Two years ago, a female friend told me about another female friend who was so infatuated with some guy that she actually stalked him. She would shadow him, hide in the bushes, jump into a taxi when he drives away. She was totally crazy about him that all the shit she did deserved at least one Judd Apatow movie. The funny thing is that that female friend isn’t your typical crazy — she taught English in some prestigious school, well-educated, not totally a loser. But she was doing this, and I thought, what the outrageous fuck was that?
Sufficiently “inspired,” I went home and spent the night pacing about my room, looking up at the ceiling, scratching my butt on occasion, and whispering to myself, “Jesus fucking christ there’s a story here, there’s a story here…” At some point, I actually sat down and began writing. I wrote a story about a stalker, but I told it in the first person, made the main character a man so I can relate, and increased his general aura of loserness and desperation. And hey, I also made him a “struggling writer” so I can put things in his mouth I’d usually say (I guess I’m not the only person guilty of that).
The result is the story “Blind Spot.” I showed it to friends, and the various reactions can be summed up as one-liners: “too sappy,” “characters’ names are corny,” “where are the gratuituous sex scenes?”, “no gun duel?”, “OMFG, I hate Beck,” “I like it, reminds me of my crush!”
Between “too sappy” and “Oh my God, I like it!” I decided to give it a shot. I emailed it to the Philippines Free Press.
However, I received no response from the editor, so after a while, I forgot about it. Around that time I started Skirmisher and worked on a long story that I had hoped would develop fully into a little novel. I never finished that “little novel” but I received news that made me not depressed over that failure: it was from the Free Press editor, saying that “Blind Spot” won and was getting Second Prize at the magazine’s century-old Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, which I learned is second only to the Palanca in terms of prestige and badassness or something like that.
I posted the story’s entire text before, but I had to remove it for technical reasons. But here it is again, for posterity, unabridged.
*******
“Blind Spot”
If you want her so much, why not stalk her?
That’s Andrew speaking. That’s Andrew giving me another one of his many advices. He’s the teacher and I’m the student. He’s Socrates and I’m some bumbling Athenian youth. And the subject is unconditional but unrequited love.
No, Andrew says. Unconditional and unrequited love. It’s the tyranny of the “and.” Unconditional “and” unrequited. Andrew laughs.
We’re fond of this teacher–student fiction. It’s some form of catharsis for me, some outlet where most afternoons I cross the grassy vacant lot behind our house to Andrew’s art deco home and listen to his intriguing opinion on most things under the sun.
The question’s not for me, I say. It’s for some friend, or some friend of a cousin’s friend, who happens to be a victim of unconditional and unrequited love.
Stalk her and when it gets unbearable, let her see you, Andrew says. Let her see you and wait until you see terror in her eyes. Wait and look in her eyes until you learn first-hand why they all say the greatest love in this universe is the one that is never returned.
Then you retreat back into the darkness.
[][][]
She’s this figure that comes out of a door. She’s this perfume that so subtly floats in the air until it surrounds me and drowns me. She’s the core of a swirling mass of weird friends and crazy parties. She’s the hollow sound on the concrete pavement, the click-clack click-clack of little shoes that thinly echoes in the night.
She’s the reason why there are many things I never tell people, not even to the ones I’m closest to. She’s the reason why I tell lies, why I obfuscate, why I insist that the question is not for me, but for a friend of a friend of a friend Andrew no longer knows.
And Andrew, of course, doesn’t believe me. He so easily sees the lie through the teeth.
I am her shadow each night she escapes from something that’s so near it burns her. She’s this moth that hates the darkness and flutters toward something that burns so damn bright. She goes to these parties crawling with other desperate kids. She drowns her little head in the mind-numbing repetitive beats of trance music. She sinks in the swirl of tax-free gin and tequila and surging sexual hormones. She looses herself in these parties, and these parties swallow her up like a quicksand would. Sometimes I am tempted to claw her out, to save her, to be her knight in shining armor, with a golden broadsword in my hand and courage in my heart. But she doesn’t really need me. I’m really an outsider. Always have been, always will. I stand outside, always outside of where things happen, staring through the glass walls, patiently watching her every move.
