This Week’s Winner
Salem Bacol, 25, was a scholar of a Japanese shipping line in college and worked onboard a vessel for almost a year when he was 19. This allowed him to visit Japan, the US and Canada. He currently works in a call center in Makati. He reads Cormac McCarthy and believes no one can touch the man in contemporary literature.
You are a shadow that burns like a sapphire in the dark. In the dark of the room, you can see the wall outside the window and beyond it you see nothing. As the night sucks out the paling light of day, you listen to Damien Rice as he sings away his nine crimes, his voice trailing off to the hollows of your skull where there are no echoes to be heard and no light to be seen.
You dreamed of this five years ago. You were 20 and you felt the need to have street credibility. You dreamed of a world where there are no phony demands, where bohemian people seek out that which is true and encompassing. As you stood at the bow of the ship staring into the Pacific, you spat into thin water and promised yourself you wouldn’t waste your youth working in the confines of that vessel, dabbling grease and paint and rust.
That night, the bosun told stories of his early seafaring years and how he had spent more years onboard a vessel than on land. He showed a scar on his left breast and he said he got it from a fight with an Indian officer. They chased each other the entire length of the ship and when the officer finally caught up with him, he stabbed him with a knife. The blades ran two inches across his breast and he proudly wore what little trace was left of it.
You left the crew in the middle of an animated conversation and you found your way to your cabin, drunk and spaced out. You picked up some random reading and as the ship transited the Bering Sea under the optic moon, you followed John Grady, the brainchild of Cormac McCarthy, into a world of understated rules and wild reckonings.
All The Pretty Horses it was called, and the book still rings true in your mind. After all these years. Like some chronic disease stuck in your system for good.
You can still hear the gunshot and the silence after the gunshot that killed Jimmy Blevins. In your mind, you still see John Grady, cold and bloody, as he stabbed a Mexican in naked anger.
The book shook you like Ecclesiastes, and during daytime, this prose would run its pages in your mind as you worked your way up to the ship’s mast. You wanted something like it. You wanted to discover life and something bigger than life and you knew you would have a shot with an eight-to-five job in Manila. Eight-to-five and you would have the rest of your waking hours to yourself, to flirt with pop culture and scour the dark recesses of the city.
Two months later, you handed your resignation letter to the captain.
As you walked down the gangway of the ship, it seemed you were walking down into a strange world below and it scared you but it was yours for the taking and so you walked down anyway. You grew up in the rural melancholy of Antique where everyone was a saint and now this was your one chance to discover MTV and life in a rugged prism.
It was a romantic idea, for if John Grady could mess with pain and get away with it, so could you. John Grady filtered pain and “imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.”
Five years and now you know that there are limits. That to be a human is to fall, fall hard.
In the interim of those years, you walked Avenida in the middle of the night searching for something you tried to define. There is no defining, you concluded, and as you looked at whores in the eye, you tried to see if there’s God or damnation and you saw nothing. You passed beggars sleeping in the sidewalks, their faces filthy and cold in the light of the passing cars, and you imagined what their dreams could be and you realized dreams were all they had.
Occasionally, you would pull off some caustic humor. You once stopped a jeepney in the middle of Pedro Gil because the driver wouldn’t let you cross the street. You stopped and gave him the finger.
John Grady went on a journey to follow his dreams and you went on your own to make mistakes. You said mistakes were all you needed to face the next 50 years of your life and that to make mistakes early on was to avoid them later in life.
The whole family talks of nothing but you now. They look at you like you’re a sorry case, and you look back with a smirk. Your cousin recently confronted you when she learned you only visit home every six months to borrow money. The last time you saw your uncle, he spoke of mistakes and their repercussions. You wanted to talk back, to tell him that they made mistakes when they were younger, too — graver ones — and that if they had the license to commit them, why couldn’t you?
You wanted to tell them that your mistakes sprang from their mistakes and theirs from their fathers’ and so on until they trace their way back to the ancient curse that sprang through time.
Yesterday, you heard some news about an Austrian who locked her daughter in the cellar for 24 years. This dog of a man raped her all those years and she bore him seven children.
You rushed to YouTube to look at this man in the eye, to see evil up-close and be done with it once and for all. What you saw was what you saw in yourself — some rage and substance in a different form and fashion, but rage and substance just the same. What you saw was John Grady looking at the dripping blood in his weapon as he figured that the evil he saw in the world was the same evil that was in him.
Could evil have its compensation in goodness?
Five years and now you spill your guts in public. This is your accounting and this is where we meet. We are one, but what I’d give to be like you, to be half the man that you are. In the dark, you stand and gather yourself. You relive every mistake and you aim to forget.
Your biggest mistake was living your prose. In five years, it will be your redemption.