A Prophet's Life by Y.B. Masdal

2008-03-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

ChapterOne

TheRising of the Dawn

I was born at around two o' clock in the morning of the seventy-second year ofthe twentieth century, as I have been told by my mother. If hospital recordswould concur, then this must be the fact. My mother once told me that she had areasonable difficulty in her labor that it took her towards the beginning ofdawn before I first breathe the air of this mortal world. That day, all Moslemswent to the community mosque because it was also the day in the Hijrah Calendarto be the commemoration of the birth of Prophet Mohammad, the feast of theMaullud-din-nabi.

I had a very special affiliation with this coincidence because when there isnothing more to say, I always mentioned to my friends that indeed I was born onthe day Prophet Muhammad was born. To be born in the day a known prophet wasborn may be a sign of some bigger things for me ahead I thought, somethinggrand that I had a sentiment of grandeur because of the coincidences of mybirth. There was some sort of pride in this; perhaps I was just like any Christianborn on the twenty-fifth of December.

So I celebrated two birthdays each year. My aunt Minda would prepare me a feastand my cousins would savor upon Chinese ramen and chiffon when April came. Mygrandfather, Imam Unih, a Muslim preacher, on the other hand, would always handme some money to celebrate my birthday when Maullud-Din-Nabi comes which Ialways used to buy lots of toys instead of a grand feast.

Mine was a very unusual childhood. As far as my memory takes me back, it hadseemed that the first consciousness I have gotten was to be a child living withmy grandfather, those memories where my grandfather was always there when I wasstill an infant. My grandmother, Hadja Daihanna, passed away when I was aboutthree year old or so that I really had no substantial memories of her except tosee her sitting stoically in her rocking chair for hours and hours, all daylong due to general paralysis. I remember quite well that in my pre-schoolages, I always dream about her (those dreams where I always fall from my bed;having that feeling of falling endlessly from a cliff).

I dreamt that I was flying furiously through the woods terrified from beingchased by this being who looked like an old woman with graying hair l like wirefences on her hair and she had wings blacker than the night. And it was reallyuncanny that she looked like my grandmother, at least the stringed hair wassimilar as I observed her when sometimes she let her long hair spread out inorder to dry it up after a bath. I had this kind of dreams and the winged oldwoman sometime had companions and they kept on chasing me. In one of thosedreams, I also had these companions who looked cherubic and whose hair wherecurly like American babies. It was because of these dreams that in my wakinghours, I felt some discomfort every time I stared at my grandma, though at thatearly age, I have learned to dismiss those dreams to be merely dreams andnothing more.

I had this particular dream that left me really screaming in the deadest hoursof the dawn. Again as usual, I was speeding through the night forests beingchased furiously by those dark winged creatures that looked like my grandmotherHadja Dayhana. I would bend my arms in front of my face in order to protect mybody from the branches of the trees that I went into in my flight from theflying specters, speeding into nooks and caverns. As I escaped from the woods,I blurted into the wide-open night sky and lost those who were chasing me. Iwas huffing and puffing from the furious chase and flew to a nearby gatheringof trees and there I found my companions, those cherubim with faces of infants.Without speaking in words, they instructed me to be quiet while we had a viewof a assembly of people encircling a huge campfire. They were all kneeling andI saw some familiar faces, the ones who were chasing me, being part of thegroup, chanting and singing and howling as they faced the burning woods in themiddle of the circle. It was a ritual. I was awe-stricken by the unusual eventbefore us when suddenly, something from behind us moved and the winged serpentsfound us again and we scurried hurriedly, to flee again. When I woke up, Iscreamed my hearts out and my grandfather had to make me drink cool tap water.

These were the familiar nocturnal dreams that I had when I was so young andlittle. Each time I woke up, I always felt so surprised to find myself in bedinstead of the caves and forests that were inside those dreams, as if I reallywas in those dreams that in fact whenever I fell in a dream, from trees andcliffs, I also fell from my bed.

Of cherubim I always had memories the most vivid of which was me afloat theclouds with many of them trotting throughout and food fell from the sky withoutend and we held baskets to collect the manna from heaven. I remember thesedreams for they were happy dreams.

I died once when I was a child. I profess to these because now as I grew older,I realized that memories are there to remind us of things that happened in thepast and not to put fabricated events in our mind. How could one for exampleimagine past events that are so vivid that they recur incessantly whenever wesee things that remind us about such incidents, refreshing our memories towardsthe growing years. For example, whenever I see rice fields I always go back tothe days when I and some other children would scour the wetlands and hunt forbirds with our slings. The smell of coffee now takes me back always to themoments when my grandfather would always retreat to the front yards and sip hotground coffee while sitting in his rocking chair, wiling away the afternoonwithout uttering any word while reading Arabic jottings he had written himselfin miniature notebooks.

Dying was a matter of darkness. Death is all of darkness, just like sleeping.When we sleep, we close our eyes and slip into darkness and unconsciousnesssets in. Such was dying. Darkness was like a tunnel, like being caught in thebody of a huge cannon. My body floated towards higher ground like a speedingrocket coming out of the dark tunnel. I had a feeling similar to skateboardingand of being carried in a Ferris Wheel, lifting my entire soul into a maze andinto a circle. At the end of the tunnel, I appeared so suddenly into the openair that made my skin tremble a bit. And lo and behold, I found everything tobe brighter than any sunlight that I have experienced before. Above me was palebluesky, a kind of hue that was so sweet to my eyes and below me were cloudsthick as foam. I felt a sudden gush of joy that my heart flew and skipped abit. In the air was the spine-tingling sound of strings possibly that of aclarion or a banjo guitar and my eyes swelled with tears as I felt anoverpowering outpour of divine happiness. I floated and floated, letting thewind control my body, leading me towards the thicker clouds that lies ahead.Within the clouds appeared angels with curly blond hairs and faces that oneimagines the biblical David have. So handsome and so pure in white raiment andwings so white as they flutter through the clouds. They seemed to be full ofjest, disappearing suddenly and appearing at the other ends of the walls ofclouds. As I hovered through the clouds, I could see a figure that took to bethe shape of a white castle, as I go nearer, I affirmed that they were reallycastles afloat the clouds, my first sight of a castle with high turrets andtowers; years before I saw an illustration of such in children's books. BeforeI could reach the castle, I suddenly woke up and found myself atop the table inthe living room of my Uncle Mameng's apartment, the eldest child of mygrandfather who we were living with, and I could see my bloated stomach as Iregained vision slowly and slowly. Initially, my vision was dull and could onlyappreciate the sight immediately in front of me until I regained full view. Icould see my father worriedly scurrying near me but with a great sigh of reliefin his face while the others smiled. I heard the man whose name I could notreally remember now, living next door, saying to my grandfather, "See, Itold you he would be alright". And then I still remembered mygrandfather's face with tears on his face. That was the only time that I sawhim cried and never ever again.

It was a fever so high that almost took my life in my infancy. I had frequentfever attacks then that often, my grandfather would perform a sort of ritualwith a blade in one hand and a candle on the other, reciting Arabic prayers inorder to cure me of my fever. Of the many times that I remember him doing suchceremony is how I reckoned how in my early years, I was often afflicted withhigh fever.

I felt so harassed by the heat every time during those bouts that my head wasaflame and my skin was torching. In such infantile consciousness, I alwaysremembered how my body was burning with extreme temperature that myconsciousness would somehow separate from my own body. When my body became numband isolated, the burning sensations were not as disturbing anymore.

My grandfather was a busy man that he had to be concerned with my frequentfever attacks while at the same time lulling my grandmother away from herrecurrent malady.

Once I had asked my grandfather about my grandmother's weakness and generalimmobility. He told me that it was indeed because of a disease that afflictedher and that she would not be able to speak so well anymore. What I reallywanted to asked him was why she would scream at times into the midnight thateveryone in the house would be awaken. What kind of disease would let onescream into the night was the thing I wanted to inquire upon. But as a toddler,I bet there are things that we do not even know how to ask, when vocabularywould not be enough to elucidate our inquiry. Everytime she was attacked bysuch "disease", Uncle Mameng and the servants would come and help mygrandfather calmed her down, to reassure her that everything was all right. Shewas always murmuring about some person she was afraid of; a one she calls"the jinn".

"There are no jinns. You are just imagining" my grandpa alwaysassured her while she would lay there wide-eyed and trembling. From the lookedon her eyes, pity was the natural thing I could feel for her. She was like achild afraid of something.

"I have checked the whole house and there was no Jinn around" myuncle would add to further reassure her.

At times the attacked on her nocturnal sleep would be so serious enough that inthe stillness of the dawn, we would packed the necessities and head for thehospital, staying there for nearly a week every time.

At such a young age, my grandmother's predicament affected me so much that Ihad always hoped then that I was already grown up and be able to help her,wishing earnestly to appease her. Those dreams of flying had made me somehowdistant from her, a little bit wary of her and somewhat disturbed that thewinged old woman in my dreams somehow looked like her. And yet, I felt so muchfor her. Besides those were merely dreams.

Once I decided to investigate the cause or causes of the "weakness"of my grandmother. I was relatively confident that I would find some answershowever tender my mind at that time. It was in the apartment's bathroom withits yellow darkened light and perpetual wet floor that she had pointed to bethe place where she had seen the "jinn". The bathroom had malfunctioningequipment that always had that pungent smell typical of aging lavatories, fullof slime and fungi stuck to walls and corners giving it a dark green shadow allover, from the floor to the ceiling. What augments the general dimness was thedecision of the household to put a bulb of the weakest power that even atdaytime, I would always feel like it was already midnight whenever I enter it.There was desperation written all over it that anyone who went into the toiletwould realize immediately that it was a place where the smell would remain evenif best efforts to clean it up would be undertaken.

As I relieved myself, I tried to stay longer when the apartment was quiet andeveryone was either asleep in the afternoon or were out for work. I examinedthe ceilings for some clue and stared at the walls for holes and cavities towhere the jinn might be hiding. When I convinced myself at that time that therewould be no such signs of the unknown being, I stepped back and headed for thedoor. As I turned my head, suddenly I saw in the corner of my left eye a hugeshadow of a man that goes from the floor towards the ceiling, the shape of itshead folding into the surface of the ceiling. The hairs at the back of my headstood up and I felt my skin trembled. Despite such apparent terror however, Igathered all of my strength to focus my stare into the wall but the shadow wasnot there anymore. I went quickly outside and found the afternoon very still asusual.

