Of course, I’d heard it before. The child of a diplomat knows no permanence.

But, this story is not mine; already at fifteen, the brooding sort who’d rather scribble in a sketch pad than socialize. This is the saga of two Americans at the American School, Manila, and their journey home. It must be about them. This was their school and their country, even if they didn’t realize their forefather’s had won it for them long ago. I, the son of a recently appointed Pakistani ambassador, was the interloper. 

“Hi, new guy…”

Katherine…Kate…K reached out in chemistry class--my first on my first day at a new school. I don’t think we exchanged more than smiles and names before class commenced. I thought she was pretty, sandy-brown hair to her shoulders, grey-green eyes. Her tan fit the tropical setting and she smiled like the sun at dawn--any schoolboy’s dream. So I almost choked on my sandwich under an awning by the football field later that monsoonal day when she appeared beside me again, essentially to ask how I’d come to be in Manila. The question was tough. Answering it would not be easy. It would require a conversation that lasted six years.

“I was born in Nebraska,” she opened her account by the sodden field. “But I lived in Brazil and Mexico before coming here four years ago.” Later campus banter would reveal she spoke Spanish and Portuguese as fluently as English and was the only one among all I met in the meantime who could address the locals in Tagalog. Her father was a scientist at IRRI, an agricultural research institute on the outskirts of Manila.

Getting to know Kate, it soon became obvious that her smile was not her sole fortune. Her most distinguishing treasure was her demeanor, because there was nothing girly-girl about it. She wore no make-up, unlike the other girls from all corners of the earth already emulating their housebound mothers. She was not coquettish about showing me up in chemistry when I was busy melting ballpoints in the Bunsen burner. She was more athletic than me too. I remember her laughing wildly as I inhaled a cigarette under the bleachers after trying out for track and field. She’d just watched me run two circuits of the field then turn straight into the washroom to vomit. Yet, she showed up for every game when I began organizing cricket matches instead.

From the way I looked at her and the ease with which she sought my company, teachers and peers alike suspected more than a budding friendship from that first chemistry class. They conjectured that we were just too bashful to admit it to others. I, at least, had only been too reserved to speak my feelings to her. I didn’t take that formal step required in American courtship--I didn’t ask her out on a date. But just before she left for the summer, we were pretending to study at the library when I instinctively took her hand for the first time. She didn’t look up from her book, but smiled faintly as our fingers played. Every moment was chemistry. The experiment only concluded when a classmate turned the corner and snickered. 

*

The distance a summer can create when you’re approaching sixteen is as large as your inexperience.

While Kate was away, I turned to the other tonics within the allowance of a privileged adolescent in Manila. Right around the corner from school in Makati--the new commercial hub of the city--beer and rum, marijuana, and more was available for little to nothing. In fact, they were most widely purveyed in the narrow alleys and numerous bars outside the campus’ every guarded gate. I walked past them, or was approached by shady guys in sunglasses--“Hey, G.I. Joe! You want weed, coke, heroin?”--everyday on my way in and out of school. Having either just escaped or hurtling back towards parents tied up in their gripes with each other and the world, such propositions were a temptation too alluring to pass by, doubly so when the friends I’d just begun to make (to replace the ones I’d just abruptly lost) had abandoned the city to rediscover where they came from, and I had nowhere else to go.

When Kate returned, we had both changed a little. I was interested in exploring more of Manila, while she had reached out over the summer to another guy. She knew Alexander…Alex…Al from school, though I’d not met him. They were also neighbors at the IRRI compound in Los Banos, riding the institute shuttle back and forth to the city. It was a surreal place to live. Not only was it a little bit of America on another’s land, like our school. The IRRI compound was in the middle of the jungle under a volcano. The resident scientists were from every niche of the globe, but they generally socialized within their respective communities--Indians with Pakistanis, Brits with Aussies, and Americans with Canadians--echoing the patterns of their children at school. No surprise, then, during the summer that Kate and Alex’s parents had hooked up in the U.S., and their kids had followed. I suppose Alex asked her out on a date.

My father, on the other hand, had bought me a driver’s license and an old jalopy that summer, presumably to make up for not going anywhere. Though looking forward to sharing this new mobility with Kate, distracted by Manila’s many intoxicants, I didn’t notice at first that she came back avoiding me. Belatedly, I resolved to ask her out on that date, only to learn of Alex. She told me, “You’ll really like him. You guys are so much alike.” Anyone who knew us would attest that she was right.

In Alex I discovered a kindred spirit. His looks were the opposite of mine--blonde hair, blue eyes, skin as pale as a ghost. His parents, excommunicated Mormons from Salt Lake City, had brought him into this world in India, a child of the Peace Corps. They had raised him in Vietnam and Thailand while serving at the U.S. Embassy, moving to Manila a year earlier as administrators at IRRI. None of his stops matched the points on my life’s map. But that was of little consequence. Impermanence was our bond. Any distance that existed was bridged when I first joked that his father was probably with the CIA, and he retorted that mine was no doubt an agent of the ISI.

At first, the three of us only spent time goofing off together at school, talking about the places we’d lived, the people we’d left behind, and the books and music we’d picked up along the way. They told me about their summer in the U.S., and I relayed my exploits, which would have been well beyond my years anywhere but in Manila. Eventually, Alex skipped the shuttle back to IRRI to learn if all I’d been describing was true. We ended up at Manang’s, a hole-in-the-wall place around the corner from campus where beer, dope, and mystery-meat on a stick could be had nightly for a few pesos and a place to sit on the grimy sidewalk was always yours for the taking.

