WordWell

If I am to rant against myself, I should not let you get involved. I know. Talking to my own head is unhealthy and toxic, not to mention it sends my family to panic. To be on the safe side, making sure I’m clear from any mental impairment, I write my first blog in so many months.

I’ve been taking my medicine for eight months running. I fish out my calculator and do some math. (I miss the feel of my fingers as they make love with it.) I would have fifty thousand to my name, enough to start a business or twenty five facial sessions in one of the sleek rooms of Crown Regency Hotel. Either a hefty bank account or a disciplined row of pores is highly preferable. And now that I think of it, a lump materializes in my throat.

What if I wasn’t sick? I would not have stopped raping my calculator. I am glad my brother, who is taking economics in San Carlos, is servicing it to compute supply-demand slopes and derivatives. Without him, it will lie useless in the house to gather dust and wait to become a relic.

Nobody would have stalked me now and demand an explanation why I took a leave in the middle of engineering review classes last year. Not owing anyone an explanation is a sham. Filipinos, Jessica Zafra writes, are extremely sympathetic and if you let them, they will take over your life. So that I don’t give an explanation to anyone, I made sure I was less seen in public. It is simple probability: less going out, less chances meeting up.

This I find restricting in the long run. More importantly, I find it destructive too. People I left in the review school pass rumors among them: I got chicken-hearted, I didn’t have the balls to face my comeuppance. So when a night out was cooked up, I broke the news to well meaning friends. I out-ed the big secret –- in the fullest sense of the word –- to give everyone peace, myself chief of them.

The fact that I was hiding means a lot. For one, it’s the self-pity seeping in like a flood. Two, it was denial. Denial that a blueprint, my life’s plan, made in five years is heading nowhere. Three, it was fear, that dread to dive into an uncertain future all over again.  

If I was and am not sick, maybe the plans I hatched at the closing end of my school year would take off by now. Pass the licensure exams (if possible, with 48 colors of Krayola) and join the legions of engineers swallowed onto cavernous manufacturing plants to inconvenience electrons, wires, and sensors.

What if I didn’t know I am sick? A lot of people, who are as sick as I am or have far worse conditions than I have, don’t have a clue that somewhere in them is a disease that’s bidding its time.

Ignorance is bliss?

Is ignorance bliss?

Is bliss ignorance?

What if I didn’t drop five years of engineering education and proceeded as planned? What if I didn’t know I am sick? What if I wasn’t sick? Many what-ifs, many what-if-nots.  

Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr. was to be a minstrel about to sing his own lore of captivity and finding the light of truth to Cebuano, and he was thinking that a mammoth crowd will listen to his tale or accost him along his way for autograph. Probably, the organizers of the forum filled his ears of a Cebu with very warm and feverish welcome. But the crowd that gathered to hear Lozada was markedly thin, and was reluctant to be counted as his avid supporters, and was doubly more skeptical of him after the forum than before. The event that he and his ilk hoped to fish more people has netted the opposite. Students, who made up much of the audience, were more uncertain than they already were.

What did Lozada exactly achieved in that gathering? Foremost, he earned the ire of Cebuanos by antagonizing the Church. Archdiocese of Malacanang, he says. Congressman in cassock, the Black and White Movement says. Cebuanos, I dare say, are strangers to themselves without religion and to remove its supremacy and Vidal in their political and social actions is to risk their wrath. That’s why successful protests, those that can muster the number of participants beyond reckoning, in Osmena rotunda are garlanded by nuns and rosaries and the Eucharist. And Vidal. This is political maturity, Cebu- and Philippine-style.

Secondly, Lozada appears to be drunk with popularity. Well, this seems to people who attended the forum. Hero worship, they say, and they cry bitterly why they were lured to promote Lozada without their knowing. Cebuanos, if you want them to take you seriously, like to be considered intellectuals. They want to take part, to be where the action is, something deprived of them by distance and the “imperialist” Manila.

So when Lozada materialized before them, they didn’t kiss his forehead and handed him a gold star. They didn’t extract their pentel pens and plead for a signature. Instead, they eyed Lozada through the lens of questions and skepticism. But when it was clear that organizers do not want Lozada to be grilled akin to a legislative hearing, and manhandled a certain “Po” out of the gathering because he asked questions like a senator, many were enraged. They weren’t there to increase Lozada’s vanity.