I went to the garden in the front yard where I usually enjoyed my solitarinesswhen the sun was readying to fall towards sunset and played in the gardens,picking some leaves and mangling some stems. My cousins would be asleep in thathour of the afternoon while I did not developed such habit, allowing me so muchtime alone to play with whatever my mind could think of. As I put some stonesinto holes that I have previously dug in the ground, I pondered upon the shadowin the toilet. Was it the shadow of the "jinn"? It was a huge being Ithought and the image of the shadow was vivid enough that I was able to surmisethat it wore a g-string garment on its body and had a strip of clothe wrappedaround its head while its hair was shoulder length, like an ancient warrior. Hemust have held spears and knives but such things did not appear to me.

I kept on digging holes and putting stones and coins into them and thencovering back the holes, ironing out the surface to look as if the soil werenever disturbed. Such was the kind of solitary games I played. I have reckonedthen so early in my life, when I dug up the stones and coins the day after,that plants and trees could grow from the ground and flowers multiply too; butstones and money would not.

I had perhaps had a very strong desire to tell my grandfather about the shadowbut somehow I did not had enough inclination to put them into words while mygrandmother kept wailing in the middle of the night every now and then. Thenafter a while, her predicament eased towards serenity that she just stared andsat in her rocking chair until she died in the hospital one day while I waslooking after her. My Aunt Julpa cried first and asked me what have I done thatshe died. Of course, I did not know what to say but her asking was etched somuch into my mind that every now and then I would ask myself if indeed I haddone something to hasten her death. But as I child that I was then, thedisturbance of Aunt Julpa's inquiry just faded into memory till now that Iearnestly attempt to recollect those events so far into my childhood.

There were a lot of card games played while the family was mourning the deathof Hadja Dayhana and the smell of brewed coffee permeated as the men would taketurns in making the coffin. They were in jest as they kept on putting one upagainst each other about who is the better carpenter. My father attempted todrive a nail into its rightful place but the rest laughed that Salip Hussincould never become a sharp carpenter. This had somehow eased my apprehensionsabout Aunt Julpa the day before. Every one was in a light mood that everythingmust have been all right and done with. Dying in the latest of ages seemed tobe most acceptable to all. But when my grandmother was finally rested to theground, as the men held her body so gently and tucked her into the crevices ofthe ground, almost everyone was teary eyed and Aunt Julpa was even talking tomy dead grandmother while we throw soil to cover the grave, about why she hadto leave, about her being not able to come and visit her frequently. How couldshe talked to a dead person I thought? Would her cries and words be heard andnot flow into the rural wind of Taluksangay? This had somehow recuperated theapprehensions I had about her.

There must something in my grandmother that gives spark and liveliness to thehouse that after she died, there was a gradual silencing of the household andeveryone was more incline to frown, more inclined to be introspective thatconversations became lesser and us children played lesser games, as if a greatlonely shadow was cast over the household. If anybody missed her among themembers of the house--including the servants--no one could tell, the leastmyself. It was the newfound serenity of the surroundings that everyday I hadwished that all those who played card games in the mourning of my grandmotherwould come and played those card games again and again, to make the noisestifle the sadness of the gardens and of the front yards, to fill the air withcoffee smell again and of rice cakes. But this was never so. And so in theafternoons, I kept playing in the garden, careful that the traces of stemsmangled and flower picked would not be apparent enough less my Aunt Nene wouldcall upon to inquire upon the suspects and then the guilty malefactor, whichwould be either one of my cousins or me. I went about to pretend that I waslike the older men who did the coffin thinking that I might become a goodcarpenter, unlike my father. It was in sunny days that I loved to play alone inthe yards when the air was a little yellowish and everything seemed to glow,like the image of those pictures not developed properly and everything in thepicture would be bright yellow. I smelled the air and they were thick thatalmost I could see the wind swooping by, and caressing my hair so gently. Ismelled such air so smoothly they seemed to be delicious, like chicken orchiffon cake thickly covered with butter. In one of those sunny afternoons, Ihad looked towards the sky and observed the sun. I tried to examine if the sunhad come nearer towards the ground that everything looked brighter. And my mindgot stoned when suddenly the clouds move so agile that a hole in the skyformed, like a gate opening. And then I saw a very colorful image coming intothe center of the hole. What a beautiful kite it was I said that it had thebluest of blue and the greenest of all green. It was a horse with the head of awoman with its hand waving at me. A kite would not do such things I toldmyself. And the gate in the sky closed and the technicolor horse disappeared.

I wanted to ask my grandfather if kites could stare back and waved at us whilein the sky but somehow, I did not ask anymore. It happened in those very earlyyears where my vocabulary was not yet efficient to elucidate every thought Ihad then.

Chapter Two

IntoThe Great Wide Open

When finally I was of school age, my mother got me back and started living awayfrom my grandfather. It was hard at times to be away from my grandfather sinceI got so used to be with him. The giddiness and wonderment of childhood mighthave staid off these longings for my grandfather that I easily readjusted tonewer surroundings. When I was with him, I played with my cousins, when I waswith my mother I played with my sister and two brothers. Children always playit seems. They were built and created for to play and nothing more that gameswas like a narcotic to every child's longing and impartibility. Old habits didnot die down that in the afternoon, on Saturdays and Sundays, I would earnestlyfind some solitary moments and played with "unreal" friends. I wouldclimb trees alone and fish with a crude hook and line equipment in a nearbypond. My mother was living in the house of our grandaunt, Hadja Saniya, and itwas an old house with a colonial built. In that place, there was some woodsfull of banana trees and a guava tree in the midst of it, near the pond weretadpoles litter it to the hilt.

The guava tree gave me a view from above and I had always liked the air upthere. I would climb it and stayed up there for hours that I could not almostfeel the afternoon passing by until twilight comes and all the children were upplaying hide-and-seek or cherry base, a game where one would guard a post inorder that the others would not take and conquer it by surprise and win thegame.

One day while darkness crept slowly into the night, I was in a hide-and-seekgame when suddenly, as I looked into the area full of banana trees, whilehiding from my seeker, I noticed a little distortion in the trunks of thebanana trees, and as I stared lengthily towards the woods, I noticed that agroup of persons were looking at me. Some were standing while a couple wassitting in a kneeling position. They were all staring at me. They lookedunusual that they had skin gleaming like bronze and their body sizes wererelatively small like children's body and yet their faces looked old. I shouldhave been scared and immediately run away but they seem to have put me in atrance that fear was absent in me at that moment. I remember it now so vividly,as I try to recollect these past events. I could even describe to you how oneis put in a trance. As I looked at them, my head felt a gentle swelling,painless and smooth, as if the rest of me disappeared, except my head and myfeet did not feel the ground. Again, my surroundings became yellow andeverything seemed to glow despite the lateness of the day. My sight becamesharper and I could hear my heart pounding and my body seemed ethereal like Iwas a spirit floating above ground. The one person sitting kept on signaling tome that I should approached them, because perhaps of the trance that I was putin, I headed towards the woods slowly, into the thick groupings of bananatrees. As I pierced through the woods, the surroundings became brighter andahead of me was a pathway in the forest, and I could see many of them at eachside of the pathway, hanging from trees and huge stones. They all held palmleaves in their hands and shook it that collectively they made a swooshingsound that is gentle to the ear. Nobody spoke to me and nobody touched me.After a few meters of going forward, I stopped abruptly without deciding on myown, and turned back and into the games that I was playing with the other kids.It was a transition so smooth that I could say that time stood still and theevent suddenly disappeared from my mind, never able to tell it to any of myfriends or to my mother about the particular strange occurrence. It was onlylater on in life, that the memory kept coming back every time I walked intosome woods with the same landscape and contour, feeling déjà vu every time, andvividly recalling details of such event. It must have been a dream. It musthave been not. But dreams I could really recall to be dreams no matter howvivid they were and the forest incident was never a dream. In fact I had adream once, about three years ago that was so vivid and yet I fully recognizedit as merely a dream, not a memory of past events. In that particular dream,there was also a pond. I found myself in the middle of a wasteland, with redcracking clay all over, up to where my sight could reach. And then there wasthe pond that was unusually situated near a sloping hill and the air wasyellowish and the sky a bit red, bleeding into many hues and concentration ofred. There were no trees or a single bush in the arid ground except for aleafless tree protruding at one side of the shore of the pond and the wind wasvery still and motionless and the only sound I heard was the poundings of myheart. If you could perhaps imagine Mars and its landscape, that was how thedream looked and felt like.

The pond was of fair size in a shape that is almost perfectly circle. It was asmall pond indeed with a radius not more than ten meters. I climbed the barrentree and sat there looking into the water, undecided about my next move. Icould see the water inviting me to jump, almost feeling the coolness that itharbored; the dewy color of the water was refreshing to the sight. There wassome life in the pond that I felt it could talk and communicate as if it was acreature on its own, with a head and a torso, and the tentacles of an ancientmollusk. I stood up from one of the tree's branches and dived into the water.The splashing sound it made as I entered the water reverberated throughout theheavy air that I could hear it rumbling even while I was deep into the water.Such sound made me reckoned that the pond was deep, so deep in fact that I keptgoing further and further into the water and I could not see ground. As I wentdeeper, there was exaltation inside me, a sudden gush of joy that became moreand more prevalent as I dived deeper and deeper. But even as I go further intothe water, I could find no end, as if it was a bottomless pit. I was insistingto lunge deeper when suddenly I felt a hand grabbed my body and pulled metowards the surface. When I reached the surface of the water I realized that Icould not swim that the man who grabbed me had to help me reach the shore.There were actually two men that helped me get out of the water, as I lay theregasping in the banks. I examined the two men and observed them carefully and tomy amazement, they both looked like me. They were my twins if only in thatparticular dream.

I sat there at the pond's shore while the two men stayed in the water, soexpert in their swimming prowess that you could not tell from the surface ifthey are really moving their hands and feet to wade above the waters. That wasthe time that I saw this vision of an old person who looked like an old womanin a very long white dress. She looked so old that I had initially thought ofher to be a ghost but despite such apprehensions, I could not move andcontinued to stare at the apparition. She approached me slowly as she floatedthrough the wind, her feet entirely above the ground. As much as I thought thatshe was approaching me, as much farther she had become. It was completely adistortion of physics and of sight. She moved away from me, hovering towardsthe top of the nearby hill. A smile was pasted on her crinkled face thatsomehow I felt reassured that she meant no harm. She pointed towards the treeand through my mind, she instructed me to dive once more into the water. And soI recreated my previous dive and the sudden gush of happy emotion was thereagain as well as the temptation to go deeper and deeper. To seek the ultimatedepth, the bottomless pit. The water offered such narcotic feeling that the twomen had to grab me and pull me up before I go so much deeper and became lostinto such very fearful depth. Every time I reach the shore, I dived again andthen dived again until I was able to swim on my own, having gained the patiencenot to go deeper into the water.