Every languid sway of her mandolin hips excites me. My heart leaps with her laughter. I see her flirting with a boy and I close my eyes and imagine I am that boy in the worn-out leather jacket, sipping my wine. I am that boy caressing her white knee as I reach the climax of my small talk. For a fleeting moment, I am that boy, tasting what he’s tasting, speaking what he’s speaking, enjoying my two minutes when I am the center of her lethargic attention. I am that boy who tells her what I feel and maybe, when she’s not looking, brush my hand against her soft skin and feel its warmth, its tenderness, its hidden longings.
She comes out in the night when her father is dead drunk. I see her as I stand in the shadows across the street. I watch her as she slips out of the door so carefully like a cat in stealth. At the crack of dawn, just before her father wakes up, she steals across the dark streets in half-drunken gracefulness. And across the street, in the bluish shadows, I stand and watch and wait and bite my lip.
buy Manhattan Every night, I take out my heart, lay it on the pavement, and watch it bleed. Bleed until it’s dry. Powder dry. Every morning, I wonder how it is to actually see your own heart dried up on the pavement. How would I feel? Would I poke at it with a stick, search for the waves of love and lust that used to animate it? Dried up on the pavement, I’ll probably see my heart for what it really is: just a piece of black, rotting flesh. Just organic cells and tissues bound up together that any stray dog can eat. Not the end-all and be-all of the universe. Not the magical thing that makes the world go round.
I want to tell these discoveries to her face, to tell her how small she is, how ridiculously insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But each night, when she comes out and her perfume tells me otherwise, my heart beats so fast like it’s going to jump out of my chest.
My heart tells me one thing: You’re an idiot.
I am an idiot. I am an idiot for daring to defy its power. For refusing to believe that, yes, it is really the be-all and end-all of the universe.
[][][]
Sometimes, when I’m bored, when the passing of hours bears down on me like dead weight, I plot our fates on a piece of paper, as if fates and lives can be simplified into mere pencil lines whose entireties can be seen at a glance. As if the present weren’t a flux but a happy story we all have a say to write in real time, with a simple plot we can control, manipulate, wield. As if the twists and turns in human life were mere story arcs that can be resolved in the end. This is my fantasy: our two lives as two pencil lines on a piece of paper. I make these drawings earnestly, as if I can force their meaning into the reality I live in.
On her birthday, I bought a cake and buried a card where my number was written. But at the last moment, the thought of losing my anonymity frightened me. I dumped the cake into the trash and watched my dog devour it.
[][][]
Stalk her. If you don’t want to be seen, move into her blind spot. Hide behind a tree. Like a chameleon, blend in. Or just walk beside her casually as if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. Most people never realize where their blind spot is; often, you just hide under their noses and they won’t see you. You can walk beside them all their lives and still not see you. You can hide in plain sight. It’s easy.
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In that thick darkness, I am tempted to believe that I have this power over her, that she’s a puppet and I hold the invisible strings that limit her actions to certain ends. That I know things about her life that even she is unaware of.
I feel like I’m God, watching His own beautiful creation.
What do you do with so much imagined power? With such imagined options? When strange things are what you endure everyday you no longer can tell the difference? That you can no longer tell if what you’re doing now is sheer madness?
Come on, I tell myself. Don’t take this seriously. You just want to see that pretty face. You are in love with a pretty face. Isn’t this all strange and funny?
Come on, I whisper in the dark. Make me happy and show it to me. Show me that pretty face.
[][][]
Why stalk her? Wouldn’t it ruin everything?
You can’t ruin what doesn’t exist, Andrew says. You actually have nothing. And all you can ever do is make some little stabs in the dark. It’s only for fun, for your therapy. That love is yours, nobody can take it away from you, and it will leave footprints on your soul regardless of whether it is returned or not. So enjoy it. Have an adventure.
But I want her, I say. Open me up. Look inside me, and all you’ll see is this unbearable longing.
“Yes, I know.” Andrew smiles and hums that mysterious song. Ooh, such a beautiful way, to break your heart, he sings, his eyes rolling in amusement. Oooh, such a beautiful way…
“For starters, kill all hope,” Andrew says. “She will always be your dulce extranjera, and nothing more than that. She will love you only in your little fiction.”
