DELIVERANCE

Some years ago, there lived in a muddy, crowded neighborhood in Manila a man named Ignacio “Nacho” Migueles, who was a novelist and retired professor of comparative literature. He had lost his wife many years before this story begins. Because they’d had no children together, he had lived alone in a small damp apartment ever since, without friends, without pets, without even so much as a plant to keep him company. The apartment reeked of cigarettes, and often in the morning, it had the smell of stale beer, gin, and sweat. Except when he went to the market to replenish the kitchen cupboard, he never went out. Instead, he sat all day in his apartment in just his undershorts and sandals, sweating, slapping at mosquitoes, and drinking or -- when the muse was inclined to favor him – working on his next novel.

Professor Migueles wrote detective novels, but he never spoke with anyone about his stories or his academic career, nor did anyone ever speak or write to him -- except perhaps the landlord. Even then, it was only to slip a note under the door when he was late on the rent. He would sigh, read the note, take off his glasses, and wipe sweat from his eyelids. After a while, he would trudge back to the sofa in the living room and return his attention to his book.

Perhaps it was because, after years of living alone, Professor Migueles had lost the skill of polite conversation. Or perhaps it was because the way he walked gave him a decidedly scornful appearance -- with his shoulders drawn, his bony, grey face jutting forward, and his grey brows furrowed into a V above his beady eyes. For whatever reason, it was clear even to the professor that he was unpopular. And as is often the case with people in this unfortunate position, not even sure what mistake he’d made, he was perpetually aloof and irritable, muttering to himself whenever he brushed against people or even the occasional dog in the street.

“Doesn’t anybody watch where they’re going anymore?” he’d grumble under his breath. “Is it so hard not to walk into objects in front of you?”

While Professor Migueles liked to regard himself as a man of some self-restraint, there were moments when the wretchedness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, damp heat of the apartment -- which was on the second floor of a decaying old building full of mice and strange, stuffy smells -- made him clench his large, crooked yellow teeth in anger.

Who would have thought that he, Ignacio Migueles, once the most fastidious of men, an educated and well-read man almost fanatically devoted to learning and neatness, could come to this? “So, this is what it’s like to be poor, old, and alone?” he’d say to himself, angling one eyebrow toward the ceiling.

If life had become for Professor Migueles less and less the magical adventure he had once thought it was, it now more often seemed a joke in poor taste. Seething, he would then bring the heel of his fist down on the kitchen table, rattling the coffee mug, plate of rice, and leftover salted dried fish he had laid out for breakfast.

But he was still alive. Every man who survives in this world has at least one talent that sustains him, however miserably. For Professor Migueles, it was his memory. He remembered objects, names, pathways, images, melodies, poems, and stories. He remembered the books he had read -- from the Roy Rogers Big Little Books series of his boyhood to Homer, Kierkegard, Herodotus, Jose Rizal, Hemingway, and Alexander Dumas. He remembered Blake and Shakespeare, too.

The retired professor remembered people’s faces, the odors, spaces, and corners of rooms he’d been in, and the names of his former colleagues’ children. His memory of his own childhood was a fog, not because he didn’t remember it, but because it was like a meandering and monotonous nursery rhyme, like light filtering through the curtains in the morning, making the dust particles dance as he swept the floor with a broom. Even so, his memory was a remarkable gift, given the fact that he had seen much of the world in his youth. His memories populated his novels with astonishingly real characters and settings: priests, policemen, widows, town mayors, street sweepers, cab drivers, con artists, marketplaces, and bazaars.

Professor Migueles often credited his mother, a schoolteacher, for instructing him in the art of tricking the mind into recalling things it might otherwise forget. He used to the tell his students that when he was a small child, his mother had advised him to keep text for memorization under his pillow while he slept. He did as she instructed, and he soon discovered that he could read a short, simple poem once and recite it from memory immediately. By the time he was twelve years old, he had learned to memorize large chunks of the Bible by heart, not only the stories, songs, and the poetry, but the lists, the laws, and the genealogies. When he drew a picture, he never forgot it. He could replicate the drawing over and over again, from simplified paramecia for science class, to Ingres’ pencil portrait of the violinist Paganini that he had copied from a book.

