Incidental Light

by Eliza Victoria

It happened in six days, the waking dreams. The first day was a Monday, at least six months after the burial. Six years, centuries, eons. Michael elected to go back to Manila because - because. Because the sky in Bulacan was too big, too wide a mouth. It could swallow him whole, like the presence of his parents, suddenly generous and suffocating. At least the view of the sky from his fifth-floor apartment was obstructed, slaughtered by tin roofs ready to cave in, by phone lines, streamers, billboards.

It was very early in the morning when Michael heard a man shouting from outside the window. Michael was staring at his room, his back to the sky, the cup already cold in his hands, so he didn’t see the man at once. He guessed whoever it was was drunk and was screaming from inside the apartment building right in front of his.

“It was an abomination built on the dead plains for Shinar!” the man said. The man was shouting so loudly – Michael imagined veins standing starkly on a neck – he wondered why no one had called the cops on him yet. “By the bloodkin of Noah it was built to reach Yahweh, our Lord! He with the name of Nimrod shall die!”

And Michael thought, probably from the Bible. It had the right of the Old Testament in it, all anger and hellfire. But Nimrod, though. Nimrod was from Milton -

Michael glanced over a shoulder and saw a man, thin and old, standing on a fifth floor terrace directly across his window, strapped inside what looked like a jacket of dynamite, his arms outstretched.

Michael stood up with a jolt, dropping his cup. In his head he screamed, Hoy! but in truth he only stared at the old man, slack jawed.

“I,” the man screamed. “AM. NIMROD.”

The man exploded into a gray blur, and he took the building down with him. First it was the windows, shattering to pieces and flying like liberated doves, then the wood and cement, crumbling to a large heap on the lot.

Michael stared and stared and stared. Then he ran, out of his room, out of the unit, down to the ground floor and out of the building -

Only to find the building right across solid and intact. “What,” he said. He climbed back up to his unit, breathing heavily from the sprint, and saw, from his bedroom window, that the fifth floor terrace was empty.

“What,” he huffed. It was all he could say. What.

Michael still showered and got dressed and MRT’ed to work; what he saw – or thought he saw – sat at the back of his head as an incessant headache. He worked in the IT department of a graphic design company, and he stayed in his workstation with his fingers massaging his temples. Going to work drove him crazy, but he knew that not going to work and staying in his room with that terrace jutting at his face through the window would drive him even crazier. The day he came back to work after the burial Michael realized that he needed to pack up and leave, find a job in a company in a place where nobody knew him. His officemates were suddenly nicer to him, but he sensed a mild anger behind their words, a wariness, a how dare you bring this upon us just waiting to be shouted at him inside the Employee’s Lounge. He had experienced a deep, personal loss, and they didn’t want to have anything to do with his tragedy. Jokes sounded awkward around him; it suddenly became compulsory to ask Michael, are you okay whenever he fell silent. Michael knew the company would take a deep breath and heave a sigh of relief once he tendered his resignation.

That Monday night, he wondered if he was finally having a psychotic break.

Tuesday, he was staring at his face in the mirror when his reflection suddenly sighed, ran its fingers through its hair, and turned away. Michael watched, horrified, as his reflection walked to the reflection of the back of his room and face the wall. Michael put his hands over his eyes saying no no no; he removed his hands and found himself facing his own reflection again.

Michael avoided mirrors that day.

Nothing strange happened on Wednesday morning, but when Michael got back to his unit in the evening, he saw himself (that can’t be me, he thought at first, but later he knew it was really himself) standing on the terrace, on the same spot where the old man (there was no old man) had stood on Monday. (There was no old man.) Two seconds later, the Michael on the terrace began to disintegrate into sheets of paper, the kind of ruled sheets of paper used to make spiral notebooks. The sheets flew into the sky even though there was no wind.

He called Charles, his officemate at the department. They used to be close friends, until Michael came back changed, carrying what felt like a rock in his chest, and avoided talking to anyone.

“Michael!” Charles sounded like he had just found him in a place he didn’t expect him to be.

“Charles -” Michael stopped. Just what exactly would he say? I think I’m going crazy.

“Mike, look,” Charles said. “I’m so glad you called. Let’s talk about this tomorrow, after work. All right? I mean, if that’s all right.”

