After the Occupation

Makati Hilton 1992

1

In the Makati hospital the slotted glass lets in the smog-damp air of Manila.

You can walk in off the street and if you look like you know what you are doing nobody will stop you.

The crowd flows in off the peopled asphalt, into the lobby, up the stairs.

They cram the halls and smokers stand shoulder to shoulder on the rooftop, just outside the cafeteria’s open doors.

We saw a sooty, sweat-shriveled mouse scamper by the waiter’s shoes.

2

Because nurses let relatives of a comatose girl serve food and wine to visiting guests, the halls of the ICU smell of soy sauce, bay leaf, and moist pork adobo. They cook on a kerosene camp stove on the floor just outside my lola’s sheet partition.

Inside, a relative boy runs about without a germ-mask coughing over my lola whose respirator tube sticks out of her cut-open throat.

My sister stares at this boy cousin evilly and goes up to our mother and says, “Get him out of here, or make him wear a mask.” “Hush!” Inay snaps, with a mortified

look at the boy’s mother, because she does not want us to be impolite.

3

“It’ll kill her, do you want to see your own mother die?” my sister asks, and our mother turns aside from Ate, as if she cannot hear us or understand.

4

The cough-boy’s mother, Inay’s younger cousin of twenty-six, glances bitterly at Ate, lips pursed tight.

5

Your sister looks Spanish, our cousins tell me. Just as beautiful as those lovely mestisa bitches at school, but not stuck-up. But she acts American. You though, look American.

6

Back in my school in Los Angeles, I was called gook, flat-face, chink-eye, slant-eye, jungle n____r. A kid threw a fist into my stomach on the tag football field and said it was for his uncle who died in Vietnam American soldiers coined the term gook in the jungles of Luzon when they took the Philippines during the aftermath of the Spanish American War then at home I clutched my gut and told Inay I had poisoning from food at school, lay in bed under a sheet and stared at my eyes in the mirror, red now with crusted salt in their narrow-slit corners; I grabbed a dart from my corkboard and pressed it into my bible and cursed my face and Jesus.

7

Last week we killed a winged cockroach on the ICU ceiling the size of a bat. My titas snuck in a giant faith-healing nun. She shimmered in an electric blue habit, towering next to her twelve-year-old cowering girl assistant, and insisted we feed her first at a pricey restaurant.

“I need nourishment to heal,” she snorted. “And if anybody is present who does not believe, it will make me very angry.”

Ate looked at me and pulled a face, then left the room. 8

Afterward she touched our chests and foreheads and people fell to the ground.

I felt electric, burning, a concussive light.

When I stood, I felt a bruising, swelling on my chest in the shape of a fist.

I still feel a bruise there now. 9

Down in Subic Bay the Americans dismantle their base, like naughty husbands sent packing. Our local relatives who seem to have decided my sister looks Spanish do not worry about her feeling hurt, but glance at me and my white father with concern. My tita shakes her head and faces him: “It’s foolish, Wade. We need your money and protection. These Manila politicians with their fake nationalism shouldn’t be so touchy. Jesus says there is sin in pride.”

10

Lola writes on her pad to the pulmonary specialist, “You are handsome. You must have three wives.”

He laughs, strokes her cheek, smiles into her eyes, gently thumbs her earlobe.

She looks up at him like a frail child.

In the hall light he takes us aside. Faces Inay.

“It has come to occupy your mother.”

“It?” Inay says.

He takes both her hands.

“It happens. Sometimes one kind, she will enter first, and make the host ready for the other. The pneumonia left your inay, but tuberculosis occupied her place.”

Our mother begins to tremble.

“How do we get it out of her!” my sister says, stroking and supporting Inay’s elbow.

The surgeon appears surprised to be addressed by a girl so, then pulls her into a hug.

11

On the highways outside people may sometimes lie like roadkill as drivers pass without pausing, but in the home among kin and kumpadre they touch you without fear.

Rich people and foreigners call this place the Makati Hilton but Ate calls it a third world hospital. Our white father sits on the wood bench outside Lola’s room looking tired from smiling at his wife’s relatives and stares out the window now at the typhoon rains that come in at a slant and rattle the walls leak in through the cracks and touch his face.