Monstress (5 page)

Just as I walk out the door, she hands me forty dollars for the cab ride back to Oakland, and refuses to take it back. “You brought me home,” she says. “If you didn't, I could be dead too.” She starts crying, then puts her hand on my face. I don't come closer, but I don't pull away either. “She loves you,” she whispers, “okay?” Then she holds me, her body pressing against mine. I wonder if this is how Eric felt after he changed, if the new flesh made him feel closer to the person he held. I won't ever know, but I wish I could stay this way a little longer, listen to Raquel whisper about my brother the way she just did, in the present tense, like he's still going on.

T
he next morning, Ma is sitting at the bottom of the stairs, a vinyl garment bag over her lap. Eric's body is being prepared for tonight's viewing. We need to deliver his clothes.

She says nothing about the girls from the HoozHoo, doesn't ask me where I went. But on the way to the funeral home, I can feel her staring at me, like she's waiting for me to confess to something I didn't do.

Loomis is waiting in the lobby. “We've set up a room, Mrs. Dominguez,” he says. We follow him through the lobby, but pass his office and continue down the hallway. “There's a phone inside, if you need anything.” We stop in front of a metal door. He looks serious, like he's worried for us. “It's not too late to change your mind.”

Ma shakes her head.

Loomis takes a breath, nods. “All right then.” He turns to me. “It's good that you're here,” he says, then leaves us.

Ma opens the door. I close it behind us. Eric lies on a metal table with wheels, a gray sheet covering him from the neck down. A strand of his hair hangs just over the edge, the darkest thing in this white room. I can see the incision on his neck, the thread keeping his lips shut.

Ma takes the garment bag from my hands. She goes to Eric. I stay by the door. “They have staff who can do this,” I tell her.

She hangs the bag on a hook on the wall, unzips it. It's a suit. One of Dad's. “We have to change him.” Ma puts her hand on Eric's right arm, rubs it up and down, the sheet still between them. She bends over, whispers
“Ang bunso ko”
between kisses to his cheek, his forehead, his cheek again, weeping. For a moment I mistake this for tenderness, her gesture of amends, a last chance to dress him the way she did when he was a boy.

Then she stands up straight, wipes her eyes, breathes in deep, and pulls several rolls of ACE bandages from her purse. Now I understand.

She lifts the sheet, folds it neatly down to his abdomen. For the first time, we see them, his breasts. They look cold and hard and dead as the rest of him, like they have always belonged to his body. If this was how he wanted to live, then this was how he wanted to die.

“Lift his arms,” Ma says.

I don't move.

“This will work. I saw it on TV. Women who try to look like men. This is what they do.”

“You can't.”

“Everyone will see him tonight,” Ma says, unrolling a bandage.

I tell her to forget tradition and custom, to keep the casket closed. “You picked out a nice casket for him. Beautiful flowers.” I keep my voice calm and move toward her slowly, like a person trying to save someone from jumping off the ledge of a skyscraper. “They won't see,” I say, “they won't know.”

“I will,” she says.

I reach for her arm but she pulls back. She steps around, stands behind Eric's head, slips her hands beneath his shoulders, manages to raise Eric a few inches from the table, but he slips from her. Ma tries again, her arms shaking from the weight of him, but she's just not strong enough. “Please,” she says, looking at me. One way or another, she means to do this, and she'll only hurt herself in the end.

I walk over to the body. The light in here is different than it was in the morgue. Yesterday, the room seemed lit by a gray haze, and it took me only a second to recognize my brother. Today, the light makes shadows on his face, and I notice the sharpness of his cheekbones, the thin arch of his eyebrows. His lips are fuller than I remember, his neck more narrow. “It's still him,” I say, but Ma doesn't believe me.

His body is hard from the embalming fluid, and he is heavier than I expected. To hold him up, I have to slip my arms beneath his, fold them across his chest. I can feel him, and I don't care how we look: we are together and we should stay this way, for all the moments we can. We have been apart for so long; soon he'll be gone for good. “Leave him alone,” I say, but she doesn't listen, and then her hands separate me from my brother as she works the bandage round and round his breasts. I kiss the back of his neck, just once, in love and in apology.