And the dream went into a blur. The last recoverable image I have got of thatdream was the old woman dancing atop the hill, while floating, and swaying herarms sideways and roundabout, as if ordering the wind and all the elements tomove, and the air moved. In fact the entire atmosphere was in a whirl.

If dreams could be so vivid, nothing could top that particular dream where evenwhen years had already passed, I could still remember the details, and theminutest of emotions that I felt. It was one of those dreams that once I wokeup, I had the feeling that I had been transported from one place towardsanother instead of the general feeling of waking up.

Of dreams and of past memories therefore I have a healthy recognition and havereasonable distinction.

It was also in my Hadja Saniya's front yard that I also had another experienceof trance. Again, we were playing a catch-me-if-you-can as twilight was alreadyheavy into the night that it was only the full moon in the sky that gave ussufficient illumination. When the moon was full, us children would play intothe night and it was sort of a ritual for us every time the moon appeared atits fullest. Before night came, the older children would inform all of us thatthe moon would appear in the night so we had to prepare for the night games.They say the night was full of monsters and ghosts but when the moon was full,even the olds would be in the yards to enjoy the mystic of a moonlit night.

The extra playing time we've got made us giddy and a little bit livelier. Everyone seemed to laugh and snitched, until we were all laughing incessantly as wego running in a circle continuously and I started to hear laughing voices notof my friends but of some other persons'—old persons'. I stopped moving whilethe others kept running in circles, and the laughing voices faded as if Ibecame suddenly deaf. And I stood there petrified and my body movedindependently of my will until I was positioned apart from my playmates andgazed towards a guava tree whose leaves was crumbled due to the coolness of thenight. The night became a little bit darker and my friends disappeared into ablur, as if I was the only person on earth that night. There was a redflickering light in the middle of the guava tree. The spark of light flickeredso slowly as if someone was blowing it again and again. I squinted my eyes andI saw a figure of a huge man with the head of a horse, and the flickering lightwas at the end of what looked like a huge cigar. I could see figures in shadowbecause the tree was just about twenty meters away from where I was standing.The figure then changed into the figure of an elephant. After a few moments, Isaw the shaped of a whale, then a horse head again, then of a monkey. The shapekept on changing and changing. The occurrence took about nearly an hour butwhen it ended my friends was still running in circles. I felt a suddenloneliness that I started to cry for no reason at all. I saw my mother comingafter me and asked what was wrong with me. The other kids said that we werejust playing. My crying caused the disruption of our over extended play into thenight. Somehow, I could not remember telling my mother or anyone about thestrange figures I have seen. Funnier still, when the day after came, nobodymentioned to me that I acted queerly by just standing there and crying sosuddenly. Just like those other strange memories, I always failed to tellanyone for reason that is perhaps beyond careful remembrance. It may be perhapsthe feeling I had then, even up to now, that no one would believe some queerstories anyway that it was not worth telling in the first place. Such memoriesfaded in my head as the years went by, to recur as deja vu in later years.

All these experiences had one major tread that are similar to all and that isthe feeling of entering into another dimension, penetrating an invisible wall thatdivides this world from some other parallel existence. I have a great feelingthat those events were planned by some supernatural beings, as a way ofintroducing their presence here on our material world, to declare that they arehere.

2.1.

Hadja Saniya was unlike other elders we had. The more she got older, thesharper she had become. She had been tending a store and kids like us could nottouch the goods as easily, in order to put some candies into our pocketswithout paying for it. All day long she played solitaire and was all tooengrossed in it. I have learned one lesson or two about playing cards from her.At age six, I was already crazy about solitaire. At age nine, I was alreadygambling with the older cousins and uncles, playing poker and baccarat.

She never spoke much but she was always ready with the broom every time we didsome mischief in the house, even those malefaction we did outside whenever newsof such reach the house. One afternoon, words got to her that we took some bitsof pork meat from some neighbors grilling a whole swine. I did not have so muchbeating from anyone as much as I had from her. That was my first religiouslessons. Moslems do not eat pork she screamed and gnashed and from then on, Inever touched the meat for a long, long time.

Her house would have been so grand when it was newly built as if centuries ago.While I was scrubbing the floor and wiping the dusts from furnitures, I imagineit to be a classic house made of wood, somehow Spanish in architecture butalways remind me of American houses that I often see in the movies, just likethe one in American Psycho. Her husband died years back that we did not reallysaw him alive but his picture hanging in the living room reminded me about howhandsome he might have been, a man pure in Middle Eastern blood, leaning to theTurkish rather than Arab. He might have been a cinch with the ladies in hisyounger days. I imagined their stories of adornment. Perhaps, he was a handsomeyoung man then, setting eye upon a fair Samal lad, and some other girls. Hemust have been a rich man to put up such a house. In Moslem weddingengagements, at least to those who were prosperous, all the matters are neversettled in one sitting, at least not in one grand ceremony, merely climaxing uponsuch explosion of merriment and celebration. There would be the engagementprocedures where the family of the male would bring all kinds of sweets anddelicacies wrapped in colorful packages. In recent times, they used colorfulcellophanes and Japanese paper when in the past they have to make use ofcarefully garnished garments and expensive silk from china. The china manbrought these things and porcelains in exchange for the gold of the localtribesmen. There must have been a lot of gold vein in the area of Zamboangathat there were old pictures of Samal tribesmen flashing those teeth thatglitter even if the photograph were in fading black and white.

Imagine yourself in a stock exchange as quoted prices flew by here and thereand you would be able to feel how the parties negotiate for the amount ofdowries to be taken by the family of the would-be bride. The spokesman for themale party would offer all the things that were superfluous like four heads ofcow or a pocketful of pearls and morsels of gold. The father of the bride-to-bewould of course negotiate for a better deal until the two parties meet at onedelta of understanding. About a year after the agreement, the wedding ceremonywould take place and in those olden days, it would last almost a week of merrymaking and festivity. The gongs would reverberate throughout, day and night,insistent and almost to the point of annoyance to the neighborhood. The bestdancers would be invited to take turns, as the bride and groom are kept apartuntil the last day of the ceremony. There was the persevering smell of ricecakes and pastries made of mustard and egg, the kind that I always look forwhenever I am in such activity, identifying the area of the kitchen as early aspossible and then reconnoitering the area like a vulture. I usually fill mystomach with a lot of native coffee as the supply was bottomless and unendingand every adult would took notice that such young child would spoil himselfwith nerve wracking amount of coffee.

Even in her fading years, Hadja Saniya looked fair that there was no doubt thatshe had deserved such grand wedding from the "Turkish" suitor.

Years after, the house of Hadja Saniya was graying and the paint on the wallssubsided that there was an apparent darkness everywhere. When night comes, thedarkness is more pronounced as silence complements the general dimness. Thesmell of old wood always lay heavy upon my nose that every smell of woodreminds me of the house. Dirt stuck to the decades old walls invites me alwaysto stare at them and I reckoned then that the dark stains on them formed theshapes of men and other unlikely beings. The house was alive I thought then andit breathes into our lives every moment we happened to be there. In the night,these shadows become sharper that I thought I saw the shade of an old womanalways while the lights are out and I lay there trying to find sleep, turningin my bed while cuddled inside heavy fabric, sweating profusely from fear ofshadows.

I would sweat so heavily from warmth as I resisted the terrifying shadows of anold woman sitting just at the foot of my bed. There were times that the fearate so much into me that I screamed and cried in the middle of the night. Myfather thought I was just missing my grandfather that at midnight, they woulddeliver me to my Uncle Mameng's house nearly ten kilometers away.

Of course, I would have to be back with my mother when school finally opened.The shadows finally came at lesser frequency and besides sleeping together withmy brothers kept me somewhat reassured. If that old woman would strangle me, atleast I would not be the only one to be strangled.

I could not tell if those shadows were really ghosts or spirits but I felt sosure that they breathe a life and they were unmistakably the shape of humanbeings.

My real sighting of a ghost came years later when I was just about ten oreleven years old. I could remember some particulars as I relate this to younow. It was near midnight, on one weekend, when most of the members of ourhousehold stayed wide awake to watch a television special; it was a late nightmovie if I am not mistaken.

Usually when the night comes, I had felt dutiful always to check the back doorif they were safely locked and shut tightly. That night, before I sat to watch theshow, I reconnoitered the kitchen and locked the door after reassuring thatevery chore in the kitchen has been done. As the show started, I felt a strongurge to relieve myself that I headed for the comfort room, situated just to theleft of the kitchen. As I turned towards the direction of the kitchen, I saw afigure of a woman in white gown, with her hair down to her knees, walked passthe hall leading to the kitchen.

" Is someone still in the kitchen?" I asked.

"Everyone is here. Why?" quipped my Aunt Coney.

"I just saw a woman in white walked by in the kitchen hall!" Iexclaimed.

"Do not kid us like that." She warned.

"Really. I did saw a woman"

We all stared at each other and after a moment, we all scurried for the mainbedroom. Every one was blaming me for playing some wicked game on them and Ikept on denying them.

"It must be your imagination." they all indicted me.

Half an hour later, we were back in front of the television while I was feelingso sick already from fear. I had no choice but to join them in the living roomotherwise I would be alone in the room.

While the television was glaring, a sudden wind blew forcefully from the windowand rain poured instantaneously as rumbling thunder shook the house. It wasjust another bad weather, as we disregarded the weather's tumult and stay stuckto the television show. Perhaps the wind was so whipping that small bits ofstones were thrown at our direction, entering thru the window.

"Damn it. Someone is throwing stones at us," Coney said and we allpeered into the window to investigate the malefactor and we find exactly nobodyoutside as more bits of stone came at us. The sound of thunder became extremelyforceful that the lights went out. By this time, I could already feel the fearthat had enveloped not only me, but also the rest of them; fear has a smell Irealized that moment. In the middle of the living room, a small whirlwind waslifting the small stones towards the ceiling in a circular motion and while thestones circled above ground, the wind suddenly stopped and the bits of stonefell simultaneously to the ground. We all screamed and run to the bedroom.