While I envied him for the stories he told that night--of midnight rendezvous with Kate by their compound pool, trips to the enchanted beach at Boracay together with their families, or just the time spent dining together at home--I suppose he saw a little green when on a guided hop from bar to bar in throbbing Makati. In the midst of it all, we also determined why it was that he was buried in Kate’s embrace and I in the seediest alleys of one of the seediest cities I know. We shared a deep desire, growing with every passing minute, to escape our unstable homes. His parents had their share of gripes with each other too.

By the time summer rolled around again, Alex had opted for my route of escape entirely, spending most of his time in Makati, staying at our house as the year flew by. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed his company. I was preparing for the loss of a girl I had met at one of those Makati clubs: the British Ambassador’s daughter, to whom I’d grown attached over the last couple of months. Our last fling would be her senior prom, before she headed back to London. Toasting summer vacation at Manang’s, Alex and I were so caught up in our lives that we barely noticed the dirt in which we’d sat all year, or the fact that people were sleeping in it behind us. This was normal, and we looked past it as we ate, drank, and talked, like every other student at the American School.

*

The first I heard of the break up was not from Alex. I heard from Kate. On the first day of the new school year, after a summer I’d spent much the same as the previous one, I encountered a side of her I hadn’t seen before. All the energy she usually expended on effervescence, she now spilled into anguish. She wouldn’t share what was wrong when our paths crossed on the way to separate classes. She just stood there, sobbing. To save her some embarrassment--though she seemed oblivious to the other kids hurrying to and fro in the hallway--I convinced her not to take the early shuttle back home but to stay in town and confide in me after school. “We can meet at Tia’s”--a Mexican restaurant by the side gate.

Whilemariachis strummed to lush candlelight, she wept on inconsolably, stammering out the words Alex had more bluntly conveyed when they’d returned to Manila from summer vacation. “He said he didn’t love me.”

I said I’d talk to him, calming her, when it slipped out that even if he didn’t change his mind, “I’ll always love you.”

She took my hand and said she knew. “I love you, too.”

            Love, love, love… As if any of us had the slightest inkling of its meaning. So, chalk it up to youth, but she had a smile in her eyes when I walked her to the late shuttle and waved her off, glad to head back to Tia’s for more sangria before heading home myself. 

On the first of Alex and my nocturnal jaunts that year--I recall it began at an open-air balot and beer joint near Green Belt Cinema--I made good on my promise to Kate. The place was new and brightly lit, surrounded by the souped-up Japanese compacts we could avoid at Manang’s, so we were downing our beers to find a less invasive spot. Before escaping the glare, he confessed. “This past summer, I realized that Kate sees picket fences in our future.” He did not. He wanted his own future. He wanted my present. There was no turning back. What could I say to that? We would drink together whenever he wanted. As for Kate…

She felt excluded. If not ensnared by the memory of midnight rendezvous, Kate lived in the days when the three of us would stalk the school’s hallways together, Alex and I usually skipping classes to hang out during her free periods. She had pushed aside the fact that much of that time, she had worked hard not to fawn over Alex in my company. I’d felt sick at the thought of how they behaved when alone, and he’d begun to wish she wasn’t around at all. Such togetherness had obviously been unsustainable. Its loss, nevertheless, sent her reeling; her only consolation, she said, was my steadfast friendship.

*

When the IRRI compound became Kate’s personal concentration camp, Alex stayed in Manila and we explored the city further. We drank at a bar-b-que place in Quezon City, chomping on chickens’ feet. We smoked a joint or two, leaning back in our chairs at a cliff-side ginebra stall overlooking Valle Verde. We talked. Every outing taught us more about each other and ourselves, though we didn’t know what we were learning at the time. In Manila, we were both G.I. Joe to the hookers and fishball vendors on every street corner. We may have raced the souped-up Japanese compacts on Edsa Boulevard, but we weren’t one with the racers. We enjoyed being immersed in dark streets far from those into which we were born, and though we’d eat the fishballs and smoke the weed, we’d only flirt with the harder drugs and prostitutes, nothing more. We were just bidding our time before racing to other places. We’d have to graduate on a fast track and travel beyond all we knew. We were too scared to go alone and too young for spouses, so we found friendship in the prospect of exploring the world together. University in the U.S. would serve as our excuse.

I should have known even then that despite the pandering voices of fishball vendors and drug dealers, Alex and I were not G.I. Joes. As I told Alex one night, I wasn’t even sure I’d be following him to the U.S. My father had recently quit his post. “I can’t represent the General, anymore,” he announced one night over the buzz of Johnny Walker. “We’ll make our lives here until the Americans tire of him. It will happen as soon as the Soviets leave Afghanistan, wait and see. Then, we’ll go home.” All he added, before returning to Johnny’s lullaby, was that we would be leaving the official residence in Makati for a suburb further down Edsa, where mostly Philippino professionals resided. Even they couldn’t afford to send their children to the American School, and without any source of income, it would cost my father a big chunk of his savings to allow my sister and I to graduate. When I raised the subject of paying for university, my father just sipped his whiskey and shrugged, saying I would be packing as planned. “God will provide.” Driven by the desperate want to follow the path of every other child at school, I accepted him at his word as readily as I believed that I too was G.I. Joe.

