Short story
This story, like all stories, begins and ends with death. On a sultry afternoon on the fourth of June 2016, the journalist, Irene Varela-Cruz, was shot by two masked assailants behind the counter of the bookshop she and her husband ran on the first floor of their two-story house on Maginhawa Street, Quezon City.
Irene died slowly, painfully. Coroner reports released to the public a week after the news of her death indicated the cause as asphyxiation due to blunt force trauma. The assailants, wielding unregistered 0.22 caliber Chinese handguns, had aimed at her throat, rupturing her windpipe and carotid arteries. The heavy outflow of blood obstructed her breathing, and Irene could do nothing – as footage retrieved from the bookshop’s CCTV would later show – but thrash her arms and legs violently on the shop’s hardwood floor, in a pool of her own blood, her unidentified killers standing over her while she drowned to her death. She couldn’t even scream.
Irene’s death gripped the public, was immediately turned into a national sensation by various activist groups who proceeded to rally at universities, outside Malacanang Palace, calling for a stop to what had then become a string of violent crackdowns against dissident reporters. Apparently, Irene had been publishing a series of controversial articles for one of the big weeklies, laying out dirty laundry from the incumbent mayor who had just won the elections as relayed to her by two whistleblowing informers. Just before her murder, Irene had already published three of these articles, and investigations by two independent think-tanks, the Commission on Human Rights, and the National Bureau of Investigation were turning up incontrovertible evidence from the breadcrumbs in Irene’s writings. Rumor had it that she was publishing two more, building towards a final conclusion that would completely expose the mayor – along with various other political figures involved in his schemes. Somebody – or a group of somebodies – had obviously wanted to put a stop to it.
But without a shred of doubt the tragedy hit nobody stronger than it did Irene’s husband, William Cruz, then chief statistician for elections survey operations at a prominent opinion polling firm. On that fatal afternoon in June, Will was at the firm’s main headquarters in Ortigas, a one-hour drive from Maginhawa, his chief concern at the moment being the orange thumbnail-sized splotch of jjamppong noodles he had splattered on his turquoise long-sleeves over lunch, completely unaware of the grisly scene lying in wait for him at home.
What followed was a week-long funeral procession that seemed to stretch out into eternity. At her parents’ request, Irene was given a public wake, visited by a gala of politicians, leaders of activist groups, TV personalities with known leanings towards the left. Will was invited to give statements, on collegiate publications, on newspapers, for the morning and evening news. They asked Will to recount coming home to his wife’s dead body, and the subsequent honor he felt knowing she had died defending the freedom of the press. He declined them all. There was no honor, and whatever warm, lustrous thing “honor” was supposed to refer to, he couldn’t find it. Not in himself, or on his wife’s pale, stone-cold corpse. All he felt was shock. He stood for hours by the open casket, trying to make closure with the dressed-up body tucked below the glass cover in a grotesque mockup of sleep. He sat at the frontmost pew, beside his in-laws entertaining the night’s guest of honor, sipping coffee from a paper cup. The coffee turning to cold mud the instant they touched his tongue. Those two weeks passed before him like a film in slow motion, with the sound turned off.
Will’s only reprieve during that week, and in the months that followed, came from Irene’s older brother, Matt. For as long as Irene was alive and well in this world, the two men hardly communicated. Not for any feelings of animosity, but simply the general sense of apathy that older brothers tend to have towards their sisters’ boyfriends. Prior to the funeral, the most words they’d exchanged was on the greeting card that came with Matt’s wedding gift (an espresso machine, for the couple’s caffeine habit), and the corresponding thank-you note that Will wrote him a week after the honeymoon. Will didn’t even know the exact nature of Matt’s work, only that Irene had mentioned once that he was in tech.
As a testament to the binding power of tragedies, after the funeral the two men fell briskly into an intimacy from which, for a year and a half, they never recovered. Matt arrived late the first night of the funeral, having come all the way from work in Makati, through the unmovable feast that was EDSA traffic. He padded over to the front pew, received a generous scolding from his parents for being late, shook hands upon being introduced to a senator, and then slowly made his way towards the casket for a look at his late sister. He idled a while at the casket, admiring with morbid curiosity the skilled hand that had waxed and airbrushed over her sister’s wounds. Nothing from the CCTV footage as shown censored over the nightly news (and uncensored on the various real life gore threads online) survived the mortician’s craft. Irene looked as though she had just decided to go to sleep and never woke, maybe in embarrassment at her now suddenly thicker neck. When Will saw him next, he was sitting to his left, patting him on the shoulder, and in a subdued tone asking if maybe he wanted to get the hell out of there.
“It’s like a circus in there,” Matt explained as they jogged downstairs to the parking lot. “No room to grieve.”