It was strange that the day after, no matter how patently strange theexperience we had the night before, everyone was merely jesting about it whileHadja Saniya simply dismissed it as the playful imagination of our minds, uswho were still tender in the head. She was deep in slumber when the strangehappenstance occurred. Even those who were present in that strange occurrencesimply forgot about it, never mentioning it again. My Aunt Coney just did nottalk about it. My brothers Nasrullah and Akmad and my sister Rimaisa just wentto the yards and play the usual games, as if nothing happened. If I rememberwell, my cousin Nimfa and Mernisa was present then and similarly, they nevertook it so seriously despite the common terror we had felt that night. Where incontrast, that unusual night were etched forever in my mind.

The eldest who was there was Aunt Coney. I had expected her to convince theothers that some spirits really played fun on us but she acted as if thestrange night was merely a usual occurrence, and did go on with the ordinarychores, as if nothing happened, as if she was expecting such things to happenordinarily. After that night in fact, she had slowly gained isolation from therest of us, at least it was how I have observed her to be. She would walk alongand would give me that iniquitous stare that I felt somehow uncomfortable thatshe had suddenly become so mindful of my presence that she would shout at meeasily if for example I happened to touch the expensive jar in the living room.

I reckoned that she had blamed me for that strange occurrence in that onestrange night.

Chapter Three

TheMystical Old Man

You could fall in love in such tender ages this I realized when I stepped intofirst grade. Those feelings might have been merely infatuations. I was notsure. Nothing is so certain with emotions especially that of a child.

I could always write "C-H-A-I-R" or "U-M-B-R-E-L-L-A" whenour teacher instructed us to identify things on the board. That was how Juliechose a seat beside me. She was like a leech poring into all the answers I havegot on my paper while I was always ever willing to share them. She was there withher angelic face looking perpetually it seemed at my paper. In such closeness,I could study the gentle features of her face, the wide-eyed girl who alsohappened to be a neighbor of ours although their house was far enough that shewas not with the regular kids I play with every afternoon.

Julie had a face of dolls my cousins used to play and she wore dresses likethose dolls wore. With flowers and sunbeams in them embroidered like badges.Her hair was always prim and her shoes shiny. When rainy seasons came, she wasthe only child who carried to school an umbrella made for kids while we carrythe larger ones, whose length were nearly our heights, making us lookedlaughable and tragic it seems.

Even in the gardening activities, I would be the one toiling for her that itfelt good to be so needed while she enjoyed being so dependent. At that age,the littlest of vocabulary in our minds never allowed us much conversation thatwhat I did was merely stare at her face and wonder how it attracts my attentionso much. In the afternoon, I would go home ahead so that I could again examineher face while she walked past Hadja Saniya's house.

One day she shook the entire class as she narrated to us, while we were playingin the fields, how she had a dwarf friend that she had put in the bottle. Iinquired so earnestly if the dwarf was still there and said that in fact shehad spoken to one of them that morning.

We all grouped around her for dwarf stories and she would tell them with somuch energy that she sweated sometimes.

From then on, she was full of dwarf stories that my classmates proceeded todisregard her. Perhaps, bandwagons were a fact of life even in our tender agesthat even I started to isolate her. She became bitter and always in argumentwhen we chided her about the dwarfs. Until one day one of the dwarfs died andit seemed she never spoke again and became all the more introspective andisolated. In the second grade, she had changed classes but I continued toexamine her face whenever she was around. As she grew older, the dresses shewore disappeared and started to wear jeans and t-shirts, and before we knew it,she had developed lesbian tendencies and became silent.

When I entered high school my grandfather took me back and paid for theexpensive fees of my catholic schooling. He had become weaker and weaker thatperhaps, he needed someone to tend over him when weakness consumed himaltogether. He had bouts with asthma that often, we both slept in the hospitalfor days. The hospital became my second home during those years while Istruggled with my studies.

In his healthier days, he would give me Arabic lessons and great myths of old.Being a Moslem preacher that he was, he was always writing some Arabicscribbles into his minute notebooks and I would ask about them.

"It is the mysteries of the world." He would always say. I wanted toask if for who does he writes it for when almost nobody could understand Arabicbut I did not.

I would observe him scribbling all afternoon like a well-versed scholar oncomposing his post-graduate opus. He had an apprentice whom he always consultsevery now and then, a young preacher named Abirin, who was also our relations.I would go along with him to these frequent visits and indeed they comparednotes. I observed so keenly how they relate and strangely enough, they do notspeak as much to each other but they would smile and grunt as if theyunderstood each other. One time, they had this ritual where they lit up acandle and Abirin was holding the Tasbi, the Moslem prayer beads, and held itup that it lay there static in a hanging position. There was no one aroundexcept the three of us. Both of them continue to mumble Arabic verses that theyboth seemed to fall into a trance, including me that my sight got plasteredinto the hanging Tasbi. Then all of a sudden, the beads swayed back and forth,about forty-five degrees from left to right. Then it went forth in wildcircular motion without the hands of Abirin moving. Then if stop so abruptlythat even at that age, it must have been impossible. When after a while, theTasbi stopped completely in a forty-five degrees position, for a bout sixtyseconds and this had astounded me so much for I know this is not how gravityactually works. My hairs stood up and felt a sadness so deep that I wept thereso hard, and tears flowed from my eyes like a river. Both of them pacified metelling me that "it's alright. It's all right. Stop your crying". Andthey were both smiling at each other without conversing in dialogues.

One of the manuscripts that Hadji Unih was writing one afternoon was a widepaper with shapes in them. It was so wide that he had to fold it before tuckingit into his black leather case. In the middle of it all was a circle and ateach side were three rectangular shapes. At each corner was a triangle andwithin the shapes were Arabic verses. I was particularly mystified by the workthat I asked him its meaning and consequences. "It's the mystery of ourexistence," he would vaguely answer again. I imagined those writings to becharms that I had a keen eye on them, coveting them in my heart that I plannedto tuck them away. I daydreamed that they would give me powers of thesupernatural kind. One that could make me disappear perhaps and becomeinvisible or one that would afford me extreme luck and plow in mountains andmountains of money and other riches. But it was only after he died that I havegot hold of the paper that I wanted most. Not by stealing it away as I hadplanned but by just appearing in my sight several nights after he had died. Allhis garments and materials were distributed among the relations including allhis writings and paraphernalia. It was only the one that I coveted much that Ifound in the empty closet that we both used to share. I was so consumed withsadness that after putting the paper in my bag I just forgot about it and didnot mind it much until years later. His death meant that I had to go back to mymother and started the "silent years" of my life.

The death of Hadji Unih was like the world falling down on me. I awoke to anewer set of reality where the very person that almost became everything to me,to be the father and a mother, to provide every garment and every toy, suddenlydisappeared. My body became literarily wobbly that uncertainties of futurethings cast a huge gloom into my mindset.

I became the more introspective and the change was so abrupt that my classmatesonce took notice of this change and ask if something wrong was happening to me.I said there was none.

As I visited his tomb every now and then, I would take a stone from the surfaceof the ground where he was buried thinking and hoping that his spirit wouldinto the stone and guide me throughout my life. I would be like a man gone outof his head as I spoke to him while my words just flew into the wind. Extremeintrospection was the consequence of his death to my person but sadness was notso. A week after he died, my mother and many others would still cry, especiallymy mother who even months and years after, she would wake up in the middle ofthe night to sit by the dimly lit kitchen of Hadja Saniya and cried. But I didnot cry as much. Weeks after his death, I was playing basketball with so muchfire that I excelled in it. I cried once and then never again. My body becamelighter that despite the abrupt change in the things that I have, as comparedto the things he had been affording me, I never cried so much over him. As ifsomebody was lifting me up and protected me from longing so much for him.

And yet, the lack of things was a something that I had to struggle with andtook me a long time to adjust.

Years later, he would appear in my dreams. One of those dreams I quite rememberso well. We were walking along the bridges and planks of a Moslem community bythe sea, like typical communities of Samals. It was unlike any community that Isee or that I have been. As we were walking, his footsteps became faster andfaster, leaving me a little behind and struggling with my own footsteps. Thenhe walked faster that the distance between us became wider and wider until heran suddenly forward. I was teary-eyed calling out for him, not to leave mebehind. I could see him run and suddenly dived into the water below and swamtowards the deeper sea. I was flooded with tears as I ran after him and I alsojumped into the water. I struggled to swim as water poured in through my mouthand suddenly he appeared from under and carried me while he swam like aswooping tornado. When we were in the middle of the sea, he suddenly became a crocodile.I did not mind it so much as the ride gave me a serene exaltation, and a widegrin was on my face. The dream ended as we approached the beautiful orangesunset against the blue horizon.

Chapter Four

InvincibleHours

In a Jesuit institution, one appreciates the love of God and of country becausethe insignia in our school uniform boldly states "pro deo et patria"a latin phrase declaring "for god and country". I had always staredat that insignia and studied every detail of the design. The very minute I gothold of that high school uniform, I felt ecstatic because for every child,Ateneo was a dream school, it was where the rich men's children gained theireducation.

Truly indeed, there were lots of them rich kids in their huge basketball shoes andrubber wristwatch protruding gravely from their little gangly arms. I could seethat even in appearance they were different from each and every one of us. Theyalways had skin so fair and tinges of foreign look.

My first day in school was not a good memory. I had bought this orange pants amonth ago thinking these were such garments the hip American kids wore, thoseBronx black kids used when they were break dancing. I was a huge follower ofthe strut and breakdancing movement that caught the whole world at that time.

While we were in the flag ceremony, some kids from behind snickered and I heardhim mentioning the color of my pants. I should have been gone to the city jailinstead of school he said. I heard that because they meant it to be heard so I feltso conscious and sweated for the rest of the ceremonies. I tore that pantslater on so that I could use that at home, at least, my money did not went fornaught.

In my college years, I stayed with Ateneo and planned to master politics orliterature when some student assistant led me to my scholarly perdition.

" You are taking A.B. Political Science while others are struggling toenter nursing" the student assistant from the admission office quipped asif she was so bored with her job that she could not help but interfere in somepoor lad's career.

" What's wrong with the course", I answered.

" You have a very high entrance score and you could take just about anyother course", she suggested and I thought she was waiting for myacquiescence with bated breath. I could see the white of her eyes as she staredworrying for my life.

"I am planning to enter law school" I said, " It is just apreparatory course"

"You could take Accountancy then" she insisted and added " ithas law subjects in it"

I examined the curriculum and indeed four entries there read "BusinessLaw". As if just to do away with her pestering, I agreed and sign in withthe batch of people who wanted to count other people's money.