Ma keeps going, another bandage and then one more, so tight the breasts vanish back into him, like they never existed. If my brother were alive, he wouldn't be able to breathe.

I
say nothing to Ma on the way back to her house, and I let her off at the bottom of the driveway. Then I make my way to Telegraph Avenue, heading for the bridge.

I find my way to the Tenderloin, and as if it was meant to be, find a parking spot right in front of Eric's building. I hurry inside, pass the same two girls on the doorstep from last night, run up the three flights of stairs, down the hall to the end. I knock on the door.

“Who is it?” Raquel says.

“Edmond,” I say. “The brother.”

And she opens to me.

Felix Starro

W
e were here to perform the Holy Blessed Extraction of Negativities on unwell Filipino Americans. Mrs. Delgado was our 153rd patient, but we treated her like the first and let her tell the story of her pain as if we had never heard it before. “It begins here”—she tapped her heart, then three spots on her stomach—“then here and here, sometimes here. Bastard American doctors tell me nothing is wrong, like I'm so old, so crazy-in-the-head.”

“Then it's good you came to see us, ma'am,” I said. I helped her onto the massage table, laid her flat on her back. Then I lit a pair of candles, hung plastic rosary beads over the covered mirrors. A wreath of dried sampaguita flowers made the cigarette air of our dingy hotel room smell like Philippine countryside.

I unbuttoned her blouse halfway up, rubbed coconut oil on her stomach, forehead, and chin. Then Papa Felix, my grandfather, stepped forward. He rolled up his sleeves, pulled his thinning hair into a ponytail. He put his palms on Mrs. Delgado's belly and began to massage it, gently at first with his fingertips, then hard and deep with his fists. I closed my eyes, chanting Hail Marys over and over, faster and faster, and when I looked again Papa Felix's hands were half gone, knuckle-deep in Mrs. Delgado's body. Blood seeped out from between Papa Felix's fingers, and one by one he extracted coin-size fleshy blobs and dumped them into the trash can by his feet.

“Negativities,” he said.

Mrs. Delgado lifted her head to look. “Thanks be to God,” she said with a sigh I'd heard a thousand times before—that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.

There was a time when I might have apologized, if only in my head. “Two hundred dollars,” I said. “Cash only.”

I wiped the blood from her stomach, helped her to her feet. She reached for her purse, gave me the money. But then she did something no other patient had ever done before: she took out a camera. “When I told my sisters that Felix Starro was coming to San Francisco, they didn't believe me.” She pressed a button, adjusting the zoom lens. “May I?”

Papa Felix shook his head: the camera flash could disrupt his spiritual vibrations, he said, which could thwart the healing of patients to come. “But for you,” he said, “okay.” He undid his ponytail, smoothed back his hair, and smiled. I moved to the right, to stand outside the picture.

I
n my family, the only recipe passed down was the one for blood, but Papa Felix said I could never get it right. “Too thin,” he said. “Like ketchup and water mix-mix.” He dipped a finger into the plastic jug of blood and held it up to the fluorescent bathroom light. “What idiot would believe it's his own?”

Too much water, not enough corn syrup. Always my mistake. “At least it's red,” I said, but he just grumbled about my carelessness and lazy attitude and insisted that something in America was making me different; he guessed it was the greasy food, the low-quality air of our hotel room, my terrible luck of turning nineteen in midair, en route from Manila to San Francisco. “I'm the same,” I said, but he took my shoulders and stood me in front of him, flicked my temples twice and rubbed them in slow circles, as though what I was feeling could be diagnosed. “You're not right, Felix.”

I was the third Felix Starro (my dead father was the second), and whenever Papa Felix said my name it meant he was serious; this time, I decided, he was just talking to himself. “You won't find anything,” I said, and returned to the room. I took the rosaries and sheets off the mirrors, peeled away plastic crucifixes we'd taped to the walls, blew out the candles. I reached into hidden compartments underneath the massage table and carefully removed tiny plastic bags of blood, then dug through the trash to retrieve chicken livers good enough to use for the next day's Extractions.

Suddenly my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked up, checking to see that Papa Felix was still in the bathroom, then took it out. A text message read,
Buy roses. 6pm. 1525 South Van Ness.

