Smoke and Ashes
1
I took my first cigarette several years ago. It was Maundy Thursday of 2017, five minutes before midnight. There was no special reason for it. It just felt like a good night for a cigarette.
2
Most of my friends were out of town, with their friends and families.
I spent the day huddled at a corner of some coffee shop along Recto, back against the wall, drinking tea, watching as students in their school jackets and heavy backpacks entered. As my eyes glazed across the shop, I spied a young woman near one of the windows, dressed in a plain red collared shirt and bleached jeans, long black hair with red streaks tied up in a bun, eyes locked on a black-bound tome before her, lips mouthing the words of the text she was reading.
I had half a mind to talk to her when I heard a voice behind me.
“You’re a lawyer, right?”
Startled, I turned around to see another woman in her early 20s hovering over me, long black hair cut to her shoulders, clothed in a beige dress, and a San Beda white jacket a good size larger than her. I managed to reply with a slight nod.
“Yeah, it’s you.” She casually dropped her handbag on the table, almost hitting my coffee and books, and sat across me.
I cleared my throat.
The young woman leaned forward, tilted her head, and stared. Her eyes were brown. It had been years since we met that day and I still remember her brown eyes like I remember every scar and wound on my body. Show me a police lineup of eyes, and I can find hers without a moment’s hesitation.
“Hey,” I said, breaking the silence. “You’re getting a little creepy.”
“You do not look like a lawyer.”
I chuckled. “I get that a lot.”
The girl laughed. “You really don’t. You look very young.”
“Have we met somewhere?”
“Yeah, we did. Or to be more specific, I met you.” The girl crossed her arms and turned her head at the security guard by the door. “I saw you inside the Supreme Court a year ago.”
I racked my brains and drew a blank. I never appeared before the Supreme Court. Nor the appellate, nor the trial courts. I never practiced litigation.
She noticed my confusion. “Roll signing.”
Ah. “You were there? You’re a lawyer too?”
“My brother is. Or was: He’s dead. Cancer, before you ask. I’m second-year law, UST.”
I glanced at her San Beda jacket and raised my eyebrows. She shrugged. “My brother’s.”
I offered my hand. “Nice to meet you. And sorry about your brother.”
She took my hand and flashed a grin as she shook it. “Very formal. Is this what happens when you become a lawyer?”
“It becomes a habit."
The girl took a pack of cigarettes from the inside of her jacket and raised them. “Want to smoke outside?”
3
I bought my first cigarette from a balot vendor. I also bought two penoys. The old man chucked the eggs into a plastic bag and gratuitously dropped a smaller bag of salt and vinegar. He handed the bag with the cigarette, grunted as he gave my change, and tended to another customer.
I walked back to my apartment under the moonless, cloudless night, footsteps echoing from the empty streets to the equally empty buildings. The living visits the dead, I thought, and the dead visits the living.
As I replayed the quote in my head, I spotted my apartment’s security guard slowly pacing in front of the entrance, humming to some tunes from the radio playing on his phone. A Nokia 3310. Classic.
“Manong!” I hailed.
“Hey,” he said, looking up. “Musta?”
“You got a lighter, boss?”
He pulled a Bic from his front pocket and threw it at me. “I don’t know you smoke.”
“I don’t either. Mind if I smoke here?”
The security guard sat down on the stone steps leading to the apartment and patted the spot beside him. “Hey, you’re paying the rent.”
“Not March, I didn’t.” I sat beside the guard, brought the cigarette to my lips, cupped the end with my hand, and lit it. I inhaled a little through my mouth to burn the tobacco. I handed the lighter back.
“You’re not going home?”
“Dabawenyo ko, boss,” I said, taking my first drag of the cigarette. To my surprise, I was able to contain a cough. I mean, the entire thing was not a pleasant experience, but it was not entirely bad. Shit, I’m smoking.
I opened the plastic bag and offered an egg to the security guard. He thanked me and cracked the egg on the pavement. The song from the radio ended and the first few chords to Harana by Parokya ni Edgar began to play.
“Where you from anyway?” I asked him, placing the bag with the vinegar between us. I let the cigarette hang to my lips, trying to imitate Clint Eastwood.
“Mindoro. But my wife and boy are here.”
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Gilbert. You saw him, he’s the kid running around the lobby earlier.”
I was halfway through my cigarette when I saw ash on my shorts. I brushed them off.
“Grade Four. You should see his grades. 90 in English, 89 in Math, and 94 in Science. Shit, my kid’s going to be a doctor.”
I shook my head as I took another drag. “He should become a lawyer.”
“Lawyers are sleazy motherfuckers. Can’t even pay the rent!” I grinned and found him cracking a smile. “No offense, of course.”
“I can’t wait to tell your boss about this. He’s a lawyer too, right?”
“Fat chance, Attorney.”
4
“How come you remember me?”
I played with my empty cup as I watched her smoke. We were outside. The clouds were downcast and there was a slight drizzle that made everything seem like a half-finished painting on a canvas. The coffee shop was an aberration in this little strip of Manila. Some shops were closed. Some shops were open with no sign of any attendants inside. Only a few have customers and those customers were probably the same people in the coffee shop, just off for a break.
“The living visits the dead,” the girl remarked, placing the cigarette on an ashtray, “and the dead visits the living.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Do you know what it means?”
I pondered for a second. “I don’t know if I do, sorry.”
“How’s your coffee?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Good.”
“Good.”
I did not hide my confusion. “Yeah, good.”
“How good? Great?”
“Not the best coffee I ever had, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still good coffee.”
“You brought a kid.”
I smiled.