They were there to increase theirs.

Thirdly, Cebuanos do not want to be plagued by apathy. But this does not mean they join any street protest and let truncheons fall on their heads for crying out loud any day. As I hinted earlier, our intellect is the grim persistence of extreme doubt. The media, yes, may feed us of terrible looting and 130million dollar kickback. It may invoke the memory of the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and smolder patriotism in our soul.

However, if you hope to see us enraged, of which we are quick and slow depending on who and what is the situation, complete the story and make the narrative inevitably compelling. The shortcut is to let us see our leaders, the religious and not government, visit our schools and bring us to the streets. The shortcut is through the pulpits every Sunday to morally justify civil disobedience. Only by then we become earnest and adamant.

The first two Lozada failed to satiate. The last one, the crucial straw to drag our participation to the streets to seek redress, is thus not forthcoming.

       Manila’s irascibility is waning, and judging by the way things are going, ZTE-NBN deal is lapsing to one of the tempests that may rap the seat of power but not uproot President Arroyo. This is her genius of stonewalling; by bidding her time, her silence has become yet most useful means to lull people and dull them to submission and forgetfulness.

            Then this war, as oppositions and critic say that this is war with them at the helm leading the champions and PGMA the Snow Queen, is brought from Manila to the provinces. This is the bitter pill of a country archipelagic by Creation and divided by elitism. Manila, by which I mean National Capital Region, is Philippines and beyond its borders lies the wasteland, the marshes, the folks untutored of the ways of democracy and current events. So the need of the campaign to the countryside, to make people there matter and be counted, as if we owe them our existence and we be thankful for them doing so. As if we have not participated in this war, if war it is called, with better means than they have.

And Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr. they package as the bearer of light, the one who has witnessed the truth and is its captive, to be the Prodding Stick – the editors of SunStar Cebu so brilliantly coined – and the Prophet who like Moses will cut through the sea of apathy for the many to see the passage to redemption. He would stir hearts and stoke anger in them, so that by his words an assault to presidency shall commence and a New Order will be wrought.

But people who brought Lozada to Cebu are mistaken. We have our own prodding stick and prophet, Archbishop Cardinal Vidal, whose wariness is such that it drives people to inaction, whose spiritual guidance has been caution, prayer and lethargy. But Cebuanos lend their ears open for his words. They don’t like to be estranged from the Catholic herd and to oppose the prelate is to sever ties from the flock. We bray as Cardinal Vidal brays and mum as he is mum. We are obedient to his orders, and believe him to every single word that escapes his lips. When he says we don’t need Lozada, we don’t need Lozada. When he says Cebuanos know the truth, we know the truth.

Which exactly was what he did.

He says since Cebuanos know the whole truth, Lozada’s coming is no necessity. No one minded that when Presidential Management Staff Cerge Remonde spoke before the clergy, nuns and lay leaders in a monthly recollection Monday last week to explain the ZTE-NBN deal, no one among our religious questioned why Remonde and if his speech is important, how can less is Lozada’s. Here the prelate seems to have the strangest definition of truth and how it should be ferreted out. Our religion listens to Remonde, a fellow Cebuano, because Vidal blesses so and believes Remonde is indispensable. Lozada?  ‘We do not need (to invite Lozada). We understand already,’ was his reply. This is the kind of wisdom we find our beloved prelate dispenses: contradiction, confused, and wanting.

But we heed him despite our misgivings. Sheeps find it easier to make peace with their own doubts than doubt the shepherd.

There’s not much throng of humanity evident in University of
San Carlos, which today is hosting a symposium with Jun Lozada, as much it was
in the South Bus terminal, Monday being the first day of the Holy Week. Among
the faceless crowd in the terminal one could see the upbeat readiness to long hours of the trip back home, people towing people and slinging their dusty
travel bags like crosses on their shoulders. The receding hairlines of fathers,
the brothers jittery in looking forward to a hot coffee brewed from burnt corn kernels
and a hero’s welcome who braved the big city to pursue the impossible. Toddlers
hurry in their small steps clinging to their mother’s grip or skirt, or are
cranky on the way to be crammed into the buses. Mothers issuing directives to
her brood, and shooting past other mothers to the gates of the terminal.

