EXCERPT FROM “AFTER THE WARNING”*

HIS PARENTS couldn’t believe what they’d heard. Their son’s name had been read on TV. He had a week to change his ways, the mayor had said. Or else.

Or else what. His mother was shaking. Or else what?

His father was the first to say something. It must be a mistake, he said to her. Alex was only a boy. He couldn’t be that person they’d named. They both had dropped what they were doing – him polishing a pair of brown leather shoes, her writing a list of neighbors who had given donations for the wake at the next door – when they heard the man on the television.

Alex would keep hearing about these details every time he overheard his parents recall the moment to their close friends.

Alex had been out for more than an hour and it was almost time for lunch. He’d told his mother that he’d be playing basketball with friends. They could send him away to Manila with his aunts, his mother would tell him later. He could continue school and go to college there. The best universities were in Manila, and one of his aunts had promised before to support him.

Soon, Alex walked into the house, a lean figure brimming with youth, his face already healing from an inflammation he’d developed in the summer, his hair seeming to catch fire in the light pouring through the door.

Alex noticed the odd way they were both quietly seated, then he slipped into his room, rolling his basketball under the bed. He strolled back into the living room, wiping his face and neck and arms with a bath towel. “Sit down,” his father said.

The first thing that came to him was the trigonometry exam he’d flunked the month before. Had the school already mailed his grades?

“What is it?” Alex asked them, unconsciously smoothing the linen covers of the couch, where he sat whenever he wanted to hog the TV.

“Do you use?” Mr. Abelar asked. “Use?” This wasn’t about school. Alex waited for his father to speak again, but those words seemed to have tired him.

“Shabu!” said Mrs. Abelar. “Shabu, drugs. Do you use drugs?”

What came to his mind was if he knew someone at school, anyone, who had used shabu before.

“What?” He wasn’t sure if he’d heard what his mother had said. What?

“Don’t lie,” said Mr. Abelar calmly. “We are trying to help you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t do that. I… I don’t even know what shabu looks like.”

He’d meant to say that he hadn’t actually seen the stuff before. Of course, he knew the white bits packed in tiny plastic bags. They’d been showing it on the news every day for as long as he could remember.

“The mayor read your name on TV,” said Mr. Abelar.

The room was tilting – the view of his parents watching him, listening to each word – turning askew from where he was sitting. How come the mayor himself knew his name, the mayor who sounded like he wanted to eat his enemies’ flesh when he talked about them on TV? Hadn’t they made a mistake? Was it really his name? He placed his hand on his forehead. He closed his eyes.

“I smoke cigarettes at school,” Alex said. “With my friends. That’s it.”

He never caused trouble. Not anymore, at least. The most he’d done was spray paint his initials on the wall of a newly constructed shopping mall, an attempt to beat a classmate who had drawn the anarchy sign on one of the pillars of an overpass.

“You are not lying to us?” Mrs. Abelar said. “You believe him more than me?” Alex said.

“We are going to find a way,” said Mrs. Abelar. “Your father and I know people.” “Do you sell drugs?” asked Mr. Abelar. “Pa!” Alex said.

“The names on TV,” Mrs. Abelar said. “The mayor said they sold drugs, and he wants them out of the city.”

He wanted to take his shirt off; the fabric stuck uncomfortably on his damp skin.

“Tomorrow,” said Mr. Abelar, “you come with me tomorrow.”

“Where? I have class.”

“You come with me tomorrow!” Mr. Abelar said.

The high after the game was fading. Alex wished he hadn’t come home. He didn’t quite understand what was happening, but he knew he was in a mess that he didn’t bring on himself.

Alex was relieved when they didn’t see the mayor the following day. He and his father took a jeep to a cafeteria beside the public park. At a table in the back, a man whom Alex had never met before was waiting for them. “He’s my fraternity brother,” Mr. Abelar said to Alex.

“He’s going to help us.” Alex hadn’t known that his father had a fraternity. The man, Alex learned, was one of the mayor’s close aides. The mayor had been in power for as long as Alex could remember, although he hadn’t paid much attention to him.

The man asked Mr. Abelar what he knew. Immediately, Mr. Abelar said, “My son doesn’t use drugs.” Where could a high-school student find the nerve to sell drugs? He was only in high school, high school, Mr. Abelar was saying, and now Alex’s name had been read from a list of shabu dealers. Surely they were not wealthy, but they provided for him, gave him enough so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.

“It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “He’s been listed. Those lists are the real thing.”

The man told Alex and his father that they had to make an appointment with the mayor.

Alex should ask for forgiveness and promise that he would go to rehab.

“I’ll let you know when,” said the man. “How long do we have to wait?” asked Mr. Abelar.

“A week maybe. Right now, he’s out of town.”

“We’re talking about my son’s life.”

“I’ll let you know.”

After the warning, Alex thought, the killings followed. The hit men drove motorcycles, often in daylight. The going price, some of his friends in their neighborhood had said, was about five to six thousand a hit. Leave the city or suffer the consequences. The man on the television sounded both like God and a madman. His teachers in elementary school invoked the mayor’s name when telling off students who had fake tattoos or wore bracelets made from skewered coins. He’d make you eat that, they’d say. Soon there were stories about hit men, shootings out on the streets. But many of his friends, including his own relatives, didn’t seem to mind that, rumor had it, the mayor was behind the killings.

“People are used to it,” Alex had heard his father say before to a relative who had stopped by on the way to another town. “But the city is better now that criminals are afraid.”

His uncles and aunts had told him how dangerous the city was when they themselves were younger. Fighting between the military and communists, they said, had reached town. One granduncle took part in a militia whose members, several of whom were civilians, carried guns and machetes. His father took pride in this bit of the story. Alex’s granduncle was a local hero, Mr. Abelar would say, a brave man who fought the enemies of the city.

His parents decided that Alex shouldn’t go to school until he and his father had seen the mayor. For a couple of days, Alex didn’t go out of the house, until restlessness kicked in and he snuck out to play basketball with his friends. He received an earful from his mother when he got back home.

*****

*This story is included in Armor, a book of stories, published by Ateneo de Manila University

Press. You can get your copies from the Ateneo University Press website and shops on Lazada and Shopee.

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Brief Bio: John Bengan teaches writing and literature at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. He has won prizes from the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Palanca Award for his fiction. “After the Warning” appears in Armor, his first book of stories, published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press.