Friday, May 18, 2007

the beginning of the 'novel' unedited

[written july 19, 2006]

Hmm.

It was dark. He knew he was somewhere, somehow floating in the deep recesses of an unseen world. The darkness, the silence, the floating would have unsettled him in another place and time, but for some reason, right now he felt strangely relieved, and blissfully content.

All of a sudden, he felt a sharp, piercing pain shoot across his forehead, and his body jerked. His eyes wrenched open of their own accord, and he found himself staring at a multitude of sweaty, dark heads bobbing up and down a few feet in front of him. He tried to move his mouth, and winced. His cheek was lodged heavily against the stone beneath him. He blinked again. The tiniest of breezes blew over him, and he felt the cool outline of drool --- thankfully, his own --- and the thick wetness of the stone beneath, where it had trailed down towards.

“Hoy. You’re awake.” The voice was not his. Somewhere above him, behind him, he didn’t know. But, strangely enough, without him sending any mental commands, his body refused to move, and his heart dropped a little at the sound of the voice. For a moment, the man sleepily marveled at how his body could already respond to the environment around it while his brain was still trying to figure out where it was.

“Hey. Look. Here. Here’s a book.” The voice came back again. This time, he registered its tone. Quiet, condescending. Mocking, even. “Read it. I think you’ll like it.”

He groaned softly. His own groan was music to his ears. He smiled stupidly.

He’d been lying on his side, and he leaned on his forearm to get himself to a sitting position on the warm, slimy stone floor. He absently laid his head on a long, rusty band of metal.

That’s when he really opened his eyes. The sweaty, bobbing heads suddenly veered into focus, and the fluorescent light from the ceiling above shone sharper, stinging his eyes. Jail. Prison. Death.

...

He lifted his head and in awakened clarity, looked around at the prisoners resting and snoring around him. A pitiful sea of humanity, drifting and floating in their own little worlds, faces covered in grime and sweat, clothes whose colors have long faded away. The bodies literally surrounded him, from the men sitting sleepily in front of him to the boards on top of his head, which held even more sleeping prisoners.

This was the Philippines he knew.

Because despite those white pristine beaches he’d never visited, and the
pictures of wide-eyed tarsiers he knew would be staring back at him once he opened that tourist book, nothing could change the fact that he was now looking at the shameful, the guilty, and the hopeless people of the Philippines in the face. Faces with histories a tourist book wouldn’t necessarily want to elaborate on. Faces like his own.

He just thanked God he wasn’t in Building One. He knew the numbers.

More than a thousand dead men walking.

Welcome to the Philippines, he thought grimly. The next death-penalty capital of the world.

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