But people change their minds all the time, I say. What if later on she realizes she wants me?
“Or later on you realize you don’t want her? What then? Would you rather know?” Andrew asks, “Or would you rather bask in the bliss of ignorance, in the surety of not knowing? She’s the sorrow that has been sent to you. I wonder how many times should you allow yourself be destroyed before surrendering to despair?”
Lethal Weapon 2 dvd Andrew laughs. I know he doesn’t mean to insult. It’s just his way of laughing at the absurdity of things in our lives. It’s his way of expressing resignation over things he knows cannot be helped, over riddles that can never be solved. But right now I want to bury my fist in his face. Right now I want to forget what it means to be afraid of consequences. Right now, I want to die.
But I grind my teeth and stare away and leave without a word. I sit on our porch and scratch my dog’s head. I muse on what Andrew said: dulce extranjera. What cute words to describe my doom.
[][][]
I make a mistake one silly dawn. I trip over a beer bottle that ricochets off a metal post. The noise startles her. She looks back and sees me. I wait to see the terror Andrew has been talking about. But she smiles. Oh, she smiles. “Hey, I saw you at the party,” she says.
You must have imagined me. I never go to your crazy parties, I want to say. But I can’t disappoint her. I don’t have the heart to expose the frailty of her make-believe. “Yeah,” I say. “I was speaking with the bartender about the best way to mix martinis. The fellow’s a genius. Bacchus would have been proud.”
She laughs her tiny laughter. I grin stupidly. She says bye-bye and walks away, the click-clack click-clack of tiny shoes growing fainter; it’s the music that will fill the rest of my night.
[][][]
Her name’s Andrienne. She’s Andrew’s daughter. But Andrew doesn’t know a thing about it; he thinks he’s giving me these advices for a friend of a friend of a friend of mine he no longer knows. When Andrew finally learns about it, he’s going to feel betrayed, he’s going to hiss through his teeth: “Et tu, Brute?”
I don’t understand him at all. He locks her up in her room all day, and I’ve killed hours and hours trying to figure out what in hell is happening in her room. And Andrew doesn’t even let her see people.
My own mother hates Andrew and calls him names behind his back. My aunt not only hates him, but also hates his daughter for many reasons. She calls her a slut. These two remaining women in my life would chuckle and sigh over the steam of our supper. Many times I’ve wanted to shut them up. But many times, I’m the one who falls silent, afraid that if I open my mouth, the shit will hit the fan, and I will catch all of it. All of it. So I just listen and bite my lip until it secretly bleeds.
In my room, I peer through the blinds to see the gloomy house across the grassy vacant lot, hoping to see her silhouette on the window.
[][][]
Andrew has this unfulfilled longing. Deep down inside, he’s longing to escape the hellish trap that is his life. Maybe it’s the bond that brings us together; we’re united by an inner fear, as the song goes. But he tries to fight back by translating his fear into cruelty.
I will leave if some trigger is pulled, he usually tells me. I will leave this life, everything, the moment I see a crack in my future. I will bring my daughter with me and maybe start a kind of life that we have yet to know.
When would that be, I ask. I am always half-afraid of his answers.
He does not say when. He just looks beyond me, his eyes glassy with wonder, as if reading the face of the coming days on the sweeping clouds.
Never wait for answers, Andrew says, because they will always be the opposite of what you hope for. Remember Murphy’s fucking laws? When they do come in the way you expect, you scram. You run like hell. Because you can always expect some catch, some painful trick in the end.
His laughter is brittle, even nervous, when our conversations tangentially touch the subject of his daughter. He rarely talks about his daughter; when he does, it’s like trying to walk on a field strewn with land mines. Because how many euphemisms can you find as pleasant replacements to words like “jealousy,” “bitterness,” “hatred”? For my part, I choose to be silent; I nod at the right places, grunt vaguely when he needs some reassurance on certain points. But it’s all pretense, all part of the grand fiction of our daily lives.
[][][]
Many, many times, I’ve been silent witness to it all.
And now, it’s happening again. As I stand in the shadows, I watch her as she carefully turns the doorknob. But before she opens it, Andrew appears with a dark scowl on his face and his eyes burning. Suddenly, she loses her grace and fear replaces it. Unspeakable fear, the kind that chokes you and makes your eyes bulge out and makes you long for dark, safe places.