“I would have been a wonderful painter, you know,” he used to tell his wife, Cielo. “I could have done it.”

“Of course, dear,” she’d say, sitting beside him at supper.

“We all have to make choices,” he’d say, almost wistful.

He would sit picking at his food, saying nothing more while he ate. If there were hairs in the rice, he did not notice. Years ago, he’d said something to her once about a hair in some broth, and it had caused a terrible scene. Cielo cried and cried. She rose from the table and ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom.

“You don’t love me,” she had said. “Why did you marry me in the first place?”

He had stood in the hallway in their old home – a two-story house outside of the city which Cielo had inherited from her parents -- calling to her through the door, begging for forgiveness. He’d even wept, but purposely, hoping to convince her. “I do love you, and you know it,” he said. “I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else. I think about you all the time and I remember you in my dreams, even.”

So, it was with some exasperation –given what he assumed was an ungodly hour -- that Professor Migueles looked at the number on his phone again, because he didn’t recognize it. He had received a dozen calls from the same number the day before. He’d received more than ten calls from the same number that day. The ringing – if you could even call the sound the darned contraption made ringing – had roused him from what was deep slumber. Quickly, after the first startled instant, he’d sat up in the dark and picked up, thinking, with a tingling of urgency, that there was a fire in the building or some other emergency, and that someone -- the landlord, perhaps -- had remembered to call him. “Hello?” he’d growled into the device, but the line went dead.

Now Professor Migueles blinked, rubbed his eyeballs with his knuckles, and tossed the phone on the coffee table. Sitting in the living room in the dark, he realized that he had fallen asleep on the sofa. He glanced around the apartment and looked at the clock on the coffee table. He was mortified to see that it was 3 A.M. Why on earth would anyone be calling him at such an hour?

“Rude is what it is,” he said, rolling his eyes in the dark and shaking his fists at the ceiling in indignation. “Who calls at this hour?”

Even his agent, who worked in an office he had never seen halfway around the world, knew better than to call past midnight. He had work to do, after all, and all the more urgently because, for weeks now, his creative fountainhead had offered him nothing but dust. Still, his New York agent had been pestering him to send at least one chapter of by the end of the week. He had already made several advances against royalties for the unfinished manuscript, and he had been working furiously on a chapter for ten days straight. So far, he’d come up with nothing. Yet he labored on, struggling to think and write – pacing around the apartment, stirring the thick, heavy air with a blue Panasonic electric fan, taking frequent showers and, when depression weighed him down, trying to sleep, sprawled half-naked, his legs and arms thrown wide on the musty, tumbledown sofa, the green cushion covers worn so thin they were coming apart at the seams.

“If it was an important call, they would have sent a text message,” he thought to himself. “If it was an important call, they would have introduced themselves properly before calling."

Professor Migueles was lost in these thoughts, perhaps even drifting to sleep for a few minutes, his eyes closed, his mouth formed into an O, and his head cocked to one side, when his phone rang again. He looked at the phone blinking on the coffee table, and, to his astonishment, saw that the same number was calling.

“All right,” he declared aloud, snatching the phone from the coffee table. “This insanity ends now.” He flicked the green button on the screen and brought the phone to his ear. “Hello, who is this?”

“Hello?”

It was a female voice – a girl’s voice: a voice Professor Migueles was sure he’d never heard before. He listened for a moment. Silence. He pressed his ear against the phone, trying to detect noises in the background. There was nothing. “Who is this?” he said again.

“Hello?” said the voice at the other end.

“Yes?” Professor Migueles said. “Who is this?”

“You don’t know me,” the voice said. “I don’t know you, either.”

“All right,” said Professor Migueles. “Enough of this. Now listen here, whoever you are, stop calling. Go pick on someone else. I’m an old man and I am tired. Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m about to kill myself.”

