worry about psychics actually existing—Olivia was the most perceptive. "It's just that you get that look like you're getting ready to pray. Even while you're speaking."

"Never noticed that before, but no, everything's fine here." Adding a nod just to make it more convincing. I wasn't ready to talk about what really bothered me. (I'm wondering now about that prayerful look Olivia described. I think it's true. And perhaps something that extended to a prayerboy streak I kept hidden inside of me. That day, the streak had written: "Please, oh Great God: not getting kicked out again. . .?")

I can't remember what happened next, if she even believed me and what we talked about right after. But somehow, after a few minutes, we leapt a great deal of topic and got to Alice.

"Do you know. . . you could find the name Alice in 23 or so of Shakespeare's plays?" she asked.

"Really? That's strange. I'm not a big Shakespeare reader, though. Really; he kept on using that?"

"Yep, it's true."

"But why? He couldn't come up with some other names?"

"I don't know. That's just the way it is, I guess."

"Yeah, but there has to be a reason, right? Let's see. . . Alice comes from Aleitia which is Greek for truth." As she smiled, abruptly, I realized that there was something out of kilter. "Wait, is this another one of your weird esoteric sort-of-puns? Because if it is. . ." She didn't answer, just downed her cup of Milo, and seemed greatly amused. I felt something even akin to annoyance tugging at me. Hold it. But there was something there that also mysteriously elated me. I stifled a sigh.

So, resigned to absurdity, I inched back and leaned on the yellow vending machine while staring at the library's revolving doors. Yeah, something there. Something spontaneous—maybe microbial—in the air that was almost unnameable. Well, perhaps the Germans had a term slotted for it already. It was something like a painful Andy Kaufman joke gone unexpectedly right at the last second or a low-flying pterodactyl, suddenly appearing and snatching away me or Olivia, or both of us, or the public payphone near us unexpectedly ringing. Public payphones don't ring in this country. "Hey, it's gone." Olivia said. "That look you had."

"Or. . . maybe you were only imagining it?" I reached for my backpack and took out my copy of Gift, a local comicbook that I had bought earlier. "Seen this before?" I asked.

"No. Is it any good?"

"I like it. It's very sad."

She leaned closer to look at the glossy, mostly-red cover. Prominent, at the center, was a fantastically muscled man—a superhero—clad in tight black pants and shirt, wearing a mask of a red strip of cloth tied around the temples, holes cut out for the eyes. There was a repugnant look of shock on his face; recognizable even with the mask. His whole body was contorted, as though some force had swiveled him to face front, so he could see the handgun on the foreground aimed and ready to fire on him. The setting was at a dark—but red—dead-end alleyway. "Seems like a superhero comic." Olivia said. "But it's okay, I still read those things too."

She started opening random pages and checking out the art but stopped somewhere in the middle. The hero, a scrawny version here of the man on the cover, was now in bed with a buxom, naked woman. Olivia read aloud: "So, what posish would you like to try now?" She lightly rubbed at the paper with a fingertip. "Must be some underground comic. Seems well-funded, enough for reasonably good paper. What's it about?"

"There's this new sexually-transmitted disease in Metro Manila with victims dead seven, eight days after contraction. Cell-degeneration, horrible painful deaths. Before the victim dies, comes a compulsion to copulate and so pass on the virus. It's always a one-to-one ratio of infector to infectee, as far as I can tell. The twist is that right after infection, the individual starts developing extrahuman abilities—super strength, agility—and then becomes a superhero. So, with each issue, you get a new protagonist who gets fucked, fucks again, then ends up dying in the final pages. The sad part here in this issue, is that this guy," I pointed to the cover, "he actually takes the time to tailor his own costume."

"All dressed up and with nowhere to go." Olivia said. "Yeah, I do think it's sad." She asked if she could borrow the comic and, of course, it was okay. Next, she popped open her blue duffel bag and mechanically began piling its contents on the ground. "So, you're borrowing which one?" Some nine books stacked up in two piles; I recognized Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Borges' Labyrinths, Cortazar's Blow-up and Richtenstein's Toscanini in Love. Beneath the left pile was the red slide folder. I knew Olivia's manuscript was inside.

"This one I finished in the FX on my way here. It's a poignant love story between a consumptive and the demiurge; the story revolves around the National Capital Region's phones' upcoming shift to an 8-digit numbering system from the current seven. Very weird." That thin black paperback she handed me which I've since read was Brewster Jones' Rest Room.