At home, I reconciled my earlier decision with the uncertainties of the future.I assured myself that it was for the better because if things would not workout right, I could always slide into counting money in banks or someinstitution. I could even go on business myself and be proficient with money.But it turned out; accountancy was not just about counting money. It was fullof worksheets after worksheets that test the patience of the students, while itwas supposedly to be merely a stepping-stone for me towards another course. Ilacked the patience and discipline that I performed miserably at school. I didnot decided to change course anymore because I felt my intellect were enough towrestle the course even with the minimal attention to it. Whoever says that anaccounting class was not a bore must have been a fanatic of numbers. We alwayshad to determine the money of some Mr. X or Mr. Y and see if the profits heraked in were properly reported or not. Then Mr. Z somehow had this factory andwe must advice him at what price to sell his goods. Then there were the banksthat we had to reconcile. It was a merciless subject that I never really caredif banks reconcile or just kept on kicking at each other's butt.

I spent a lot of time in the library instead. While my classmates was carefullyputting entries into their ultra-neat worksheets, I dived into the world ofRussian literature- of Feodor Dostoyevsky and of Tolstoy- and into thoseAmerican textbooks who were not wanting in graphics and designs, full of schoolyards and prairies and colonial houses made of Oak.

I joined the school paper to further stifle the general boredom of classrooms.I must have questioned enough inquiries as a reporter that in my senior years Itook the rein as the Editor in Chief. I learned to make more poetry because theones submitted were simply crap. Well, not all of them at the least. I wouldhide in some other name to fill a section full of serious literature. Eachissue was always a labor of love that I would stay alone in the pressroom up tothe late evening to get some editing done.

I kept the greater load of the works, burning hours after hours doing the dirtystuffs, integrating issues with more than two of my pseudonyms. I kept everymember of the publication at bay. I was not a good administrator despite mywriting skills that a friend declared that the publication was a one-manmagazine. I sort of took offense at that, but it somehow gave me a feeling ofinvincibility.

Chapter Five

TheMan In The Moon

There was a time when my grandfather was telling me the story about "theman in the moon". In moonlit nights, long after my grandfather died, I satand merge with the cold wind and studied the geography of the moon's surface.He called the man Taberlok, a scary name I surmised then. He rode the sky in amagic broom and had a pointed trumpet-like hat. He comes down once in a whilemy grandfather said, looking out for kids who did bad things and taking themaway into some other world, never to return again. I shriveled at theproposition that I gained some distrust against my grandfather. How wickedTamberlok was I thought for children only wanted to play and laugh all daylong.

But Tamerlok was not a one-dimensional freak after all as my grandfathercontinued. On the other hand, according to the old man, a good kid was given awild and happy ride across the stars and beyond. And it would be a veryenjoying ride my grandfather always reassured me.

As I grew older, I reckoned this tale to be purely made up but somehow I keptstaring at the moon when the moments were perfectly at hand. I had hoped verymuch that my grandfather was the real "man in the moon" in order thathe may come and took me a ride across the meteors and along side those speedingcomets. If he was the moon man I thought, I would gain the wild and happy ride,because I had been generally good with him, at least as I had believe then.

When he was alive, he would always take me with him whenever he had to godowntown or visit some relations. It was a happy walk always that before wewent home, we passed by the store to buy some toys or new garments.

At times I stared at the moon so fervently that at one time or another, I saw aface with a huge grin pasted on it. The moon was sometimes a person, living andbreathing. They say when it was at its fullest, ghosts and winged serpentswould appear and roam the sky and the earth, but to me, it was another chanceto summon the man in the moon.

I called upon the spirit of my grandfather also whenever I pray, after callingout to God. It was extremely difficult for me to memorize those Muslim prayersthat after trying my best, I gave up and decided that I should settle with theprayer of the beads which only three words were muttered in Arabic. I conformedthen to the idea that every prayer, as long as it was genuine, was good enough.There was this Tasbi that my grandfather had which I kept until now as aremembrance and I used it in my nightly calls to Allah. Since he died, my nightcalls gained sufficient frequency. I called on Allah and confessed all thethings in my heart. The things I did in the day and all the things I did not. Ifelt so sinful then that not at one instance merely that tears would flow downeasily from my eyes. "I am despicable", I admitted always. I callupon God and sometimes I could interchange Him with my grandfather unknowinglythat my tone for my meanderings were indistinctive, regardless if I wasconfessing before God and summoning my grandfather.

Chapter Six

The Rose Bud

I met Evelyn during my first years in college. Our family moved house towards aneighborhood that had once been familiar to me. The old apartment where UncleMameng's once rented was just nearby. Lustre Street felt familiar, there werethose stark reminders of those adventures I had in Childhood. There were thechronic water ponds were fishes used to roam and we'd fish like there was notomorrow. The rice fields somewhere in the out backs of the houses on stiltsseemed barren now, but in the past, wild birds dotted them that I had slingeredquite a number of them.

I never had a girlfriend since that time and it took me quite a number ofnights thinking about my move. The neighborhood friends were too urgent that Ihad to save some manly honors. There were not a few times that I sipped abottle of beer before I would speak to her. And some nights it was not merelysipping, but I was already half-conscious from beer.

There was nothing I thought I was best at but at making love letters and Iwrote them in stationeries I burnt with cigarettes to heighten the effect andthen I wrote her poems.

Poets have privileges that others do not have so perhaps when I finally got heracquiescence I celebrated my poems, almost putting them in plaques.

I wrote poems that were somewhat surreal; the kind only the poet knew the exactmeaning and nobody else. They were erotic at times, but adventurous at most.There was the poem that I remembered the most and it was like magic that untilnow, I remain its most ardent admirer, though it may look I am the soleadmirer. That poem was the "Rose Bud" and it goes…

Set your fodder widest
Like an ocean of yellow poppy field,
On an orange farm
That once ruled
The mazes of my perverted dreams.

Here I stand,
A smirking child
Lost in the underground caves
Where I set my Indian soul free
Always upon your magnificience.

You offer me your oriental meal
Flavored with salted tenderness,
Laced with diamonds of
Hopes and promises.

When you tamed a whispering storm,
The moon was a scarlet fire.

Aziz accused me of inventing some poem that was heavy on drugs and perversion.I said it was only in his mind. I explained that the poppy field is the beautyof the farm I used to see in pictures of Europe. They must have been tulips,but I preferred the poppy flowers.

Poems are always misunderstood. Mine were not exempted.

Chapter Seven

The Accidental Politician

Law school was both a destiny and a curse. The first appreciable words I heardfrom my father was "you would be a lawyer when you grow up" and stuckto my mind like mildew on wet rock. If he were a warlock, it would have beenthe curse from Gods. But since he was not, then it must have been destiny.

The minute I stepped into the halls of the University, there was a realizationthat every other hour I have spent in classrooms were for the sole purpose ofthis endeavor, to learn and argue for somebody else's tragedy. Sighing as if agreat thorn in my heart had been plucked out and yet sighing, or rather yawningthat the specter of boring classrooms would still be there to haunt me. It hadbecome the wildest of my ambition to finally find myself free of blackboardsand teachers mimicking textbooks. And in my first year of law school, mypatience was gravely questioned; my discipline doubted thinking it would beanother four years of classrooms.

To make matters worse, my law years overlapped with Satan's wrathfulstranglehold on me, stifling my attention rules and procedures as the scourgeof depression sent my emotions into ecstasy, and then sadness, then everythingin between. Again, I merely traipse along periodic examinations and semestralbreaks and along summers and make-up classes and completion tests. The years inthe University would have been mostly plain and sordid, until I got myself entangledin student politics.

I was riding the seaside highway towards school while heavy in my mind waswhether to skip the class or not. My decision to attendance led to a lengthyconversation with a classmate that was himself harboring a hard decision to make,that is, whether to run for another term as President or not.

"This is a good proposition," he said. Teng Catong is a miniaturenational politician who takes his politics so seriously that it pores out ofhis skin. Elections were his staple, the lifeblood that makes his spirit riseand gain him some shine in his face. If orations were an Olympic sport, hewould have represented Philippines.

"Any good proposition is good to hear," I said, pinching in somebravado, upon speaking to one who is full of politics.

"I am sure you could do it," he sort of whispered to me and that wasthe time I realized that this may be something beyond jest. I felt somesinister.

" If I can do it, then I will do it," I answered with bated breath,somehow recognizing that the proposition would demand so much from me. Ithought perhaps this was a business proposition and he needed some capital,which I do not have really.

" We need you run as President for our party" he muttered casually,psychologically assuring me that it would not be so much of a big deal.

I regretted my bravado soon after and smiled so hard I thought I would laugh.He must have been joking I reckoned then and my mind rushed for excuses.

"I do not have the resources"

"We have the resources"

"I won't win. I have no previous reputation."

"You will win."

The following day, I submitted my application with the dean of student Affairsand rode the campaign trail thinking I was merely in a movie and everything wasmerely an acting job. And most of it were actually acting job for someone whodoes not have much time in the past speaking in front of crowds. I would scurryto imagine Jose Rizal or Ninoy Aquino. If I had then the proper equipment, Iwould have studied their movements and actuations every time I prepare tospeak, like basketball coaches do. In my mind was a playground, and I was themaster of my speech, the director of that movie. I became Gandhi and thenMarcos then Pilate, sometimes all of them at the same time. "Lend me yourears.." were words I learned in school; "bring me your votes"was the phrase I learned in the field of political battle.

When the counting came in, the lights went out and Teng was almost shouting atme to make the rounds and guard every vote. He was holding his personal tallysheet as sweat poured all over him. He shouted like he was my master and I wasmerely a confidant. I did not say anything although I wanted to appease himthat losing would not be the end of the world for me. It was then I realizedthat my defeat would be the world falling down on him. It was much of hiselection as mine. When the smoke got cleared and every bullet was shot andevery cannon fired, I got away with the most minimum of votes and worryovercame me rather than elation. But it was a show all along until the very endthat I jumped as Teng and my other teammates hugged to the air. I smiled butdid not laugh.

Running for the topmost student post was one thing and winning was another. Itwas purely bravado that got me embroiled in such very alien endeavor. I wouldnot worry much anyway for winning is not one of my expectation. You see I was acomplete nobody then. I had not anticipated governing that my losing would justbe another day for me. But I won and worried so much about governing.

The summer after such election, I fell into an abyss and that made everythingworse. I have to deal with a major depression while preparing for my reign asthe University president.