Perhaps as much a minute passed. At last, Professor Migueles straightened his back, shifted in his seat, and switched on the lamp on the coffee table. He hunted around for his glasses, found them under a magazine he’d been reading, and put them on.

“Hello?” said the voice on the other end. “Are you still there?”

“Who is this?” Professor Migueles said again. He waited for an answer, drumming his fingertips on his knees. When none came, he said, “How did you get my number?"

“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “I really don’t know why I called you. I just dialed a number. Forgive me, I will --”

“How did you get this number?” Professor Migueles pressed, his voice rising.

There was another silence. Again, he waited, eyes rolled toward the ceiling, his face squeezed into a scowl. “Well?”

“I’m sorry,” the voice said, slow and tremulous. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I will not bother you anymore. I’m sorry.”

“No, wait,” Professor Migueles said. “Wait.”

“I said I’m sorry,” the voice said, sniffling.

“Are you actually crying?” Professor Migueles said, suddenly quite thrown. He glanced around the apartment as though looking for a clue as to what to say next. The caller was either insane or deadly serious, and he had decided that it would have been indelicate, even for him, to say anything dismissive.

“You would cry, too, if you were me,” the voice said. “You think you’re smarter? You think you’re so much better?”

“Calm down and give yourself a moment to think,” Professor Migueles said. “Calm down.”

“Think about what?”

“Whatever it was you said you were going to do.”

“You mean kill myself?”

“Well, yes,” Professor Migueles said. Timid as he was when it came to giving other people personal advice, he found himself – quite surprisingly -- reacting to the voice with unselfconscious concern. “Don’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Professor Migueles said.

He listened for a moment, then heard an exhausted sigh at the other end of the line. He remembered how his wife used to sigh the same way -- with a soft, barely audible whistling sound toward the end. The memory pierced his heart like a knife.

“Stupid?” the voice said, stung. “Stupid? You think it’s stupid?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Professor Migueles said. “I don’t know you. I don’t know why you called. Yes, you might be in some sort of trouble. But if you think killing yourself is the answer, then you are probably an idiot. Go back to sleep.”

“Now that is stupid.”

“Is it?” said Professor Migueles. “When was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Exactly,” said Professor Migueles. “Is there no one there to sit with you a while? Where are your parents?”

“What makes you assume that I live with my parents?” the voice said.

“I do not know what to assume,” Professor Margueles said. “I suppose I had guessed you live with your parents because you sound very young. May I at least know your name?”

Her name was Alice. She was, as he’d guessed, in her twenties; a Manila native; and though she did not tell him what was troubling her, she made her situation clear enough.

“It’s incredible,” she said. “One of my grandfathers is a hundred years old. The other is eighty-five. But I guess it doesn’t matter. When God chooses to kill you, there is no stopping it.”

“All right, Alice,” Professor Migueles said. “Where are you? Are you home?”

“Yes, I am home,” said the voice. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Nacho.”

“You sound like someone who holds a position of authority,” the voice said. “You certainly have the voice for authority.”

“Oh, no,” Professor Migueles said. “No, I am not. I am a retired professor.”

“I see,” said the voice. “Then you are a person of authority. You must be an authority at something if you teach people.”

Professor Migueles touched his chin, considering. “I suppose you can say that, yes …” he said, allowing his words to trail off. “I taught literature."

"Like, poems?"

"Poetry, yes, among other things,” Professor Migueles said.

“What other things?”

“Stories, too.”

“Do you enjoy these things?” the voice said, curious. “I don’t know much about poetry and stories.”

“Of course, yes,” Professor Migueles said. “Poems and stories have brought great joy to my life – and wonderful, wise lessons.”

“Well,” the voice said, pausing. “I may not know much about poems and books and such, but I know what question you want to ask me.”

“And what might that be?”

“You’ve been wondering how I plan to do it,” the voice said. “I have a bottle of sleeping pills. They say it’s painless. Is that true?”

“Who said it would be painless?”

