LONTAR issue #1 (2 page)

Only when the world stops shaking, only when the distant sounds die down, only when the blaze of fear and panic have been doused by prolonged silence and an extended stillness, does she stop trembling.

When there's nothing else to do, she moves.

She stays close to the buildings, avoiding the other shades and the glare of symbols. She notices that not all shades are motionless; some move, aimlessly, some stop suddenly, as if something occurred to them in their wanderings. A few evaporate into thin air, but not before a light emerges from one of the symbols in the sky; not before the shade is illuminated by a welcoming glow; not before their lips form an enviable smile.

Disappearing is good. Everybody in Manila is dead. Fading is bad. Time is different in Manila.

She has a horde of disjointed memories now. A flash of light just before she died; the face of a man, smiling; the sound of a child laughing; the taste of chocolate; a plethora of demonic encounters; a dead man who is her friend, who is in Manila, who is her trusted companion, who is called—

"Enzo."

He appears in front of her, as though summoned. His eyes slowly become alert. When he finally acknowledges her presence, his brows furrow, his face grimaces. Eventually, he's able to spit out her name.

"Carla."

She remembers the deal: to hold each other's name, because names are important in the ghost city of Manila even if names are the first to fade, followed by a sundry of details that relate to their sense of self. But memories of another, these, they have found, these don't fade as easily. And so they secreted other things in each other as well.
 

A flurry of words tumbles past their lips, as they try to fill up the blanks of their lives.

"We're dead. We're in Manila. Stay away from the demons. You like guavas and beer."

"We don't belong to Manila. The Catastrophe was unexpected, instantaneous. You love coffee. Don't eat crabs."

"You love Leslie. She wasn't in Manila. She hates roses."

"Outside, you have a husband and a son—Mark and Joseph? Or is it—?"

Suddenly, Enzo is bathed in warm light. He looks at her, and Carla looks at him, and in a moment, a memory of a conversation resurfaces. Just before he disappears, she reaches her hand out to him; he takes it, then pulls her close into a tight embrace.

*

The tunnel that is not Manila but is not not-Manila is called the Outer Rim.

She and Enzo appear in front of one closed, square panel. The tunnel that is the Outer Rim is barely lit—one small yellow bulb caged in metal to illuminate several yards of space, just enough light to show various symbols on walls that are peeling paint. There are no chairs, no tables, no other furniture except the yellow light bulbs, empty spaces, and silence.

Carla barely moves, aware that her presence is forbidden, terrified of the unknown, unremembered consequences, if they're found out. But they have done this before; she knows this. She remembers the first time when she (or he) curled up into the smallest possible of seemings and came with the other as an illicit companion. She also knows that it used to be impossible, and then difficult, and now, just uncomfortable to perform such a feat. And she thinks,
we are diminishing,
because there was a time when they were too large and couldn't fit, back when the walls were not crumbling in decline, back when the symbols in the sky hung higher than clouds. But she does not say this to Enzo, who is about to put his hand on one panel.
 

Instead, she says "time is different in Manila," because beyond the Outer Rim is a petitioner who remembers them—oftentimes loved ones, sometimes family, rarely friends, and people change.

Enzo nods. But she knows he still hopes; expectation lines the ghost of a smile on his lips. When the panel opens, they see an old woman, seated on the other side of a dirty sheet of glass.

The old woman speaks, before either of them can react. She speaks slowly at first, her syllables drawn out and measured, as if her words have been considered and are being reconsidered, even as she utters them. The old woman punctuates her phrases with heavy coughing that wracks her body; later into the monologue, she starts slurring her words, as if she is simultaneously trying to clear her throat and speak.
 

Despite this, Carla and Enzo understand. They've heard most of it before. This is what the old woman says:

I'm not Leslie. I'm not your mother, your sister or your cousin. I'm a woman your parents hired, thirty years ago, to remember you.

There was a Catastrophe. You died, along with an entire city. But you and the city did not move on. Instead, you have remained, and there are many attempts to determine why.
 

(You had your own theories before, but in the fifteenth year of my service, you told me to stop enumerating them to you. 'It doesn't matter anymore,' you said.)

There are portals in the ghost city of Manila, where monsters come out, which you fight, to keep the world outside safe. Do not go into these portals. You have seen friends lost in the world beyond those gates. You have seen them suffer.
 

(You told me that, should you ask for their names, to refuse to give them to you. Remembering is a different sort of pain, you said, and you insisted that any version of you will understand that.)

Your parents are dead. You have no siblings. Leslie is married, with grandchildren. She doesn't want to see you. She wrote you a letter, which your mother read, which I've never read, and things between you and her were over, before I was even hired.

This is the last time I will visit. I'm very sick. I know you don't even remember my name, but in the years that have passed, you've become important to me. You are my responsibility, my burden, the one constant in my life.
 

I've come to say goodbye. I've come to say I love you.

My name is Natalie.

The old woman coughs again, and does not stop. She starts heaving, spittle dripping down the sides of her chin, blood splattering against the glass.

Several things occur to Carla in the confusion of the moment:

• the old woman is dying,
  
• the defenses aren't as formidable as they once were, when she and Enzo had first tried to escape,
  
• there's a place other than Manila, other than the Outer Rim, a place where demons don't protrude out of intersections, reeking of violence.
  

Carla looks at her companion.

"Do it," she says, because Natalie is his.
 

When Enzo turns to face her, she doesn't see excitement. He seems even less now, dimmed and shadowed. His stillness is saying
there's nothing left for me out there
and slowly, even the despair in his eyes drains away, as if even that is fading.