We also talked about how badly Kate had taken their break up. Alex thought, “She’s not who she pretends to be.” That self-assured, capable voice I heard by day, quivered in the dark with him. “Her mom is pretty hard on her.” I guessed something more than losing Alex accounted for the severity of her despair of late, but Alex’s insight still came as a surprise. I imagined that Kate lived the peachy, Midwestern life of sitcoms, albeit under the shadow of a volcano. After all, even the manhole covers of the IRRI compound were ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Still, I figured Alex knew better. I’d barely met Kate’s family. He’d practically lived with them. And once alerted by Alex, Kate’s behavior, too, did nothing to dispel the idea that she was not the person she fought so hard to project; that the troubled individual Alex tried to put behind him, was in fact the same person he had first asked out on a date. And Kate’s mother would do one thing, of which I‘m personally aware and will refer in good time, to suggest that she was somehow involved.

*

Kate’s response to my conversations with Alex clashed with our plans in ways we had not expected. Time dulled none of her anguish, but every passing minute fortified her resolve to reconstruct the past she longed for. She would graduate early, too. She would stalk the streets through the night. She would travel with us. Alex and I squirmed, though each for our own reasons, and Kate was perceptive enough to know it. She would feel ganged up on when he and I were swilling vodka and professing our atheism, our socialism, in some elitist club, while she sipped cola and defended Jesus. She stood apart to scold us when we’d pass some racist slur about the native masses around us, some juvenile thing we’d found funny when she hadn’t been around. She felt isolated when we’d break our promises to attend some play she was in, or some function to which she was invited, because we’d spent the night toking in the paddy fields by Lake Laguna. It all came to a head when she got her greatest wish.

In her good old days, Kate, Alex, and his parents had taken a scuba course and diving expeditions around the Philippine archipelago ranked high on her list of fondest memories. One had been arranged before their break up and was on the agenda now: a weekend on Bonito Island, diving the reefs and rock faces that surrounded it. My parents had not the expendable income to fund scuba lessons, let alone diving expeditions, but Alex said there’d be an extra hammock in his nipa hut, he’d give me some diving tips and we could snorkel, too. I wasn’t fooled: he wanted me to run interference with Kate. I only agreed because of the ferocity of his dread and the intensity of my never-ending quest for destinations other than my own troubled home.

Why did Kate want me along? She slept with her head on my shoulder the entire way from Los Banos to Batangas on the bus. She clung to my arm on the choppy banka ride over to Bonito. She sat close to me when we feasted by the fireside on fish and prawns pulled from the turquoise waters around us. We even shared a regulator in a school of yellow angel fish twenty feet below the surface of the sea. I was taken aback. We had never been this intimate. I think I even looked to Alex for an explanation our first night on the island. A silent grin reached across his face in response to my dropped jaw. We were all on the beach when Kate used my thigh as her pillow. I didn’t think she was trying to make Alex jealous. Perhaps that was naïve, but I’m still not convinced that was her intent. I believe she was simply casting me in his role the way she’d scripted this excursion long ago. Of course, it didn’t work. By the end of our final day, she broke. All the anguish of that afternoon at Tia’s erupted with the ferocity of Mount Pinatubo.  I told Alex there was nothing I could do. He had to face her. So, he spent the night in her nipa hut, trying to dampen her sobs with pats on her back, while I writhed under a mosquito net within earshot, trying to escape more than insects and the guttural calls of the geckos in their pursuit.

I found myself unable to toss and turn for another minute, just before dawn. Restless, I decided to find a spot from which to watch the sunrise. The bamboo patio of my hut was not ideal; it faced west. But, Bonito is a small, rocky island and I figured it wasn’t a long hike through the swaying palms to the unexplored eastern shore. To my surprise, it was uphill all the way – difficult going by the light of a torch – and I winced at every crackle in the underbrush, imagining that creatures more fierce than geckos lay in wait. I was certainly relieved when I finally found myself peering through the dense foliage and over a crest at the last flicker of the moon on the sea. There was a bench on the cliff at the end of the path, but what I hadn’t anticipated was the silhouette of Kate seated on it.        

Struck dead in my tracks, I turned off my torch, thinking myself hidden in the palms. Deciding I should turn back, I was about to go when she swiveled in her seat and smiled serenely, gesturing for me join her with a raised eyebrow just visible in the moonlight. I approached gingerly, unsure of what to say and not exactly thrilled at the prospect of dealing with her woes when sleep deprived. Once seated awkwardly beside her, I settled on simply asking if she was alright. “I am,” she nodded, wrapping an arm around me, drawing close. While she stroked my hair, gazing out to sea--I, still and heavy as the boulders around us--we watched the rising sun peel back the starry horizon. She only let me go when a blue, starless sky stretched over our heads and the rustling of palm fronds behind us announced that others were up. She leaped to her feet with a smile as they approached, less vivacious than affected.    

*

In the coming months, Alex avoided Kate as much as possible. I’d only see him if he was staying the night in Manila, and that was no longer too often. No more Bonitos were planned. He told me later he was hanging out with Danielle…Dannie…D--famous among the guys for her killer body, infamous among the girls for her willingness to use it. D allowed no more time than was necessary for Alex and I to finalize the details of a trip to Europe on our way to university in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Kate and I spent more time together alone. She’d take the late shuttle to IRRI, and we’d go to Green Belt Cinema to watch movies, or just head home to listen to music in my room. She was lonely and down. After that weekend on Bonito, we’d hardly held hands, but we’d grown closer than we had ever been before. No longer hiding in her books or buried in some extra-curricular activity, she also seemed to have no time for any of the countless friendships she’d courted before. No longer asking me to sit in on her dance recitals, she’d model for me in the art studio and share every random thought that entered her mind, from the particular hue of Nebraska’s endless cornfields to her love affair with Mickey-D’s quarter-pounders. Using the poses she’d strike, I’d sketch grotesque portraits of myself, hangmen for ear-rings, appendages contorted. I knew she’d always been attracted to these sides of me, but through such lengthy exchanges, she began to penetrate the unstable home that contorted her poses. I think, in some ways, reading those motley drawings led her to look up to me a little. I had been able to ground her during the worst tornado to blow through her fields of corn, despite the cyclones already raging in my back yard. Perhaps, it was not so much that she looked up to me, but that she felt small. I cannot say. All I know is that she accepted warmly when I asked her to be my date at our senior prom. It would be an interesting night, part of a larger journal of curious anecdotes surrounding graduation and our last days together in Manila.

