Recalling the past

By Jing Villamil

HAVE you gone through an experience of so many years ago and suddenly something you did today simply attaches itself right unto that particular past? Like the dot to your i or j or the cross to your t?

The monosyllabic IF YOU HAD CALLED by Emmanuelle, written and published just recently, laments:

If you have called, I would have smashed through your dark walls. I would have wrapped these arms tight round your pain, your fears. We would have hummed songs of joys past to hush your hurt.

I could have brought you a blue rose so dear, so rare You would have smiled!

But you had not called. And, for you, I had done none of those.

Now, let us trek back through time. CANNOT BE REACHED was written and published October 4, 2010:

STORY 1. She should not have taken that one last bottle of light beer. The beer was everything but light. It was also the “last tagay na ito!” that lasted and lasted and lasted to way past the last stroke of midnight. When the group broke up, dawn was just a wink of an eye away.

She took all the usual security precautions. A drinking buddy saw her to the taxi stand. She made sure the buddy noted the plate number of the taxi she took. She also texted the plate number to a dormitory friend and that she will be arriving in less than twenty minutes not a second more.

She never arrived. Somewhere along the way, the taxi took a one-way route from which there was no coming back healthy, untarnished, and alive. Sometime between the first quiver of alarm and the last scream of her life, she was frantically calling her friends.

The woman manning the network circuit kept intoning: “the number you have dialed is either unattended or out of coverage”. The friends cannot be reached.

STORY 2. Nick is truly Jam’s best friend. He disapproves of the jam Jam had lately gotten himself into. Yet, when the going got tough, he found he did not have the heart to let Jam down.

Despising himself for this weakness, he shrinks his bulk further to fit behind his hiding place of a tree trunk. He is Jam’s lookout. Jam is with his lover whose other boyfriend may appear anytime on the pebbled path straddled by the tree.

Suddenly, Nick sees him, swaying and stumbling. Nick swears. “Lagot, this guy is either high or drunk.”

Nick’s plump thumb stabs the call key. The woman manning the network circuit intones: “the number you are calling is busy at this time; please try your call later”. Again and again, Nick stabs the green key. “Sh_t, sh_t, sh_t. How busy can you get, Jam!”

Jam cannot be reached. The police and the ambulance did reach him though. But long after the other boyfriend’s knife had stabbed into Jam’s innards again and again.

STORY 3. Then comes the most awaited portion of this noontime show, where from the red tambiolo the host plucks out the number of the lucky winner from the audience. After awarding the cash prize, the host draws again, this time from the green tambiolo. He unrolls the piece of paper, he reads the cell phone number of the registered home viewer who will receive the same hefty prize as the studio winner.

He dials the number. The number rings. And rings. And rings. The woman manning the network circuit intones: “the number you are calling cannot be rich”.

If the dialed numbers in the above stories were reached, would their owners be alive, lovelier, richer?

No other way then but to . . . get rid of the woman manning the network circuits!

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