There's nothing left for me out there
.
There is nothing left. There's nothing.

Carla feels a spark of irritation that quickly turns into urgent anticipation. She doesn't hesitate. She reaches out again, this time to the old woman, then imagines herself small, smaller still, then as tiny as she is able.

I am a grain of sand on the beach,
she says to herself,
I am a teardrop on the glass,
and this time, she knows she's being foolish, but the foolishness helps her focus.

There's only a barely audible pop, accompanied by a sudden heaviness that must be the sense of loss for Enzo and everything he must have been to her, and then she's out. And just when the old woman draws her last breath, Carla takes over Natalie's body.
 

*

Carla staggers out of the wooden enclosed space.

At first, Outside Manila seems like a jumbled jigsaw puzzle of mismatched parts. The trees are in the sky, the ground is an endless blue, a dark wall becomes the ceiling becomes the floor and becomes the wall again with each blink of the eye, and the unforgiving sun is everywhere, making everything too bright. Carla's instinctive response to confusion is to get away, because demons (or monsters, or beasts) are always lurking in the spaces created by chaos. Carla forces the body that is not hers, that is heavy and exhausted, that sometimes still coughs, that moves too slowly, to go forward and away, just away from Manila.

It is so odd to be alive. So odd, and so painful.

When the world finally makes sense—when the trees find their place on the ground, when the blue returns to a sky unblemished by symbols, when the dark wall disappears into a thin outline in the horizon—Carla is beset with another type of assault.

Memories come in relentless waves, most of them about her time in Manila, some of them about her life before she died. Because of the volume, the memories are nearly indistinguishable from each other and the quality of information she's able to obtain is vague and imprecise. She only knows she's been dead for some time. She knows Enzo is important. She knows there are others with them who are lost, attempting an escape from Manila through the portals. She knows, even if she doesn't remember their names, they mattered. She knows there is a Husband and there is a Son, though she can't even determine which one's Joseph, which one's Mark. She knows there were arguments that grew out of hand; trips taken or forgone; routines and schedules and an ever expanding grocery list. She can glimpse fragments of conversations, tail ends of tantrums; the comfortable and uncomfortable types of silences; all indications of an imperfect happiness.

She doesn't know if Husband and Son ever visited.
They must have
, she tells herself. They must have come and she must have let them go, as she imagines someone who loves deeply would have. If they're still alive; if they're both well; if she sees them now, will she be magnanimous?

The words that come to her mind are far from noble:

Where have you been? Why haven't you visited me? Why have you forgotten me? Help me.

The hubtrain complex that materializes in the distance anchors Carla against the deluge of her past and the emotions that come with it. Though it is large and smooth, when she expects the complex to be less sprawling and sharp-edged, Carla recognizes it, in the same way, she supposes, one would recognize a parent in a child. When a symbol gleams on its façade, she stops.

That's when Carla notices the other paths that are running parallel to hers and how all these roads will eventually converge. On these paths are a handful of people, most of them gray-haired and thin-boned, sweating and slow-paced, smelling of an unforgiving heat and confined spaces, all of them coughing. They walk, unperturbed, toward the hubtrain complex. Carla reminds herself that not all symbols are there to entrap. Carla reminds herself she's no longer in Manila. Carla reminds herself that for now, she's alive.

The memories pounding in her head make the decision for her. They're all screaming, asking to be recognized, demanding that she make herself whole. The hubtrain complex is one step toward that goal because it is a place to go to other places where everything she remembers will somehow make sense. With nothing more than fragile hope, Carla follows the other people to the imposing monolith.

*

The hubtrain complex is air-conditioned and bright with artificial light.

There are digital billboards, flickering, shifting, screaming their importance in white against black. Crowds of commuters are going up escalators, turning corners, coming out of elevators, obscuring painted symbols, drowning out announcements made on shattered speakers. The whole complex throbs with impatient energy, as if trains and people and data cannot wait to depart or arrive or move on.

Carla disrupts the intricate choreography of commuters going up and down, in and out, to and from, when she stands still in the middle of a crowded tunnel, then on top of an escalator, then just before the bend of a narrow corner. Most people make space for her; others push her in annoyance. Carla barely notices them. She's wading through memories, trying to fish out a place that is somehow connected to the hubtrain complex, that is somehow very important to her, but is somehow blurred by the ceaseless ebb and flow of crowds.

You must be my home,
she tells the hazy image in her mind.
Where are you?

Carla abruptly starts walking again. She bumps into one of the commuters who pushes her back; she staggers into someone else who shoves her away. When the crowd settles again, Carla finds herself engulfed in a sea of dark shoulders, expressionless profiles, words dropped without context as an overheard conversation drifts away from her, momentary blasts of music from curiously shaped headphones, a miasma of different smells—sweat, mint, cigarette smoke, deodorant, smog—making Carla feel as if she's so small and irrelevant, tinier than when she slipped past glass. She gasps for breath, coughs, panics then coughs some more.
 

I am a leaf in the wind. I am a lily on a river.
 

Carla is pushed out of the throng.

She leans back against a cold, tiled wall. After the coughing fit subsides, she starts feeling through her pockets, compelled by an instinctive general wariness of pickpockets and thieves that thrive in the hubtrain complex chaos. She finds a rectangular laminated piece of plastic, with an intricate emblem embossed in gold in the corner. In bold letters, it tells her what it is: HUBTRAIN CARD.