A trident of points to mention, beside a crown of thorns…

One: throughout the period of graduation, after final exams were written, Kate stayed at our house. Two: my mother, more than her own, spent time shopping with Kate in preparation for the event. Three: Kate’s parents’ adored Alex, their blue-eyed boy.

Granted, the first two points can be explained by the fact that Kate’s parents lived in Los Banos, but the third suggests the prom would have been different if Alex had been her date. There was also the fact, which she’d confided in the time we’d spent alone, that Alex was right to think something of her melancholy had to do with a growing distance between her and her mother. Even in my presence, that woman only harped on the virtues of her eldest daughter, married and baking babies in Nebraska, and her youngest, Rebecca…Becky…B, dating the captain of the swim team, another blue-eyed boy named Jackson…Jake…J. Kate, on the other hand, poetic and curious about the world around her, received little praise or encouragement. When in Alex’s arms, she had had the feeling the distance was less. I saw myself how openly she and Alex cavorted in her mother’s company. With me, there were no invitations to dinner, and there is the matter of points one to three, mentioned above. I only saw her parents at the front door when dropping Kate home from Manila. I’ll never know if Kate or her mother was behind this last circumstance, but either way, it speaks of distance between them.

Now, the crown of thorns tearing at her brow…

When Alex and I had finalized our plans to tour Europe, Kate had expressed a desire to accompany us. Alex was, quite expectedly, unenthusiastic, but by graduation I wouldn’t have minded. Nevertheless, so as to avoid any repeat of Bonito, I told her it would be better if she didn’t come. Besides, we could see each other in the U.S., even though she was going to California, Alex to Utah, and I to Massachusetts. I know Alex told her the same. She eventually acquiesced, but at least I was oblivious to the depth of the cuts being delivered. We made her feel like a middle child, first excluded from her mother’s affections, then overlooked by her siblings; all of this on top of the spike of Alex’s unwavering resolve to remain separated. Kate obviously held all this in her heart the night of our senior prom, but it was also clear that she wasn’t going to let it spoil the occasion she had planned to spend with Alex.

It would be nothing like my previous experience at the prom. Then, I’d waved to a radiant Kate and an already uncomfortable Alex, when my date, the British Ambassador’s daughter, dragged us out before the first dance was called. We had driven through Manila, radio blaring, then parked, steaming up the windows until dawn, as we had most nights together before she left for London.

On our night, Kate had never appeared more beautiful--except, perhaps, on that moonlit bench at Bonito. We chatted at home while she applied her make-up, a rare sight, until Mum came along and ushered me out. Kate made her grand entrance down the stairs to my applause and Dad’s flashing camera, a white lacy dress falling from her shoulders with Mum still pinning a hem behind her. A corsage was duly attached. We attended the formal and danced the slow dances, before heading out with B and J, who had invited us on a cruise of Manila Bay. After the cruise, we stopped for a drink and listened to some live jazz at a hotel on the waterfront, then made our way to a party where the booze must have arrived in trucks and the weed in gunny sacks. I declined every offer, seeing Kate’s discomfort, before we headed home early.

Sooner than expected, we found ourselves on the couch in the den by the flickering light of the TV, back in the usual garb of shorts and t-shirts. We had been in touch all evening--fingers entwined, bodies close--and I hadn’t seen Kate so much at ease in ages. Even the sight of Alex at the prom with D had not fazed her. And then, the highlight of the occasion: we kissed and the rest of the night passed in each other’s embrace, both for the first time. I suspected that it was the Bonito syndrome all over again, but it was better than truck loads of booze and gunny sacks of weed, so I savored every moment without hesitation.

An emotional, but mannered parting awaited Kate and I a few days later, when I dropped her at her parent’s door in Los Banos for the last time. The piercing trident and crown of thorns, as much as our last few nights together, had taken their collective toll. I, of course, only thought of her lips on mine, her hair in my face, her waist in my arms, and wondered if I would ever feel them again. Having nothing else to give, I took the Allah pendant from the chain around my neck--placed there by my parents--and put it in her hand. I told her it would protect her while we were apart, as they had told me. Without a word, Kate strung it on her chain to dangle along with her Cross. 

*

Alex and I parted company at New York's JFK Airport after months of crawling through Europe. We felt we’d seen it all and enjoyed seeing it together, but were ready for some time apart. The only low Alex had to deal with came over a baguette and some wine in Paris, across from Notre Dame on the Left Bank, when he was shocked to see his parents waving at us from a tourist boat on the Seine. But that was on the last leg of our trip. Otherwise, he had only worried--whether walking toward the Prado in Madrid, riding a train through the Alps, or on a ferry to a Greek isle--that Kate had chosen a university in California because it was driving distance from Utah. If Fatal Attraction had been out by our travels, I’m sure he would have likened Kate to a crazed Glenn Close.