They loaded into Matt’s Innova, and Matt took him to a bar along Tomas Morato where for the next five days, and every other Friday for thirteen months after the wake, they would meet and catch up over drinks. For the first five months, all they talked about was Irene, and Will relished the fact that he had someone to talk to about his wife. Grief, thought Will, especially for a dead loved one, was a deep wound that you healed only by succumbing to it, by placing yourself at its mercy, and living out each day in remembrance of the pain. Without those Friday night beers with Matt, the time it took for him to move on from Irene’s death would have taken much longer. This he believed.
At the end of that week, Irene’s body was transferred for cremation at the Chinese Cemetery, where Irene’s family owned a private plot. At Matt’s suggestion, they stayed behind while the rest of the procession squeezed into the small chapel to watch Irene’s cremation from behind a glass screen. Matt brought along a canister of coffee – “for this, we have to be sober,” he explained – and they stood side-by-side on the front lawn of the crematorium watching billows of white smoke rising into the sky painted deep blue in the approaching eve. It was almost like watching her ascend into heaven.
Irene’s irises dappled with the reflected neon glow of the pool’s underwater lights. I love you, she had whispered to him, and Will learned how it felt to drown in open air.
“How are you, Will?”
They were at the bar on Tomas Morato, already on their third round of booze. A Friday in November, more than five months past Irene’s death. Though activist groups still commemorated the name Irene Varela-Cruz, on a list of hundreds – no, thousands – others that met similar, some even grislier fates, by then the rest of the public had completely forgotten, having moved on with the media towards more current sensations. Now only they remembered, but the heavy cloud that hung over their Friday beers had long since passed, and the name came up only here and there by way of some stray memory, a sudden, dusty relic discovered by chance inside the narrow crannies and crawlspaces of the mind.
That was when Matt told him about the Eurydice project.
“I’m alright,” said Will. “Really, I feel like I’m finally pulling through.”
It was his standard, go-to reply when people – that was, his boss, his colleagues, his parents, his in-laws –asked how he was doing, and until then the only person to whom he hadn’t said it was Matt. Matt would have seen right through him, and for that same reason Matt wouldn’t have asked. He seemed to share a similar philosophy towards grief. For the first time Will said that line and actually believed it himself.
“That’s good,” Matt said, elongating the good. He took a swig of his beer. He was restless that night. He kept fingering the neck of his bottle or bothering with his tie. The television behind the bar was tuned to the evening news. An anchor was covering the sputtering end of a snap rally held in dissent of the government’s clandestine transfer of the remains of the late, murderous dictator to the Heroes’ Cemetery. Despite it being a Friday night and almost the Yuletide break, there were only three other customers in the bar: an old man sitting at a corner table near the door nursing a glass of Scotch, and a couple, presumably in college, sitting near the center discussing the contents of a stack of manuscripts – the girl’s thesis, by the looks of it – on the table over their second bucket of beers. The bartender sat on a stool behind the counter next to the fridge with the see-through door, his back against the wall, reading a hardbound novel.
“You still dream about her?” Matt asked.
“Sometimes.”
In the weeks immediately succeeding Irene’s death, during and after the funeral, not a night passed that she didn’t visit him in his sleep. The dream was always the same: that afternoon in June, but instead of his office in Pasig, he would be there, with her. He would walk inside the store and find Irene alive and well reading a book at her spot behind the counter. He’d missed her so much. He had so many things he wanted to tell her. He would walk up to her. But just when he’d come within touching distance, the armed men would come.
They would break through the glass doors with their TV bodybuilder frames, clad in black jumpsuit, bulky assault rifles slung around their necks. He would scream at Irene, tell her to go, get away from here, but she wouldn’t listen. She’d keep reading her book as the men approached her, utterly oblivious to his warnings or to the almost metric left-right-left-right-left-right marching of their combat boots on the hardwood floor. Irene they’re going to kill you! But Irene would stay where she was, hardly looking up from her book, and the men have pointed their rifles at her throat. And just before he woke up, a vision of their fingers squeezing the trigger. He would wake up back in their bedroom, on the second floor, just above the scene of the crime, his side of the bed drenched in sweat, hers cold and empty.
That was then. The dreams have since petered out, though when it did come it was still the same dream, not a detail changed. That his subconscious could exhibit such specificity amused Will to some degree. That was how grief worked: first it gripped you, then you were back in the world.
“How are the details?”
“What do you mean?”
“Crisp?”
“Like daylight.”
“That’s good.”
Matt downed the rest of his beer.
“Will, listen to me.”
Matt began explaining the nature of his work. It occurred to Will then that for the five months that they’d been coming here to drink and talk about his sorrows, he never once asked him about his work. He was flustered. He took a long sip of beer to hide the embarrassment rising on his face. He was beginning to feel bad about having been so self-centered, but Matt didn’t leave him enough time for that. There were more pressing issues at hand.
“I work for Sense/Net.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of them.”