“You caused quite a stir, you know. Bunch of families and photographers, and there you are, white long sleeves barong, short hair slicked back, Bedan pin proudly displayed on your lapel, smile as huge as a goddamn clam, and then for some reason, you brought that boy peddling beside you.”
“He asked.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was selling mineral water outside. He asked what was going on inside. You know, lots of people and all. I just brought him in.”
“Your plus one.” She chuckled and brought the cigarette from the ashtray to her lips again. “You’re goddamn weird, you know that, right? Why are you here moping around anyway? You’ve already passed the Bar.”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“Oh yeah? Is it a girl?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve never seen it… him… her.”
She paused for a while. “Do you have a twenty-peso coin?”
I tapped my jeans, felt that I did have a coin inside my pocket, and brought it out. It did not surprise me that it was, indeed, a twenty-peso coin. I took a glance at it - minted 2016 - and placed it gingerly on the table.
Steel, bronze, nickel. A reminder of a newer country, a newer world. Faster and ever moving to the future. Hop on the train, or you’ll get behind. Everything that you are now they are just figments on a digital ledger somewhere in China. And who reads the ledgers? No one. Just computers. Everything that you are now is just code, binaries, beep bop beep. Hop on the train, or you will be crunched by digital langoliers.
The girl took the coin from the table and, with a slight flourish, showed me its back and front. She tapped the coin hard on the table - once, twice. She then took the cigarette from her mouth, let out the smoke from her lungs into the air, and placed the lit end on one side of the coin. “Now look closely,” she said. As ashes fell on the table, she pushed the cigarette through the coin-like paper and out the other side.
I applauded as she pried the cigarette back between her teeth. She bowed down with an exaggeration and let out a laugh.
I looked at her smoking before the rain and realized that for some reason or another, for one brief moment during that dull, rainy Friday evening, like a thunderbolt among shards of memories that I was having that day: I wish she was the one I was waiting for. And looking at her startling brown eyes as her fingers played with the cheap plastic ashtray before us, turning it round and round, I realized another thing.
We were just two ships passing at the night.
5
I met the young woman with the Beda jacket briefly years after our first encounter.
August, 2020. COVID-19, quarantine, essential employee. I was no longer a lawyer. Or I still am – you never lose the license if you took the option of lifetime certification – but I no longer practice. I continued instead as an IT guy, falling back to my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I did well, eventually leaving with my wife, who was a nurse in Ireland.
I was working with my tablet in a coffee shop near Galway Cathedral – at least one of those few open those days – when I heard a cough behind me.
I turned around. It was the same routine, by the same young woman in Recto all those years ago, with the same oversized San Beda jacket. I didn’t know her name anymore, but I did remember those eyes. Show me a police lineup of eyes, and I can find hers without a moment’s hesitation.
“You-“ I began to speak, but she cut me off.
“I’m not really here.”
For some reason, I know what she meant. She was not really here. At least not physically. Some trick of the mirage. She sat down at the table opposite mine, placed her elbows on the table, and then her head on her hand. She was looking at the river beside the coffee shop, brown eyes shifting under the sun.
“I want to visit you,” she said.
“And here you are,” I replied. “And without the hefty flight costs from Manila – well, if you’re not really here.”
She laughed. “I am here, and in a hospital at Cebu, and maybe also at Bali… I am your typical girl next door.”
“So, you’re a ghost?”
“Maybe. Ghosts are supposed to be dead, aren’t they? I’m still alive. Or at least I’m still breathing. Hard.”
“Why do you want to visit me?”
She took something from the inside of her San Beda jacket and placed it on the table. It was a twenty-peso coin. Steel, bronze, nickel. I took it and wondered if it was the same coin all those years ago – or something else entirely. Like the girl. Like the mirage.
“You should stop smoking,” she said. She still was not looking at me. Her eyes were locked on the river. From the cathedral, church bells rang out to mark noon.
I touched the coin gingerly to see if it was really there. It was.
“Is that all you have to say?” I asked.
“I don’t actually have anything important to say. I am just here. Enjoying your company, in a coffee shop by the river and the church. People say when they die, they see the life that they had. It’s different for me, maybe. I see the lives I could have been.”
“So you’re dying?”
“I am. Or maybe not. I don’t know yet.”
I put the coin in my pocket and stood up. “Wanna smoke?”
6
That was our last cigarette – mine and hers. My wife is eternally grateful for the miracle. The apartment eventually turned yellow to white again.
I searched Facebook and saw the young woman’s timeline. She eventually survived COVID. I wanted to send her a message but stopped myself.
Our last conversation was already perfect as it is.
7
A few weeks after I started smoking, a friend later told me I was smoking wrong. (You’re faking it, he bluntly told me.) He can tell by the smoke: I’m not inhaling the smoke to my lungs; I was just letting it simmer in my mouth and puffing it out. It turns out you have to. I told him cigarette packs need to have instruction manuals on them, condoms.
I had a real coughing fit when I first did it.
8
“I should get going, Manong,” I said, flicking the spent-up cigarette to the street. The radio had just finished Jeepney by Yeng Constantino and was moving to a commercial for some energy drink.
“Yeah,” the guard said. “Thanks for the egg.”
“No problem. Say hello to your wife and kid for me.” I rolled the plastic bags into a ball and tossed them across the street.
I crossed the lobby to the elevator and climbed to my room.
As I opened the door, I looked around the dark room from the red shirt draped on a chair to the vague outline of a woman sleeping on my bed. I took my shirt and shorts off and slipped inside the covers. I could feel the warmth of her naked body, smell the hint of perfume on her shoulder, and hear the beating of her heart. As my hand caressed her long black hair with its red streaks, now undone, down to the digital watch on her arm, I licked my lips for a trace of the cigarette.
There was none.