Depression is like water. You could not get hold of it. You grasped it intoyour hands and they just melts away. It is also like upon a darkened room thatthe darkness would be so unkind that you would not know where the chairs andtables are, not even the way out. I bet our soul is like a ship and mine wasthe Titanic. I hit an iceberg and got sunk into the deepest of the icy Atlanticwater. There, in the most desolated of the ocean's bed, nothing lives exceptsome freak creature, staring at you every now and then. The coolness of thewater would not support any moss, not even some anemones. I remember again thatdream of mine where I repeatedly dived into a pond, where I dove deeper anddeeper and had no such temerity to rise up again. My anxieties had gotten soworse that to compare me to a shipwreck was an understatement. Depression waslike that, you have worries and could not point out to the source of theseworries and you end up just letting go of any resistance and wallow in sadnessand general bowing gait that paints the darkness of my life then.

I carried on with routines of governing when there is not much to govern exceptthat you are being expected to make something move and live, like a magician.Student politics is not similar to the usual politics we have where everywhereand everything calls for action and work, work and more work. In that set-up,you have to create work it seems not so unlike of milking a male cow. So I hadconcerts and essay writing contests and everything in between. If history trulyjudges the rein of student presidents, then I must have not deserved a singlejottings or a blot of ink in the history books.

Chapter Eight

MyPen, The Arrow

In my senior years in law school, an old friend, Aziz Mustafa called me up andinquired if I needed a job. The offer was like that of Marlon Brando's, it washard to refuse. Working for a foreign-funded institution is like a baptism offire, threading another dimension of existence. My hands were so full I chokeon paperwork virtually. There is this braggadocio in me that always get me intothe prying pan. I never learned it seemed. Serving the second half of mypresidency, tackling the end years of my law school, and eating up paper atwork—all of them almost at the same time—stretched me up like a rubber band inorder to clip bundles and bundles of papers. I was always up and about, alwayson the run it seemed. If I find myself sitting in a corner at that time, thatwould have been a minor miracle. Even at home, I would take work and finish itthere because there was a time that regular office time could not accommodatethem. There was madness in activity, so much activity it seemed that you couldimagine me like a crazy wheel rolling and rolling until nothing is there toroll for. My nerves were full but it did not snapped because somehow, I felt atease with furious activity that inactivity was then a hellish idea. I bet whenthe juices gets going, work becomes more and more palatable.

The money was so good that I stayed in my job even if I had consequently has totake the bar examinations to gain my lawyering license. And besides I wasmarried already then.

I did not last in my work. There was a parting that was both hurtful but at thesame time relieving. For almost two years, office work had gotten so flat thatwith more personnel coming, the load got lighter and lighter until there isnothing more to do except watch for the clock's small hand to approach five o'clock. And the days grew longer that we always joke around that somehow theremust be some fantasy company we could work in that every day was salary day. Atthe beginning of the day, we wished it were already twilight. At the beginningof the month, we would wish it were nearly halfway through. At least not all ofus felt that way. Or perhaps some were just not as honest about being disturbedof the almost fatal routinariness of day jobs, especially government jobs.

But work is work and a job is a job. Without it, there is no sense that youfind yourself suddenly idle and not earning the usual things. Besides, whocould go against that unwritten rule where it seems that humans were createdmerely for the purpose of growing up until you could work and then die? Therewere times when I was too uncomfortably busy that I used to daydream how myworld could be so wonderful if I could spend every day of my life just sittingaround in front of my computer and make that proverbial "great Filipinonovel" and watch over my kids when I am not scribbling anything. Alas,writing a novel was so much easier to imagine than do. It was like putting up arocket ship or assembling a nuclear bomb. I tried to make some upstarts butnothing came about not until years later.

Delusion I had hoped then could propel me towards success in literature. I hadbelieved that my intellect was adequate to harbor such ambition, sadly, intellectand grammatical skills were not enough to get me going towards endless andlonely nights by myself, writing and imagining, the sort fiction demands. I hadfully realized then that there is more to me that writing demands, somethingethereal and incorporeal, one that could not be seen; some call it inspirationand it was inspiration that I lacked then.

I tried giving life to an otherworldly tale of two-lovers separated by time. Icalled it "Black Sea, Dark Night", the way old writers thought offancy but concise titles like "My Brother, The Executioner" ofF.Sionil Jose or "The Joy Luck Club" of Amy Tan. More of it, it was atitle that came to my mind whenever I pondered upon the darkness of depression.I had learned so well that writing from the heart is the sole highway towardsaffective writing and I could not be genuine I would not find no parallel in mylife to the things I write. It was about Peter, an adolescent struggling withthe same depression problems I had who suddenly saw a creature of the night, avision of an old man with a decrepit hat. The spirit would talk to him andproposed that he do some favor for a task only he could do. Peter would notknow how to tackle this quandary at first for no one would believe his tales,when almost everyone he knows he had this mental or behavioral problems; untilsomeone did and the story goes on and on until the final journey into thespirit world and back and the final task accomplished to appeased the spirit.What task was this did not materialized in the story, I could not even inventone until now that it is such of essence that a spirit would go to the extentof contacting a half-deranged boy. Although the tale would take me into theancient warrior days of Zamboanga, towards the colonial days of SpanishConquistadors, it stopped when the tribal chieftain was about to declare warupon the much stronger Spanish soldiers and I left it at that. Until now, BlackSea, dark Night is still yearning for its ending but you would learn later onwhy It remains eating dust somewhere in one of my attaché cases.

Stephen King might have invaded the crevices of my veins that I had thisinclination to write about the things that feeds our fears. There is somethingdelicious in testing the limits of our nerves. The more we fear the more wescurry for the mysterious. Like eating pepper; the more it stings the more wecrave.

I remember that before there was "Black Sea, Dark Night", I had thisshort story, again with a fancy title. I called it "The Southbound City ofIceberg", a tale of an imaginary beast lounging beneath the city underways, in sewages and giant canals, pulling down each victim one after another,one by one that as the disappearances became more frequent, the"beast" would go on a very lengthy guilt-trip. What if men finallyknew about his existence? And although it was merely a beast it had the properintelligence to regulate its mayhem. It ended just that way, although everypossible circumstances was scrutinized by the "beast", to the worsewhere mankind would pour all its resources, the fighter planes of America, thesatellites of China, the tanks of Great Britain—all at once coming to the cityof Zamboanga hunting for its own mischief and blasting it towards perdition,turning into pulp or pulverized like crisp biscuits.

The "beast" would stare upward the sky and got disturbed by themoving starlights that it did not suspected at once to be man-made, until lateron it surmised that men had invented eyes in the sky in order to hunt it. Ithad surmised that before, man had no such equipments to search for misfits ofnature now it has meteor-like gadgets to roam the sky as searchlights. The"beast" was an ancient creature that slumbered for thousand of years,only to wake up to a cacophony of downtown lights, rock music, honking jitneysand television. The world was never the same it had determined. Even at night,the streets were brimming with clarity making its haunting all the moredifficult.

And yet, despite this difficulty, the thirst for flesh and blood wasoverpowering that day in and day out, it would peer from the dark crevices ofthe street, in some isolated nook or corner of the city, finding out if itcould be lucky at any time, that someone had drunken too much or got too muchhonked by drugs in the head, to walk alone by some abandoned alleyways, andthen go for the kill. It could get luckier it thought, if some lovers wholacked patience would abuse the darkness of bushes and wayward trees, to do theunthinkable, where the beast could go for a double kill.

As days went by, newspapers started to report these mysterious disappearancesand so the "beast" finally went into the guilt tripping I mentionedearlier. Men are now more sensitive to this untoward incidence, that everycrime has its record and every sin has its public board. The "beast"hated the modern man all the more. It had delusions of murdering the cityinhabitants all at once, wrecking havoc like a crazy evil god, flooding theground with flood. Luckily for the city, it inhibited itself. Thanks to thethings it sees on television. Those weapons of the modern man were so differentthan those it had seen before—those spears and daggers—even those catapultswere no matches.

It ended when it decided not to devour as much in order that it would not beindicted by man that in my fantastic mind, the "beast" is still outthere, pulling down its victim one by one.

The "beast" story was somewhat lyrical and honest. It was then thefirst and only tale that I had completed. It was flowing since it was all aboutmy struggle against "Satan", that beast of a menace that keepspulling down young men and women, leading them into some dirty and stinkingabysses of life, and never to get out again.

I simply lost my manuscript that was why it did not go all the way to thepapers.

But material things are not to be fret up, especially when these things couldbe created. If I lost it, I thought I would just make another one then. Abetter one, it must be.

This better one did not materialize and the tale of that doggone"beast" is like a lost child whom I wish to be reunited in thefuture.

Oh, I lied about completing just a single work. Remember the dream of the pond?The moment I woke up from that dream, I could not stop the itch to write anddocument it for I had no such other dream that could be so vivid at that. Iremember so well the caking red clay to where the dancing old woman floatedabove. Even the color of the dewy water was stained like rust in my mind thatevery time I think about it, I could feel the sharp and crispy coolness itbrought my skin. I documented every moment, every emotion and every color ofthe environment. The sky was red, bleeding towards horizon and the air washeavy and so still, and that my breathing was the only sound I heard most ofthe time. In fact there was that conversations with the other two men presentthat I forgot to mention. As I came out from the water, I remember being alittle aghast at the interferences of the men who looked like me.

"Why don't you leave me alone", I almost shouted at their faces.

"You could not go deeper. You would not be able to come out", one ofthem said, with a worried look in his face that tells some grave worry orconcern.

I looked at them and hissed and I almost sneered. What could have gotten intheir heads that they burden themselves the issue of my well-being? These werevery particular dialogues and emotions that I have captured in writing"The Pond" then. I remember how surreal was the world that I paintedin that story, responsibly truthful to the happenstance in my dream of thepond.

Then perhaps by now we recognize that my dreams, my memories and my fiction hada heavy thread on them; all are surreal. Perhaps, we could add my life to that.

Chapter Nine

WhenThe Dead Came Marching In

There was one fish story that brought me to the very ends of the world itseems, so far away that running water does not exist and a paved road is analien concept.

My cousin King came to me on a warm day, the kind of day that my head is looseand every idea could grow and expand into some humongous concept. The kind ofweather that the breeze is almost thick you could see them pass by, making youlight inside and cheery. It was this cheeriness perhaps that took a bite intosalesmanship, an amateur one that I realized later.

"I am busy with some business prospect," I mentioned to grasp sometalking points. King always seeks tutoring with his school assignments.

" That must be a good prospect," he condescended.