I ride my way to work everyday passing by this terminal which
for me today has not only become the meeting-point of people moving outward
from, or into, the city. The terminal – the subject of verbal brawl with the
lady-governor and the mayor whenever political arrogance is mistaken for public
service and publicity is needed to steer the issues away from South Reclamation
Project, CICC and expensive lampposts - has become host to millions of dreams fulfilled
piecemeal in construction sites of uptown buildings, cash registers of department
stores, and empty bottles of beer in dimly lighted brothels.

Each of them plods through with a narrative of that simple dream
that takes off from and touches down in here, the terminal, the convergence of
fated brethren whose grimy face and eyes gleam in wishful reverie at the
vaguest streak of hope. Away from the muddy farms and the bleating goats and
the merciless sun beating down on the crops, and out in the metropolis that brims
wide of opportunities that  heed no weather or  tempest, each retreats back
to where their stories started. The shack perched precariously on the hillside,
the beasts grazing on the pasture at the foot of the mountain, the patch of the
forest to be torched to the ground for clearing and coal.

The sojourn back home is thus, for a moment may be a pause,
but in reality the missing bead strung into the thread of destiny. It is decreed by capitalism that they embark in this exodus rich enough to afford the bus and small presents to expectant relatives, but poor enough to make them keep coming back to the city. It is a life denied
of democratic access to wealth and education necessary to step on the next rung
of economic mobility. It is the circle of needs and income, the content of daily struggle and strife, that perpetuates their poverty and increases their ignorance. And the city eats them alive - flesh, blood and sinews - all over again when they make the return trip and delve the pits with their sweat, punch the keys on cash registers, and dance naked on the table.

    It’s
the nth day since I took the first medicine which consists of a capsule and a
tablet. The former, which I did some brief introduction before, has transformed
its smell from that of a rusting metal to a rancid meat’s. I have to start
breathing without smelling, achieved by delegating respiration from the
nostrils to the mouth, each time I free one from the
blister pack. And I close my nose, my thumb and index finger compose into a
pair of pincers, when I wash it down with water.

    Up
to now, I cannot pinpoint any pronounced beneficial effects of the medicine. There
are some days I would want to play truant against myself and plan to postpone
the intake for several days. Before you jump in and claw out my eyeballs for
flagrant disregard of health, I have stopped myself from undertaking this
experiment before it would stop me.

    Some
people don’t believe that we get our water supply from a pump right beside a
pigsty. It turns out I was right and wrong. Right because it’s true; basically,
I fetched the water myself and witnessed how one large swine was scratching her behind on the wall by sliding it up and down, up and down. It was wailing while
continuously exhibiting general motor activity. The toothless washerwoman said
it was in the helpless state of ‘overflowing’ libido, which in Cebuano would have
sounded more graphical. Wrong because it was not the only
source we get our water from and there, there are no pigs in the throes of lust.

Today, I meet the debaters for an afternoon of practice, all raring to say their piece. Debate is a lousy thing, people claim, because it may talk about what’s wrong with society and how things be done the right way, the speakers are left to have not moved society any bit after the wordplay. All it is about is dogged resoluteness to pursue the impossible, the ideal, that is always beyond the human reach.  All it is about is words that bloom with other words and create imagined reality palpable enough to throb as long as the debate lasts.

At the end of the day though, and every droplet of spit employed into the useful occupation of bringing out the longing of humankind to make the world a better place, the world remains the same, equipped with existing mores that are questionable and biases that put asunder what everyone hitherto has been pretty much wanting to stick together. The reality debaters spun, as systematic and causative as it is, crumbles as the claw of naked truth reveals people are inept and skeptical and none the wiser.

All that is left are spits that land whichever way, on desk arms or on someone’s open pores, globs that are lightly viscous and vomit-inducing.

In my university, well the time I spent there for five years, two of which I dedicated pursuing the art of refutation and bitching, there exists an animosity between philosophy organization and the debaters. We did not openly engage each other, knowing that we wield similar instrument of reasoning, and that keeps us at bay. It’s enough that we exchange scathing remarks through the word of mouth, them having no qualms to accuse us of not doing the homework on fallacies and our haphazard regard on classical syllogisms. We accuse them of pining for the absolutes, the romantic pursuit of underlying causality of things, forever chasing a cosmos where discordant truths meet their agreement, conflicting discourse will find respite and union.