“The internet.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Professor Migueles said, startled by his own impatience. His heart, it seemed, was thudding more aggressively. Had someone held a mirror up to his face, he would have seen that he looked as though an enormous and rumbling ocean of sorrow was threatening to drown him. “There is no such thing as a painless death,” he went on. “And no, my dear, I wasn’t wondering about how you planned to kill yourself. I’m not as morbid as you think.” He removed his thick-lensed glasses and wiped them on the hem of his shirt.

“Yeah,” the voice said. “You are probably right. It’s bound to hurt somehow. But I would rather just be done with it than wake up every morning only to struggle to explain to myself why I shouldn’t just end it. I’m starting to feel like that guy who rolls the rock uphill all day only to have it roll back down to the other side in the evening. It’s just exhausting and humiliating. It feels like I’m in hell already.”

“Sisyphus.”

“What?”

“That man who is forced to roll a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he reached the top,” Professor Migueles said. “His name was Sisyphus. No, you and Sisyphus are not alike.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, he was a murderer. You’ve never killed anyone, have you? Second, he didn’t want to die. In fact, he cheated death twice.”

“Yes, well, that wasn’t my point.”

“What was your point then? That you are suffering, is that it -- that life is frustrating? We all suffer. We are all frustrated.”

“Yes, I am suffering,” the voice said. “I know everybody suffers. But it’s killing me. Please, if you think what I feel isn’t real – if you think I’m being weak, keep it to yourself for now. I just want to talk without being judged.”

Professor Migueles was about to say something, he wasn’t sure what, when the realization landed on top of his head like a boulder. All this time it had been there, poised – and he’d missed it. She, this woman, this strange caller, sounded so much like Cielo, his wife -- although he presumed much younger—that he was ready to believe her a lost twin. She couldn’t have been. Even in his writer’s mind, that would have been too far-fetched. Yet for all his doubt, the notion had seized some tender, juvenile part of his brain.

“I realize that, yes,” Professor Migueles said. “I didn’t mean to sound judgmental.”

“Life hurts,” the voice said. “Life is terrible and hopeless and cruel, and I know it will never be anything else for me from now on. The pain goes right through me, and I know it will hurt me for as long as I live. It gets worse by the day. It’s as if God wants me to kill myself. If there is a god, he wants me to die.”

It took Professor Migueles what might have been a quarter of an hour, for all he knew, to clear his throat. “I see,” he said. Now he was speaking to a person. He could almost see her in his head.

“Do you, really?”

“That should be obvious. I’m listening to you, aren’t I? I can sense that you feel terribly sad. I can feel it.”

He waited for Alice to say something. Had he said it the right way? Had he been too earnest? Was she scowling at the other end of the line? He felt a tinkling at back of his neck, as though someone had slid a cube of ice down his nape. It had not been him, especially, that she had wanted to hear, really. She, this girl –Alice -- hadn’t gone out of her way to seek out his advice. Anyone who cared to listen would have sufficed. She’d merely wanted to breathe freely a little – to speak to another human being.

“You can feel my sadness?” Alice said, finally.

Professor Migueles blinked, drew a deep breath through his nostrils, and said, “Yes, I do,” he said. “I think you remind me of my wife.”

“Your wife?” Alice said vaguely. “Is she there?”

“She died many years ago,” Professor Migueles said. “She’s dead.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Professor Migueles.

“I’m sure you still miss her.”

“I do, yes.”

“I’m sure she’s in a better place,” the voice offered. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“Oh, I don’t know about those things,” said Professor Migueles. “Who knows what happens when we die?”

“I like to think we go to heaven.”

“I hope so.”

“What was her name?” the voice said. “Your wife, I mean.”

“Cielo,” said Professor Migueles. “Her name was Cielo.”

“Cielo?”

“It means sky.”

“That sounds lovely,” the voice said. “

“Yes, I always thought so, too,” Professor Migueles said. “She liked to garden.”

“She grew flowers?”

“Yes, a few,” Professor Migueles said. “She grew hibiscus, bougainvillea, and anthuriums. She grew tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, and garlic, too.”