Even Charles had changed, Michael realized. The old Charles, pre-new Michael, would never have bothered to say I mean, if that’s all right.

The next day, Thursday, Charles too the MRT with him and walked with him to his apartment building. They were trudging up the stairs when Michael suddenly felt weary. He felt the weariness in his legs.

“Are you all right?” Charles said.

“Yes, just go on ahead.”

On the final flight of stairs, Charles stopped, glanced back, and said, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Suddenly, Charles was also standing beside him, asking, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Michael jumped. On the fourth floor landing, a third Charles looked up through the banister and said, “Are you sure you’re okay?” The question was like an echo falling down the stairwell.

Michael held his head.

“Mike?” There was only one Charles now. “Hey.”

“I don’t think now’s a good time to talk, Charles. I’m sorry.”

“What’s wrong? Are you sick? You’re shaking.”

“I feel sick.”

“I’ll help you up.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m okay. I’m sorry, Charles.”

Michael walked up the stairs and opened his apartment door.

He went on sick leave the next day.

—

Friday. Michael stayed in his bedroom. Around noon he heard voices from outside, coming from the unit’s living room. “I feel worthless,” one voice said. A young boy.

“Oh, you do?” another replied. An older boy, maybe a teenager.

“Can you make this feeling go away?” the young boy said.

“Oh, sure,” said the teenager.

It was followed by the sound of a shotgun.

Michael covered his face with a pillow and cried himself to a long, disturbed sleep.

Are you crazy if you know that you are crazy? Michael had heard this question asked so many times in movies or on TV shows; he just couldn’t remember the answer.

He knew his parents and his relatives (and, to some extent, Charles and the rest in the office) were just waiting for him to flip. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe it was just impossible, unthinkable, for a person to live his life unscathed and unscarred after seeing his younger brother get shot in the head right in front of him. That person would have to go to the other side. Perhaps it was necessary to happen, to maintain balance in the world. Perhaps it was cosmic law.

Joshua was taking up his masters in Physics, a University program that was probably so mind numbing that Michael hardly ever had a straight conversation with his younger brother the semester he started taking it. Then semester break came, and one day in October, Michael decided to drop by the house Joshua was renting and invite him out.

That night, they decided to go back to Joshua’s house together. The shortcut to the house was a dark swath or road flanked by an unfinished elementary school on one side, and an empty basketball court. The road was pockmarked, bumpy. THe cab they rode on refused to go in there. A padyak ride was an option, but it was really late, there were none of those anymore.

It wasn’t the bumps, however, that worried Michael. It was the dark. The walk to Joshua’s house wasn’t nearly as difficult during the early evening, when Michael came by; the basketball court had lights powerful enough to illuminate the road. There were no such lights when they went home that night.

Joshua was walking several paces ahead, and Michael was grateful he could still make out his brother’s silhoutette in the darkness. Then Joshua stopped and raised his arms. A twitching creature was screaming at him. Your wallet! Your cell phone!

A glint of metal that could have been an ice pick, or a knife. Or a gun.

Wallet! Cell phone! The man with the weapon sounded deranged. Michael felt cold all over.

Did he make a sound? He couldn’t remember. But the man jumped and there was a spark and an explosion, and Joshua reared back from the impact of the bullet and crumpled to the ground.

The man ran away. Michael did not run after him.

Michael walked over to where Joshua had fallen and knelt beside him. His first thought was: I want to see my brother’s face again. Not this face, not this mangled mess. Michael touched his brother’s chest with both of his hands and cried.

—

The man died four days later in a police shootout, which could have been a rubout. Nobody asked. Nobody questioned what happened.

They told Michael the man’s name, but they did it during the funeral mass, where his brain had turned into a sieve and just drained away all the things he didn’t want to hear, or know, or remember.

Oftentimes Michael would find reality hitting him while he was doing something routine, like washing the dishes, or backing up important files on a colleague’s personal computer. The blow would freeze him, and he’d come to staring into space, the water running over his hands, the computer monitor already prompting him to Click OK to Continue.