Heck, even engineers join in the fray, and a student-leader had the audacity to express his barefaced repulsion about the practice of formal disagreeing and humiliating and alienating people in public. He has not heard about the Roman maxim: when you want peace prepare for war.

            An officemate once asked why I debate. It was an inappropriate time, she rather inquisitive in a loud way amongst eavesdropping passengers in the jeepney. Their heads were trained in our direction. I was caught off-guarded and my knee-jerk reaction was to search for a way to evade an answer. Finding none, I answered the de facto debater’s official, noncommittal reply. It makes one to believe the possession of facility of the language. It makes it easy to pull brilliant excuses from the air. Together with these two, it’s a handy tool to sweet talk one’s way to the future.

            I did not tell her debaters worth their cents use these to, shall we say, kick asses.

***

            I open my phone and find a message from a friend. It says, Ikalibang ra na imong sakit. (You’d better shit that sickness out.)

             I have received sundry messages that express unfading support and heartfelt sincerity to stand by my side. None has been much shockingly acerbic, much pregnant with love and rawness, than this. Rather than be pissed off for that friend’s remark, I have the strangest idea that an inspiration has just come in, the answer to many of man’s questions that are indubitably self-proving has break in, the balm that appeases the vainglorious to kick asses is at hand at last. Walk it away. Just shit it out. Indeed, what wisdom and relief crap holds.

            When I drink my medicine at midnight, I feel better. So much better.

Third Day

I bathe at every sweltering afternoon, right at the end of Willie of Fortune and its contestants toting goody bags of food supplements purported to restore failing health and to keep optimum body functions. What these people endure is the basest of bare-faced capitalist exploitation in exchange of their stories that they never thought to have contained commercial value, their lives that are miserable as they already were, in exchange of hugs that are nearly insincere and the specter of thousands of pesos at achieving maximal melodramatic vulgarity. Consent, however, has the power to default the evident capitalist oppression. Commoditization of poverty beefs up ratings, and ironically to perpetuate poverty to keep stories coming. Ito’y para sa inyo, sa kinabukasan niyo.

            My father though finds hilarity of it all and I strongly suspect he does not see anything wrong. And, when there’s only one TV set whose tantrum includes dwindling its reception to only one channel, there is no way I can remain impervious. Soon I find myself captive of the witless humor, bigoted antics and platitudes about facing the odds of life by the limited means which the poor, the laundry-woman, the scavenger, the street child, are so privilege to have access to: the employment of brute strength in subhuman conditions. It’s primitive, it’s crude, but it sure is damn entertainment when these characters belt out notes of dizzying heights, dance in a lewd imitation of waddling ducks, and deliver banal lines of a badly-written monologue.

To step out of the grit, to be beamed worldwide as noontime stars wanting to be taken seriously, is what they live for. Everyone heard their stories and by sufficing their needs by the dole-out afterwards, everyone is happy.

This is thus how my afternoon unfolds, shitting the bullies and taunting the bullied.

Today, the taking of my medicine has been put on hold. I have yet to buy replenishment enough for the next ten days, which would bring me forward to the payday. By that time, I shall buy my meds sufficient for the next fifteen days. And on it goes, the wait for the payday and my medicine replenishment, payday and my medicine.

Tuition fees, allowances, electricity bills I have yet to resolve. Already the shampoo has been diluted with water half the volume, the toothpaste now badly tortured, and the soap bar for laundry is down to the last quarter. The signs of the time. Mundane concerns that I assume and I now want to suspend worrying about. This has been the grind I test myself for adaptability. So far, I’ve been exceptional. But this came. For now, my meds loom larger and all other things are keeled over to the side.

My shift for work starts late afternoon and ends in the evening. Hence the bath. I do the unthinkable when I wash myself. I sing. Not love songs, not ballads. Rock music is a no-no. The list includes Shout for Joy, Never Say Goodbye, Take me Out of the Dark – my friends note my fondness of this song in karaoke bars. They say it’s the subconscious speaking my repressed desire of fair complexion, not a plea to stay in the light – and Natutulog ba ang Diyos. The philosophy of architecture of the house is such that the bathroom, the toilet has no room for the said activity, is in full view of passersby. Now when I perform the screaming vibrato, some innocents are drawn to see a half-naked in concert pose, the shampoo as microphone.