“I hope not,” Matt said. “Our business is mostly for the military. We develop neurotechnologies – no, not for brain surgeries. We’re talking devices that can interface with the brain.”
Will didn’t quite understand. His mind conjured up images, vignettes from sci-fi films. Blade Runner. The Matrix. He imagined Matt in a laboratory, regaled in a white coat, clipboard in hand, walking among patients – test subjects – laid on metal beds with thick wires, fiber optics, plugged into sockets drilled into the back of their heads. Their eyes, implanted with LED cut-outs, glowed and flickered and flashed. What did he mean by interfacing the mind? He was about to find out.
“Will, I’m glad you’ve moved on from Irene’s death, and what I’m about to offer you probably isn’t the healthiest for you, but you’re a strong man, and I know how much you loved my sister.” He took a long, deep breath. What he was about to say next, it needed momentum. Then: “How would you like to see her again?”
He felt a waft of cold air fall on his cheeks as he stepped inside the shop. Irene was at the end of the room, sitting behind the counter, reading the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. Already used to the comings and goings of people in the store, most of them students drawn in by curiosity but not enough interest – or cash – to actually buy anything, she wouldn’t pay him any mind. Her eyes remained on the pages, her lips moving slightly as she followed the verses under her breath, her left index finger tapping on the counter marking time, tap-tap-tap tap-tap-tap tap-tap-tap. Will thought of the combat boots.
From the back corner, a turntable wired to a pair of JBL speakers was playing the B-side of her favorite Miles Davis album. What song was it, exactly? Will couldn’t tell. An undulating current of trumpet swoons. The ebbs and flows punctuated by an undercurrent of piano notes.
He padded through the row of shelves containing rare Philippine Literature titles, English translations of East and Southeast Asian literature from the past three centuries, well-loved European classics. Plato, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre – the essentials of Western Philosophy, balanced by The Annalects, The Art of War, Tao Te Ching, and a smattering of Confucian classics. The poetry of Basho, Issa, Li Bai, and Wang Wei. Nobody was prouder of their collection than Irene and Will themselves. Every title was collected, imported from overseas, negotiated with suppliers with a sense of purpose borne out of their shared passion for literature. On top of the shelf for local classics, over volumes of short stories by Greg Brillantes, Paz Marquez Benitez, and Nick Joaquin, was a dozing ball of silken white fur – their tabby Persian cat, Zelda.
He ran a finger over the cat’s rich, fur. The soft, ticklish sensation reached his fingers instantly. It all felt so real. Just how deep could this illusion go? Despite his knowledge that everything around him now was a façade, a simulacrum, no more than source code communicating with electrical signals bouncing between synapses at the speed of thought, they all carried a sense of reality that even the best dreams never had. Wasn’t reality itself just a matter of electrical signals bouncing off synapses, the mind interfacing with the world? He scratched the underside of the cat’s chin. Zelda purred, twitching her tail. Now he turned to his wife sitting behind the counter, and the thought that he could come to her now, touch her warm cheek, hear her voice – talk to her, even. His heart dropped at the thought. Then he remembered – the men. He stole a glance at the door. Yellow sunlight filtered through the curtains and dripped to the hardwood floors in shifting parallelograms. He thought, they’ll be here any minute now.
“Honey,” he heard Irene from behind him. He hadn’t heard that voice in so long that a single word was enough to bring tears to her eyes. That voice, sound waves making the air inside the shop vibrate, seemed to transform into tiny particles that entered his ears and massaged his brain. He turned around. She had put down her book, was looking at him with her wide grin, perfect white teeth showing. “How’d you get home so early?”
“Your brother –” he heard himself say. “He brought me here.”
“Matthew? But you don’t even talk.”
“We’re very close now. I really like him. He’s just like you.”
She aped a hurt look, gasped. “How dare you! I’m nothing like that monkey.”
“Oh honey, you don’t know how much I missed you.”
“What are you talking about? You haven’t even been gone a day.”
“But it felt like months.”
“You’re crazy!”
He wanted to come to her. He wanted to run over to her, jump over the counter, and take her in his arms. He wanted to feel her warmth again. Once, on their anniversary, they had gone on vacation to Cebu, in Moalboal. They had booked a hotel room that had a balcony overlooking the sea. But at the baggage carousels, Irene fell ill. Her temperature climbed up so fast, by the time they reached the room her fever had already reached 39 degrees. He was anxious to get her to a doctor, but Irene insisted she only needed some sleep. That beautiful day, the sea calm and blowing cold, salty air coastward, they spent locked up inside the hotel room. Irene’s temperature had gotten so high that lying next to her, under the covers, made him sweat like a stuck pig. But he refused to get up from the bed, refused to disentangle his arms from his dozing wife. When evening came, just as she’d predicted, her fever subsided, and the two awoke to the bed soaked all the way down to the frame in Will’s sweat.