There are no words. Just that face, that face that suddenly grows so dark and so full of murder. Andrew hisses, “You’re screwing with them, aren’t you? You’re screwing with them? Like your mother?”
And then the back of his hand savagely cracks on her face and she screams. She goes running to her room. He runs after her, and from where I stand, I can hear Andrew howling like a madman. They scream, and I close my eyes and let tears run down my face. Without a word, I turn my back on it all. I slip out of the shadows and run across the grass.
The leaves of grass are like a little army of men with blades, scourging me for my cowardice.
Even in my room, I can hear them.
I hear her whimpering like a small dog in that far, far place.
I hear Andrew screaming in rage and crying like crazy in that far, far hell.
I snuggle in the darkest corner of my room, in that safe place where nobody can see me, and I quietly weep. I weep for all the world’s sins. I weep for everyone’s cowardice and cruelty. I weep because I’m a liar and a hypocrite and a coward and because I know I can only watch it and let it all happen. I don’t know why I nurture this shameless fear. I don’t know why I’m able to live with the knowledge that perhaps, in this tiny land of monsters, I’m the most gruesome, simply because I’ve always chosen not to choose. I’ve always chosen to weep in the shadows. For all eternity.
[][][]
When I visit Andrew later in the day, we don’t talk about it. We never talk about it. We never talk about real details of our lives. We live in our pleasant little fiction, we live in a world where nothing exists but ideas and the intellect. We talk about things without clear edges, things tucked away safely in the haze of abstractions. We dream up what-if scenarios for a new story I want to write. He hums melodies for a new song he’s making. Andrew’s fond of making love songs, but whatever he’s composed, he never mouths out the lyrics but only hums to me the melody or strums it on his guitar. They are good melodies, very catchy, the kind that you will remember after only the first hearing, as if they’ve always been there in your brain and he has only summoned them up.
Sometimes, when Andrew’s not looking, I glance up the stairs, to the direction of Andrienne’s room, and wonder about what she’s thinking, what she’s doing in that room by day. What does she really feel about all this madness?
[][][]
The following night, she’s again here in this party. You can still see how she’s smarting from the pain of yesterday morning; you can trace it on her face if you look close enough. You can see the bruises thickly covered by make-up, the subtle quivering in the corners of her lips. But like a moth, she keeps fluttering back to this place to escape the darkness of her life. And it all appalls me; I’m looking at her through the glass walls and all I see is how her desperation mirrors mine; how her sadness, unspoken and unspeakable, reaches out to me like a dense beam of black light. Maybe if I open her up, I will find the same unbearable longing that has always throbbed in my chest. Maybe if I approach her close enough, I will finally understand all the whys that have bled in my brain since the moment I first saw her.
I walk past the glass walls for the first time. I shoulder my way through youthful, perfumed bodies cavorting everywhere. Like a moth, I timidly approach the flame. She’s sipping her wine when she sees me; on her face registers both recognition and confusion.
May we dance?
She stares at me for a long time before nodding and slowly standing up. I take her hand and lead her to the dance floor. All around us is the madness of trance music and entranced dancing. When we reach the middle, I hold her hips and we begin dancing slowly as if the music were a smooth ballad.
We dance in the dark. And she’s smiling her tiny pink smile. I smell the bubble gum from her mouth and the cologne from her armpits and the shampoo on her hair. I taste gin as I kiss her mouth. She allows me to kiss her in the resigned way she has let all those men ravage her lips in all those nights. It is a token she pays for her fleeting freedom.
I am not special. And because I know this, the kiss feels nothing; it tastes like food you eat every single day.
Then when it’s over, she looks at me. I hold her hips for a moment longer. I don’t move; I just look into those big, painted eyes. That is when she realizes that I know.
I know and you don’t have to speak, you don’t have to weave a story to cover up your father’s madness.
Perhaps, silence is enough.
It astounds her for a moment, but she’s so weak she doesn’t even resist. She easily gives in like a water-choked dam. She sobs, then weeps violently on my chest, and I caress her hair in the way I have fantasized in all those nights I stood shivering outside the glass walls. I hug her tightly like I hold a corpse; I’m like the knight in shining armor who only came too late, too fucking late.