It’s this stupidity I am doing when I sudden think seriously about how my life has become thus far. Grappling with the reality fate and I created, I think about dying as an end of the self-sustaining grind of need that is inexhaustible and money that is not. I mean as a means of escape, more as a means of redemption. Whenever I want to get to the bottom of things, why living is like running full sprint in a rat wheel, where each strength expended returns you back to where you started, death must possess the escape to nurse a waning desire to run farther and the redemption to go back to the race armed with illusion that it is a different wheel.

****

I plan to buy my medicine before work. The pharmacy, from which I bought my first two-day worth of meds, has a branch a stone-throw away from the (mini)bus terminal. The lady I talk to refuses to reflect a two-peso markdown on one drug, saying such entitlement is exclusively for a receipt worth of one whole box. I try to coax her to give in, saying the other branch has set a precedent, but she’s stubborn.

I end up prowling Osmena circle close to midnight alone. The rotunda is dark and lifeless. The urgency of the task is set by my doctor’s directive explicit on the prescription: one tablet a day. Few minutes before midnight, I am striding out from the drugstore.

I consume two pieces of bland, coarse bread quickly. I unpack my purchase and take in my meds. When I check the time, it is exactly midnight. As I walk homeward bound, there arises a nagging questionability of this practice, like is an overdose likely if I take the succeeding tablets hour earlier than is set tonight, which I strongly intend to do the next day?

For now, I have fulfilled my doc’s advice and my life has been given another lease. I shall face the problem when I get to the next day.

It’s horrifying fact that I wake up to an empty house today. I can make out the discordant implements of this house’s humanly existence on my un-creaking bed, that is, it does not yield to every move akin to a waterbed or folding one with nicely crisscrossing fibers. The bed has the therapeutic benefit in inducing pain on my back, which I take as a form of exercise and/or mortification.

It’s horrifying in two respects. One, I’m afraid of desertion much more when unnoticed, or that falls in between dozing off and coming to from slumber. Once in my childhood, I woke up from the afternoon nap with searing sunbeam on my face. I was alarmed to confirm that the room was empty of people. The last time I heard before drifting to sleep that afternoon, my mother was negotiating the weekly visit to my grandfather’s house in Talisay (years way before becoming a city), where my other siblings lived and were schooled. What if they had left me, alone and naked in the city? Would I share the misfortune of directionless street children scampering onto the roads, escaping to holes whence they came like rodents? Who would feed me Eggnog, the quintessential kindergarten snacks? What would become of me?

It’s dreadful to even think of waking up to a reality that was different than what I had securely left for sleeping, to an unrecognizable dimension where no one wants me and I would take on the world two decades early.

Two, an empty house reminds me of my mom’s last moments. She died trying to lustfully suck in air, an activity we do without so much labor. She now passed on to the next realm, but I wonder what would she be thinking after coming to a strange land where no one wants her and she would take on that world in timeless forever.

Besides, the mirth and warmth of the house have been significantly diminished on her death that sometimes I ask myself if it’s such a sin to make her grow in importance in our lives, or if it’s such a sin to make her less so. Compounding these questions is the inevitably natural thought process of asking, if I sleep tonight would I wake up? Or would members of the family find me cold and still on my un-creaking bed the next morning? Who would I find in His Kingdom?

I move silently to get up from bed. I scan my surroundings and inwardly I laugh at the traces of the commotion that morning. Ballpoint pens and discarded crumpled papers by students rushing to beat deadlines of procrastinated homework, hurried baths, the distinctive scent of body soap on the towels left to dry. The slippers, their dented part for the heel had waters refusing to sublimely disappear in evaporation, are heaped among fellow slippers and mud and the rug. Looking up the second floor of this humble house, my father is snoring with his glasses on and the day-old newspaper an arm-length away.

Smitten by pangs of hunger, I eat my first meal of the day. Cold rice, some fish doused in vinegar, salt, and garlic cubes boiled to cook, and instant miso soup -which, on account of the long story that would eventually transpire and the amount of digression this entry has already committed, I will explain much later.