He would realize: my brother is dead. It was easy to forget when he was busy, that was why he still came to work, still woke up in the morning, still went through the motions of preparing for something. Something – an equipment assessment report, lunch, the future. My brother is dead. Michael had read somewhere that if you say a word over and over, it would, in the long run, be stripped of its meaning. Bug. And Michael would say, bug bug bug bug. My brother is dead. My brother is dead. My brother is dead. My brother is dead.

But the meaning held fast, like something that couldn’t be peeled away.

On Saturday, Michael found dolls standing on his laptop keyboard.

There were two of them, six inches high, both women, dressed in kimonos with their faces painted. The word geisha flickered through Michael’s head and dissipated. The dolls could have been marionettes, but there were no strings. They moved anyway, slowly, the motions fluid and calculated. Michael was suddenly reminded of a Noh play he once saw.

“Let me tell you a story,” one of the dolls said to the other doll, who then slowly, very slowly, nodded and knelt on the computer keys, its little hands folded on its lap. “In the beginning,” said the doll still standing, “there was no beginning. There was no time, yet. So how can we know with which to begin the story? Should we start with the void, the spark? Maybe the spark came before the void.”

“I’ve had enough,” Michael said suddenly, and felt a chill run through him when the dolls stopped moving and turned to look at him. He was still on the bed, wearing yesterday’s clothes. Quickly, without knowing why, he dug through his backpack, took out his planner, ripped out a page, and wrote:

Life is nothing but an incidental light in the void. We know, in our heart of hearts, that the void can exist without this light.

Graffiti, etched on his desk back in college, written on a wall somewhere. Or a line from a poem, part of a story’s dialogue. Or a thought that had occurred to him during the wake, while his brother’s classmates huddled around the coffin, careful not to touch the glass or the flowers, careful not to bump into him. Michael couldn’t remember where it came from.

He was already sobbing when he looked up. The dolls were gone. Michael stood up, took a quick shower, and did his grocery. He checked his email and surfed the net the rest of the day.

Sunday.

Michael was riffling through his DVDs that afternoon, searching in vain for an old comedy film he wanted to watch again, when the knock in the door came.

Michael sighed. He lived on the fifth floor, but ever now and then he’d find a representative from a charity group or the barangay basketball team standing behind his door, armed with an empty white envelope and a pious smile. He’d wonder why they bothered to trudge up those steps. Was there someone on his floor who actually gave them money?

But when Michael looked through the peephole, there was only a girl.

Michael opened the door a little. The girl, who could be no more than twelve, was wearing a thick black headband, a short white dress with black velvet buttons, and black flip flops. She had her arms behind her back. She had a smile ready when he opened the door. She smiled at him widely, disarmingly.

“Hi,” the girl said.

“Hi,” Michael said.

The girl smiled.

She’ll ask if she can come in, Michael suddenly thought. And I will say no.

“Can I come in?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” Michael said, and stepped back, thinking, if Carla and I had a girl, she would have looked just like her.Carla was an old girlfriend. He wondered why he suddenly remembered her. He had not thought of Carla for months and months.

The girl entered the door gracefully – he didn’t even feel her skirt or her hair touch his skin. There were shelves of books to her right. She looked at this display for a moment, then ran her fingers across the spines of the books. They were mostly encyclopedias, references, some science books from Joshua. Some novels he had picked up from bargain book sales and accumulated back in college.

Michael, standing mutely behind the girl, watching her, felt like he had forgotten to do something important.

Then he got it. “Would you like something to drink?” he said.

The girl glanced over a shoulder and smiled, still gliding down the shelves, ballerina-like. “I’ll have what you’ll have.”

Alcohol was the first thing that came to Michael’s mind. His head throbbed lightly, as if he were on medication. He walked into the kitchen and came back with a glass of milk.

He placed the glass on the coffee table. The girl had come upon his old computer table at the end of the bookshelves. The PC the table used to support had been sold to the junk shop; now the table’s covered with framed photographs. The girl was holding the one with him and Joshua in it.

“That’s the time he finished his bachelor’s,” Michael said.

In the picture, Joshua was in his black toga; Michael, in a crisp polo shirt, had his arms around him. Their mother took the picture. When their father checked the digital preview on the camera, he said they had an identical smile.