Before he could take his first step forward, a loud crash came from behind him. Two masked men, built like the bodybuilders on TV, clad in black jumpsuits and heavy combat boots, broke through the glass doors. They each had assault rifles slung around their necks. The men ignored him. They jogged towards the counter, Irene as their sole target, the sound of their combat boots hitting the hardwood floor almost rhythmically. Left-right left-right left-right left-right. Irene froze, the color draining from her face.
“Will, what is this? Who are they?”
When the first man, the larger of the two, was just a yard away from Irene, he clicked a button on his assault rifle and trained the barrel at her white throat. Irene looked like she’d been pulled right out of an Edvard Munch painting. But Will couldn’t come to her. His feet had turned into heavy lead and all he could do was watch as the first man, with a sure finger, squeezed the trigger on his rifle.
“Will, help me!”
But the fireworks didn’t come. No gunfire blast. No blood. No Irene, either, not anymore. The instant the first man squeezed the trigger, the bookstore winked out of existence and Will was in the middle of a vast, rectangular enclosure the size of a football field. Metallic grey walls supported by thick iron frames. Will was standing under a blinding white light about twenty feet above him. He was in the same clothes he’d worn at the bar, white long-sleeved polos, khakis, a red tie – the clothes he’d worn to work for Friday morning. Two electrodes had been stuck to either side of his temples, a third one snaking between the buttons of his shirt, attached to his chest, just over the heart. His heart was sprinting at an Olympic pace. He heard Matt’s voice over the intercom: “What the hell was that?”
“That was my dream,” Will murmured.
“Seemed more like a nightmare to me.”
“That’s all I dream of now.” He added, “about Irene.”
“Hell, it’s the same principle used for recording and playing LPs. Vibrations from sound waves are captured by a needle and engraved on the surface of the vinyl. Afterwards, running a needle through those same grooves reproduces the vibration that made those grooves in the first place, which you can then translate back into the form of sound waves.“
It was called Project Eurydice only for lack of an official name. Military projects of its kind, explained Matt, because they were commissioned directly by the intended users and never had to be marketed, especially to the public, were never assigned fancy names unlike commercial technology. The project designation in their files was a long string of letters and numbers that sounded more like a hash code than an actual name, so for the sake of having something to call it in the middle of development phase, someone suggested they call it Project Eurydice, or just Eurydice, and the team was only happy to pick it up. Matt’s own internal designation for it was the Nightmare Chamber, but it didn’t look quite as good on the documentation.
“It’s built on advanced neuroinverter technology,” Matt explained on the bumpy ride through a fine November drizzle from Tomas Morato to Sense/Net’s research facility in Makati, in an excited ramble that just bordered on being unintelligible. “Basically how it works, it’s reversing the way the human mind processes sensory information. You wouldn’t believe how much data your mind is actually storing in terms of sensory experiences. When you’re experiencing something, your mind collects input from your eyes, your ears, your skin, your tongue – basically what you saw, what you heard, what the air tasted like, how hot or cold it was where you were – and stores that information by sparking up certain synapses in your brain. That’s what we call memory. When we recall memory, all the brain does is sparking up those same neurons where it stored the data.
“That ring a bell? It’s like accessing data from a sector of your computer’s hard drive. Hell, it’s the same principle used for recording and playing LPs. Vibrations from sound waves are captured by a needle and engraved on the surface of the vinyl. Afterwards, running a needle through those same grooves reproduces the vibration that made those grooves in the first place, which you can then translate back into the form of sound waves.
“Now brain pulses are much more sophisticated, much more varied than sound waves, but in theory it shouldn’t be impossible. All it takes is the right translator, the right program that can interpret impulses bouncing between synapses while a patient is dreaming, translate that back into sensory information – colors, sounds, temperatures, surfaces, all basic stuff – then materialize that information in a specially designed chamber and, voila. You’re walking inside your own dreams.”
Even with Matt’s attempts at a scientific explanation, the whole matter with materializers, impulse translators, convolutional neural networks, dream reconstruction chambers all sounded too fantastic to be taken seriously, and in a more sober state of mind he might have perhaps questioned his brother-in-law’s sanity. But that November night he ran along with it, and after what must be the shortest two hour drive through the Friday night traffic along EDSA to Makati, to a complex of drab, granite cylinders sealed from public access by barbed-wire fences and 24-hour security – which, thanks to Matt’s special authorization as lead project manager for Eurydice, they slipped through without a hitch – Will let himself be taken through a series of offices, briefing rooms, signed any number of nondisclosures that Matt plopped on the desk before him, like a lifeless marionette. The next thing he knew, he was being injected a syringe full of mildly luminescent blue liquid, wheeled underground into the center of the stadium-sized chamber, and attached with electrodes connected to varicolored wires that ran through tiny holes on the floor under his feet.
“Remember the rules?” said Matt’s disembodied voice through the intercom.
