by Isabel Garcia-Gonzales

1.

I know the path well by now. For eight months we have been meeting on this day, at this hour, in this place. It is typhoon season and the path has been washed away, but I do not need it anymore. I know the maze of the coconut grove, the angle of the mountain behind the treeline, the curve of the stones beneath my feet. I can pluck the sound of Artemio’s calling from the rest of the tree and bird and rain sounds like a pebble from unwashed rice. I know how to whistle back in response.

But today Artemio does not call. Today I hear something wrong behind the tree and bird and rain sounds, something gone sour, a rotten sound.

I arrive at our meeting place, “The Tres Marias,” we call it, three trees slanting inward, treetops like foreheads touching at the center, palm leaves overlapping in embrace. I find Artemio, eyes skyward, unblinking in the rain. Artemio, body sprawled on the ground, and still. Artemio, guts spilling from skin.

I thought I heard something this morning as I slipped between walls of tree and rain, something rumbling and distant, like a train, but it must have been Artemio dying. Death has a sound. It can be so loud sometimes. I can still hear the echoes of his death reverberating against the mountains.

I look upon Artemio’s young body, and I wonder if Artemio is even his name. We do not go about revealing such things these days. I look upon Artemio’s young body and I know that my fate is just a few steps behind his.

I turn around, dropping the satchel of medicine and bandages and ointments as I walk away. I can pretend that I am here to gather food. I can pretend that I am lost. I must keep placing one foot in front of the other, keep drawing in and pushing out breath. I can pretend that I am looking for firewood. That I am here by chance. But there is something on my arms. I am being dragged backwards, fists and feet striking only air. I can feel my rage pushing against the limits of my bones and skin, trying to lengthen and expand, grow larger than my body allows. I will myself to fly, to disappear, to kill, to get free. But I am on the ground, my face pressed into the soil that is still warm from Artemio’s blood. I can taste Artemio’s death in my mouth, metallic and sharp, like eating shrapnel. I swallow death and fear and words. Better if I could forget all the things they want to know, but I can only swallow them all down. I will be like Artemio in moments, but I must keep silent. No matter what they promise, I will not speak.

2.

They do not mean to kill me swiftly like they killed Artemio, riddle my body with bullets that pierce through skin to muscle to bone to organs. I realize this when I am thrown into the back of the jeep, headed for the abandoned hospital. They are going to the trouble of lengthening my last moments.

I vow I will not speak. I will never speak. But as we near the hospital, I am overcome with the urge to say something. To hear my own voice one last time on this earth. To know that I am still alive, for now. I want my last words to mean something, to be important, to have weight.

I want to shout across the sea to Mami and Papi, to Mariluz and Maricar. I want my voice to find them, to skip across the islands that separate us, and I want to say Are you safe? And I am sorry I won’t be back and I am thinking of you always.

But I cannot say these words out loud. I watch the world pass by, the same as it has ever been. It does not alter itself just for one’s dying. It continues on like any other day. I begin naming everything we pass, muttering the words like a madwoman: road. tree. house. child.

I want to call out to strangers along the road, women who sweep dirt from their doorways, men who burn garbage in fields. I want to yell, These men are going to kill me and I am afraid and My name is Maria Pilar Manlapaz and I am twenty-one years old and Will you remember me, the young woman with mud and blood on her face who rushes toward her death in a jeep? Will you remember me always?

But I continue with my litany of objects: windshield. carabao. ricefield. rain.

I want to turn to these soldiers who smell like leaves and sweat and war. I want to turn to them and say But how can you do this? and How can you sleep at night? and I am afraid, but whatever you do to me, I will not tell you what you want to know.

We pull up to the abandoned hospital. goat. flower. rubble. glass. Before they shove me through the doorway of the brokendown building, I look up past the rain and the eaves and the storm clouds. I mutter my last word, my very last word on this earth: sky.

3.

I am already dead before I hit the ground. Before they heave my bloated body out the window like refuse. Before my limbs twist under me at strange angles, bending where there are not joints. I do not hear glass scattering or bones crunching or typhoon rain beating down on skin. I do not feel warm mud opening and swallowing, receiving my body from its imposed flight. I do not see the outline of soldiers leaning over the window ledge, the one with the face of a boy, vomiting.

