It’s summer in the global south (which is winter in the global north), and for the month of January Literatur.Review is bringing them all together, publishing previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the north and south of our world.

Daryll Delgados was born and raised in Tacloban City, Philippines. Her first book, After the Body Displaces Water (USTPH, 2012), from which this story is taken, won the thirty-second Manila Critics Circle/Philippines National Book Award for Best Short Story Book in English and was a finalist for the 2013 Madrigal-Gonzales First Book Award. She has been awarded writing residencies in Australia, Spain and the Philippines and holds degrees in journalism and comparative literature. Her novel Remains (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2019) is Daryll's second book and will be published in German translation in spring 2025.

Turn on the TV!

My brother commanded loudly, as he burst into the living room. The door banged so hard, so violently, from behind him that I thought it would detach from its hinges altogether.  The glass jalousies rattled against the aluminum window frames, dust flew off in all directions and undulated in the windless air.

My boyfriend and I jumped from the sofa in surprise, not expecting my brother to be back so early in the day.  It must have been only three, the afternoon outside was a bright and blazing white in heat.

Oh my God! Oh my God! Putangina! We’re busted! They got caught!  He rattled on, his hands shaking as he pointed the remote control at the TV and punched in the local news channel.  Beads of sweat lined his forehead and slid down the sides of his pallid face.  His hair was disheveled.  His white office shirt bore dark, soot marks at the back, and a rip in one sleeve.

Who?! What’s going on ba?!  We asked, absolutely clueless about what was happening. Sit down please, and relax, I begged my brother, and motioned for my boyfriend to get some drinking water.

Tanginaaa!  My brother shouted again at the TV.   Then he took one step and punched the wall above the TV set so hard, blood trickled from his knuckles, and bits of bloody skin got stuck on the concrete wall.  

Hoy!  I yelled, running to my brother to try to stop him from hurting himself and the wall again.  He stepped back a bit and then threw the remote control against the TV screen instead, the black device crashing to the floor in pieces.

My boyfriend and I turned to look at what, or who, was on screen.  And, oh my God. We couldn’t believe who we were seeing.  All I could do was shake my head.  What? Why? What is this? It didn’t make sense.  It made no sense that they were there, and we were here, watching them.  What is this? What the hell is this?

Pu. Tang. Ina.  My boyfriend echoed my brother’s fear in a low whisper, and his expression mirrored exactly my brother’s shock.

Before I could do anything, before I could even begin to understand what was taking place, what I was seeing, my brother kicked the TV right in the screen, and sent it crashing very loudly against the wall.  His rage that afternoon reverberated in the small living room.

Outside, everything remained still.  The black leafless tree by the window stood out starkly against the bright white of the summer afternoon sky.

It was the summer of 2002 and my boyfriend and I had found ourselves back in Quezon City again, after being home in the province for a few years right after graduation.  

We rented one of three rooms in the apartment my brother was sharing with two other guys from work.  Don and Gerry, those were their names, and they were both from the Visayas, too.  Don was young, overweight, smooth-skinned, and pale. Gerry was old, muscular, hairy, and dark.  You get the picture.  The contrast was pretty stark.  

I never understood what their job really was.  The three of them would leave at two in the afternoon and be at work until midnight, or even until two a.m., the following day. Sometimes a van with heavily tinted windows would come to pick them up, but most times they just took a cab. My brother told me that the van was mostly used for delivery and pick up of products. I never bothered to ask what kinds of products it delivered or picked up.

Their office was in faraway Fairview, the edge of Quezon City.  The work involved programming computers, monitoring machines, producing discs, and entertaining their Chinese-speaking Malaysian foreigner bosses.  The job paid well, though, they said.  And it clearly did.  My brother was always loaning me money, which I never returned to him.  My boyfriend and I were then living off our scholarship allowance from the University.  We never really had to shell out any for the rent.  My brother always ended up covering our share.

We ate out a lot in Tomas Morato Street, which was literally a stone’s throw away from the apartment, or wherever we wanted, whenever we were not in the mood to cook.  Even when there was time to cook, which my brother used to love to do, we would eat out instead.  It was as if he couldn’t wait to spend all the money he had, every time he got it.  So, he had no savings.  He had no big adult purchases like a car, for instance, or even furniture for the apartment.  He did have a lot of expensive shoes and clothes that he neither had the time nor the occasion to wear.

It was Don who had savings.  His only purchases were books.  Computer books.  And he was always trying to show off his stock and newfound computer knowledge to us.  I think he was desperate for us to acknowledge that he was some kind of computer genius.  Which he probably was.  Or wasn’t.  I never figured it out.  Or, he wanted to make it clear that, at the very least, among the three of them, he was the only one with real computer cred, even if they all did the same thing at work.     

