Insurrecto

“Do you think there are parallel universes and we are stuck in the one made up only of the bad movie plots?”

“I wonder if we are stuck in the bad movie plots we make ourselves,” says Magsalin.

For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives

Everyone used to wave at the buses when they passed, as if each passenger vehicle were some thrilling distraction from a vast boredom, so that Magsalin always felt she was leaving something behind, her significance, as she moved away from the waving children toward her destination.

The alter-native.

Magsalin regrets the pun but has no willpower: she does not resist it.

The alter-native.

In America, she kept confronting these doubles, cultural puns—repetitions of details from her homeland that have reverse or disjoint significance in this simultaneous place, as if the parallel universes of Elvises and Neil Diamonds in both the Philippines and America were a dark matter of the cosmos that eludes theorists of the world’s design.

“Sweet Caroline” was the Boston Red Sox song, not Tio Exequiel’s signature karaoke anthem.

It was a shock when she arrived in America, and she recognized that the culture she had thought was hers to sneer at was, all along, not really.

Magsalin had never liked the songs, though it surprises her now how all the tunes she thought were absolutely Filipino, like “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—an annoying kundiman if she ever heard one—turn out to be Elvis.

“Diesel fumes hide in the body’s cavities, you know,” says Magsalin, “in elbows and in the folds of your neck. Those longsleeved cotton camisas buttoned up to the clavicle are not just affectation. Nor is the dreary umber or brown every workingwoman likes to wear, have you noticed, despite the heat: warm colors hide the grime. That is what I discovered when I came here for the university. Everything has a purpose in Manila.”