What rules? Matt must have discussed them somewhere during all the paperwork, but he passed through all that in a haze. He couldn’t remember any rules.
“The system can’t generate new dreams. Whatever comes on, you’ve dreamt it before, and so you know when the dream ends. When you reach the end, do not touch anything. Let go of everything you’re holding. Do not grab or hold on to anything until the playback is finished. You got that?”
“Affirmative. Thanks for reminding.”
“Playback in three…”
An overwhelming wave of drowsiness crashed over him, likely an effect of the blue liquid. But instead of collapsing into sleep on the cold iron floor, the bookshop – his and Irene’s bookshop – winked into existence before his eyes. And his wife sitting in the back reading a book of Dylan Thomas’ poems.
Honey, how’d you get home so early?
This time it was to the jazz that he first came to. The smooth, sensual moan of the trumpet filling up the room, accentuated by the piano accompaniment. He opened his eyes and he was in the bookshop, having just entered through the door. His wife was behind the counter, reading her book. Having sensed his presence, Irene looked up, a smile quickly rising to her lips. She closed the book and laid it on the counter. “Honey,” she said, “how’d you get home so early?” This time, aware of the limited time they had, already comprehending the workings of the chamber, he hastened towards his wife. He hopped over the counter, knocking over a paper cup of coffee that had been left standing there, spilling its contents all over the floor. Irene gasped.
“What’s the matter?”
Will didn’t answer. He grabbed Irene by the waist and drew her to a tight embrace. The warmth was real. The fragrance of her cologne was real. Vanilla and almonds – a gift he’d given her for her birthday that April. He inhaled and greedily took it all in. The particles of her scent, the sound of her breathing, the warmth of her skin under her grey blouse all permeated through the pores of his skin and turned his bones into jelly. Five months. Five months suffering through the loss, his uphill battle to get over her death and move on with his life. He felt the progress he’d made through those five long months uncoil like bandage wrapped around his soul, opening up his wounds anew, fresh red blood oozing through and soaking him like the bed at the hotel in Cebu, until once again the bitterness saturated him down to his very core. He broke into wild sobs.
Irene’s voice sounded full of concern. “Honey, please tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” he struggled to say.” I just missed you so, so much.”
“No, really. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“It’s just been” – he sniffed – “so difficult. I can’t. I don’t know how to keep on without you.”
The shop was her idea. In lieu of a lavish ceremony and a honeymoon abroad, on the night of their engagement Irene requested if they could instead pool together a significant portion from each of their savings and use the money for a down payment on a two-story house she’d been eyeing in Maginhawa and as capital for a small bookshop they would run on the first floor. Will loved the idea and gave her all he had. They ended up with a considerable sum. They’d gotten the house before they’d even seen the marriage contracts. Day and night they set to work on cleaning, decorating, planning and almost forgot about the ceremony itself.
The ceremony they held in private, attended only by the couple’s immediate families and a few close friends, at a small Baptist church in Caloocan. At the end of the ceremony they carpooled to a quiet resort in Cavite for the reception, an intimate dinner under the deepening September eve out by the hotel’s private pool. Will’s brother played guitar from the gazebo, and everyone clapped and chanted at the couple dancing to jazz renditions of Frank Sinatra. Irene’s irises dappled with the reflected neon glow of the pool’s underwater lights. I love you, she had whispered to him, and Will learned how it felt to drown in open air.
The following morning, after checking out, Will and Irene headed straight to a furniture dealer in Quiapo and chose the simplest wooden shelves on display. Irene moved in a half-ballet, half-strut through wooden fixtures, rocking chairs, closets, and shelves inside the showroom, singing all the titles she wanted to have in her collection. Bonfire of the Vanities. The Color Purple. The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Ariel and The Bell Jar and The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. The Iron Man. Irene had always dreamed of running her own bookshop. A week after the marriage, on a Saturday, Irene hung the OPEN sign on the glass doors, and Will pulled up the shutters. Epistolarium – Irene chose the name. The house of letters. The house that the written word built.
When the sobs subsided, Will’s face was a mess of tears and snot.
“I made a mess,” Will said, looking at the spilled coffee on the floor. “I’ll clean it up.”
He pulled away and, sniffling, coughing out the lead that seemed to have gotten stuck inside his throat, he kneeled down and picked up the coffee cup. It bore the name of the neighboring coffee shop in simple, green font. Irene stood over him, watching, not quite sure what to say. His sudden burst of emotions was sure to have overwhelmed her. There hadn’t been much coffee left inside the cup so the spill was a minor one, but of course he was going to have wipe it down or the floor would get sticky. He was standing up when he heard the men crash through the glass. He clenched his hands into fists, the coffee cup crushed inside his right hand, more coffee dripping to the floor. This was his third time in the chamber that night, and even though he’d dreamed this same dream countless times before, nothing could prepare him for the horror that was coming. Left-right left-right left-right left-right left-right left-right. The men’s combat boots vibrated on the floor, sending ripples across the surface of the coffee spill at his feet.