I puncture the blister pack by a grimy nail. One tablet smells like rusting iron, and seems to waft off a strong metallic whiff whenever I pry it out. More so when I gingerly gobble it, my mouth sends hints of rust off. I wash everything with water, this time from public artesian well right beside a pigsty.

I go to my gastro(-enterologist, someone assigned to check the status of my vital, digestive organs without ever opening me up) today. The clinic, on the fourth floor of Chong Hua Medical Arts, is one of the many antiseptic office-clinics lining along the narrow corridor. The building itself is nondescript, so not much to be expected of its inside as that of the outside. Instead of windows and soft curtains playing along the wind, air-condition units and their garish cases are arrayed floor upon floor, office to office, unabashedly in-your-face, on the face of the building. Like cold epitaphs only several meters higher. People streams to the building throughout the day solemn, all with a far-away look, but hopeful that this place might cast some bleak sliver of cure.

But in spite of that, there is unmistakable salvation of its architecture. There is cheerfulness in its parking lot that, though not sprawling, yawns generously. What makes it cheerful I don’t exactly know. Beside it stands a flagpole, whose length ends with a red flag flapping at the midday sun. I gasp to see it is the Chinese embassy. As imposing as the Asian economic behemoth that it represents, the embassy is alarmingly unassuming that I took it was a drugstore or the mess hall for weary patients. It would take several visits later to find that out it is not and would take a reading of Newsweek to know that this is how

China

does business: tightening grip of world cookie jar without anyone guarding or with everyone watching Super Bowl.

The gastro says that yes, I’m dying, and yes, contrary to my belief, not too soon. There would be a time for that but not the schedule I anointed. I make this one up, but this might as well be his words. Several weeks ago, he had me visit a laboratory who upon my payment of cold cash, extracted blood sample from my scrawny arm. It was starkly brownish, the blood I mean and not the arm. The result of the tests those blood samples, my pity goes out to all of my corpuscles who got inconvenienced to this process, undergone is what my gastro is piercingly looking at now.

You are sick, he says. Your body though is fighting. Some antibodies have become gungho, went berserk, took the matter menacingly, and initiated the warfare against this malady. Cheerful, I say to myself.

How have I contracted it, doc, I ask. From your mother. Or, nag-gerger na ka? (Have you got laid?), he says matter-of-factly. NO, I say. Really? He’s looking at me accusingly, as though he was startled to hear a vehemently vulgar lie. No, definitely, I’m sure of it. I really mean it.

            He whisks me up and leads me to an inner room, where he asks me to lie down on a raised bed. His fingers prance around on my abdomen, pressing, running them in some precise order, as though rummaging a buried scalpel on that part of my anatomy. Youtube told me it’s for sizing internal organs, whether they had bloated out of normal proportions. The manual check ends with him attempting to perform rumba with his fingers, and I almost pass out from the fatal tickle.

I get up and follow him going back to his table. He hands me the laboratory result. Stupidly I compose into an intelligent frown, and I attempt to figure anything out of what was written in there. Seconds later, and still stupid, I give up the pointless task. The next slip comes that contained two foreign drugs. The first one stops “their” multiplication. That would keep them at bay. The second one is vitamins. Two months, and then I will see you.

            Outside, I walk away from the building. Tonight will usher the Chinese year of the scampering rodent and as I trudge on

, I met two Chinese on the way. They are robust and sweating and heading in the opposite direction. I catch snippets of their conversation, but they might as well speak Oompa Lumpa’s.

I get to the drugstore fast and I get the prices of my medicine even faster. For two months, I need to ply my body with miraculous chemicals worth fourteen grand. I dash outside, and sidle into Mercury Drugstore fronting Osmeña rotunda. The price difference is slight, only by ten cents, but for many like me whose lives are on the threat of hunger and illness, cents and millions are alike.

Dashing back to the first store, I ordered enough for two days. Half a thousand has now been committed to their coffers.

Two hours past the appointed lunch break, I flush my first tablets with cold mineral water.