When my computer hung, for instance, Don was always quick to tinker with it, all the while explaining to me the operation intricacies of these machines, what it really means when an operation hangs, how the conventional notions of hanging – e.g., hanging things out to dry, hanging oneself to die, etc. -- are actually very applicable in computing.  Weird stuff like that.    

There would be this glint, this tiny wavering light, in Don’s eyes every time he talked about computers.  It was a bizarre and unforgettable kind of glimmer, one that made me uncomfortable, and that made him look vulnerable, and then also uncomfortable.

Don was very tall, and this was another thing that he was clearly uncomfortable with.  He stood at about six feet in height, but he was all flab.  He did not look the least bit athletic.  He really did look like the proverbial geek with sallow skin, in need of some fresh air and real sunlight.  His front teeth were small and sort of pointy, which sometimes made him look malicious.  But he wasn’t at all malicious.  He loved Coldplay, was always borrowing my CDs, and he knew, with a fragile and desperate certainty, that he was destined for greater things than monitoring machines and pleasing foreigner bosses who couldn’t speak English, violated labor standards, and knew twit about computers.

Sometimes the glimmer in Don’s eyes wavered with sadness, sometimes with great hope, especially when he talked about finally taking that special two-level licensure exam online, or about presenting his new inventions and software to Steve Jobs at the Apple Convention, someday, someday very, very soon.  All of these things he was saving his money and himself up for.  

Like a pregnant rat, Gerry would say, a pregnant rat scrounging for bits and pieces of food and warm fabric for her lair.  Gerry liked to kid Don about his miserly ways.  I never got the pregnant rat parallel, until I almost saw one, that summer.

They told me that a rat bore a hole into one of the corner posts of our old apartment.  The boys had found the hole without the rat in it.  Gerry and my brother proceeded to break up the burrow, fishing out all sorts of unrecognizable graffiti-like bits and pieces of once-whole things.  With sticks and rods, they scratched and scraped the walls of the rat hole.  And then, for good measure, my brother, with a strange mix of anger and playfulness in his actions, poured muriatic acid into it.  Don and I had looked on, cringing at the thought of the rat, bloated with a litter of little black fetuses, smoked up in acid.  

I never really saw the rat.  But that did not stop me from dreaming of it for nights on end.  I knew my boyfriend was getting exasperated with me stopping all of a sudden in the middle of sex because I was convinced that I saw the pregnant rat as big as a cat with a tail as thick as the body of a snake, darting from one corner of our room to another, or scampering under our bed.

One day, he just left – the rat, my boyfriend.  He did not return for a week.  I dreamt less of the rat, I noticed.  When he came back, he had a stuffed toy mouse with him, a gift and a remedy, to satisfy my fascination and to stymie my fear.  Ayan, para matigil ka na, he said.  It drew a lot of laughter but was no good for much else.  I was still bothered by the pressure our lovemaking was creating on the spring bed.  I resumed dreaming of the rat trapped under the bed, stuck in the bed frame, its bloated stomach bursting, its head flattened, its thick wet tail flapping heavily, pounding the wooden floor.

I slowly learned to participate more actively in the sex, despite the nightmares, only because I had missed my boyfriend, and he was, well, very vigorous in his attempts and thrusts to make me not think of the rat.  He became more and more creative in his ways to accommodate my irrational rodent fears and fascinations.  Musophobia, it’s apparently called, an extreme fear of mice and rats. I think it was during that summer when I first heard the word, and when I started to truly love my boyfriend.

But back to Don who was as harmless as a Disney mouseketeer.  He was a bit of a miser though, yes, I finally noticed.  I made the mistake of pointing it out one time, over Sunday lunch.  We had all gone out drinking the night before in one of the bars in Tomas Morato.  Don did not order a single thing, but he enthusiastically picked from each of our plates of appetizers, and then left just before midnight because he was sleepy and had lots of reading to do.  When the bill came, we divided it by five, forgetting, in our drunkenness, that Don had left, messing up the computation, providing my brother another reason to spend, spend, spend.

There is this expression in Tagalog which I really like, next to “kapit sa patalim” or hang by the knife’s edge as in desperation; it is “galit sa pera”, which has no sufficient translation in English but literally means furious at money, can’t wait to throw it away.  That was exactly how my brother was in relation to money, a combination of the two idiomatic expressions: desperate for and furious at it.