“Will, who are they?” came Irene’s panicked voice.
But he didn’t look up. He couldn’t watch his wife’s last dying moments one more time. His head bowed, he closed his eyes tight and waited for the illusion to pass. He heard the faint ruffle of fabric on their clothing as they raised their rifles. The dull metallic click.
Will help me!
Three playbacks – that was the deal. Although after Matt first witnessed the horrific nature of his dream he had initially wanted to cut it down to just one. Will insisted. “I want to see her again,” he said. The second time he had tried a more potent sedative, engaged Will in some conversation, reminisced the wedding, his first date, the day he and Irene first met in a class on Creative Writing that Will, a statistics major, had randomly decided to sit in, all in the effort of rousing a different dream, something more pleasant, but Will’s subconscious wouldn’t relent. Throughout those three runs it gave him the same nightmare. He was a prisoner of his own mind. After the third run, Will was silent, his composure like that of a soldier coming home defeated. He staggered to Matt’s office and said nothing as he signed the debriefing forms, the exit nondisclosure agreement, the safe release voucher. At the door, Matt offered to drive him to Maginhawa. Will only grunted.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” said Matt as they navigated towards Quezon Memorial Circle in his Innova. It was three in the morning, the roads empty. In the horizon, a crane studded with lights loomed over them, getting larger. “We’ve talked about this.”
But Will had something else in his mind.
“About the rule,” he said, staring out the window. “About not touching anything as the machine disengaged. Why was that necessary?”
“Eurydice is essentially a projector. The walls display images of anything that extends beyond its own dimension, but everything else inside is made of real matter. That’s why the sensations feel real – they are real. The odors are real. The temperature is real. When a playback starts, the chamber reproduces all matter that appear in your dream by reorganizing atoms inside. And when the playback ends…”
“The mass is annihilated.”
“Disassembled is the proper term.” Matt paused as he made a right into Philcoa. “But the machine has to know which matter to disassemble, which to ignore. This caused problems in our early tests because it kept disassembling the subjects as well – though of course, we weren’t using human subjects yet. Tell you the truth, you’re the first human we tested it with.”
“Jesus.”
They stopped outside Will’s house. All lights were off. Heavy curtains blocking the view behind the glass panels. The CLOSED sign now fixed on the front doors. Will hadn’t opened it since Irene’s death. Now it stood on Maginhawa Street, now bright and brimming with life even late at night with its offerings of bars, coffee houses, other bookshops, restaurants lining the street, a dark relic of a grisly past. Students walking by would slow their pace, stop, point at it, and pay silent respects. This is where they shot the writer, they would murmur, very quietly, afraid that if the house heard them recounting its history some grudge, some curse, would follow them home. Will got off without inviting Matt to come inside. He thanked his brother-in-law, hopped off, and closed the door behind him. As he walked away, Matt lowered the window on the copilot side and called out to him.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. “None of us thinks it’s your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
“Of course,” Will said.
Will navigated the bookshop without turning on the lights. Even in the dark he had the space memorized. At the far back, on the counter, was the Dylan Thomas book Irene had been reading the day they killed her. In his mind, it was always the day they killed her, not the day she died. She didn’t die. They took her from him, left behind for him nothing but a void, dark and cold, that soon grew and consumed the bookshop, then the second floor, and finally his dreams. Over there, on the floor, a black tell-tale spot that refused to wash off the way only blood, among all the bad memories that a person can accumulate in this life, refused to be forgotten. Will found the stairs. He headed straight to the bedroom and crashed on top of the mattress without bothering to undress.
He laid on his stomach over the mattress. From the back pocket of his pants, he pulled out a white paper cup, crushed, sticky with dried Americano. Printed in simple green font, the name of the coffee shop just next door to them.
For the rest of that month, he would think about all that Matt said. He hadn’t meant to break the rule. But when the men burst into the bookshop in the third playback of his nightmare, he had gripped the cup in his fist and forgotten about it. He simply wanted the nightmare to end. Only when the chamber disengaged, and he was again back in the cold, empty enclosure, did he remember that he was still holding the cup. He had hidden it inside his pockets, worried of angering Matt if he betrayed the fact. He kept silent throughout the rest of the night. He had taken a piece of his dream with him – how was that possible?
Mornings he would lie in bed and hold the crushed cup in the light filtering in through the window. He would think about Matt’s explanation. Here was real matter reproduced from his dream. Eurydice produced real matter, that was why everything felt real. The books. The cat’s fur. The wooden floor. Even the breaking glass and the combat boots and the assault rifles. Then was the Irene in there real too? He had felt her warmth and smelled her cologne, heard her soft, sweet voice saying his name and calling him honey.