Later, when there is no more light spilling from the broken second-story window, when the jeep has pulled away, tires sliding and sputtering out mud, Manong Pedrit will gather my body with so much care, as if it still matters. He will wrap my body in coarse army-issued blankets, mumbling The Lord is my shepherd. He will repeat this line because in that moment, he will not remember the rest of the passage. In that moment, the act of speaking will help him hold fast to a slippery thread of sanity. The Lord is my shepherd, he will say as he brushes his hand over my eyelids, closing them. The Lord is my shepherd. He will smooth my hair over bloody, bald patches of scalp. The Lord is my shepherd. He will bend my arms at the elbows and lay my hands over my chest, careful not to look at my bare breasts as he does this. The Lord is my shepherd. He will swaddle me in coarse army-issued blankets and he will rock me as he rocked his eldest daughter many years before.

4.

I will linger for lifetimes in the shadows of other people’s memories—Manong Pedrit; the soldier with the face of a boy; Mariluz. I will echo uninvited in slim spaces of silence as they go about their lives, making tea, pulling socks over feet and calves, plucking mangoes from a tree. Sometimes they will see my face glinting on the surface of sweating windows, my body turning corners split-seconds before they can turn their heads. And sometimes they will see me burned onto the insides of their eyelids, flashing before them with each blink. And they will not be able to sleep for days.

Mariluz will always blame herself for my death. She will name her second daughter Pilar, after me, in hopes that the child will grow to be strong and unwavering, even in the face of fear. But the truth is, I am not braver than Mariluz. I only know more. I know what my silence will mean. I have gone up into the mountain to see with my own eyes the faces of the guerilla soldiers, their families, and the people who keep them all hidden. I have seen their wounds and their fears and their illnesses, and I have seen too their courage and determination and love. And I know that their lives depend more on my silence than on any medicines or messages I can smuggle.

Mariluz will try to kill herself to escape the horrors of the war, rebirthing herself with a new name, Renata. But she will never escape. None of us will. She will pace the hallways of her memories, groping walls and turning on lights, opening and shutting doors, inspecting every inch and wondering if there could have been another way out for her, a hidden door she hadn’t seen before. And when she finds herself trapped in that madhouse of her memory again, she will sing to call herself out of it. She will sing loudly, the sound of her voice growing large, large enough to push out the memories.

The soldier with the face of a boy will grow old from the war. He too will try to push the memories from his mind, but they will always resurface, unexpected submarines breaking through the thin membrane of forgetting. He will try to push the memories from his mind because he will not be able to stand the sight of his own hands. His hands that have performed the widest spectrum of acts. The soldier with the face of a boy will remember me as the first, but his memory of me will not be me exactly. I will become a composite of all those who come after me, our faces and our voices, our lives and our deaths running together in his mind. Instead of a nurse at an abandoned hospital, I will become a rice farmer in her nipa hut. The angle of my cheekbone will become someone else’s, sharper. The insides of my thighs will become thicker but less muscular, and he will remember someone else’s knee thrust into his groin. Where I held silent, he will remember a plea for my life, for my children’s lives. The way I stare at him as he shoves the hose into my mouth will become even more haunting, a merging of all the anger and terror of countless others. The one thing he will remember accurately and in detail is the way in which the texture of my hair reminds him of his sister’s as he yanks and knots my hair to the rod. As my body swings, suspended by my hair, he will marvel at how fine my hair is, like his sister’s, yet it can support so much weight. In that room, he concerns himself with the small things, thought of in sterile, scientific terms: how much water a body can hold before bursting, how much weight hair can carry.

Manong Pedrit will only live a few more years after the war ends. In many ways, he will already be dead before he takes his last breath. He will die in pieces. The first dies when his thirteen-year-old daughter steps on a mine while pulling gabi from the fields behind his house. Another piece dies when his wife refuses to say goodbye when he and the rest of the hospital staff, newly-inducted into the US Armed Forces, leave for Mindanao to set up the American field hospital: That is not your duty, Pedrit! We are your duty! And another when the endless streams of dead and wounded keep coming in through the Quonset doors, bodies upon bodies in need of care. And another when the Americans surrender to the Japanese and he is transferred from concentration camp to concentration camp, men’s bodies pressed together in tight spaces, the smell of urine and sickness always lingering. The last piece dies when the gates to the camp are finally left open, unguarded, and he finds his way back to this town, discovering only ashes where his life used to be. And so when Manong Pedrit places the rope around his neck and kicks down the stool, he will already be dead. And when the church people cluck their tongues at the eternally damned fate of a man who has taken his own life, they will not know that Manong Pedrit has not killed himself. He has died in pieces. He has died in the war.

5.

The last thing I hear is water. The world seems saturated with water, heavy. And then I am out the window and flying. Sky. My rage is breaking through the limits of my bones and skin. I am already dead before I hit the ground, but I have grown larger than my body, larger even than death.