[][][]
Careless film In the bittersweet madness of that dance floor, while I’m holding her so closely for the first time in my life, I am thinking about Andrew, her father. I will never understand his kind of fatherly love, maybe because I’ve never had one. I have nothing to compare it to. All my life I have been surrounded by lonely women. I have been raised by a long-suffering woman who’d usually wake me up at night with her stifled sobs. When it would get worse, she’d swallow sleeping pills. When she had no pills, she’d wake me up with her stories about my father, stories that always had the texture and unreality of a myth. And I’d raptly listen to those stories because, in the absence of real answers, I had nothing else to cling on to.
My aunt would visit us every two days, would cook sinigang and guinatan and mend the holes on my socks, and she’d tell me stories about the long-ago men whose romantic proposals she rejected. She used to be so lovely, she’d tell me, and she’s show me sepia pictures to prove it. And she had such handsome suitors, but because of what happened to my mother, she was so afraid of them that their looks didn’t matter, even if they resembled Eddie Gutierrez or Eddie Mesa during their prime. Now, she’s lonely, like my mother. Now, her world is full of cobwebs and dried skeletons and the hollow echoes of the love songs that used to fill her youth. Now she has bad teeth, incessant migraines, useless ovaries. And like my mother’s stories, the myths she’d feed me are all the answers I have in my heart.
That’s why perhaps I will never understand Andrew and his kind of paternal love. That’s why I’ll never understand his pain. His pain will always lie within my blind spot, forever beyond the reach of my comprehension.
[][][]
There are many things I don’t understand, anyway. There are many things I don’t know why I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m always following her. I don’t know why I’m always behind every tree, every trash can, every signpost. That if only she will look behind her, she will easily spot that small shadow that hides in the night’s many penumbras.
I also don’t know why we still do the very things that we know will hurt us.
Tonight, for instance. Andrienne doesn’t know I’m in the shadows watching her as she quietly opens the gate, as she carefully turns the doorknob. She doesn’t know that I’m watching how her face crumbles into a thousand pieces when the door opens and Andrew appears with that murderous scowl on his face again. She doesn’t know that I’m just a few steps away when, without a word, he drags her inside by the hair and she just whimpers like a puppy. She doesn’t know that I’m seeing it all; how she shivers in terror, how the elegant loveliness that so entranced me on the dance floor just a few hours ago instantly disappears. She doesn’t know I’m seeing it all, that I’ve watched it happen a million times without doing anything. She had danced with me not knowing I also have blood on my hands.
Andrew drags her by the hair. He slams the door before I could do anything.
I lunge at the door and bang it with my fists. The door suddenly swings opens and Andrew’s so shocked to see me.
“Please stop it,” I say as valiantly as I can. “Stop hurting her.” And in a cracking voice, I say “she’s my dulce extranjera.”
Maybe I said it so unfeigned and corny that, after a moment’s hesitation, Andrew suddenly bursts out in laughter. He laughs like a hyena and points a finger at my face in disbelief. He laughs and laughs and laughs like there’s no tomorrow, but when he sees me unsmiling and grim-faced, the laughter very slowly leaves him. Gradually it dawns on him. All those questions, all those advices, all those stories, all those songs… for whom?
I see Andrienne peeking from a corner. She smiles wanly as if she understands, even as her father asks me if I’ve lost my wits. Andrew spits and says “Are you fucking crazy?” over and over. “How could you? You don’t even know her!”
“I know her,” I say. “I know her. I know why.”
“She doesn’t want you. She’ll never…” His face is beet red in anger. “She’ll just use you up. She’s just like her mother. She’ll leave you like a dried-out corpse.”
“You don’t know that. You know nothing. It’s you who’s done all these things.”
“You’re crazy,” Andrew spits and I see there’s blood in it; he’s so angry he’s been biting his lip until it has bled. “You’re fucking crazy. You don’t see it. You don’t know anything.”
