Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural (7 page)

Everyone was too stunned to react. Wiping a dirty, grimy, partially un-fingered hand on an equally dirty, grimy pant leg, he reached across, his arm brushing against Elli’s hair. The beggar slipped his hand into the little bundle of swaddling clothes, and grabbed the baby’s face.

There was a moment of shocked, stunned silence. It was an outrage that no one had words for.

Like a nightmare, everything slowed to a crawl. I wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t. Elli whimpered. The man was smothering, kneading the baby’s face. The man shoved his arm into the bundle, and I could hear the baby’s muffled cries under his dirty hand. It was then that I screamed. At least I think it was me.

That broke the trance.

I can’t remember all the details about that moment. I think the mother grabbed at the man’s dirty forearm with her free hand and tried to pull him off, shrieking. The fat woman across from us joined the shrieking, as did the two high school girls, and the two men down the aisle also started to yell. Pandemonium erupted in the jeepney.

The jeepney skidded and slid violently to a stop at the commotion, throwing everyone off balance.

Broken images: Elli squirming in my lap; our umbrella falling into the aisle and slipping under the seat, the rain swirling into the entrance; the driver turning around and yelling; one of the men grabbing the beggar’s filthy shirt; me, trying to pull Elli away.

Just then, the beggar was seized by another coughing fit so violent he almost doubled over where he half-crouched in the aisle. It caused him to let go of the baby’s face as he covered his own mouth. I remember spittle falling on my arm. He was racked by coughing so violent it seemed to make him forget his plans.

Before anyone could do anything else, he had backed quickly out of the jeepney, his body shaking from the violent coughing, all the while incongruously and primly covering his mouth and muffling his hacking.

He leaped off the running board and fell to his knees in a muddy puddle, his back to us. He seemed dazed, and coughed into the mud again. I saw him pause, grope his face and feel it for a moment.

Then he reared his head back and screamed at the sky, into the rain, an agonized, gurgling, horrible noise. He choked, as if the rainwater went down the wrong pipe. We stared and gaped as he got to his feet and limped quickly away towards a cluster of banana trees off into the fields by the road. He disappeared into the gray sheets of rain.

That was the last I ever saw of him.

The jeepney driver jumped from his seat and shook his fist in the direction of the fleeing beggar, hurling curses with conveniently timed empty bravado. Everyone craned their necks to see, and babbled excitedly. I was silent.

I turned my attention to the baby, who had become quiet after his ordeal. I wanted to see if it was hurt. The mother was swaying it gently. There was a black, oily smudge where the beggar’s hand had soiled the blanket, and I could see the baby’s face was blackened and fouled from the grime of the man’s hand.

The mother groped into her pocket for the small lace handkerchief to wipe the dirt off her baby’s face. She pulled the blanket away from the baby’s head, and then began screaming.

Elli gasped as she pointed at the infant’s face, her own mouth open in astonishment. She cried, “Ma, look!” I didn’t have to look, because at that instant, without seeing, I knew.

I felt cold fingers play an arpeggio on my spine.

The baby’s face was looking up at me, dirty and black, but otherwise it was fine.

The harelip was gone.

Elli doesn’t remember much. At least that’s what she claims. Sometimes I catch her, a pretty, blooming teenager (with long straight jet-black hair with a small streak of white where a dirty arm once brushed against it, a streak that never seemed to go away), peering closely at the faces of beggars who come to the car to ask for loose change, or at scavengers at the dump, with an intent expression crossing her features.

Elli and I and my reluctant husband scoured the areas near the place where the beggar jumped off the jeepney. We never found a trace of him. We spent many hours driving around in our old Corona, looking around the public market, the church, the slums nearby. Sta. Isabel Community Hospital had never heard of him, so we thought he was just a vagrant passing through. Later we would expand the scope of our search, but it was futile.

We’ve kept in touch with the mother and the daughter. The mother, Elsa, applied for janitress in my school and I sort of helped her application along. She works with me now. Her baby’s name is Marissa, and she is one of the most talkative little girls you could ever hope to come across.

And she has the sweetest smile you ever saw.

To this day I still look, and look very hard. If you do see someone like him, won’t you let me know? It shouldn’t be hard to find an old scavenger like that in the city. He’s tall, thin and dirty, with a beard and one eye.

And, I think, a terrible harelip.

Anna Felicia C. Sanchez

There it was, the low gray building embraced by bermuda grass and slender white-barked trees. The sun hung low in the west and drew a halo upon the structure, glazing the treetops golden. Dennis took in the sight, inhaling deeply, then with eyebrows set, shoulders taut and fists clenched, he approached the steps to the entrance. At the top of the steps he froze, because there were shadows on the lobby floor, shadows quivering like tens of dying mice. Then he realized that a breeze was blowing, and that the shadows were only those of the leaves glistening from the treetops. Leaf-shadows, Sarah’s favorite writer called it. He’d been scared by leaf-shadows.

He turned around to gaze at the late shafts of light, the leaves filtering them into gentler rays, then went to sit down by the vending machine on one side of the entrance. He stretched his legs down the flight of steps and raised his head. The trees loomed over the building, over him, reminding him of the woods of a mountain in Agusan, of the first time that he glanced up and saw bark and branch and leaf stretching, crowding, disappearing into the sky. That day, that evening when he and his cousins set up camp under those trees, that was the first time he saw the fireflies. The fireflies that would follow him all the way back to Manila.

They’ll be showing up soon, he thought, gazing at the gathering purple of the sky and the golden beams that grew fainter and fainter through the trees. He could almost smell the evening creeping up the street, coming to him. The trees lined the street, too, that street that led up to the other buildings on campus, and which, on the other end, led down to the housing project where Sarah lived. A brief smile crossed his lips at the thought of walking her home again, of walking with her under the leaves of the trees and the dim light of the street lamps.

