THE WRECK OF THE XAVIER

If there was ever a time when I loved you more than I do now, it must have been then. Gin-soaked and giggling like schoolchildren, we had tumbled into the room just as city’s garbage trucks began scavenging the streets below. We had conquered the morning’s beachhead and claimed Manila’s ragged skyline for our own. We had survived the ocean journey on half rations and had come ashore seeking a ransom in sanctuary and time. We were deathless, inviolate, as dazzling with the newness of our conquest as Cortes on the causeway to Tenochtitlan. I knew you wanted me to give a word of pledge, but I could think of nothing upon which I had not pledged before. I bartered my tongue for your acquiescence. Nothing seemed as safe, or as solemn, as silence. Daybreak drifted through the windows in streaks of honeyed rose and dusty amber. The city on the other side of the glass pane was shrouded in a haze of sickly light, and though it was May the air was chilly against your skin. Your thigh rose from the tangle of sheets, pale as terror in the soft glare. I gasped in awe of all the long miles of you: chin settled on the crook of an arm, hair spilling over, and mouth formed into an O. Were we, even then, preparing to say our farewells to each other? You were not listening, of course. Your eyes were half closed, and you were gasping quietly into my ear. You trembled at the edge of the morning’s moist yaw as you girded yourself against me. I felt you break free, fall away, roar past the arc of zero gravity, and explode into smoke, lighting, and laughter.

The TV was the only light in the room. I sat up in bed, smoking a cigarette, trying to appear casual in the face of catastrophe. The behemoth reared its head, spiritous as mist, its skin rippling with static. The blue light from the screen flickered on the walls. Military convoys comprising Burkina Faso Armed Forces units and VDP militiamen opened fire on multiple villages in the Sahel and Est regions, killing hundreds of civilians across several incidents during a supply mission…

From the depths of the room came your voice. You were half asleep, and I was watching your lips move. I found that all I had to do was shut my eyes when you told stories about your girlhood, and then it all came vividly to me. The large white house on the ridge above the dusty valley, poker and mahjong on Sunday afternoons, your grandfather’s uniform pressed and pleated, and the general’s two widows sizing each other up at the funeral – I saw it all. I lived those memories with you. “Are you awake?” I asked. “Do you hear me?”

Did I tell you how beautiful you were? Strolling past the front desk, you glided into the oriental splendor of fake bamboo and hotel palms like Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. The guests clustered around long banquet tables festooned with buntings and oversized peonies. Trays of hors d’œuvres—tiny towers of caviar and shrimp canapés -- made circuits through the crowd, their minarets bristling over the coupe glasses and the mousse hairdos. The bride drifted from one table to another, her smile alternately warm and unreadable. You sparkled throughout dinner. All eyes were on you. Your red mouth would open, and it was anyone’s guess what would come out – laughter, perhaps, or a burst of song. I was spellbound, helpless as a stag with its antlers snagged in the poacher’s net. The dining hall was a great coming and going of people, porcelain plates and clinking glasses punctuated the hum of the crowd. Giant ceiling fans churned overhead, their gusts lifting ribbon ends and napkins from the tables.

“How did you guys find Thailand?” the large, jolly woman with the silicon cheekbones asked. “I worked there for two months last year.”

“We turned left when we reached Vietnam,” I grinned.

“I get it,” she chuckled. “You’re terribly corny, but I get it.”

You once said there are as many dreams of love as there are lovers. I suppose that was true for me, at least. Loving you meant I often found myself jammed in between two separate worlds. There was the actual world—that vulgar patch of earth for which I often feel a profound distaste—and the reverie we had built together, our secret geography of ghostly flowers, merry songs, red Bordeaux wine, and your laughter trailing in the dark. There was a time when I could have managed straddling both sides. But I had made too many mistakes. I had been beaten, spat at, flayed, and struck down more times than I could remember, and my mind was careening headlong into the stars. Mission Control crackled in the earpiece. The overhead instrument panels began beating out an irregular Morse of urgent red lights. Somewhere in the fluorescent brightness above the control room, the flight director’s voice popped and fizzled through the static. Contact with the module has been lost. Its precise location is currently unknown. The crew may be awaiting instructions …

The huge man seated to my left was flirting with you. Short-haired, muscular, and suburban, I thought he was a little too neat for a man of his size. “I do a lot of reading in my spare time, you know,” he told me. He searched my face for a reaction, nodded, and went back to the fish on his plate. His wife was good-looking, chirpy, tragically nervous. I was trying make out what he was saying over the hum of the crowd when your hand moved in on me under the table. “Sit up straight,” you said. “Try to look like you want to be here.”