I brought it up the following day, over lunch.  Not my brother’s spending practices, rather, Don’s lack of them.  At first, Don was very defensive, saying that he had, in fact,  told us that he was not interested in going out that night, but that we were very insistent.  He said that he did not order anything because he had no intention of staying.  But he did not run.  No way.  Why would he?  He had, in fact, asked everyone’s permission to leave.

We all laughed at Don’s use of the word permission.  His eyes started to acquire that strange glimmer again, making him look really uncomfortable and an even easier target for our banter.  And then, it happened.  He sniveled.  The moist light in his eyes turned into a tear that inevitably fell, down his fat, flabby cheek.  It seemed so out of context though, so unexpected, that we almost missed it.  

Don stood up quietly, bringing his plate with him, and proceeded to the kitchen.  We all pretended not to see the tear – the tear! – for some unspoken reason.  Gerry almost made a joke of it, but he stopped himself.  Don averted his face awkwardly when he passed us on his way up to his room, saying in an even tone, that he will wash up, but much later, after he finishes reviewing for an online exam, so just pile all plates on the sink please, thank you.

Sorry Don, I somehow managed.

The apartment was located in the not-so-glamorous part of the Scout Area, a trendy spot lined with bars, restaurants, and cafes. But the place has some dark history too, which pervades it still, if you ask me. It is named after the squad of scouts on their way to a world scouting jamboree in Cairo who all died when the plane they were on crashed into the Arabian Sea off Bombay in 1963. A memorial stands for the boys and their scout master at the rotunda where Tomas Morato and Timog Avenue meet. Coincidentally, this is also the location of Ozone Disco, site of one of the world’s deadliest fires to occur in a nightclub (yes, there’s such a ranking), killing some 160 people, most of them celebrating their college graduation.  

But on our street, and inside our apartment in particular, you wouldn’t think you were in the middle of one of the most happening locations in the city at all. Sometimes, there was no water in the taps.  Sometimes, there was flood in the bathroom floor.  But the house had three big bedrooms with huge wood-framed windows, a two-car garage with not a single car, lots of stray cats, no rats – none in sight anyway – and, in front of the apartment stood an old branchy tree that bore no fruits and hardly had any leaves. That summer, when we moved into the apartment, was one of the country’s hottest. In the countryside, the fields had cracked open, waiting for a single rainwater to drop; the unnourished crops had shriveled up in desperation; animals dropped dead or wandered like ghosts in abandoned towns.  All of these according to the papers, as sensationalized and dramatized to me by my silly boyfriend.  

In an old apartment in Scout Tobias, corner Scout Santiago, he continued in what he called  his reportorial voice, people have shed off all manners of clothing, have been drained of all strength by the heat, and have barely enough energy left to… procreate.  This is the beginning of the end, he said.  We were in our room.  The curtains were drawn.  We could see the gnarly branches of the old tree outside.  Everything was still.  There was absolutely no breeze.  But our bodies were entwined, sweating profusely, very much alive in the oppressive heat.  

One payday, as promised,  my brother blew all his salary on a rather big air-conditioning unit, and had the thing installed in the living room, of all places.  Before that, I had just bought a small television set with my scholarship allowance, and from then on that room was where we ended up congregating, after a long day’s work.  

I started broaching the idea of having cables installed, the very possibility of which excited us all.  We lingered several times in the living room talking about what shows we would watch if we had cable TV, and what shows we used to watch all the time at home where we did have cable TV.

Although the summer ended with no cables being installed, with that same TV set literally crashing into pieces, the living room became the cooling and the coolest center of sorts in that scorching hot, old apartment.  Eventually, it became a communal bedroom, dining room, and study room, too.

But we would only drink out in the garage, where we could freely smoke.  This was the only house rule we created and actually followed.  Besides, those summer nights were quite beautiful, even if humid.  The skies were always clear, the stars vivid.  Don liked to come out of his room at night.  He liked the night stars, but not the sun.  He liked to sit out and talk to us, but he hardly drank.    

Gerry was the hard drinker and liked to play the guitar, sing Dylan, Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Freddie Aguilar, and then some Nirvana, too.  His thick muscled neck would turn red, the veins almost popping out, when he sang, always in earnest, but sometimes out of tune.

Gerry also liked to roll a joint every now and then, even at his age.  Gerry was old. The oldest jologs in the world, we called him.  He was old enough to be a grandfather, which he was; a fact that he was in denial of.

Gerry turned fifty that summer.  I only remember this because that was the only Saturday he did not drink with us.  We never really knew where he went that night, dressed in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, and shiny patent leather shoes.  But he came back the next day, sober, dry-eyed.  Strange.  My boyfriend said that Gerry probably went to church, went to confession and did his penance; that was his secret life.  My boyfriend was convinced that Gerry was just pretending to be astig, to be tough, when he was actually a saint with tattoos.  Or, a secret agent of the intelligence bureau.