We also stopped in London, where we saw my British Ambassador’s daughter, now unemployed and living with her sister in a tiny flat. To be honest, I only contacted her because we needed a place to stay, trying to avoid the cost of hotels wherever we happened to be. She seemed a little dazed both days we spent together. Alex had no idea I had hurled some rubbish at her about the wound she’d inflicted by not writing to me in Manila, rather than more honestly declining the place in bed she offered that first night in her hometown. As far as she and Alex were concerned, I was myself. I was not. I missed Kate and was guilty every day, whether on the Acropolis or at a cinema in Zurich, wondering if she had rediscovered her vivacity after being excluded from this trip. I was also haunted by the daily certainty that my father did not have the money to pay for all this. It had been an extraordinarily long summer, and I had had no contact with Kate or my family at all. I called her the moment I checked into a motel in Boston.

I needn’t have worried, at least, regarding Kate. The roommate who informed me that Kate was attending an orientation session already knew who I was. Kate returned my call soon after…elated, effervescent. She was already talking of visiting for Christmas. “I love Boston,” she announced, still giddy. “I’ve never known winter. We’ll discover it together.”

There is a sense of hope among college freshman, quite distinct from the dread of kids entering high school. A new chapter is being written and the pen, the collegiate believes, is in his or her hand for the first time. My saga could be no different. So, I read it as a sign of things to come when on my eighteenth birthday – my first away from family – I received a grand parcel of thoughtful notes, home-baked cookies and other little trinkets from Kate. This was another first for me. No woman, other than my mother, had reached out in such ways before. It was the first inkling I had of the love between a man and a woman who weren’t related. And the smack of growth, like the rustling confetti in her birthday box, made Christmas seem an eternity away. Why walk the slushy streets of Boston? I resolved. Why not spend Thanksgiving in Kate’s warmer surroundings? I washed dishes in the cafeteria to make it happen.

Warmer than Massachusetts in November, yes, but along the stretch of Californian coast from Santa Barbara to Long Beach that Thanksgiving, it was only a matter of a few degrees. It rained and an icy gale blew off the Pacific the entire duration of my stay. It should have been a portent of doom the moment I stepped off the plane, but I was sheltered by Kate’s welcoming smile.

That evening, however, diving out of the wind and rain into a Mexican restaurant Kate had chosen because it reminded her of Tia’s, she confirmed that the storm outside would penetrate my bones, after all. Alex, she said in a whisper, averting her eyes, had descended from the frosty blue heights of Utah a couple of weeks earlier, unannounced. He’d asked to be reconciled. That surprised me, but I didn’t need to ask how she had responded. “I didn’t know what to tell you,” she explained without prompting, “You’d already bought your ticket.” That said it all.

I wanted to leave, but didn’t. We were still friends.

Love, like life itself, is as laden with twists of fate that cannot be predicted, as it is replete with omens fulfilled. By the time we stood on Santa Barbara pier on my last day, a week later, snuggling for warmth as we scanned the churning seas, she looked up at me through the drizzle and asked, “Is it possible to love two people at once?” It seems she was also acquiring an inkling of the vast, indefinable meaning of that small and easily bandied word. But, taken by the moment, I answered with an abrupt no. My head was crammed with the barely dry images of being bundled together in a bus, wondering why anyone would name a town Oxnard; huddled together under a stranger’s stoop on Long Beach, the rain pelting down, the Queen Mary across the gray waters in front of us; snuggled together watching cartoons on a coin-operated TV at LA’s bus station; throwing popcorn at the movie screen when Rocky beat the Russian guy. Together with that last day on the pier, they were all moments when she’d grabbed me from distraction to kiss.

I don’t recall the times I grabbed her. There must have been one or two, but I suspect not more. Flying east over the continent, only the occasions on which she’d reached out to me remained. Her touch had felt nothing like Bonito or the prom. It hadn’t made me feel like a substitute or second fiddle. Every sensation had been chemistry. She had laughed with me, seeing what I was seeing, like on those long, sweltering afternoons in the art studio. I had heard her every word, tuned into every frequency of her voice, just as in the many phone calls to have passed between us since I’d arrived in Boston. So, I couldn’t understand why, despite the desire in her kisses, I had not been elevated from a stand in to a contender in the larger scheme of things. Why was I still flying solo?

The passengers around me landed safely at Logan Airport; I alone crashed.

*

The plot thickens…

More than an emptiness that devours you from the inside out lurked in Massachusetts. My university was not Ivy League, I’d heard it said, because one of its football players had died on the field, leading its program to be scrapped. Even without a football team, however, tuition fees for foreign students in particular were smothered in ivy. I don’t know what my father expected from me. Did he think I’d land a scholarship within months of arriving, or better yet, a job that could cover the exorbitant tuition fees, room, and board? I suppose so. Before Thanksgiving, that’s all I’d been pressed to achieve in every letter and phone call from home. After Thanksgiving, second semester fees being due, those cries for action were turning to screams of disappointment. I was failing him, somehow. And, although I’d not spent a penny from home on California--dirty dishes had even purchased my books and other school supplies--I was riddled with guilt. I was also distraught. The prospect of throwing in the towel after only a few months in the US, to return to a grimace in Manila, was not something I relished. Neither God nor my father had provided, but I was supposed to? I broke down and called Alex. We hadn’t spoken since JFK.       