Were you, even then, planning your escape? Regret is a waste of time. Everybody knows that. I was young and jealous and insecure. To this day I am ashamed of the energy I wasted. There are even days when it even gives me comfort to think that others have done the same to me. He threw first, dropping his right shoulder and leaning behind his right. I leapt back and felt the air shift as he barreled past like a freight train. He scowled furiously as he went by, astonished that he had missed, and I thrust my knee up to meet him. I should have stopped then and there. He was probably a perfectly nice person. Or worse, he may not have been worth the effort at all. “I can’t believe you did that,” you muttered as you dragged me out of the hall. “Must you behave like a savage all the time?”

Back in the room, you retreated into silence, planting yourself at the edge of the bed to slip your heels off and rub your feet. The television muttered stock reports and the weather. You put your earrings on the bedside table. I was drunk, acting as though nothing had happened. I was telling you about Pavlov – the dog whisperer, the maestro of reflexes —leaning over a notebook, catching whiffs not just of salivation, but of reversal, a weird dance of the psyche that even his metronome couldn’t have predicted. What we perceive as light versus dark or joy versus misery springs from a network of neurons in the cortex of the Homo sapiens brain, I explained in my best David Attenborough. Each node negotiates its own tangle of excitation and inhibition, then passes the verdict downstream. At some point, Pavlov, buried in a blizzard of data, must have noticed something odd. Flood the circuitry with stimuli, zap it, torture and traumatize it, and the neurons begin to fire in the other direction, like a vinyl record dragging the needle backward over the grooves of a song. The dog drools at the sight of the T-bone steak but won’t eat it. The schizoid discovers an inexplicable pleasure in his misery. The principle was a kind of neural jazz bebop in the brainstem. Pavlov didn’t think it was poetry, but it was. “You are insane,” you muttered. “Do you even understand what you’re talking about?”

Was it love or love’s revenge that found us that evening? I was wavering, tracing the border between opposites like a cartographer obsessed with a coastline that shifts beneath his feet. Had the needle skipped backward? When we stepped out into the sunlight with our bags the following morning, did you rise up to meet me? The cab had just emerged from a tunnel when the windows caught the glare of the sky, and there was your face on the glass, remote and impenetrable, aloof as an idea of continents. “How long have you guys been married?” the cabbie asked cheerfully.

I was unpacking in the bedroom when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I could hardly recognize the face that looked back at me. Every writer who has a job thinks they’re too good for the work that they do, and they are right. I had grown old and hadn’t noticed how wintry the hair had become, how hollow the eyes, and how cavernous the cheeks. How many times had I sold out by then? How many times had I exchanged the truth for a little money? The muse had been kind and forgiving. I tried to comfort myself with excuses, as I was sure many hacks did. Were it not for those early experiences of loss and loneliness, and the trading in of one world for another, I would have died years ago.

The notion of fate was seductive enough. I was walking up the narrow stairs, the boards creaking under my weight, when I heard your voice. I looked up and there you were. Could it have been otherwise? Was that moment not part of larger plot? Fate, as I understood it, was not the aimless drift of heavenly flotsam but its opposite: a black ops functionary sketching blueprints behind the random fireworks of colliding gases. I had arrived amid the hum of idle conversation. Your presence in the circle was so deliberate it might have been rehearsed, guided by a clandestine stage director, yet nothing in our fumbling meeting betrayed the script. How old were you then? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? Had you been waiting for me? I was sure we had met before. I felt like I had known you all my life. You were shy, and your mouth and fingertips were slow and tentative, nervous, needy. I kept losing you in the soft dimness of the room, and you kept finding me.

My friends had warned me about you. She is toying with you, they said. Be careful. But I had your smell in my nostrils and a whisky bottle in my pocket. I could not have cared less about what anybody said. When I saw you again, I was at the head office arranging a ticket for a red eye out of the city. My inbox resembled a data graveyard of polite regrets and phantom approvals. You smiled, said hello, and I drafted a love letter on corporate letterhead. When we decided we could no longer live apart, I hailed a cab, rode shotgun across the city, and went up three flights of stairs into your living room. We behaved as though we knew what we were doing. I showed you pictures of my children. We were good friends, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and drinking whisky from plastic tumblers. Your apartment was cozy and silent. You arranged my books on the shelves, folded my clothes and put them in the closet. In the morning, I crossed the street to buy bread while you made scrambled eggs.

Looking back on it, our life was easy. We loved each other so easily. We talked and laughed so easily. Work and love: that was all the excuse that we needed. Working and loving had set us free, made us whole, made us better. Everything was so simple and correct that I became convinced that we deserved to be happy. Your body was moving, and everything around me was your smell, your mouth, and your hair. You shivered and asked if it was raining outside. “Go close the window,” you said. “My teeth are chattering.”