Once, I caught a glimpse of a photo of a young man and two boys in Gerry’s wallet. The young man in the picture looked exactly like Gerry, and that was how I knew that Gerry was certainly not, as my brother suspected, a pedophile, that those kids were not his prey. They were his son and grandsons. Well, you never really know these days, do you, my homophobic brother would often say.   You could be standing right next to one in the toilet, in the bar counter, in the train, or you could be sharing a room with them, isn’t that right, Gerry?  My brother joked and teased relentlessly.  Don just raised his eyebrows and exaggerated a yawn.  Hohum, here we go again.

But it was Gerry who made the nastiest gay jokes.  That’s why I first thought that Gerry might just be overcompensating, that he might be, in addition to being a saint and a secret agent, also gay.   He never brought a girl home, nor went out with one; and he did share a room with Don.  Gerry was also especially mean about Don’s rather soft ways, as he liked to refer to them, always making insinuations about Don’s sexuality, which Don might have been more upfront about, if he weren’t too preoccupied with his software dreams. They had a very peculiar relationship, those two. They looked out and cared for each other clearly, even if they did not always have the language for it.

Gerry did have a rather remarkable laborer’s body, I told my boyfriend once.  And my boyfriend said I was the one who was being mean, this time.  But it was true.  Gerry had the unhealthiest habits, had no notion of exercise or diet, but had the hardest abs, the firmest forearms, and the tightest buns.  I swear to God.  I never really bothered to find out where he came from and all.  But his body, usually clad in ridiculously tight and short denim cut-offs, spelled it out for me.  This was a man who had labored long and hard, not in the gym, but in cargo ships, maybe, or in factories.

Gerry looked freakish, actually.  His face was as old as a World War II veteran’s, bearing all the coarse lines and deep marks of battle.  But his body seemed ageless, perfected by the forces of nature.  And of poverty, my boyfriend always added.

I remember thinking those same thoughts when, five years later, I saw Gerry’s body for the last time, clad in a simple white button-down shirt and a pair of black slacks, lying inside a plain varnished wooden coffin.  He had been dead for almost two days before his body was found decomposing on the floor of the room he was then renting, in a boarding house somewhere in Lawton.  There didn’t seem to be signs of foul play, the report said.  It did look like he had a massive attack and had fallen off his bed to the floor, face up, his right hand still clutching the edge of a blanket.  But his eyes were open.  And there was no explanation for the bruises and the severe discoloration around his neck.

My brother came to claim Gerry’s body.  He was all they could reach, the police officer said.  They found my brother’s business card in Gerry’s wallet.  Apart from some cash, rolling paper, several bank deposit transactions bearing the same account number, and an old photograph, my brother’s card was all they recovered from his wallet.

My brother was working for some fat, corrupt Congressman by then.  Just two years into his new job, he had managed to purchase his own house and acquire a nasty government executive manner about him.  He was perfunctory, almost dismissive, and always in a hurry.  He never stayed up for the vigil, did not have time to sit with us, or to talk.  But he arranged payment for everything.

My brother just got really lucky.  He wasn’t in the Fairview “office” when it was raided by the NBI along with some camera crew.  My boyfriend thought that my brother may have known, may have been tipped off at the last minute by the accountant, who always had a soft spot for him.  My boyfriend also thought that it was their own Chinoy boss, or my brother himself, who had ordered the raid, and reported the illegal immigrant status of the two aliens.

Before they were thrown in jail, Don and Gerry, and the two foreigners, were presented to the media.  The aliens covered their faces with their thin, pale, trembling hands.  Gerry’s body was not fully visible to the cameras, and only his pathetic old face could be seen.  When the cameras zoomed in on him, he tried to duck behind Don. Meanwhile, Don, because of his size and his fair skin, looked the most prominent among the four and became the poster boy for this first successful anti-piracy operation.  How remarkable, I remember thinking.  Remarkable how Don’s eyes did glisten, even in shock, even on TV.  

Don almost died in prison, I later learned.  He was severely beaten up right in front of Gerry who could not do anything to protect his frail, fragile giant roommate.  Don had to be brought to the hospital right after they were bailed out.  Their boss paid for everything, of course.  He was very generous. Gerry continued to work for him.  So did my brother, and his Congressman employer.  They all worked for him.  

Don went home to the province and stayed there for quite a long while, gaining weight, keeping to himself, reading his computer books, preparing for the online licensure exams, and perfecting the software he had developed for the Apple Convention in the US.    