"And this one," she picked up a much thicker purple tome, "Scheherazade, has a dream within a play within the novel. Got that? I'll tell you the first two chapters or whatever. The novel is set in modern day Rennes-le-Chateau with Uemasu, a Japanese psychic hunting for Sauniere's treasures. The quest leaves him a blind quadriplegic in a small backwoods Rennes-le-Chateau hospital. Bored beyond his wits one afternoon, he begs the ward nurse for stories. 'Tiens. . . je pense qu'il y a quelque chose d'interet dans la réserve.' She comes back with a tattered copy of an old, English play, Zakarion, and reads to him. The play: Freud was in the Vienna of 1920's, in his clinic, when in walked his good friend, Arthur Nothnagel, then president of the Rothschild Bank. 'I've had this dream', he began, 'maybe you can tell me what it means'. And he went on to recount its many twists and turns. Hey, Rom, all I'll tell you about the dream is that near the end, Arthur finds himself inside a barricaded bar, Scherazade. It is nighttime in London. Already inside are the half-dozen characters previously encountered in that dream: a vomiting teacher, a Piedmontese priest, a homunculus, an Irish burn-victim, a mother and her seven-year-old. Outside, just beyond the unlighted corner where Nothnagel hadn't quite dreamed anything yet, there is something standing. It's out of their sights, very frumious; so all of them start feeling some later horror. 'What is it, really?' 'Is it going to kill us?' After a while, the priest confers to Nothnagel an interpretation of what the dream was about, what each event and character represented. 'So you see, child, that fellow skulking out there is the devil, the Morningstar himself!' 'Borborygmus! Very wrong', the Irish shouts, then offers a new analysis. Soon, everybody is part of the cacophony: 'The sky! You saw the evening sky as red because of latent sexual blocks!', '. . . and this little chap is Rory, your childhood friend—killed by mustard gas during the war!', 'No!'. Back to the play: 'So, which one of them do you think was right, doctor?' Ah, but Sigmund also jumps into the fray; 'I feel you should not put too much weight into the teacher's explanations. Surely, beneath the surface lie your Oedipal desires. We should explore those now.' 'But, Sigmund, the homunculus has dismissed that theory already.' 'What? The fool!' It's very funny, Rom, how he then starts arguing with all the dream psychoanalysts. I mean, how could Freud know better when he's outside? Nothnagel explains how matters get more confused afterwards. A howl erupts; the mother carries her son away from the windows. This book that the kid's been keeping drops to the floor. Irish picks it up, begins reading. It's about this treasure hunter in Rennes-le-Chateau. Just try to imagine who that is."

I looked at my watch. "Okay, I will. But how about we go to Kalayaan and get some isaw first?"

"Now?"

"Yeah, now. Unless you'd like to stay here a bit longer." The truth was that I couldn't wait for us to stand and amble away. Olivia came to ". . . howl erupts; the mother carries her son. . ." when I noticed a faded-out, green, Storck wrapper behind my left rubber shoe. As I moved to unstick it, a slight gale arrived to pick it off, leaving me in mid-motion. Instanty, it struck me how familiar the entire period became: Olivia to my right—she was revealing the story of a novel, but not the novel Scheherazade—, the Storck wrapper plus the wind carrying it, the other books still stacked, stocky security guard visible through the doors, myself in mid-motion; I knew all these had happened already. A while later, a pretty, goth freshman with short, unruly hair and an exposed midriff came bounding out of the building. The guard's sharp features had then bent in consternation as the freshman's elbow collided with his ribs; she moved past, not noticing. She glanced in our direction for a second, the wind ruffling her hair a little more, then, walked down the steps and was out of sight. Those few moments also seemed odd, to me nothing more than recurrences. It was déjà vu, I realized. And I was being ushered on by it as the wrapper was by the breeze. It looked to be in an epicyclical path. ". . . about this treasure hunter in Rennes-le-Chateau." Olivia said and I knew she had spoken those same words before. Knowing that, itself, was another recurrence. I looked at my watch. 'Perhaps this 2:25 p.m. is old. And if this has happened already, then maybe I am really somewhere else—in the future, just remembering these events in detail'

Dawn broke half an hour ago. Beside me, not a smudge of rain is left on the brown, glass window. But behind, over Marikina, black and turgid clouds are still hanging. Cars and jeepneys glide past outside but a bottleneck would soon pick a moment to leave the later vehicles in a torpor.

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