With a single motion of his mind, he brought his wife back, and it was as if she was there, just a few feet from him, and they were in their old house again. She stood healthy and spry, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe in the kitchen, watering can in one hand, a trowel in the other.

“A garden sounds wonderful,” Alice said. “Tell me about it.”

Professor Migueles beamed, even gesturing in the dark as he spoke, describing the small patch of ground in the backyard of the old house which Cielo had inherited from her parents. She thought it was a good idea that they work together in the garden. But it wasn’t a garden then, just a long rectangle of putrid smelling earth behind a two-story house in the northern section of Manila. He felt like he had talked incessantly for an hour. His jaw hurt.

“You like gardening?”

“Yes,” Professor Migueles said, as if gardening were the greatest of his pleasures. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Gardening bored and annoyed him -- not that he was unable to appreciate the end results. ‘What is it about flowers, trees, shrubs, and vegetables that no matter where they’re grown, in prison yards or by the sea, in shanty colonies, suburban backyards, or in war zones, they thrive? Why is it that they keep flourishing, insisting on their right to encourage feelings in us that we can barely understand in all our barbarity and viciousness?’ he had thought at the time.

Cielo’s garden soon became something of a genuine work of art. The foul-smelling patch of earth was transformed as if Ceres and Mariang Makiling had become one. Cielo would find something growing in a neighbor’s yard, and if it pleased her, she simply broke off a small sprig or picked the seed from the fruit. She would bring it into her garden and tend to it in an offhand, almost uncaring way, as if the plant was growing in a forest. She grew everything in the garden that way.

“You would have liked her,” Professor Migueles said. “I think she would have liked you.”

“She sounds wonderful,” Alice said. “The garden sounds like paradise. You must have been very happy.”

“I didn’t know it at the time,” said Professor Migueles. “But that was the happiest I had ever been in my life."

“You must have loved her very much.”

“I did,” Professor Migueles said. “I still do.”

“What fond memories you must have.”

“I do have some happy memories. But then there are things I’d rather forget, as well.”

The girl continued to speak, but Professor Migueles wasn’t listening. A scent of dust, gin, and old feet rose from the floor, and the smell of mildew from the sofa. The girl’s voice seemed to fill the room, and he thought hungrily, sickly, of her kiss for a moment. For a long time, there was no sound in the city at all except for the girl’s voice and the roaring of his own blood.

“Tell me something,” Alice said. “Do you ever feel afraid?”

“Always.”

“What scares you?”

“Hunger,” Professor Migueles said. “And sickness.”

He remembered how it was when Cielo fell sick. She had never been ill in her life. She had no idea how serious it was to vomit blood. By evening, she had lost so much blood she was as white as a sheet. She couldn’t stand up or feel her hands.

They had been in bed. He was reading. She was asleep. She woke up and was in the bathroom when she fell. She couldn’t have crawled back to bed if she tried. Professor Migueles thought she was going to die then and there, but she would cling to life for six more years.

The endoscopy had been a terrifying ordeal. The doctors couldn’t sedate her for breathing reasons. They did not carry Clonazepam, either. She refused to take anything else. She had seen her father, a doctor, die from drug addiction. They shoved a camera on a tube down her throat into her stomach and probed around in there. She lay still throughout the procedure and tried to breathe. Tears were streaming down her face. Then they found the lump in her stomach.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Alice said quietly. “It all sounds excruciating and unbearable.”

“Like I said, she died a long time ago.”

“Life will betray you,” Alice said after a while. “Life is about betrayal.”

“People will betray you,” said Professor Migueles. “Life has nothing to do with it. We live and we die. The ones you love the most are the ones who will hurt you the most.”

“Did Cielo betray you?”

“No,” Professor Migueles said. “I betrayed her.”

“How awful,” Alice said.

Professor Migueles got up, weak and heavy-limbed, the phone pressed against hir ear, his stomach and guts groaning with acid. It was all nonsense, of course, his guilt, fear, and anguish. None of it mattered. Guilt, fear, and anguish did not redeem him.