“Do you know how old the universe is?” the girl said, still holding the picture. When Michael didn’t answer (because he didn’t know, and because he was for the first time hit by the strangeness of the situation), the girl placed the photograph back on the table and turned to face him. “Thirteen point seven billion years. Thirteen point seven billion years ago, something sprang into existence. From that starting point, it took ten billion years before life appeared. It took that long. But still, life did appear. Think about it. You would have thought that nothing would ever come from a shapeless mass, no matter how long you stood around and waited, no matter the endless amount of time, and yet - there it is. After ten billion years time. Isn’t that amazing?” She paused and smiled. “All you have to do, really, is be patient.”

“Who are you?” Michael said.

The girl was unfazed. “Do you know that you can touch time?” she said. She never lost her smile. “The very existence of time depends on the existence of space, so it is just acceptable to think that time can be touched. When planes travel in the direction of the Earth’s rotation, the clocks on the planes run fifty-nine nanoseconds slower than the atomic clocks on the ground. Time’s there, in the clouds, and the air in which they fly. You can just reach out and fold it, like a new silk dress, or a fluffy towel.” The girl balled her fists, then opened her palms slowly. She looked at her hands as she spoke: “Minutes ago, before I came in, you were looking for a copy ofThis is Spinal Tap.” Balled her fists again, opened her palms, placed her right hand over her left. “But you’ve forgotten that a year ago, your brother borrowed it. He lost it two weeks later, in a study group.”

Michael felt sick. “Who,” he said, “are you.”

The girl looked up, possibly startled by the tone of his voice. “Michael -”

“How did you know my name?” Michael moved behind the coffee table, then behind the sofa, putting as many objects as he could between them. “Don’t you dare come near me.”

“Michael -”

“Who are you?”

The girl stopped advancing.

“What does it matter, Michael?” the girl said. “If I gave you a name, what difference would that make?”

Michael was still angry and scared, but he saw that the girl somehow had a point.

“Call me whatever name you want to call me,” the girl said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been trying to speak to you, but you shut me out.”

Michael lowered his hand a little. “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Are you God?”

The girl stared at him with her mouth partly open. Then she burst out laughing.

“You’re funny,” she said. Michael was offended.

“Are you one of those missionary people?” Michael said. “But you’re too young to be a missionary.”

The girl covered her mouth with both hands, giggling.

I’m going crazy, Michael thought. Then he said: “What do you mean you’ve been trying to speak to me?”

“I’ve been trying to speak to you since Monday!” the girl said.

Something clicked and shifted. Michael walked around the sofa slowly before sitting down. The girl made a move to sit beside him, but he quickly held up a hand. “Don’t come any closer.”

The girl stayed put. “What?” she said.

“You’re the one responsible for the hallucinations?”

The girl looked genuinely surprised. “What hallucinations?”

“Oh, man,” Michael said, leaning forward and burying his face in his hands. “Oh man oh man oh man.”

“What hallucinations?” the girl said. “Tell me.”

Haltingly, Michael told her.

“Wow,” the girl said. “That’s loopy stuff. Where did they come from?”

Michael could only glare at her.

The girl took a deep breath. “What you experienced, the things you heard over the week, those were not what I mean to communicate. Honest. I think – and I don’t mean any offense – that perhaps your brain isn’t equipped enough to understand what I want to say to you. Right now, I’m not even sure if you’re hearing what I’m actually saying. If you know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” Michael said.

“See?” the girl said. Michael glared. She cleared her throat, suddenly embarrassed.

After a moment, the girl said, “When the human mind is faced with information it can’t understand, it’ll still try to make sense of it. The old man blowing himself up, watching yourself turn into paper, these are things that perhaps you’ve seen before, maybe in a show or a movie or a painting. Your brain just pulled it out from your massive collection of memories in the process of making sense of what I’m trying to say.”

“And what are you trying to say?”

The girl said, “That it is true that everything becomes meaningless after you die.”

The girl could have just as easily struck him with a metal chair on his head. Michael reared back. “What?” he said, softly.

