Elvis didn't feel good. His back, neck, hurt as a result of the fight and his chin stung when he wet it with beer. Tanya and Rey had vanished. At another table Maricar was bouncing up on a new knee. By reflex, he touched his shirt pocket. The ballpoint was still there. And the folded sheet of paper on which he had started to write. Old shit, he thought. Oh, the blond girl was gone. But Doris wouldn't act on impulse, fly to Manila a day early and risk not meeting him. That was irresponsible. She looked very much like her. So that was settled, he thought. The girl was not Doris. But a moment later she was back in his mind. The girl walking with a storky grace away from Raymond's. He tried to freeze the image of her when for a second she came uncluttered in the midst of the crowd. Thinking his memory was a camera, he imagined to zoom in to clarify her identity. "Oh, damn god!" he hissed, irritated by indecision. Someone bumped into him and he realized that he was standing. Pushing. Searching. Nowhere to sit. But one night more in paradise. Isn't ittttt? Out of gas. Someone moved - leaving?! Elbow in rib. Looking. Smoke rings. He pushed to the counter. A scream. Choking on giggles. At the extreme end of the wet, wriggling bar a person brooding, accussing, wanting. Suddenly, vendors walked in out of del Pilar with their roasted Spanish peanuts, rubber tong sandals, aviator sun-glasses (for moonlight flying?), unRolexes, raw mangos with shrimp sauce. A cascade of treasures. Then - an empty stool - Elvis grabbed it. The counter top seemed to lurch away from him, and behind the people the yellowish wall began to slide, so he tried to concentrate below and the people seemed faraway, distant like birds or lunatics in their own world, which frightened him, and he turned his eyes to the counter top to his hands and he sensed them like numb things, somehow grotesque and cloud-like, dirty and pregnant with smelly rain. Yet, past the flickers of fear and neausea, he saw it all with an endearing clarity, and heard the vendors' shrill voices, the disco noise, the meaningless, endless conversations, and didn't bother to think what it could all mean. "I go with you." He waved her away. Then a pack of Marlboro, a face grinning - "Don't smoke. Remember, remem-." Elvis rested his head on his knuckles. Felt the counter top supporting his flesh, the smell of his bones. He was breathing evenly, drifting through clouds of images, the blond girl appeared again, and other nights, and things, and he sighed at the feeling of like a great something that had passed and became forever gone, unsensible, like an odor from childhood, suffocatingly alive, once, receding into a horrible sterility. Then an image of Melanie brightened up the cloud he was in. The garden of weeds in his dumpyard had a sweetness that he simply accepted, thankful for the peace he felt, for the cool air that by some grace wafted in from del Pilar to touch his cheeks while the cloud he was in shook softly with the passing of a jeepney, passing by, going nowhere going somewhere into the echoing chambers of a word, or a phrase, rumbling into a sentence that shone like a vein of silver through a great fool map of a world, no, a moment, that he loved more than ... than ... more than ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

 

A change in the quality of light, fresh, disturbingly quiet, woke him to the morning. A few customers left from the night remained. And some new faces. One of the counter girls was asleep on top of the ice box; the other was setting empty beer bottles into crates for the day's pickup. Overhead, the fans whirred as usual. The peach-fuzzy dust roiling in the funny, cool air. A jeepney crackled by on del Pilar. It was about 6am. He'd slept maybe 2, 3 hours. The walls seemed motionless. But he was still drunk. Tired. His mouth tasted sour aluminum. Rubbing his eyes, he saw night again, and nebulous stars. Then the luminous breath of morning. He yawned and noted a black ant - big, harmless sort - speeding on the counter top. It paused to drink in dots of moisture, rubbing front legs along its excited antennae, and speeding on again, lifting its head, sensing without hesitation toward something. It sniffed at a glass? Backed away, stayed motionless but for its antennae where its life seemed to concentrate. Elvis felt the urge to erase it on his thumb. It sped across the counter to the edge near his chest, sure-footed down the perpendicular, it disappeared. He could have killed it, reducing its life to a stain on his thumb. Whimsically, he shadowed its progress with his thumb right over the funny antennae, ready to plunge down. The foolish ant, did it know the thumb of death was there so near? Did it want release from its boring, obsessive patterns? At one point it seemed to stumble over a crack in the grain of the wood. Was it afraid? But before plunging over the counter, it paused on the edge and seemed to be looking about (but weren't ants blind?), antennae tasting the air, and stared right up into his face and its tiny jaws opened and closed as in a greeting or a yawn or an expletive. This was the perfect moment of execution, face to face, life to life, however infinitely separated from each other, yet there was the common bond of thirst, the moment of ripeness when out of the blue the finger of fate must apply the final tickle and either you laugh in recognition of the love, glory, and absurdity of it all, or you rant, rave, and curse at fate, either way you die, with a grotesque face or with a smile. Elvis felt, suddenly, an anger at his hesitation and his thumb plunged - stopped - and instead, smiling with the final truth of his affection, he felt only like petting the innocent