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35. INT. MORATORIUM – THAT NIGHT

The club music is loud, nearly unbearably so, as if just on the knife’s edge of shredding eardrums, of drawing blood.

Within, there is the stale reek of desperation, of the bewildered and the anxious plunging themselves into a frenzy of artificial jubilation, a synthetic fire fueled by chemicals and alcohol and pheromones. Here, Christmas a month or so away, at the tail end of yet another year that seemed to go by too quickly, another year of stubbornly fixed incomes and upwardly spiraling costs, the moneyed (and apparently moneyed) of Manila try to drown themselves in momentary amnesia, a blessed few remembering years past when things seemed so much better, wondering where and when it had all begun to go awry.

Normally, Luis would not be here, not on a Saturday night[1], but he is still trying to lose himself, this, his penultimate act of evasion, of willful distraction, before tomorrow, and the pivotal conversation he will have with Lilith.

He does his best to be unobtrusive, to hang back in a shadowed corner of the club, merely watching, soaking the atmosphere in, taking mental notes for some as-of-yet unknown future role that might require such notes. Club kid drowning in a flood of drugs and drum-and-bass? Male prostitute scoping out potential sugar mommies? DJ, cool and controlled, 21st-century high priest, cutting and pasting beats and samples at his wheels of steel?

Then, in a sudden break of the aural wall—hyperkinetic beats silenced, replaced by breathing rhythmic, sampled and looped to the same beat—Luis hears a voice, strident, “No! I’ve never believed a word you’ve said. Ever. You don’t love me. You use me. I let you use me!”

Cassandra.

Frowning, Luis moves in the general direction of where her voice had come from. Sees her, there, at the mouth of the narrow corridor leading to the comfort rooms. Luis sees she is watching a MAN walk away from her.

He walks right up to her side without her even noticing.

“Cassandra.”

She does not flinch, as if she’d heard him coming from a long way off. She instead, turns, looks at him with cold, haughty eyes.

“Are you all right? Was that Ace?”

“No, that wasn’t Ace, and no, I’m not all right!”

“Come on,” Luis says, Mr. Diplomacy, taking her gently by the elbow, “I think you’ve had enough to drink.”

Cassandra jerks her arm away, as if from a leper’s touch. “I am not drunk!”

And Luis is startled to realize that she’s quite sober, no alcohol reek on her breath at all.

Pero baka high, he thinks.[2]

“Why are you here?!” she demands.

“Nagkataon lang na nandito rin ako. I’m not stalking you, kung `yun yung inisip mo.”

“That’s nice,” she grins, “but I wonder why you’d think that that’s what I might have thought.”

She giggles. “Surprisingly, that actually made sense!”

Luis sighs, battling his exasperation. “Tell me how I can help, Cass.”

“Why would you want to help me? I don’t even like you. I hate you,” her eyes glare wetly, genuine venom in her voice. “You’re not Habagat, Luis. You don’t have to help everyone, especially not the wicked and the damned.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“Just wait, Luis. Wait till you’re in this business long enough, and you’ll see. Now, it’s all still fresh to you, but after awhile, it’ll start to stink. And when that happens, you’ll think, quite naturally, that it’s all the other people around you.

“The big reveal is that it’s you you smell, you that’s been rotting and decomposing all this time, rotting till there’s nothing left of the person you were when you first started.”

“You haven’t been in the industry that long, Cass.”

Cassandra’s face settles then into a grotesque parody of itself, somehow fundamentally wrong. “Oh, I’m far older than I look, Luis.”

Luis shudders involuntarily, staring at Cassandra with dawning horror. The strobes stutter-skip, flashes of luminescence flickering over the exquisitely ravaged landscape of her face.

“We all make bargains, in the end. And bargains cost.”

Luis watches, and Cassandra’s hair begins to sway, to undulate, beneath the strobes.

“When I started, I was just like your precious Lilith. Integrity,” she spat, somehow making the word sound obscene. “She doesn’t know the first thing about integrity.

“Time passed, for me, for everyone, and one day I woke up with someone very old and very important and very married in my bed, and thought, `Well, “compromise” isn’t such a dirty word after all.’”

Luis stands rooted, watching, unable to quite believe that Cassandra’s hair is reaching for him, for his face.

“And that’s where it all started to go horribly wrong.

“Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. At the time, I thought I was `getting ahead,’ `advancing my career,’ `growing as an actress.’”

Still, he is unable to move, as he feels the feather touch of Cassandra’s hair against his cheeks, his lips.

“Let’s see your Lilith wave around her integrity while she’s pregnant at a point in her career when she can’t afford to be, with a child she shouldn’t have. Let’s see her give her child up and still manage to look at herself in the mirror.”

She looks into Luis’ eyes, her hair trembling against his skin, framing his face, probing, caressing. Luis holds his breath.

She closes her eyes then, closes them, her anger suddenly spent. Her hair falls away from Luis’ face, limp now, dull and lifeless.

“We tell such terrible lies to ourselves, Luis.” She shakes her head, disconsolate, and her hair looks normal now, normal, though Luis knows better.

“Terrible,” she whispers, her eyes bleak, empty.

Luis backs away from her, slowly, then, turns on his heel and walks away, half-expecting her to scream, or at least to shoot off a farewell jibe. (Or to feel the cold cables of her hair slide around his throat, throttling, closing taut, the inevitable shrinking of a circle, trapping, suffocating…)

Nothing.

Luis walks to the club’s exit, shuddering despite himself.

----- * 0 * -----

1 Luis has decided to come to this particular club because of the X-deal Joanna set up, wherein all regular Habagat cast members get to enter free of charge, and any and all drinks are on the house. (Luis, Mr. Kuripot, has put away quite a lot of iced teas tonight.) [back]

2 And Luis is right.

Cassandra is currently under the influence of veritrax (or V), a chemical made from the ghosts of lice, and given to the most stubborn and uncooperative of souls facing final judgment, those who refuse to tell the truth.

And though the effects of V are the same on the quick, as well as the dead, there is the added side effect for a living human being, of experiencing the world from one remove—sensorium muted, emotions dulled—so that though the drugged individual may appear happy, or sad, the truth is, he doesn’t feel the emotions at all, numb to his own heart.

Some addicts have described the feeling as, “like watching yourself on TV and not remembering any emotion at all, like some doppelganger was acting instead of you.” [back]

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