"What do you know about silk?" I asked. Perhaps he must have knownsome who could give me some idea.

" Not much" he said. He seemed to know nothing. Bet that's why I wasalways ghost writing his report.

"It's something we could grow from silkworms" I answered my ownquestions. "We have to nurture worms and the most part of the work isgrowing hectares and hectares of mulberry trees to feed these worms."

"Oh" he exclaimed and I felt hopeful." I know such worm. I sawsome huge ones in the beaches of Tawi-Tawi. They sell well."

He was talking about some other specie of worm.

"Why don't you try dried fish?" King suggested later on.

"What about them?", I asked.

"They cost half as less back at home."

I went for the calculator and grinned at the prospect. A week after, we wereheading for the islands, about two boat-rides away, three hundred milesdownward, and near the Malaysian border.

Banaran Island is place rich in lore, the ones you hear from the elderswhenever they visit us. I had been there once but that was way back in mychildhood. There was one ghost story about the place that I could not forget.When we were kids, my two brothers and me and my sister would always seek someretelling after retelling about such particular incident from the visitors fromdown south. As children, we craved for fear and scurry for more mysteries. Thescarier it gets, the more attentive we became. It was like eating pepper; ithurts to eat more and yet wanted to eat more and more. At night, after we tookour meal, we washed our bodies from sweat and put on fresher clothes and thenwe troop into the living room where the available storyteller would be waitingfor us.

One night, they always started the story, when ships and boats was not supposedto sail anymore, when the air is so fragile and the wind was harsh, a ferrysunk on the way to Banaran from the main island of Bongao. All those aboard didnot survive the tragedy. This accident had happened about two decades ago andit had caused so much distressed to those whose relations were part of the doomedvoyage and due to the large number of victims, the sinking of the ferry cast ahuge shadow over the entire province of Tawi-Tawi and would be remembered as asorrowful time for the area for years to come.

Island life then might have been darker without electricity, and lonelierwithout the touch of modernity that every death lays every possibility ofotherworldly apparitions and the wanderings of ghosts.

Then came the night when the wind whistled and overhanging clouds made thenight more sinister. When the dogs howl started to howl incessantly, the eldersin the island would call for their children the doors and windows were solocked that even air could not come in.

The yards have become empty and even cats would scurry for safety. Not evencrickets were brave enough to serenade the eerily hushed night. It was a nightthat humongous clouds would cover almost the entire sky. Everything you seewould be cast in shadow and the stars were all absent. They said that it hadbecome so dark that when they look towards the sea, they could see nothing butdarkness. No glow of the sea would reflect and the waves did not made a soundthe way they usually make.

The island folks first heard the sound of drumbeats reverberating through thecold and wet atmosphere. "Tom…tom…tom…tom…" The beat did go until itgot faster and faster. They could feel the air get thicker they said and thesmell of decay became so overpowering according to one account that theirstomach would ache, urging to regurgitate.

Some peek into the darkness to investigate the source of the drumbeats and asif in a sudden, the yards became illuminated, as if the sky parted instantlyand the moon belched out its head. The moonlight gave those few brave souls theundeniable sight of a parade of people going in circles in the middle of thecommunity plaza, walking in a line. Most of them have limbs unattached andtheir faces were white as chalk. The leader of the parade was in fact aheadless drumbeater carrying his own separated head. The children cried whenthey heard some of their fathers and mothers wailing and shouting. Theyscurried into corners as if it would be of much help to them. They hide inthick fabrics and sweated horrendously. The men were ready with their bolosanticipating any physical attack by the limbless walkers.

No such attacked occurred as they sighed every time they tell and retell thehaunting. The drum beatings carried forth through the dawn and many were notable to sleep that night. They said the ghosts was somehow taunting them as thebeatings would suddenly stop and then came back again gradually, slowly andthen frantically. The sounds of the drums were suddenly loud and then suddenlycalm.

When the morning came, the entire island populace was awestruck with fear thatnobody spoke much. The children were kept inside their homes most of the timeeven when the sun is blazing in the sky. Many went to the nearby cemetery tomake some offerings while the men embarked on a lengthy prayer session soarduous that it started just after sunrise and ended when midnight was alreadyaround the corner. The air was so full of the smell of burnt sulfur, as theprayers involved the burning of small yellowish stone-like bits of sulfur.

The shock in their faces was so apparent that in a matter of hours, most oftheir countenance shrunk and withered so gravely. They were bowed and theirheads stooped all day long, a sign of surrender to the menace of the unknown.There was no knowing what was to come really. Most of them until that time hadnot really fully believed in ghost but since that night, their greatest fearscame true.

At first, they said, the parade of dead people came every now and then,especially while the moon was full or at least fairly illuminating. Then theycame less frequently, sometimes catching them by surprise. The parade wouldannounce its haunting by the sound of drums, starting rhythmically slow untilit gets faster and faster as children cried aloud and the dogs howled into thenight wind. It was really very fortunate that the dead persons physicallyharmed nobody although the emotional injury was so palpable.

The parade of the dead, some told us had successfully lessen the islandpopulation by at least half. Many left their homes to seek some habitat innearby islands and Banaran became the more silent. Many houses lay empty andwere allowed to wither by themselves.

Most of my relatives, as we were told, decided to stay despite the haunting,for they said, they would never know another place aside from Banaran where ourforefathers settled and died through the years.

Chapter Ten

Inthe Middle of Nowhere

It was a huge disappointment to find out that although dried fish processingwas rampant in our island hometown, there was just too much buyers of the goodsthat I could not possibly penetrate the cartel in so short a time. Traders fromas far up north in Pagadian City, about five hundred miles from Zamboanga,would come and negotiate with the local fishermen and cornered the marketthere. I was advised that seizing a sufficient amount of the goods would entailsome patience and a lengthened stay in the islands. This was an untenable ideafor me. The urban man in me would be so hard pressed to slide into the virtualdesolation of rural life, to be "the man called Friday" and away fromthe honking noise and pollution of the city. While the serenity of the islandsprovided me a great breather, it was imaginable for me then to succumb intogeneral silence of a rural environment. There would be just too much silencethat it would border the deafening.

The wide and miles and miles of stretch virginal beaches consoled myfrustrations and led my mind away from the profits that I nearly countedalready and yet the ones that would not be obtaining, at least not with thattrip. We took small boats and scoured the nearby islands. The breezy seascapehad regained my trust in nature, quelling every suspicion that nature hasfinally and absolutely lost its battle against the industrial advancement ofhumanity.

There was this over-stretched patched of sand in the middle of two islands thatreally caught my amazement. It was not of course very unlikely that suchnatural accumulation of sand would concur in an area full of shores in thefirst place; but have you heard of a beach in the middle of the sea? One couldnot help but surmised that Atlantis might have been similarly situated as thatparticular beach, once rising to the surface before it got sunk into the pit ofthe ocean.

I walked almost the length of the half-mile patch of the whitest of sand andwondered why nothing grows except some marine plants attached like mildews torocky corals. I picked some shells and stones and felt somewhat mesmerized thatthere were sea stones that were embroidered with the most perfect shape of a star.My cousin King told me that they sell well with Japanese tourist, the ones theymake into beads. My eyes squinted to examine the stones more forcefully and Ialmost concluded that God must have some industrial factories up there thatstones like those could be sculptured with some design that only machines couldafford. The perfect symmetries were there and the lines were straight.

I stared upward and the sky was clear of any cloud and it was the kind of placewhere you could view the entire sky from one end, towards another, at any angleyou gained sight. Funny that I felt reassured that in that place, I would nothear the sound of radios, nor the cacophonic slur of television, neither thehonks of cars and motorcycles. There was no smell but the salty fragrance ofthe sea and I was assured that any fumes or dusty accumulations of factorieswould never ting the air. No matter how trivial was such realization but Icould not help appreciating the newfound belief that despite of everything,there is still a place where the hands of urban life, with its many gadgets andequipments and convoluted industrial mazes, could not reach.

Chapter Eleven

AnOld Warrior

My paternal grandfather was my namesake or rather I was the namesake of mygrandfather. I never saw him alive. He died when we were infants. There was onevery old black and white picture that I once got hold of in my childhood yearsand I had felt strongly that it must have been my grandfather Yusop that waspositioned in a kneeling position. I was not able to reaffirm and verify thatnotion with anyone but every time he comes into my mind, I saw him as that oneman in that old picture.

After scouring the islands for supplies of dried fishes and finding none, Iwent to visit his tomb feeling perhaps like it was to console him since I didnot meet him before. I had always thought how it was very ironic that the oldman to whom I was named for was one that I did not meet even for once before.

But my father and aunts had good stories about him; how he became the richestman in the province; how he trailed the Malaysian borders to buy importedcigarettes and selling rice to Malaysian Chinese in the island of Labuan,merely an overnight boat ride from Banaran Island.

How I thought he was such a man of character that he gains these lore and talesfrom the ones who survive him. And then I felt the heaviness of the name; thename of the old Yusop they always mentioned.

There was the heavy name on the side of the tomb and there were others, thebrothers and sisters perhaps. They all had the title of Salip, the one Isuppose to have but do not use. That was to identify the bloodlines of theheirs and descendants of the Caliphate of Arabia, the relations of Mohammad,the great prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, him that was born in the daythat I was born or the other way around.

There was violence in the history of old Yusop, or was it of the father of oldYusop. Banaran Island was the place of exile from nearby Sulu town wheresomeone was killed, by vengeance or by mischief was an issue that was neverretold. This was the issues of old rekindled by persons suddenly appearing inour lives and one that exemplified to me the delta of every human being, thatalways it seems people part ways only to meet at some point in the river oflife, and the world is but a very small place to live in.

Chapter Twelve

MyMind is A Desert Sometimes

Business acumen is never the automatic mark of every person that I realizedupon my return from the islands. I sat for almost an eternity inside mydesolated room, back to the drawing board it had seemed, and asking the gods offate of all things that I must deserved. I was some guy who has no luck, oneperson that Rod Stewart did not sang about.

My writing hit a blank wall, a cul-de-sac, the story that I started-that is,Black Sea,Dark Night—lay hanging like a piece of painting half completed. Icould see the beauty of its mysteries and the stark philosophical investigationinto the darkness of depression and the imagined revelation of a spiritualworld somewhat subsisting parallel to that of what we have in this earthlyexistence.

I could not make money grow by themselves. My dried fish venture staggered likea herd of wild stallion falling from a high cliff. Plants and flowers grow butmoney does not; a lesson of a child that recurred to me that time.