Obviously, my turning to Alex was not helped by the Kate situation. She may have told him of my feelings for her before I visited California, but I never had and wasn’t going to start now that all was in the open. Yet, I had to call Alex, because his grandfather was on the board of directors at Utah State University, where Alex was pretending to study while he skied. The fees there were considerably less than Ivy League and a speedy transfer of credits could insure against visa hassles. Perhaps, Kate had even suggested, I speak with Alex at some point; I can’t recall. Anyway, when Alex said that he’d do everything he could, I didn’t feel the offer was insincere. I think he was feeling quite isolated himself, up in his frosty blue mountains, surrounded by the Mormons who had excommunicated his parents. And I had no choice but to believe that he’d be happy to see me. My visa did not allow me to work off campus, and if I dropped out, I had no right to remain in the country. So, I resigned myself to make the move to Logan, Utah.

One more thing…

While awaiting the call from Alex’s grandfather to confirm the paperwork was done, the phone rang one night after everyone else had left the dorm for Christmas break. I hoped it was Kate. It wasn’t. Out of the blue and as remote as the Rocky Mountain peaks around Logan, it was the British Ambassador’s daughter. She spoke casually, laughing over the ruckus around her, saying she was in New York for a small reunion with some of our former classmates. She was wondering if I’d like to join them. I said no. I was broke. She said it was good to hear my voice anyway, before hanging up with a thud.    

A few hours later, the phone rang again. Not Kate. It was another voice from the past – the Indian girlfriend with whom the British Ambassador’s daughter was staying in Scarsdale. She said our mutual friend was beside herself. She said that when we’d met in London over the summer, I’d convinced her how deep my feelings for her ran. She’d only crossed the Atlantic to see me. I had to make the short journey from Boston to New York. She’d give me the money if I was broke.

I went to New York on my father’s coin, albeit hesitantly. I told myself the girl who greeted me so warmly at Scarsdale Station did so for the same reason she had offered me a place in her bed in London. She’d had a difficult time adjusting to life in England. It couldn’t have been easy after spending her childhood in all the places England had once owned. I understood that much, at least. So when she offered me a place in her bed in New York, I didn’t squirm out of it. This time, I crumbled into it.

I know I shouldn’t have done it. I know I should have told her about Kate, instead of repeating the line I had delivered in London, that my anguish was a sign of her earlier rejection. I know I lied because I sought solace in her arms, just as she did in mine. By our second kiss, I even set aside the nagging suspicion that this was how Kate had felt with me in California.

Bidding her farewell under the magnificent ceiling at Grand Central a couple of days later, she overcome with grief and I with renewed guilt, I took the chain from around my neck--the same one from which I’d given the Allah pendant to Kate--binding it around her wrist, to remember me by, I said. I felt ashamed. She knew I’d be disappearing into the frosty blue of Utah soon after, but had no clue that keeping in touch was not high on my list of priorities. Self preservation alone was on my mind, not least because I was following in the footsteps of Brigham Young without the protection of any God.

*

Alex, snow ten feet high and a racial slur I had never heard before--‘grit’--awaited me that January in Utah. I had encountered other colorful epithets in Boston, of course--Paki, Rag-Head, Spic, Nigger--but not even Alex knew what this one meant when some red-necks threw it at me from their passing truck on Logan’s main street. We conjectured that it referenced the dirty, brown grit strewn on the roads for de-icing, or the dish known as grits on the menu of soul food restaurants. But this wasn’t my most pressing problem. In my desperation not to return home, I hadn’t considered how awkward I’d feel when Kate called Alex, or if I wanted to talk with her for any reason. I hadn’t imagined how alienating that would be. It must have been the same for Alex, because we spent those months in Utah binging on weed and cheap gallons of wine, rather than talking about anything.

In Massachusetts, I’d actually attended classes and studied. I’d worked at the cafeteria. I’d reserved alcohol and marijuana for weekends and avoided buying much myself. But two weeks high in the Rockies, it was like sea level in Manila. Only, it evoked none of the thrill it once had. We were just up all night, sleeping after breakfast and making sure that no one else on our dormitory floor slept at all. Classes, be damned. There was something mean about us; something bitter. Perhaps it was just my third wheel driving Alex. Perhaps I was simply crushed by the inevitability of my departure. But I don’t think so. As I mentioned, Alex’s home was as unstable as mine and we were never at university to study. I think seeing each other again only pushed us toward the realization that the lives we’d lived in the tropical splendor of the Philippines, the lives we’d run from, were in fact the lives we’d imagined lay in our futures. We now knew, because such lives were nowhere to be found knee-deep in rednecks and over our heads in snow, that those had been lives of privilege, lost. This realization scared us as much as our previous imaginings had thrilled. I understood why he called Kate. I’d call her too, separately, when I could.      

So it was that one night in March, stowed away in the basement of our dormitory, far from our floor, Kate and I fell into a conversation prompted by the overdue acceptance that it was time to drop out of university altogether and head back to Manila. Nothing else would ease the financial crisis at home. I didn’t know what I’d do there, I tried to explain, but at least I’d be cheaper to maintain. Kate first responded with a pregnant silence. Not until I wondered if we’d been cut off, did she speak. “That’s probably best,” she finally blurted in a voice I had not heard from her before. This was not the voice that usually greeted people with Ola. This was not the person who’d been wearing her Allah pendant in Santa Barbara. This was a new voice, at least to me. This was her mother’s voice. She asked, “What would Christmas be like, anyway,” me with her blue-eyed family? How would they react to my “praying to a different God,” if I pray at all? “We’re from different worlds.”

All my life, I had been told the world is one, whatever the color of one’s eyes. I had been raised to believe there is only one God, if any. And even if I had been blinded by my upbringing, it was only because I had been led to think (by American School after American School) that Americans, more than anyone else on earth, espoused the same values as me. I was stunned to learn otherwise from Kate, of all people. All I could do was agree without argument. For the first time, I understood why I was not a contender. Only in the Philippines could I be confused for G.I. Joe. She had reduced California to Bonito and the prom, after all. I couldn’t stay.