life. "Hey, little buddy... have a good morning. See yah later." Rubbing his face, he got up from the stool. Unsteady, tasting bile in his mouth, he turned himself towards the sidewalk. He let go of the counter. At a table was the preacher, head bent over his chest, snoring, bible akimbo amidst the greasy plates, brown bottles, rum glasses. Morning shine warmed over his back. Down the chair, his naked arms dangled, hair particularly gold in the light. He looked as if he had been slaughtered, a martyr in an old spectacle of ageless story. Elvis didn't judge him this morning, this colleague of del Pilar, veterans of the logical wars of the heart, of the heart in the brain, of the cock in the soul. Del Pilar was almost deserted. Up the sidewalk, a woman and her children, using cardboard sides for blankets, were fast asleep. On the corner a half-naked man stood brushing his teeth, washing out of a water-filled flour can, towel draped over his heavy hip bones. His coughing echoed darkly down the street. But, already, there was a feel of larger movement. Already, Elvis felt the great sun's insistent rays sticking over his body, reflecting off his Hawaiian shirt, tickling at his nipples from so far away overhead. It was then he sensed something amiss and saw that he was missing one shoe. "Son-of-a-bitch ..!" He shook his head in disgust and plopped down on the curb in front of Raymond's. There was nothing to do. Feeling an itching, he scratched down for his ankle, and, going farther, leisurely examined the sole of his foot, nearly black with jeepney oil. Resigned to the loss of his shoe, and his back aching, he closed his eyes for a long and musical moment, breathing evenly, inhaling in the darkness that throbbed with the sun's gold, savoring the feel of where his body stopped where the air began. He was peso-less, drunk, smelly with sweat and foot, but alive as that roaring star overhead was not. Wildly, laughably destructible. He opened his eyes. Saw the dumpyard. Soon it would be too hot to sleep. By reflex, before standing, he checked his shirt pocket for his ballpoint, and took out the page of paper he always carried. What had he written in it? He smiled at his old hopes. Scribbles wandered on the page. He could read a few words, try to guess at fragments. But in the middle of the page in a relatively clear hand he read "Once upon a time ..." That was all. Dot dot dot. Everything, of course, was in the dots. How spare they were. Dot. How precise. The dots of a great writer! He blushed in embarrassment. He lightened the grip of his fingers and let the page dangle into the pull of gravity. His hands dropped between his knees. He looked very tired. On del Pilar passed the oil-smoking buses, tinsel-spangled jeepneys, chauffered cars, the leg-powered tricycles. People were going to jobs or homes or to lovers or out to early markets in Divisoria for vegetables fresh from the countryside. Symbols seemd to flood the air. And it was only air, he knew, but he felt as he watched the traffic go a significance in the passing that applied to him alone. One moment - one De Soto automobile crammed wih sugar cane, a truck groaning with wet sand, a jeepney filled with curious people, and faces he seemed to know, a cripple struggling on a bycycle, a taxi whose driver had a killer's face. Then they were gone. Like the stories he would never write. He bade them a great farewell: regret of melodramatic sharpness seemed to cut through the cartilage of his heart. He sobbed, a little. There went glory, went dreams. In a way he felt relieved. What he ever really wanted was to be free. Free of the need to love. No more - desire for long life. Worth is lost, when the past will be like a glance into smoke. He took a stand: he would refuse to want anything more than what he had at the moment; and writing, ambition, desire to set the world afire, those things were for cowards. He would stand on the ground of shit and weeds before the wall of death without a blindfold and glance at the coming bullet as he glances at the garden. He would not demean himself with empty words or hopes. He was Elvis, no-one else, nothing else; he would live exactly precisely unconditionally as he deemed! All else was a sales campaign for anesthesia. Even for the anesthesia of disappointment. His chest went out with defiance. The sound of his words seemed to steady him, like spiritual hairs of the dog. A fart resonated. Elvis glanced behind him into Raymond's. There was the preacher shifting his butt in the chair. "Good mornin', god man," Elvis said. The preacher sunk his pimply head into his arms, and coughed. Del Pilar darkened, a cloud crossing the sun. Suddenly, Elvis remembered the letter from the girl in San Francisco. When was it she was coming? Today? Panicked, he searched his pockets, rushed into Raymond's, checked along the counter and on the floor by the stool where he had sat and in the toilet. Had the counter girls seen a letter? Really important! No. Nothing. He searched in the gutter and the glistening tar of del Pilar and found only flies buzzing at a chicken bone - nausea overwhelmed him, bending him slightly over. "Hoi, do not throw up here!" He let out the vomitus, and when there was nothing left he remained for a few moments hunched over, his hands pressed against his knees, staring at the sour pool on the asphalt. Thus occupied, his mind seemed to clear, to shine, and he inhaled again the hazy sun, cloud's shadows rolling back from him. In Raymond's the countergirls made faces, calling him a pig in their own language. He stepped away from the swamp that had been inside of him. Wiped his lips, tasted a residue of acid, and felt dizzy. I must sleep, he thought, before it gets too hot.