My law education opened a brief sight of opportunity, so minimal that if myback was not pasted on the wall, taking the bar would have been the least of myoptions. I never had confidence on my legal knowledge, not with an educationfraught with the deadly menace of depression and general disinterest toclassroom sessions.

Despite this quandary, the seeming hopelessness of it all, I took the trip toManila to take the bar examinations and changed my life forever.

Chapter Thirteen

Fleeting Clouds in The Night

San Beda might have been somewhere in my past memory if only memories were soaffirmatively credible every time. The minute I went there, I thought I hadknown just how those gothic buildings would have looked like; as if I hadpreviously walked those high-ceilinged halls before, where my shoes would clickand clack like horses' hooves. I felt a little de ja vu as I roamed those hallswith their handsomely checkered floors. I must have loved temples and mansionsin my past life.

So much of the past was in my mind.

I burned candles for nearly four months in order to refresh my grasp of thosemountains and mountains of law books, as if I had any grasp at all. I rented aroom less than a kilometer away from San Beda and for most of my stay inManila; I must have walked the length between the law school and the boardinghouse a million times over.

I felt comfortable the minute I stepped into my boarding school. My room wasoverlooking the busy street of Legarda while facing the northern sky.

At night, I sat in near the window and watch the motorcars speed through thestreet below. I relaxed my tired mind by listening to my Walkman, letting myconsciousness slip slowly into sleepiness.

As I gazed towards the night sky, a very bright star near the sky summit alwaystook my attention. Every night, I could see that star at the places it usuallyappears, treading the same path in the sky consistently. I had realized thenthat navigation thru the guidance of those heavenly bodies could be so accuratethat even in the ancient times, men find faraway places by merely staring atthe night sky.

It is one those nights typical in Manila, windy and wet. The clouds would moveeasily that they have patent fragility. The clouds were too dynamic that Iindicted Manila to be a place of queer weather. I thought that back inZamboanga, the clouds never moved like this. I pitied the Manila indeed, alwaysstruggling against typhoons and hurricanes. A city with the burden of being thecapital of a nation and at the same time bugged with hellish winds.

One night, the movement of the clouds started to move so queerly that I decidedthat was not the weather anymore. The thin clouds would seem to break out, thenclose in again. Sooner, I thought I saw the shape of a man. Then there were thewinged horses. Then there appeared also a shapely woman in white gown.

I retreated back to my room thinking my mind merely needed rest. Too muchreading may have affected my visions that I started seeing things.

Inside my room, I sat in front of my study table and proceeded to read. My headstarted to move independently, sideways then all around, until it got plasteredfacing the wall. I could see shadows and then figures began to move. The shapeof a boat took shape and at both ends were two little beings that looked likethe form of aliens usually depicted in movies, hairless heads and thin bodystructures. Again I questioned my senses and proceed to the living room andgasped for air. I started to worry then about my sanity. In my past readings,seeing things is a symptom of schizophrenia. This may be it, I thought. I wasalready losing my mind.

I recollected myself and began to calculate my entire person. How does aninsane man think and behave. Am I of the unusual behavior? I had also askedmyself. Do I talk senselessly? Am I still able to acquaint with the usualpeople I know?

After such inquiry, I concluded so determinedly that indeed, there is no markedchanges in the way I behaved and relate with others. I am still able to havethe common notions and senses. If I were not insane, then only one thing wasdeductible—the visions is a reality that I must accept. I tucked my thoughtsthrough a deep sleep, hoping somehow that whatever defect of mind that bothersor would be bothering me would soon go away.

And yet, the night after, I looked at the sky again and the clouds behaved asusual—so fleeting and fragile—and the bright star that I have mentioned earliershone the brighter than the night ago.

When the clouds began to form figures again, I did not retreat anymore to myroom and instead tolerated what was then to me was a huge stage show in thenight sky.

As I trained my sight so carefully, in the middle of the sky appeared a figureof a person with wings extending towards its sides. It was an angel, as we knowthem through stories and movies, cloth in a long white garment and wings sowhite that it almost shone. Such image stayed there for a long time that it hadseemed that it had merely served a center point of the entire visions. At thefarther left of the sky, I saw clouds in the shape of a ship of the ancientform, with huge mast and sails, voyaging towards the eastern side of the skyuntil it faded as the clouds soon disintegrated into thin parcels of smoke.Then I saw the figure of a man, also sailing by from the left of the skyheading to the right. Despite the distance, I could see that the he looked likea Chinese man with a headgear, and he was smiling. If Genghis khan werephotographed before he died, the man would have resembled him. That was thethought that immediately came into my mind.

I returned my attention towards the middle and there were the winged horsestrotting the center of the sky, in circling motions, so steadfast and sogallantly.

Those were my initial visions.

The night after, the visions became more lucid that the angel in the middle ofthe sky showed me a dance that was somehow familiar and yet altogether unique.

The angel spread its wings again and again and I just stared. This particularvision was so clear that some tears flowed from my eyes as I realized that thevisions had already transgressed the bounds of reality, as I know it then. Ibecame so concern that one of my companion in the boarding house might come andfind me in such unusual condition—staring vehemently at the sky while my eyeswere wet with tears. One of them, Alexis, was just nearby at that particularmoment, reading in the living room just outside my room. In later times, I hadfelt the notion to tell Alexis about the vision since he was the closest tome--sharing the room I had-- but most of me relented because again, that wouldonly propel the suspicion of insanity. In the mind-numbing mad rush towards thebar examination, many had lost their minds in the past.

So I just stared at the angel and marveled at the sight. I could feel a littlerising in my emotions and a general feeling of gratefulness.

The angel kept on spreading its wings, again and again; that I thought itwanted me to follow such movement. My head nodded independently. I took this asan instruction so I spread my arms while being so wary that some of my mateswould suddenly come in towards my direction and deduce insanity.

Then the angel's arms showed as apart from its wide wings. It swayed its armstowards the right side of its body in a circling motion and I followed it. Thenits arms went back to the middle of its chest, while its palms were open, andthen I followed suit. The arms swayed to the left of its side, and I alsofollowed suit. After a while, the Angel moved its arms in circling motions thatwere so complicated that I was not able to follow it as it slowly faded away.

That part of the vision was the mesmerizing of all for it was the one thatexhibited a lot of movements that naturally ordinary clouds could not do. Thisis perhaps more coherent than the vision of a bearded man sitting on thethrone. About the bearded man, I saw a huge throne and the man sitting on it.If my notions were not wrong, I reckoned it looked like Jesus Christ in cleanwhite raiment. But this vision was static compared to the dancing angel wherethere was dynamism of mobility that had clearly erased whatever doubts I had ofthe phenomenon.

The morning after, while still embraced the foggy streets of Manila, Irecreated the dance I had witnessed the night before. I planted my feet in afairly wide position and swayed my hands from left to right, just like theangels did. I did the routines as far as my memory could serve me right. Thenafter a while, my hands started to move by themselves that on its own it hadseemed, my hands repeated the complicated movements that the angel made, theones that I was not able to follow well the night before.

The dance drew some lightness of being inside me that it felt good always torecreate them. It was sort of habit forming, an addictive action. There wassuch lightness of being that I felt floating above air when I walked. I felt myhands and I could feel some force in it, a trapped wind beneath my palms thatwhenever I held my hands against a surface, I could feel a palpable forceunderneath, a kind of a magnetic force. And my body started to move queerly attimes, a sort of an independent force was controlling my movement and from mymouth the sound of a bird's chirping came out too often. I would sway to oneside and to another without intending to move. I would walk into directionsthat I never intended to head.

There was a visible smirk on my face whenever I walked the streets or thehallways of San Beda. The phenomenon of angels had given me such giddiness thathumored my mind to no end. How could such things happen? I asked and meanderedupon myself and why of all people it had happened to me? I must be the "chosenone" I was tempted to deduce. For what purpose that I was chosen was notyet apparent to me at that time.

The review for the law examinations had gotten more intense. By the end ofJuly, all the students were priming up for the big month, which was September.

I had been tenacious with my reading in order to recompense for the poorquality of my law foundations, the result of boredom and frequentinattentiveness at school during my college years. As September approached, Ieven forgot to eat at times.

The "night calls" of the angels somehow tempered the rigidity ofreadings. And because of the queerness of my body movements, I felt so stronglythat I gained the attention of many. They were good attentions although I couldfeel some look that decided that I had gone haywire in the head. Most of theattentions however were of the inquisitive kind; the way one looks upon anexploding mystery. In the library, when I thought no one was looking my way, Iwould sway my hands to recreate the dance of the angel. The dance alwaysrelieved me of stress, especially when my readings became so ardent andstraining. Obviously, some of the students noticed me that some of myacquaintance started to inquire about the strange movements I made with myhands. I felt embarrassed by the inquiries so I had no recourse but to explainit. I could not explain it to them as factual as possible for I felt it wouldbe too much for them to accept and then it would only lead them to the beliefthat my mind had already succumbed to the pressure of the bar preparations. SoI put up a comfortable lie. I told them that I was a practitioner of a Chineseform of meditation and I sway my hands in order to relieve me of stress.

My comfortable lie might have been convincing that instead of shying away fromme, most of my acquaintance became interested in the movements of my hands.They wanted me to teach it to them. I said I had no luxury of time to becometheir Chinese meditation master. They liked it many condescended because of theharmony and synchronicity of my palms swaying thru and fro.

Some threw me a disconcerted look. Some stares were stained with disparagement.And then there were those with amazement in their eyes.

I seemed to be easily get blown by the wind that I had to readjust the angle ofmy footing or walk in order to evade the whipping of heavy breeze. When I stoodstill, some force was tugging me towards some direction that perhaps manyobserved it so keenly and decided fairly that I was not just making them up.

The inquiries about my condition had become more prevalent but still, I had notyet gained the proper mindset to divulge the truth about my visions as thecause of these strange movements. I continue to hide under the lie of a Chinesemeditation. Perhaps, my lie was somehow weak in some point, there were gossipsgoing around that I was really going haywire in the head. The talk spread likewild fire that it had reached my hometown of Zamboanga. Apparently, one of thebarristers preparing for the examinations was my town mate. I did not know herso much because she was from the lower years though her face was familiar tome. I received messages in my cell phone from friends back in Zamboanga,advising me to slow down and take some breather. I felt disturbed by the gossipsrunning around in San Beda and as far as back home. But I easily set it asidefor I felt that someday they would know the truth about all these matters.

...tobe continued

A PROPHET'S LIFE

A Prophet's Life by Y.B. Masdal