“Set her free, Andrew. Set her free.” And for the first time since I’ve known and befriended him, I’m actually not ashamed of the tears in my eyes. “Set her free, please, I beg you. Set her free. She deserves it. Set her fr—”
Andrew shoves me out and slams the door to my face. I stand there stunned for a moment. I stand there and listen for the cruelty to start again. But there is nothing. Nothing but silence.
I sit right there and listen, too astounded to do anything else. I look up and see the fading stars of the predawn.
[][][]
Death is on your mind each time you cross the road. You think of the small mistake that might end your life. You think of small mistakes and big mistakes that six billion people commit each day, and you wonder, when you add them all up, how the world is still able to turn as it does every single day. Maybe we really are so small that even our biggest fuck-ups don’t even matter, don’t even create ripples in the order of the universe. Maybe each decision we make is nothing but a bubble that pops out without a trace. Or maybe not. Maybe when you sustain the mistake for the rest of your life, constantly feed it with all the lies you can invent, maybe then it will matter. Maybe then the mistake will be heavy enough to tilt Earth on its axis. Andrew has been doing that, and now it matters to a fool like me. Now his mistakes are my mistakes. Now, his sins are my sins. Now, his pain is my pain. All because of Andrienne and her tiny pink mouth and her mandolin hips that will always and forever sway in the neon lights in my head. All because I’ve swallowed a morsel of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and desire and depravity.
I wonder how people who know the difference between good and evil still choose to be cruel. Is it because of the desperation in trying to run away from pain? Is it because when you’re falling down, sliding down the abyss, all you can think about is taking some other fool with you? So that when you finally sink into that Great Blackness, you won’t have to face it alone?
Pain is like blood in your eyes; you see not the yellow of the flowers and the blue of the sky; you see only red gushing, streaking across your field of vision. You see scarlet blotches and you wonder about the missing pieces in the puzzle. Missing pieces whose edges you always see, but will always be out of reach, forever mocking you with their inaccessibility.
[][][]
In the morning, I wake up on their doorstep. The three-story monstrosity of a house is now so quiet, so still. I don’t feel them anymore. The house feels like some empty shell.
I enter the house and for the first time, I walk into her daughter’s room. I stare at the lonely walls that speak of sadness and a secret life. I see faint traces of dried blood in the dark corners; I imagine wounds that never heal, cruelty that never relents, hatred that has no bottom. Standing in the wasteland of her room, I listen to the abstract fugue of some ancient pain; the wind hums it, whispers it. I feel nothing.
I touch her things. I run my hand on the fabric of the divan and on her pillows, on the glazed countertop of the table, along the plastic contours of her CD collection. I carefully touch everything, feeling everything in my bones. As if I’m touching her face. Then there’s that CD with her name on it scrawled in thick, black strokes, by some artist named Beck. Out of impulse, I pick it up and slip it into the CD player. When the piano begins floating in the air, I recognize the voice, the words, the melody. Oh, such a beautiful way, to break your heart. Oh, such a beautiful way…
I sit on the doorway under the morning sun and wait for them. The sun makes me sleepy. I lie on the pavement and let the sun sit on my face.
Behind my closed lids, I could see the angry red circle of the sun throbbing.
I will wait for them, I tell myself. I will wait for all the madness to subside. But the moment my back touches the pavement, I suddenly feel very tired, as if I haven’t slept in years. As if I have been running in a mad marathon and now, finally, I’m allowed to rest.
And then I begin dreaming. About the tiny laughter that has echoed in all my nights. About the girl who stands alone on the dance floor with those painted eyes. Waiting, hoping for redemption.
- END –
{*From Hipkiss’ song “Afterhours”}
{Image: Adrian Portmann}
Comments 2
Oh.. so this is the blind spot
Nice…
Posted 11 Jul 2009 at 8:36 am ¶Hey – whats up. Thanks a bunch for the blog. I’ve been digging around for info, but i think i’m getting lost!. Google lead me here – good for you i guess! Keep up the good work. I will be coming back in a couple of days to see if there is updated posts.
Posted 15 Dec 2009 at 5:42 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 6
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[...] in the University of the Philippines’ Likhaan Anthology in 2001. In 2006, my story “Blind Spot” landed second place in the Philippines Free Press Annual Literary Awards. But after that, I [...]
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