Alex and I drove to Santa Barbara a few days later, picked up Kate and moved on to LA, checking into a motel for the night before my morning flight. I bought a bottle of something, but not even Alex was in the mood. I poured myself glass after glass anyway--it was expected of me and it provided an excuse to pass out. In fact, I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, feeding a potted plant most of my drink when no one was looking. The next morning, we set off for LAX with Kate sandwiched between Alex and me on the bench seat, looking uncomfortable. She cried while Alex took a walk to give us some time to bid farewell at the airport. She told me she’d be writing me a letter every week, and that she loved me. I told myself I shouldn’t care, that I was an idiot … a shameful idiot.

*

A people’s uprising had shaken the Philippines while I’d been watching my life explode like the space-shuttle on take-off. Marcos--Manila’s long-ruling general--was now in Hawai'i under U.S. protection. Everyone in the diplomatic community knew a suitable replacement would soon arise from the abandoned piles of Imelda’s shoes, but without diplomatic immunity of his own, the uprising had left my father feeling vulnerable. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. Was it time for a rapprochement with his general? Should he wait for the inevitable fall, as planned? And what’s more, my dropping out of school had not settled his nerves, as I’d hoped. In fact it only added the burden of explaining my premature return to his friends.        

Obviously, my return to the Philippines was marked by none of McCarthy’s triumphant bravado. I returned in the shape that McCarthy had left: in tatters, self-esteem trampled. Worse yet, unlike the cheers that restored McCarthy’s sense of self upon his promised return, my parents only added to my sense of worthlessness. My father, unemployed but still riding on the fumes of his former privileges, described me to his poker buddies--all fathers of classmates not yet back for the summer--as a good-for-nothing who had bankrupted him in America, chasing girls. My mother, glad to have her baby boy back home, told the wives at the table not to listen to her husband, that I was a sensitive boy, I’d been hopelessly homesick, I’d missed my mother. And finally, when no one else was around to impress, they bickered over which of my weaknesses had carried me prematurely home.

Nothing, however, robbed me of an illustrious return more thoroughly than Kate’s letters, which arrived like clockwork every month. She wrote pages and pages, but managed to say nothing at all. She told me her parents had moved back to the US, her father taking up a position at the University of Nebraska, and that she had left California to live and study under their wing. She recounted her routine in excruciating detail, even describing the bicycle route from her house to campus and every person with whom she worked at an ice cream parlor. I learned more about micro-biology--her field of study--than I ever cared to know. And I endured directions to all the best spots for Mexican food in her new town, the latest developments in the lives of second-cousins twice removed, and miscellaneous odds and ends gathered on excursions across the U.S. and Europe.

It was as if Kate had accomplished what nature itself had eschewed. Every month’s letter was menstruation. Most of the month I’d maintain an even keel, but as the time for a letter approached, I’d begin feeling queasy, weepy, ill at ease. I’d stop eating properly. I’d snap at people. Then the letter would arrive and I’d bleed. My only relief was the crew of Philippino neighbors my sister had gathered around herself during my absence. In their company, I remained G.I. Joe.  

Nevertheless, I was glad to leave Manila when my father finally decided to take his chances in Pakistan. No matter the manner in which I may have been perceived, I knew I was not an American action hero. What’s more, time with my Pinoy neighbors reconfirmed that I was also not one of the locals racing souped-up Japanese compacts on Edsa Boulevard. Besides which, I was tired of avoiding the former classmates who had returned for the summer and, breaking with the routine of previous moves, I made no pretense of keeping in touch with anyone.       

Kate’s letters, however, pursued me to Karachi--that’s why I bled on the shores of the Arabian Sea as profusely as on the pavement outside our house in Manila. I duly dispatched a postcard from time to time, but Karachi provided one counter to cramps that had not been available in Manila. This was the realization that, if I kept my mouth shut, I could blend right in with the kids racing souped-up Japanese compacts on Sharea Faisal. I capitalized by taking up a job as a front-desk clerk at one of Karachi’s five-star hotels--valued for my English skills. This paid for weekends at the beach and travels from the deserts beyond the city, northward with the twists and turns of the Indus into the shadow of the roof of the world. Looking past the multitudes sleeping in the grime, I discovered ruined cities as ancient as Egypt’s pyramids; castles, palaces, and tombs drawn with the same pen as the Taj Mahal; music played in ecstasy and despair; and poetry and lore as complex as the fabric of time itself. But most importantly, unearthed from under the sands, dredged from the bottom of that mighty river and imbibed from the sun reflected off Himalayan peaks, I discovered that, if my accent did not betray me, I could claim all of this as mine.

The same process of rediscovery that made me want to stay, led my father to question his return almost as soon as we arrived. His contacts in government had evaporated with the constant shuffles taking place. People who once flocked to his side, now avoided him. Money was running out. He couldn’t secure his pension, let alone a new posting, so long as the general remained in power. And worst of all, the general’s promise to his American superiors was threatening to wipe out the very heritage and culture which I was busy claiming. In the charge of the general and his friends from the CIA, Pakistan was fast joining the ranks of places and people that did not believe in one God for all. I cannot blame my father for flying to Islamabad to begin the process of immigration to Canada less than two months after we arrived in Karachi.