I had learned and mastered the trick early on. In your absence, I had conjured your shape the same way I had summoned the monsters of my boyhood: Charybdis sucking in oceans with its enormous snout, or Melville’s whited leviathan rising in a geyser of salt and froth, its flanks prickled with harpoons. I saw you many times. Driving through the early morning mist of Tagaytay, I caught a glimpse of you boarding a bus to Manila just as the hillsides were exploding into fiery flower. When I embarked for Cebu with my mother’s ashes, I saw you buying a garland of sampaguitas from a beggar on Colon Street. Did you see me, edging my way toward you through the crowd? I was about to cross the street when you disappeared. I stumbled, almost hit my head on the pavement. An American couple looked up from their bowls of beef soup, their faces flushed a fierce red in the heat and the glare. “What kind of gook are you, dear?” the woman asked, lowering her sunglasses to study me. “No offense, but I can’t tell you guys apart,” she said. Her man nodded his head in agreement.

In Manila, the rain ceased. Was that our last walk together? If it wasn’t, it should have been. We had been book-worming through our days for so long that meeting other people felt strange and new. Downstairs, the acacias on either side of the street were still dripping from last night’s thunderstorm. We had walked across the park into the empty café. The girl behind the counter looked up, smiled, and motioned us inside. We took a table at the far end of the dining area. Out the window, the sun was rising, caressing the beads of moisture on the glass panes into a sparkling blush. Two uniformed policemen walked in and sat at the table next to ours. They looked tired, bedraggled, hungover from the previous evening’s brandy. These were killers, these two. I could tell. They had dark, cruel faces and dead eyes. They seemed like prototypes for a figure that has since become almost a cliché in Manila: the remorseless fascist who has a cogwheel where his heart should be. How many had they murdered that week? I felt anger rising in my chest. I tried not to stare. I wondered how death would approach such men. Perhaps they would want to scream, to fire their pistols into a crowd, to touch each other’s horror and openly weep. Or maybe they would keep to themselves, each in their own private world, each in their private cocoon of regret, grinning as the air in their lungs dwindled to a last gasp. “Black, no sugar,” you told the girl. “He’ll have the same.”

You did not care to talk about death. We had seen too much of it too soon. I was wavering, tracking the constellations, tracing the border between opposites like a cartographer obsessed with a coastline that shifts beneath his feet. Yet I wish I had pressed harder to prepare you. How does one survive intact without a map in this wild electrical storm? Veins of lightning crackled through the sky as the ship entered the harbor. Love was that small breath caught between our arrival and departure: the loop that had no end -- or so we pretended even as we both knew the hourglass was tricking us. Sitting there, in the city’s deepest maw, something stirred inside you that was neither spark nor void but a gentle, buzzing current, perhaps the inkling of a smile. Like wiring laid down in secret, a small circuit flickered, flared, and died, its message held in limbo. Somewhere behind the bank of blinking consoles a lone gramophone began dragging its needle backward across the spiral grooves, spitting static as if possessed by a signal from deep space.

Did I ever tell you about the San Francisco Xavier? Her fate has become something of a historical puzzle. She was a full-rigged galleon with two-hundred feet of spar and deck combined. She slipped her moorings from Cavite in June of 1704, without fanfare, save the semaphore of parrots screeching from the rigging-strung palms. Her timbers were an amalgam of molave and African teak, and her decks were crowded with crates of Nuevo España silver, silken bolts from Canton, and twenty-four brass cannons mounted fore and aft. She was braced for the long haul— her iron-ringed decks polished by indio labor and the salt air of Luzon. Her standing rigging, a cathedral of tarred hemp and iron deadeyes, braced pitch wood masts that pierced the sky like the empire’s own sentinels, each ratline humming with the latent tides of sea-blown commerce.

At the Xavier’s helm was Don Santiago de Zabalburu y de Balenchana, a Basque nobleman. He had cut his teeth navigating the Basque Current -- trimming jibs by lantern‐dark swell and whipping spray— before mastering monsoon gales under Jesuit tutors in Manila. His captain’s commission, inked by Philip V himself, bore the seal of his family’s coat of arms and the restless pride of a thirty-year-old exile at sea. Rumor had it that the captain’s brother, the governor-general of the islands, had trafficked in the royal favor to see his kin raised to command.