Don surprised us with a visit one night, just last year. Yes, exactly a year ago this month. My boyfriend and I were already living in the subdivision close to the university campus, so far away it seemed, in atmosphere though not in distance, from the Scout Area.  Our little house was carefully furnished – everything in it was relatively new and bespoke our current states.   We had stripped it of any trace of its previous occupants.  Each of the original concrete tiles had been plucked out and replaced with wooden floorboards.  The off-white walls were repainted in ochre and tan.  A floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelf was installed in the area where a television set obviously used to stand.  

It was a Friday night, I remember.  We were entertaining guests, colleagues from the University. It was a particularly cool and windy summer night.  The doorbell had rung, just once, and I ran to get it, thinking it was the pizza delivery. From the doorframe I saw only the silhouette of a tall, fat man, standing awkwardly by the gate, shifting his heavy weight from one foot to the other.  Pizza Hut?  I called out.  It’s Don, he replied, in a level tone, devoid of all inflection and emotion, that I almost missed it. What? Who? It’s Don, he said in an even lower voice.  Oh my god, Don! I ran to the gate to open it, to let him in.  Come in, come in, Don!  He didn’t want to come in.  We had guests, he noted.  And he couldn’t stay long anyway.  

We sat out in the veranda, looking at what few stars we could see instead. He had just come straight from the airport.  He was going to be in Manila for only two days and then he was flying to Taiwan.

Taiwan?! Wow.  Are you going to study there?  Did you get a scholarship?  I asked him. Why Taiwan?

To work, not to study. In an electronics factory. Production line. The factory supplies hardware.  Minor parts. To Apple Computers. He said, reciting the information in a robotic litany.

That’s good, that’s good, I said.  After that you can take that exam you’ve always wanted to take…  It’s been so long, Don, what else have you been up to?  I asked, attempting to break the silence.

Tried to… hang myself.  In my mother’s old house. He said, looking down at his hands, resting on his lap.  

What? Don! Why?

Brought the entire ceiling. Down. With me. Too heavy. Mother was so mad.  He said, smiling briefly, looking away.

What? Oh, Don.  I clutched at his hand.  But he pulled it away and stood up to go.

When he bent down to kiss my cheek, I caught his eyes. They were clear, and dry, and kind of dead.  

Take care, Don, I somehow managed.

In bed with my boyfriend, I sometimes think of Don’s lifeless eyes, of Gerry’s dead body, my brother’s inert anger at himself, and the crazy pregnant rat that had remained a phantom that whole summer of 2002.  The summer of our discontent, as my boyfriend now jokingly refers to it.

I do not know what to make of it.  I was certainly happy before and during certain parts of that summer.  But, what happened since?  How did it end so tragically?  How did it all go wrong like that?  Why did we survive and they didn’t?  I ask my boyfriend these, every now and then.

What the hell was I thinking?  Why did I leave home nga ba?  I had become a liar.  I had either become too happy or too bored.  I had either been in denial or had become a prophet.  I clearly knew, but pretended not to see, what was before me.

I stop again in the middle of sex.  I jump from bed, catching my boyfriend by surprise.

Oh fuck, oh man, he says.

I pace from one corner of the room to another, naked, while he lies there in his discomfort, in his discontent, watching me.

It was true happiness!  That was what it was!  We had family then, and dogs, a car, a real home, with real rats!  We had mountains and fields for a bedroom view, three minutes to the beach, small coffee shops, real conversations, with real friends, drinking at night along Magsaysay, passing out in the amphitheater, diving naked into the sea!  All those out of town trips, the endless laughter, the guitar music, the loud singing!  And I said no to all of it?!  What the hell was I thinking?!

I realize that I am shouting like a crazy woman, so I lower my voice.  

Why did we leave home?  Why did we come back here?

He does not answer.

I stop pacing.  I stand by the window.  There is a rare summer breeze.  It blows the curtains to one side, but from our window there is not enough view of the night sky.  I see billboards instead, the pale light of a street lamp casting strange shapeless shadows on the wall.

We were not ready for paradise just yet?  He offers.

And they were ready but did not deserve it?  Is that what you mean?!  Fuck you!  And, and how could you have witnessed it all and remain like that?

Like what, love?

Like that!  Whole!

He shakes his head.  I know he is trying to understand, but he doesn’t.  Maybe I don’t, either.

He gets up from bed.  Let’s go home, let’s get married, he says.

He stands behind me, pulls me softly into the hollow of his chest.  And then does his earnest to make me forget.  But I know that the pregnant rat is still there, trapped under our bed.