He stopped coming to work. After about an hour ruminating on the coffee cup he would come down, make himself a simple breakfast of coffee and toast, and make his own version of The chamber in the bookstore. First walking out into the street, then coming in again, the way he did in the playback. He would look at the empty counter and talk to his wife. I got home early to see you, he would say. I missed you, you know. Then he would walk over there, stand at the opposite side of the counter, look down at the book lying on the table. Oh I’ve never read that. I only know a few poems of his. Are they any good? Only in this version he didn’t have to worry because the men with the rifles never come. He and Irene could have the whole afternoon together. He made up entire conversations for the two of them. And the playback could keep going so long as he didn’t look down at the blood on the floor.
Of course it hurt. Over and over again, it hurt, but why would he leave? Love meant coming back, always.
“Jesus, you look horrible.”
Matt jumped from his seat when he saw Will coming in. The bar in Tomas Morato was full this time. The TV was turned off, and instead speakers fitted to the ceilings blasted loud Korean pop music. Probably to appease the mass of college students that filled the tables. Will could feel them stealing glances at him the moment he passed the double doors. He had lost weight. Ten kilos to be exact. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken and surrounded by dark circles. His gait reminded one of somebody trying to walk in zero gravity. But he wasn’t sick, Will thought. Quite the opposite, he felt light, in probably the best mood he’d ever had for months. He dismissed Matt’s comment and settled in his seat. Matt sat down.
“Have you been eating at all?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’d die.”
“Looks like you’re halfway there already.”
“Very funny.”
Matt had already ordered for them. A bucket of six beers. He had one open and was halfway through its contents. He pulled out another one, opened it, and handed it over to Will. Will raised the bottle in a toast and took a long sip. The alcohol hit his system almost instantly.
“Will,” Matt started. “I think sending you into Eurydice may have been unhealthy for you. I mean, look at you. You look like you haven’t slept since. You remind me of Christian Bale in that movie – not Batman.”
Will shook his head, was going to say something, but Matt leaned forward and kept on.
“I mean, look, you were doing fine before. You were telling me about new projects, conferences. You were planning a trip to Singapore. You were fine. Now I call up your office and they tell me you haven’t shown up in weeks. And now this.”
“Matthew, I’m fine. Really.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like the complete opposite of fine.”
“And sending me into Eurydice was the best thing you ever did for me. I really missed her, Matt. And I held her in my arms like I hadn’t done for months. She was wearing the cologne I gave her.”
“That wasn’t her, Will. Please understand. That was a construct reproduced by the chamber from sensory detail contained in your dreams. Irene’s dead. You’d moved on, remember?”
“I know, but she was there.”
Matt didn’t say anything. Frustrated, and very sorry for the brother-in-law who had come to be his closest friend in the months following his sister’s death, he leaned back on his chair, his mouth agape.
“Matthew,” Will said. “I have to see her again.”
“We had a deal, Will. Three playbacks and that’s it. And besides, after seeing you like this, I think another playback will only kill you. No more. I won’t put you through that nightmare again.”
“Just one more time, Matt, please.”
Matt shook his head.
“Just move on, man. You’re not making this any easier for you. Do what you were doing last time. Throw yourself to your work. Go outside. Irene’s death was unfortunate – hell, it was unjust – but she wouldn’t want to have you become like this. You’ve got your own life, too. And you should live. Do it for her.”
“I had another dream.”
Matt remained silent. Though he hardly moved a muscle, Will caught the moment Matt’s eyes lost their anxious, adamant look, softened. He was listening.
“It was the coffee shop again, but this time the men never come. Irene and I talk the whole time. She tells me she’s finishing the novel she’d been working on for months – remember that? She told you about that, right? The novel? She tells me she’s still two chapters behind but it’s practically done in her head. And just before I wake up she plants this kiss on my cheek and tells me, tells me, tells me – ” A ball of lead had sprung inside his throat and now Will choked and stuttered through his words. The dream, of course, never happened, but reciting it now to Matt, he could see it so well, hear the words in Irene’s voice so clearly, that he started to tear up. Nice touch, Will thought. “She tells me we’re having a baby. She got the test that morning. I’m finally going to be a father.”
Now Matt sat up in his chair, shaking his head. He took a swig of his beer.
“I dreamt that right after you took me inside the chamber. It was rough. That’s why I’m like this. I skipped work, stopped eating, because all day I’d spent in bed hoping to catch that dream again, but I never did. I just want to see it happen again before me, like it’s real. I know it’s not Irene – you made that clear the first time. And I know it’s all just simulated matter. But I really need to see it – her. Until I do, until I hold my wife and it’s not in that nightmare, I don’t think I’ll ever get any closure.”