“The physics becomes scrambled. The rules change. So everything becomes meaningless from your particular viewpoint. Do you understand?” The girl moved the glass of milk aside and sat on the coffee table. Their knees touched. “But that doesn’t mean that your life, this life, has no meaning. After you die, this life becomes meaningless, yes, because your mind will begin to operate in a dimension with different rules. But right now, Michael, your life has meaning. This life. In this life, a free falling object has a downward acceleration of nine point eight meters per second squared. Isn’t that meaningful? Light travels at around three hundred thousand miles per second. Isn’t that meaningful? And you love to jog around the campus very early in the morning, when the sunlight is pale and the grass smells as good as the flowers. Isn’t that meaningful?” The girl smiled faintly. “Do you understand, Michael?”

“Why are you telling me this?” Michael said. He was sobbing now, the tears dripping from his chin, his hands balled into fists on his knees.

“Because we have to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I think you know, Michael.”

The girl stood up, walked to the door. Michael watched her leave. In his head he slowly counted to one hundred, his tears still falling. I don’t know what you’re talking about, eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, I don’t have to go anywhere, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three. When Michael reached one hundred, he washed his face, changed his clothes, grabbed his wallet and keys, and left the apartment.

A short jeepney ride later, in the fading light of the late afternoon, he found himself walking toward Joshua’s old rented house. The elementary school was still there, still unfinished, ready to turn into a white elephant; the basketball court was still empty, unlit. The road had been paved.

There was still light enough to see every single detail, there was no deranged man with a gun on the road, but everything still felt the same. Michael began to cry once again. A small, warm hand reached up and touched his right hand.

“Why?” Michael asked her as they walked.

“Because,” the girl said.

“I don’t want to be here.”

They had stopped walking. Michael and the girl, still holding hands, stood staring at the ground where Joshua had fallen.

“You’ve always wanted a daughter, right.”

Michael jerked, startled. He glanced to his right.

“Joshua?”

Joshua was wearing the same clothes he had worn that night they met up. He smelled like the bar – booze and cigarettes and laughter; he smelled like a quiet evening. Michael tightened his hold on his hand.

“If you want to have that girl, you have to walk closer to her,” Joshua said. “Do you understand me? You can’t stay locked up for the rest of your life.”

“I’m,” Michael said, sobbing. The sky continued to darken as night fell. “I’m so so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Don’t fucking tell me it was destined to happen.”

Joshua smirked. “I didn’t say that, Kuya.”

“Then why? I want to understand.”

Joshua looked amused. “Do you want your head to explode?”

They fell silent.

“Do you know,” Joshua said, “that scientists can map the timeline of the universe all the way back to ten raised to negative forty-three seconds after the Big Bang? But they still don’t know what came before ten raised to negative forty-three, or even before the Big Bang itself. Calculations crash when they try to compute. You know why? Because time isn’t yet. You can’t begin a timeline in timelessness.”

“I should have guessed,” Micahel suddenly said. “That little girl spewed Physics every time she opened her mouth.”

Joshua laughed. It was the first time Michael heard the sound in six months, and he savored it.

“Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know if what you hear is actually what I’m trying to say, but I”m trying my best,” Joshua said, smiling. “It’s like – well, it’s like Physics, to you. It’s really hard to translate.”

They shared a brief laugh.

“The afterlife,” Joshua continued, and Michael fell silent, “comes after a life’s timeline, but it’s similar to that incalculable condition before the scientists’ existing timeline of the Universe. Maybe you can say when you die, you go back to how it was before the Big Bang.”

“The beginning?”

Joshua smiled. “I don’t think we can talk of beginnings in a places with no time.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Joshua turned to look at his face.

“So stay in the life where you still know the rules,” he said.

Michael looked at his younger brother. He nodded.

A minute later, Michael walked back to the main road, alone. The basketball court had been lit, the glare illuminating the faces of the boys who had gathered to play a three-on-three. Michael watched them as he walked, smiling as one boy fumbled and lost the ball to the other team. Their friends sitting on the bleachers whooped as the ball sank in the basket, the sound carrying through the cool air. Joshua sucked at playing basketball. That’s what always infuriated him, he once told Michael – that he could get the physics of the game down pat, but couldn’t beat his brother in even a single quarter.

“The physics of the game,” Michael whispered under his breath, and grinned at the memory. “You dorky bastard.”

—

Eliza Victoria lives in the Philippines. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications based in her country and elsewhere, most recently in The Pedestal Magazine and Philippine Speculative Fiction V. Visit her at http://sungazer.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter (@HiElizaHere).