*

A year later, we stepped off a plane and into a hotel in Toronto. A letter from Kate was waiting for me when we arrived. She said I was missed, valued, and that she was glad that we shared a continent, again. “When will we get together?” she asked. Anytime, I replied immediately. But she would have to make the journey north. I was trying desperately to find my feet in my fourth country in two years. I was broke. All true, except for one sin of omission: once bitten, twice shy. It was late summer now and she responded within days; school was about to start, but she’d be with me for Christmas. As it happened, in the coming months, she wrote of many other excursions, but the one in my direction was finally aborted on account of family obligations. I didn’t wait for the next bout of cramps. The bloodletting had to end. I picked up a pen and instructed her to stop writing. Again, a response arrived in days. She refused my request, saying she would continue writing even if I burned her letters, that she loved me, that she could explain everything, that my image of her had become warped…

Kate’s final letter, though not my final period, was posted from Nebraska in time to drop in the mailbox on my twenty-first birthday, my second in Toronto. In it and the letters leading up to it, a new voice had issued from Kate, one that bore no traces of the one on the phone in Utah or the letters written before I asked her not to write. It was an older voice, a more mature voice, a voice I had heard before, back in Manila at the art studio and on the pier in Santa Barbara. It spoke of more than lab experiments, the idiocy of cousins, or the texture of sauerkraut encountered on some trip to Germany. It expressed some sadness and evinced some of the understanding that had crept up on her without her knowing. She said that it pained her not to know how I was. She’d undergone an operation lately and it had made her think, that it had switched things around in her head, as she put it. She had been planning trips to surprise me, but they kept falling through. She had picked up the phone many times, but could not bring herself to dial my number, fearing that all on my end had been instructed to tell her I wasn’t home. She knew she had no credibility, but she had experienced a sense of loss that she had only just come to realize. She would not write to me again, as I requested, but urged me to speak with her. I didn’t.

Alex was not such a prolific writer, and those were not the days of email. Apart from the odd postcard passing between us in that time of motion, I knew little more of his comings and goings than that he too had dropped out after freshman year and moved from Utah to D.C., where his mother, now divorced from his father, had set up house. So I was taken aback when he showed up at my doorstep in Toronto, soon after Kate’s last letter had fallen from my hands. Over the next few days, mostly spent at my favorite watering hole on Queen Street, Alex was uncharacteristically subdued, listening to me reminisce about our travels or babble on about being tired of handing out movies at a video store. My father drove a taxi. My mother worked in a boutique at the Eaton Centre. Home was unstable as ever, but divorce remained out of the question. My menial job helped pay the rent, but I couldn’t live with my parents anymore, so I was planning on going back to school, funding my newfound interest in history with student loans. I knew nobody ... I was seeing no one ...

He waited until our last night together, but Alex finally interrupted my immigrant’s tale with the stunning news that his father had recently passed away. I was dumbfounded. It was deemed a hunting accident, he explained. “Of course,” he added, circumspect, “I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. He knew how to handle a rifle. And what’s more, I was left to clear out his place.... He’d been living in El Paso, supposedly working for an organization that supported Latino immigrants ...” He paused to shake his head. “Guess what I found in the back of his closet? A box full of documents, transcripts of interrogations he’d conducted going all the way back to Vietnam. Remember how we used to joke that he was CIA and your father was ISI? Well, it seems we were half right.” He sipped his beer and shrugged, looking bemused. “My whole life has been a lie, man.”

I didn’t know what to say, other than offer my condolences, but Alex didn’t seem interested. “In D.C.,” he said, the floodgates now open, “I spent my time drifting from dead end job to job. It made my folks think I was trying. But now, after having finally met my Dad, I say fuck it. I’m going to live as I want. I’m on my way to Egypt. It’s going to be great. I’ve landed a gig as a scuba instructor in Sinai. Then, I’m heading back to Utah to hit the slopes. I hope this hot Israeli girl I met in D.C. can be coaxed along for the ride.” He smiled.

Kate had not entered our conversation, but now I had to ask. What had happened after I left the U.S.? Were they still in touch? He was surprised to hear that I was not in touch with her. He said that they’d spoken here and there over the last couple of years, but things really hadn’t worked out after I left. They’d driven to San Francisco after dropping me off at LAX. It had been a miserable time. She’d cried a lot, as she had on every occasion they’d met since. I thanked him for trying to spare my feelings.

“I especially made myself scarce after her ‘troubles’,” he added off-handedly. What troubles, I asked. “Oh, man. It’s classic. Sometime back she finally let go and went to some frat party, got smashed and slept with some guy. Wouldn’t you know it, a month later she figured out she was pregnant and spent the next few weeks arranging an abortion without her Jesus-freak parents finding out. She told me about it after it was all over, but she insisted that I don’t mention anything to you, so you didn’t hear any of this from me.”      

I don’t know why Kate didn’t tell me. I could speculate, but I won’t. All I can say is that I bled for Kate and called her one last time after Alex picked up his back-pack and dove into the Red Sea, never to be heard from again. Kate’s mother answered when I called. She said that Kate had moved to Baltimore, where she was beginning graduate work in some scientific field. She didn’t offer me her daughter’s address or phone number, and I didn’t ask. I merely requested that she inform Kate that I called and that I hoped she was well. When I didn’t hear from Kate, I wasn’t surprised. Maybe it is to shield my heart, but I like to think that her mother never passed on my message. I didn’t have the strength or the courage to track Kate down and find out for myself. I was afraid she’d chosen Baltimore because it was close to D.C. Besides, Kate and Alex were home now. Manila was a receding memory. Only I was still a scribbler, still an interloper just enrolled in another American School.