“Awful,” Professor Migueles said. “Yes.”

“But she kept on.”

“She did,” Professor Migueles said. “I broke her heart, and something in her changed. But she remained as loving as always, even when she was sick.”

“You didn’t deserve her.”

“No,” said Professor Migueles said gloomily. “I did not. But I claimed her heart, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because I was selfish,” said Professor Migueles. “Because she was the sweetest, kindest, most beautiful person I had ever meet and I didn’t want anybody else to have her.”

“How terrible that is.”

“Yes, I know.”

“When did this betrayal happen?”

“When she was sick.”

“How horrible that must have been for her.”

“She found a note that the woman had written me.” Professor Migueles said. “She found it in the drawer of my desk. I do not know why I kept it.”

Alice said nothing for a while. Then she sighed, “That must have crushed her.”

“It did. And it killed me to see her so hurt.”

“How does it feel?” Alice asked. “How does it feel when you betray someone who loves you?”

“You don’t think about that when you do it,” said Professor Migueles. “When it’s done, you feel stupid and sad and ashamed.”

“Is life worth living? I am in hell. Why would I want to stay here? People are terrible to each other. You can’t ever change that.”

“You go on living because life itself is a promise of happiness,” said Professor Migueles.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that redemption and happiness are always possible, no matter how bad things look to you right now.”

He felt embarrassed. He was talking like some kind of shaman or truth-seeker. Or worse, a poet.

“I don’t think I can ever be happy now,” Alice said.

“Why not?”

“Because I am alive.”

“You can be happy precisely because you are alive,” said Professor Migueles, shuffling back to the sofa.

“I have to go now,” Alice said. “The sun is almost up.”

Professor Migueles sighed. He didn’t know how long he had slept. The neighborhood around him was droning, as if serenading the coming daylight, or what could have been an endless expanse of darkness. The entire planet had moved away from him, tumbling toward to the edge of nothingness. He was adrift. He was alone again. He had nowhere to go.

“Nonsense,” Professor Migueles said. “Are you some sort of vampire? What’s wrong with a little daylight?”

Alice laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “If I was a vampire, I’d live forever.”

Thoughtfully, Professor Migueles asked, “Will I hear from you again? Will you call? You can always call.”

Strange memories began to crowd his thoughts. They were like images in a movie. What were they? Ideas? Messages from somewhere?

“We’ll see,” Alice said, “Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”

“What do you mean?” Professor Migueles said. “I thought we had put the idea of killing yourself behind us.”

The line went dead. She was gone.

“Alice?” Professor Migueles muttered.

For a brief instant, he thought about calling her. Then he decided against it. That would have been too intrusive, too needy. Professor Migueles mused, “Maybe she’ll call again tonight.” He put the phone down on the coffee table. Maybe she had changed her mind. Maybe she calmed down. Maybe she was just sleepy now. He sat in the thick grey darkness of the apartment, thinking. It wasn’t sadness he felt, or even anger at the unfairness of it all. What he felt was bafflement: a kind of tremor that paralyzed the mind. If he were religious – which he was, but not in the same sense as other religious people -- he might have been enraged at how God had mishandled the girl’s life. She was no more than a child. She was a young girl. “Don’t be silly,” he muttered to himself.”

They had talked for two hours, at least. Now the apartment was filled with ghosts, not just people but also animals, streams, trees, and mountains. There was a world of ghosts crowding against the window and the walls – all of them oblivious to the plummeting, howling blood, hair, stone, and flesh of the glittering city around them. He imagined this what children’s nightmares were like. The groaning half-light, now pink and grey, swirled. Some of the ghosts had their palms against their faces. Some were shivering. Some of them were weeping. Some were laughing. Others just looked at him: priests, prostitutes, teachers, mothers, fathers, children, bus drivers, the destitute, and the abandoned. He’d met them all. All of them were woeful, desperate, and empty-headed: all of them yearned to be remembered, and perhaps redeemed.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.