I left the livers where they were. I took the day's cash from the ice bucket, stuffed it into a manila envelope. “I'm going to the bank”—my voice shook, I could feel it—“to make the deposit.” We'd found a Filipino bank near Chinatown where no one questioned large deposits of cash. I changed into a clean white shirt and my good corduroy pants, grabbed my backpack and Windbreaker from the closet.

“Look before you leave,” he said. He meant that I should check the hallway, through the peephole, for anything suspicious; anyone, he said, could be undercover hotel security, ready to arrest us for our activities. But I didn't look, not this time, and I left the room so fast I nearly collided with a maid vacuuming the hall. She was a Filipina, plump-cheeked and short, younger than me. We had seen each other before.

“Excuse me,” she said in English, “sorry,” but I caught her staring at the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on our doorknob. It was always there, to keep maids from finding the batches of blood and bags of chicken livers, or barging in on an Extraction. So the room was never cleaned, and though we kept it tidy ourselves, the Filipino housekeeper looked suspicious, as if thinking,
Dirty room
.

I said sorry, too, then walked slowly to the exit stairs, ran all the way down.

“D
o you know this place, sir?” I showed the taxicab driver the address in the text message. He popped his gum and nodded, and we sped off before I could fasten my seat belt. In minutes I was far away from downtown. For the first time in America, I didn't know where I was.

We had arrived in San Francisco three weeks before. We worked seven days a week, up to ten hours each day, making the kind of money we could no longer make back home. Once, life was different: years before, Papa Felix had been one of the Philippines' top healers. He'd made his reputation by curing Batangas City mayor Agbayani's gout and action star B. J. San Remo's diabetes, which led him to becoming a regular Very Special Guest Star on
It's Real!! (Di Ba?)
, the paranormal TV variety hour that named the procedure the Holy Blessed Extraction of Negativities. Once a month for several years my grandfather, my father, and I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Batangas City to the TV studio in Manila. I would sit in the last row of the live audience and watch Papa Felix in the monitors above, the zoom angles on his hands penetrating the patient's belly, like a ghost about to possess a body. When blood was shed the audience would gasp; when fleshy Negativities were extracted, they would cheer.

When I was ten, I snuck backstage to watch the performance. I hid behind the edge of a moveable wall, and as my father chanted Hail Marys into a microphone I saw Papa Felix slip a hand beneath the table and snatch something small and red—a bag of blood the size of a thumb. In an instant the Extraction began, and I felt a hand on the back of my neck. “You don't belong here,” a stagehand said. He brought me to a white, windowless room, where I waited for what felt like hours, and when my father finally came I told him what I'd seen. He nodded slowly, stared at the ground. “Time to go home” was all he said. Two months later, he died in a jeep wreck, and at the post-funeral potluck I heard Papa Felix tell our guests I was his one comfort, a good, strong boy who would take his father's place: like a birthmark, the family business was mine forever.

After some years, Mayor Agbayani's gout returned, followed by prostate cancer, and B. J. San Remo became a double amputee. The big-shot clients were gone, and our loyal following in nearby shantytowns brought in little money; I remembered long months when we were paid with eggs and sacks of rice. “Even the peasants are ripping us off,” Papa Felix griped. And then two years ago, his old rival Chitz Gomez began performing surgeries on Filipinos abroad in Guam and Saudi Arabia, and returned a far wealthier man than before. “We can do better,” Papa Felix said. He called on old connections to help him build a client list in California, then scheduled our trip to San Francisco, where there were plenty of Filipinos in need of healing. It was true: our first patient, a middle-aged sales clerk with stomach tumors and a fear of doctors, fell to his knees when he stepped into our hotel room. “You're here,” he said, taking Papa Felix's hand and pressing it against his forehead, “finally.” It was amazing that there were people who remembered Felix Starro—and even more amazing that they still believed in him.

At the end of our first week Papa Felix said, “How I pity them, these Filipinos in America. So many sick without knowing why.” He was standing at the hotel window looking down at the crowds in the street, as if they were his people. “Can you imagine, waiting and waiting, just for someone to bring you hope?”

I lied and said no.