The royal coffers had spilled silver doubloons for the Xavier’s timbers, and merchants had hustled aboard silk bales and blocks of beeswax destined for the Real Puerto de Acapulco -- no risk, they reckoned, of this enterprise failing them. But by late May of ’05, as mariners off Manila Bay squared away for the waning southeasterlies, investors were getting the jitters. Brokers for Canton’s silk exporters and Manila’s wax merchants pored over their ledgers, finding nothing but blank ocean charts. The streets and back alleys were rife with rumors of ruin. Word on the street had it that the Xavier had run into a typhoon somewhere between Guam and the Revillagigedo Islands, or else had been waylaid by Dutch pirates in the Pacific expanse. In the smoky tavern of Los Tres Perros, Diego de Quisqueyano—an Armenian émigré turned silk-smuggler—passed notes to the port’s deputy factor, demanding to know whether the cargo manifest was already being rerouted to Zihuatanejo rather than Acapulco proper.

In Acapulco, every doubloon teetered on whispers of a North Pacific gale swallowing ship and cargo alike. Had the Xavier slipped beneath the swells? The consulado’s merchants—factors, brokers, and shadowy middlemen who’d already staked fortunes on the Xavier’s freight of silks, porcelain, and some seventy‐odd tons of beeswax—paced the customs hall like caged jaguars. Their ledgers bristled with “SFX” annotations, and muleteers across the isthmus readied caravans for deliveries that never came. Day after sunbaked day, powder-stained clerks leaned from the balconies of the city, scanning the horizon for the galleon’s telltale three tiers of sails even as the bay lay empty.

Word eventually trickled back to Mexico City— with official missives from Acapulco pleading for answers. In the Real Casa de Moneda, the mining magnates and hacienderos muttered that not so much as a broken spar had been sighted since the Xavier slipped its moorings. Not long after, creditors and relatives petitioned to have the galleon declared lost at sea, naming every passenger -- from the royal alcalde’s wives to clerical page boys – to account for unpaid freights, and hashing over whether a cyclone or a hidden reef had done her in. By the midsummer of ‘05, traders had torn through every scrap of paper, summoned every courier, and refuted every rumor, all to find Acapulco Bay as vacant as the ocean that withheld its counsel. The Xavier lived on, somehow, in the blank pages of Acapulco’s dusty customs ledgers, in the records of Manila’s lost-ship lawsuits, and in every furtive clink of silver paid out as indemnity. But it was anyone’s guess what had happened to the ship, her crew, and her cargo.

Once, long before sand and storms conspired to bury even the memory of the Xavier’s name, archaeologists in Oregon had examined chunks of Asian beeswax and shards of Ming‐style porcelain littering Nehalem’s rocky coves. “San Francisco Xavier,” they tittered to each other excitedly.

The speculations made sense: the ship had disappeared a few years after the great Cascadia quake and tsunami, and her manifest did catalogue beeswax and ceramics. There were even rumors of driftwood that matched the timbers of the Xavier strewn along Manzanita Beach. But these conjectures remained little more than whispers cast against the void. The fact was that, by then, the Xavier had become a ghost, and her identity could only be inferred from what scholars and treasure hunters ever so tentatively hoped were traces of residue from her hold. Refusing the interrogations of time, she has found her resting place somewhere in the North Pacific’s uterine depths, her timbers draped with swaying kelp, her hold pried open by centuries of howling winter storms. She is gone and she will never be found. Contact with the module has been lost. Its precise location is currently unknown…

How could we have known? What could we have done? I watched you most evenings at the window, tracing invisible lines on the dark glass, drawing a landscape from which I had been suddenly cast out. I heard you crying in the hallway. I heard you crying in bed in the dark. I wanted to give you a word of comfort, but my own sadness was stuck in my throat, gummy with uselessness. Grief was a knife you sharpened in the quiet, and you would only let me tend to your wounds after I had convinced you they were there. “Let’s not talk about it,” you said. “I’m so sick of talking about it.”

These days I wake before dawn, and the humid air is already stifling. The city growls and roars around, above, and below me: neon signs sputter out in the quivering air, and the rooftops lean into the alleyways in streaks of rust and soot. The apartment feels cavernous, endlessly empty. Your toothbrush is still in the cup by the sink. The bristles are splayed. I can’t bring myself to toss it. Each morning, I stare at that toothbrush and wonder, ‘If I stare hard enough, will I see you in the shallow glow of the bathroom mirror, alive, amused, and forgiving?’ Each morning, of course, the mirror shows only me, much older, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, and weary to the bone.

Outside, the pilgrimage starts again. I am part of it. The heat rises up from the pavement. The engine rumbles awake. The train ride to work is exactly what it was yesterday, and the day before that. Manila presses in around me, hissing smog between its teeth. The beast is hungry again. Yet still, still, I breathe, tangled in the grime and grace of a city that murders hope every day but somehow keeps you alive.

Good grief, why am I telling you all this?

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 while in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies. He regularly submits prose for literary magazines and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.