Patron Saints of Nothing: Chapters 11–16

Bags and balikbayan boxes start sliding down the ramp, but I hang back as everyone else jockeys for better position.

Then I push through a surprisingly lax customs line and past the crowd of families waiting outside of arrivals.

She’s deep in that awkward preteen phase complete with pimples, braces, and gangly limbs.

We creep forward, stymied by the bumper-to-bumper Friday morning traffic surrounding the airport.

It’s like people are using their horns for echolocation, so there’s an unending cacophony of beeping over the rumble of engines.

It’s like people are using their horns for echolocation, so there’s an unending cacophony of beeping over the rumble of engines.

On the other side of the thin wall that lines the highway, I catch glimpses of small homes with unpainted cinder-block walls and corrugated metal roofs.

Tomas pulls startlingly close to the rear ends of garishly painted jeepneys stuffed over capacity with passengers, swerves into oncoming traffic, and then cuts back into the right lane just in time, making motorcycles and tricycles dodge to avoid us.

I take a few American dollars out my wallet and Grace discreetly presses a few Philippine pesos into my hand.

Some of the houses have fresh paint and look immaculately maintained, while others look run-down or half-completed.

Yeah, it has the same security features as the other homes and then some, but it's all tall windows and modern angles, accent stones and terra-cotta roof tiles, strategically placed mini-palm trees and walkway lights.

The crucifix above the entrance, the four seasons panels made of shells, the leather sofas arranged around an oriental rug, the tapestry of the Madonna and Child in a Renaissance style, the beige floor tiles—they’re all the same as they were when I was here as a kid.

Minus the Santo Niños, the paintings of St. Mary, and the other Catholic paraphernalia scattered throughout the place, a lot of it looks like something out of a Williams-Sonoma catalog, which feels out of place in the tropics.

There are no decorations. No pictures or artwork of any kind on the walls. Not even any of the Catholic trappings.

As for me, I recently visited the squatters in Legazpi with Tito Danilo (or Father Danilo? I am never sure what to call him ever since he was ordained).

As for me, I recently visited the squatters in Legazpi with Tito Danilo (or Father Danilo? I am never sure what to call him ever since he was ordained).

A single silver star sits in the center of each epaulette on his shoulders.

Since we’re doing a round of updates, this is a perfect opportunity to bring up Jun—but I can’t bring myself to broach the topic.

At the same time, something about the tone of his voice—a voice accustomed to giving orders and having them immediately carried out—compels me to wait for his permission to leave.

They were surprisingly deep for a ten-year-old, not the usual superficial stuff like favorite color, food, TV show, basketball player, etc.

At the end of the room, there’s an expansive desk, its back to a large window.

I sift through the office supplies to make sure there’s nothing hidden at the bottom or the back of each, but the most incriminating thing I find is half a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

I imagine Tito Maning’s spidey sense tingling, as if my presence in his study moments ago left some temporal residue lingering in the air.

A stray dog with mangy fur trots across the street, inches from our bumper.

We lapse back into tense silence.

We wave good-bye to Tomas, and then the car disappears into the maw of traffic.

At one end there’s a pond and a stone obelisk.

“Ah, the poetry of capitalism,” I joke.

We pass through security, cross the atrium, and step onto the escalator.

Some have long, threadlike tentacles several times longer than their bell-shaped bodies, while others just have little nubbins that constantly undulate. We watch them move through the water, mesmerized by their slow-motion drifting.

We wander over to the next tank which contains bulbous, sack-like jellies in water glowing purple.

I fall quiet trying to reconcile the violent vision of that relatively recent event with the mundane middle-class fantasy of this mall, with the international stereotype of Filipinos as friendly and subservient.

I fall quiet trying to reconcile the violent vision of that relatively recent event with the mundane middle-class fantasy of this mall, with the international stereotype of Filipinos as friendly and subservient.

I fall quiet trying to reconcile the violent vision of that relatively recent event with the mundane middle-class fantasy of this mall, with the international stereotype of Filipinos as friendly and subservient.

“Sure,” I answer, unsurprised by everything this mall contains, as if it’s a microcosm for all the contradictions in this country.