“B
uy roses” was a code from a woman named Flora Ramirez; 1525 South Van Ness was the address of her flower shop, which was squeezed between a Mexican bakery and a liquor store. On the storefront window, yellow curly letters spelled out
BUHAY BULAKLAK
, which translated strangely from Tagalog—it meant “life flowers” in English. I took a deep breath, but just as I reached for the doorknob I glimpsed a streak of dried blood over the ridge of my knuckles. I licked my thumb and rubbed it away, checked my other hand. It was clean. I went inside.

The store was barely bigger than our hotel room, lined with flower-filled shelves and humming refrigerators; everywhere you moved, it seemed, flowers would touch you. A woman was standing at a wooden table behind the cash register. She had a pair of scissors in one hand, white flowers in the other, and one by one she snipped them in half, letting stems fall to the floor. She was not tall, but her tailored blazer and the tight bun of her hair made her seem like a serious businessperson, someone who could get things done. Though I had never seen Flora Ramirez's picture, I knew it was her. It had to be.

She greeted me in English, like I was any ordinary American customer. I meant to identify myself but was unsure if it was safe to speak: there was one other customer, an old, bent-over woman in a dirty ski jacket with a scarf on her head, moving from bouquet to bouquet, rubbing petals between her fingers.

Flora Ramirez looked at me and said, “You want to buy roses.”

I nodded.

“Roses are on sale. Seven for seven dollars. Red, pink, yellow, white. What is your preference?” She put down her scissors, stepped around the register, and slid open the refrigerator door. Cold, rose-scented air floated toward me, and suddenly I feared her text message was no code at all, that our meeting truly was about flowers and nothing else.

“Red, pink, yellow, white,” she said again.

“Yellow,” I said.

“Yellow means friendship.” She took seven yellow roses from the refrigerator and carried them to the register. She wrapped them in cellophane and rung them up, then handwrote a bill on a small pad of paper. She tore it off, handed it to me. It said
$25000
—the initial payment.

“Everything is fine.” She smiled, and something about her perfect teeth let me know that I was right to seek her out. For twenty-five thousand dollars, Flora Ramirez could help illegal Filipinos stay in America—months or years, forever if they wished. I didn't know how she did it, only that she could: two years before, she had given TonyBoy Llamas, my girlfriend Charma's favorite cousin, a new life. He was vacationing in California before returning to the Philippines to join the seminary when he met and fell in love with an amateur Mexican boxer. His parents disowned him, his brothers, too, so he and the boxer sought help from Flora Ramirez. Six months later, they were living in what TonyBoy called a Mediterranean-style apartment complex in Las Vegas, earning good money dealing blackjack. So when Papa Felix began planning our trip to America, I knew this would be my chance: I made contact with Flora Ramirez and started a yearlong correspondence of coded e-mails and text messages, coordinating cash amounts and payment dates and when, where, and how we would meet. These were risky, secret dealings, but in times of doubt Charma would tell me, “If my homosexual priest cousin and his Mexican boxer boyfriend can make it in America, why can't we?” We were no different from them, she said, or any other person in search of a good and honest life.

Flora Ramirez tapped her fingernail twice on the receipt. I unzipped my backpack, took out the envelope of cash, handed it to her. She slipped it underneath the register drawer, then tied a black ribbon around the bouquet of roses. “Better selection tomorrow,” she said, “you come back then. Same price.” She nodded toward the door.

I left the store and walked to the corner to hail a taxicab. My heart was pounding; people on the street stared at me, as if they knew who I was and what I'd done. But it was merely the roses in my hands that caught their attention. They were lovely and bright; I could imagine pressing them between the pages of a heavy book, a souvenir that would inspire me to look back on this day, the first of my new life. But for now they would only make Papa Felix suspicious, so I left them on top of a trash can for someone else to take.

W
henever I called Charma, I'd stare at postcards of famous San Francisco landmarks, images of which she would download online—the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, the famous crooked street. It was like taking in the same view together, despite the distance between us, and she'd say the pictures were glimpses of our future. But now, I was calling from the backseat of a dented, lime-green cab, staring at a lightning-shaped crack in the window.

She picked up on the fourth ring. “I bought roses,” I said.

First she giggled, then she gasped. “You really did it? Truly?”

“First payment was today. Second tomorrow. And then—”

“Pay it all now!” she said. “Pay it all now and send me a plane ticket tomorrow and let's be together forever.”