Almost half a year ago, they were introduced by his cousin right there outside the lobby, right where he now sat by the vending machine. That time he was standing with a can of Coke in his hands, and it was his cousin he was waiting for, a girl cousin whom he had hiked with in Agusan only the week before and who was attending a teachers’ conference inside the little building. It was late into the evening when his cousin finally stepped out from the lobby with Sarah, and he was gulping down the Coke, trying to wash down his annoyance at having waited so long, and with nothing but the fireflies glowing among the nearby trees to keep him company. Sarah greeted him with an unforced cheerfulness that caught him off guard, but other than that he saw nothing special about her, felt nothing when he shook her warm brown hand. He wondered a little when his cousin declared that they needed to walk Sarah home, but despite that he found nothing unusual about the shorthaired, big-boned young woman. Nothing, that is, until they came to the old, empty guardhouse that marked the boundary between the campus and the projects.

“Lead me, please?” she asked Dennis’s cousin, who complied by linking arms with her. The two women made their way slowly past the little guardhouse, with Dennis’s cousin guiding Sarah’s blind steps. Dennis walked behind them, staring into the darkness of the guardhouse, at the fading, crumbling paint. He saw nothing, and his forehead creased in amused curiosity.

When they turned a corner, Dennis’s cousin relaxed and released Sarah’s arm. “You can open your eyes now,” she said.

“Thanks,” Sarah said, looking short of breath.

He stopped himself from laughing and fell into step with her, asking, “What in the world was that?”

She blushed, he saw by the light of the crowded houses. His cousin signaled to him sharply, and he put up his hands in surrender, smiling. Sarah steered the conversation towards the conference she had attended with Dennis’s cousin, until they reached the two-story apartment that she shared with some college students. She stood behind the gate as the cousins turned to go, but all of a sudden she said his name, and, puzzled, he faced her again.

A light bulb cast a dull glow from one of the upstairs windows, and he could see the smooth curves of her face outlined in the gloom. She bit her lip as she looked up at him, as if she could not make up her mind what to say. Finally she averted her eyes and waved her hand towards something behind him.

Fireflies hovered by a neighbor’s bushes. They were delicate dots of light, looking as if the slightest wind could put them out. He turned back to her, shrugging. “It must be the season. I see them almost every night.”

She cupped her hand under his elbow, very hesitantly, and asked, “Do you see her, too?”

He knew that she did not mean his cousin. Nonetheless, he glanced back at his cousin, who in turn glanced behind her. But there was no one there.

He would find out more about Sarah later, from his cousin who continued to befriend her, and from Sarah herself, who he would later seek out of morbid interest. He had to admit that he had been bored with work that time, weary of the monotony of business and negotiations, so that the thought of Sarah gave him something new to occupy himself with. Thanks in part to his cousin’s urging, he invited Sarah out often—to the malls, to amusement parks, to picnic groves, to dinner—and always she accepted the invitation, laughingly ignoring his questions about that first night they met, about the empty guardhouse and the fireflies.

He was a little disappointed by her refusal to confide in him, but he had the patience of a rock, and soon he knew enough about her to gather together a list of her quirks and qualities in his head: her large eyes disappearing into merry slits whenever she laughed; her love for comedy movies and hatred for films that made her cry; her reasons for majoring in studies on folk literature, and on and on and on. She was his cousin’s co-teacher in the university, and she was drawn to structuralist theories because, she said, they gave her the chance to systematize, to place phenomena and beliefs in a scientific order. She was always vague about which phenomena or beliefs, though, always shuffling topics, talking about her favorite film directors, her small collection of books at home, or anything else that had no relation to what had intrigued him about her in the first place.

Among other habits she had the tendency, whenever the two of them walked together, to cup one hand under his elbow, as if she were helping an old woman cross the street, and at first it annoyed him because her hand, brushing repeatedly against his waist, tickled him no end. But eventually he grew accustomed to her touch, to her peculiarities, to her, and soon they were inseparable.

It must be noted that all this time, almost every night that he was outdoors, the fireflies hovered wherever he went. Always they followed from a distance, so that for the better part of the evening he would forget about them, until he’d turn around and see them lingering several paces away, as nonchalantly as if their presence was as natural as the sun during day. He never saw them in brightly lit places, of course, nor where people swarmed in numbers, but otherwise, they were always there, floating like wan stars that had lost their gravity.

“You’d think people would’ve noticed by now,” he muttered one night while he was in the Riverpark with Sarah, the two of them strolling along the quietly glimmering waters. She said nothing, didn’t even glance behind them.

Another night, the next time he walked her home from the campus because she had had to stay late in the college, he stopped in his tracks along the shadowy tree-lined street and, to Sarah’s amazement, whirled around, dashed and lunged at the fireflies. The lights escaped his hands, dispersing for an instant, and then recollected without missing a beat of their silent, rhythmic flickering. He groaned, utterly exhausted.

That was when Sarah started telling him about what she could see in the guardhouse, what she could see in other places so that the next time she had to pass through them she needed to close her eyes, and what—or who—it was that she could see surrounded by the fireflies that followed Dennis.

“A woman, of incomparable beauty,” she said over coffee in her kitchen. Upstairs, her housemates watched a movie on Sarah’s DVD player. “Her skin is like the moon. Her hair is so long it trails on the ground behind her as she walks, so black and deep and luxurious that you’ll drown in it. And unless you do something, she’ll follow you forever.”

“Sounds like a dream,” he smiled. The back of his neck tingled, and whether it was from fear or excitement, he couldn’t tell.