I usually ride in minibuses everyday. These are street beasts that lurch suicidal, one that takes at no chances in missing a heartbeat to cover distance. I can reach the city in twenty minutes riding in them. Compared that to the conventional transit, the lumbering jeepneys and multicabs, who shall pompously discharge you from their innards after forty five minutes. The minibuses mean serious business.

They are not really large though. They are about half the size and length of the bus. The two are similarly cut like a bread loaf — the bus is cut boringly straight, the minibus has a softer “head”, curving toward the windshield before the driver. By virtue of imagination, the two have the same load capacity.

Some of them appear flaring when by design their sides have metallic fringes formed into tongues of flames. This enhances their chances at weaving through the traffic no matter how jammed, by appearing bullish. Other minibuses should rather be ads for porn, their skins sprayed with luscious feminine forms in g-strings and bras that leave nothing to imagination. I have spotted two whose murals included nude women in eagle-spread, heads tilted towards the passengers, droopy eyes, ready for the action; not a few have topless men in various stages of unbuckling.

There’s no mistaking of their message. People driving them must be reading Freud.

Others though are alternatives to the pulpit, emblazoning the end of days and the urgency to repent, the failure of which shall bring one to sure damnation. It can make apostle out of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which I still can’t pronounce without tripping.

Their drivers don’t just hold the steering wheel; they coil their forearms around it. Their foot on the accelerator doesn’t usually relax. And they are the devils that heed no prayer of any woman, man, child or cats who do not leap out from the way. They speed, they plow through. They overtake, they broadside other vehicles. They establish larger roads by using the opposite lane. Somehow they manage to ease the bulk of the minibus into the most congested roads, shooting out of the bottlenecks. On inauspicious days, they tail behind a speeding ambulance.

It helps that drivers have sidekicks — konduktors, we call them — whose spit can be deadly woofers. They can scream and not go hoarse the next day. Their throats are well suited for this profession; booming in shrieking, even much shriller when they collect fees among sedate passengers. They can spot troglodytes, beings who are contemplating their fate to cross or not to cross and hence have decided to put their lives ready for God’s taking, miles away. The sidekicks forewarn in primal scream lest someone becomes a relic on the road. Horns are seldom used by drivers who believe, that in the age of electronics and video streaming, there are things only humans can be trusted with.

The sidekicks have other tricks that come in handy. They can cram the minibus to its last crack of space. Space is money and therefore precious. Breathing, in this case, is strictly reserved for survival. Air is thus obtained by competition. One can inhale lustily when equipped with large nostrils and larger windpipe. No one expects the air to be pure oxygen of course. It comes with aerosols from old people coughing. Or the pungency of cheap perfumes, armpits, and foul breaths. Plus the nutritive smog in the city. The weaker lungs can die without anyone noticing.

One time, a father hailed the minibus to a stop because his child passed out. The toddler was cold, pale and not moving. This solicited remarks from passengers. The father was good-for-nothing fellow, they said. He should have exposed his son’s head generously out of the window. No one mentioned about the child’s deprivation of his right to breathe and riskier position in displaying one’s skull available for lopping, and thus the sidekick comes out clean from any responsibility.

The sidekick, like Rudy Baylor of Grisham’s The Rainmaker, has a calculator rattling somewhere in his brain. Mention the place where you’ve boarded and he can tell you how far is it from the city, how far is it from your destination if you are not alighting in the terminal, the fare, and the change once a bill is handed over. All in split second. He tells you the flag down rate for first six kilometers, the rate per succeeding kilometer, and the latest traffic enforcer gunned down yesterday for being such a stupid ass stickler. And if you come friendly, not cocky, oafish, and brave enough to take in the gore, he tells you who killed the poor man.

He throws information about fuel prices, the fucking government, the corporations preying on hapless creatures like him and his driver. Most ignore him, others nod. Now some passengers choose to engage in debate with him. Big mistake. Debates are appreciated only as far as it produces a brawl. Forget it if you want your digestive system complete at the end of the trip.

He can be forgetful once someone misses to demand the change. It’s miraculous actually, the way he can hint amnesia.

It is with these fellows that I find myself everyday, commuting to work. At the peak of the afternoon, around three, I station myself for their attention. Immediately they come. On other days, I wait for couple of minutes. Ten minutes running and they are nowhere in sight, I go for the multicab and wish for luck.