Alone
a super-short story

for Marne Kilates

HAVING finally gotten to this page, . . . we begin to tell your story.
    Manila, 1996. One particular Reader (you)—this one belonging to the lower middle-class—enters the bookstore and finds upon his entrance two special tables for the bookstore’s hype on Penguin books, Vintage books, Granta books, and other such books from the U.K. and the USA. And the fictionists and poets and dramatists included there are of various citizenships—a couple of them Filipino-Americans who’ve earned some renown in New York and Los Angeles, respectively (later in Los Angeles and New York, respectively)—all of these writers anyway celebrated in the US or the U.K., or in Newsweek or Time, or by the Nobel Prize Com­mittee or some such influentials. Most of them are also celebrities in their respective countries. Well, except those in that group of emigres in London who haven’t yet won Booker Prize awards—whose books, which we see lying glossily here, in glossy paper­back, are not so talked about yet in their homelands. Them, along with the two Filipino-Americans whose books have only been whispered about in the Philippine intelligentsia. Literary intelligentsia, that is, as there are many intelligentsias in the Philippine islands. To be more specific, the Filipino intelligentsia interested in Filipino fictionists’ or poets’ or dramatists’ works (in English or Filipino). . . .
    The Reader goes to the tables, as a matter of course. Of course. Isn’t he a young “erudite, literate, and literary” ad agency copywriter, working among other copywriters who are into other reading materials, e.g. comic books (just as respectable to him) or “bestsellers” (popular spy books or adventure/suspense books he too sociably reads)? As we were saying—you, he, picks up a couple of books, one a novel chronicling the story of the black people in America in the 1920s, the other a book of poems singing about and meditating on the lower-class experience in Cairo in the era of Sadat. Wow. Wait. He considers taking another one (also a novel) on the misadventures of a deviant woman enamored with nothing but her own cookery. But he has only enough savings for another one book from another literary category or shelf. So he moves to the next, yes, shelf of popular pocketbooks telling stories of, uh, hold your breath, gripping suspense, as it were, clever espionage between existing powers, chilling catastrophes, big-time crime, or moving romance. Wow! Pass, today. On to the adjoining shelf of non-fiction books on coping with life in present America.
    Presently, though, the Reader bumps into an odd-shaped shelf. Really a long and tall rack, it is. Containing magazines from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Hong Kong, at the left side of it the magazines from the Philippines. Business magazines, fashion magazines, women’s magazines, parenting magazines, maga­zines on the real-estate business, on practical psychology, on male grooming, on food and restaurants, on music for the young, on executives and managers, on stocks and investing, on motoring and cars, on high culture, and many other special subjects.
    The Reader retreats. The Reader runs through a row of numer­ous shelves: the dictionaries and thesauri shelf, the European and American Classics shelf, another tall modern Penguins and Vintages and Grantas etc. shelf, a coffeetable books shelf, a Law textbooks shelf, a textbooks-of-Medicine shelf, a textbooks of Engineering shelf, and so on and so forth, and so on and so forth.
    Oops. The Reader almost falls over a pile of colorful photo albums. And on the pile of notebooks with local movie stars or Walt Disney or Japanese cartoon heroes on their cover designs. And, likewise, on a pile of bargains, those books that couldn’t be sold. That he finally and truly falls, an embarrassing, and actually finally embarrassed, sight. For he has fallen! He fell! Hahaha.
    Now, as if that was not enough, the Reader is here suddenly surprised by something. Awed, in fact. He hastens to be up. Mouth open! “Holy Mary!”—he gasps. “Holy Mary.” There it is. There! In front of this flea area of piles of consumables, piles of what might otherwise be precious items in a different situation, . . . the lonely shelf that contained what they call in the bookstore Filipiniana. “Wow!”—he says. “Wow.” Actually containing stuff, it did, . . . books here, actually, by Filipino authors who’ve written stories about “the Filipino experience.” Also about, uhh, hold your breath: “the Ilocano experience,” “the Filipino lower-class academic’s experience,” “the Bulakeno experience,” “the Filipino Moslem experience,” “the Chinese-Filipino experience,” “the sexual experiences of a young Filipino woman in Japan,” “the boring non-experience, devoid of any political import, of a pro­vincial boy in a small non-town,” and so on and so forth, and so on and so forth. . . . Now. Look. Most of these books aren’t Law books, or books on Russians in the Philippines, or about Filipinos on the moon. No. Some are history books. Some are thoughts-on-our-society books (what they call in schools sociology stuff). But a lot of them are fiction; a lot of them also poetry, some drama, a couple of them screenplays. Though most have poor designs, some are really pretty attractive. There are those in English, those in Tagalog or Filipino, those in Cebuano, Ilocano even. I don’t know if there’s one here in Arabic or Chavacano or Kapampangan. I’ll look. I’ll look.
    Anyway. Here you are. Here. You’ve finally gotten to this page, you lout. That alone. How. That alone makes a story. A long, long story of national significance which none of us, none of us, wants to tell. . . .
    So I won’t. I can only be interested in your story, my lout. Your singular story. Wow. Which we can now begin to tell—up to that point when . . . when somebody or everybody silences every­thing, something; some thing.
    Actually, it’s this thing. Story medium.  [V]