The bookshop again. He hadn’t seen the workstation where Matt operated Eurydice but he knew from his reaction to the nightmare that he could see what was happening inside. He probably had a screen over there. And he probably had a way of prematurely overriding the projection in case the chamber’s operation ever went awry. In that case, Will thought, he had to enact the dream exactly as he’d narrated it back at the bar, or else he’d see through the deception. He only needed to wait for the sound of the glass breaking, and then he’d grab Irene and take her with him like he did with the coffee cup. Will’s heartbeat quickened at the thought. Then he heard the voice.
“Honey, how’d you get home so early?”
He looked up at the counter and saw her standing there, reading. She put the book down. Smiling, he walked over to her, passing the shelves and the cat. “I wasn’t feeling well this morning. I thought I was going to run a fever so I rushed back here. It’s passed now, though. Must have just been the heat getting to me.”
“It’s been so hot recently. That’s why I keep the air conditioners this low. Our power bill’s sure to be skyrocketing right now but it’s better than suffering in this heat. It gets so stuffy here surrounded by all these books. I hope you don’t mind.”
Will wondered at that response. First at how natural it was, how very Irene it sounded, down to the choice of words. Second at how the Irene in his dreams had never said such a thing and yet this Irene was saying it to him now, a perfect response to what he’d said to her. It wasn’t at all like talking to a marionette – a construct, in Matt’ s words. It was like talking to a real, living human being. But just how possible was that? How deep did this illusion go? Maybe the chamber really was just that clever. Or maybe, secure in his knowledge of the physics that governed his creation, Matt had overlooked an unplanned outcome of it. That completely oblivious to him and his team, he had produced a machine that was capable of far more than they’d anticipated.
“Of course not,” Will said. He was standing in front of her now. Close enough to smell the vanilla and almond perfume. He ran his hand on her right cheek. Felt it warm and supple against his palm. “You’d get heatstroke.”
“Are you sure you’re fine, though? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” he said, stroking her cheek. “I mean, I’m here now.”
She blushed, looked down at the book on the counter, hiding her face from him. Will stole a glance at the door. The afternoon sunlight threw a contorted golden parallelogram on the floor. Any minute now, Will thought. When he turned to Irene, she had remembered the white cup half-filled with cold coffee on the counter, was tilting it now against her lips. When she put the cup down, she was still smiling, but the smile wouldn’t last for long. A faint signal captured on television, it flickered, darkened, brightened again, then abruptly disappeared. Irene’s face had turned grey like TV static. Her voice, becoming solemn all of a sudden, said, “Why do you keep coming back here?”
Will’s heart dropped to his stomach.
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t this hurt you? Seeing me, over and over like this?”
“It’s not –” He stopped, his eyes darted to the door again. He thought he heard something hit the glass. No one was there. A gust of wind oscillated from the air conditioner and drifted the curtain slightly. A thousand replies converged into his thought at once, leaving him dumbstruck. Of course it hurt. Over and over again, it hurt, but why would he leave? Love meant coming back, always.
“Not what?” Irene was saying, now looking out as well towards the door. “You know any moment now they’re going to come. And I’m going to be fine, because I only went through it once. It’s you I worry about. About the toll this must take on you.”
“Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“I am. I love that you’re here. But this is my hell, and…” she paused, biting her lip. She had that expression she often had, when struggling to put together the right words for a new piece of writing. When she looked up there was pain in her eyes. “I just don’t want to have you keep coming back here.”
Will held her hand. She let it rest limply within his palm.
“I’ll always come back.”
“It’s just not right.”
He turned to the door again. Shouldn’t the men be coming now? Or was this a different dream, a different nightmare altogether? The chamber couldn’t produce new dreams – Matt had told him that. But he had never had this dream before. The agony rising now from his wife’s eyes were real. She shook her head, looking down at the floor with a distant sigh.
“Irene, this time I’m here to save you.”
Had Matt heard that? For sure he did– yet there was no indication of an interruption, no signs of an attempt to stop him. The dream went on. Irene’s eyes as she looked up at him now brimmed with bewilderment as she struggled to follow what he had just said. Her face, first cold and grey like TV static, now flushed pale.
That was when the men, at last, crashed through the glass entrance of the bookshop. Irene jumped up in panic as she caught sight of them forcing their way through the doors like they were made of paper. Will jumped over the wooden counter, beside his wife, accidentally hitting her cup of coffee and spilling its contents on the floor at her feet. Their pace was hasty. Only now did he notice their eyes regarding them through the cut holes on their masks, grey and dull. This was nothing to them – only business. Will watched as the first man, the bigger of the two, lifted his gun – now a shotgun instead of an assault rifle – and pointed it at Irene.
Will closed his eyes. A metallic click – the gun’s safety being turned off. Will felt for his wife’s left hand and held it tight. With his eyes closed, he didn’t have a visual of Eurydice disengaging. But the sounds – he was never going to forget the sounds. A sonic boom – the pressure giving, matter collapsing back into the heavy air – and the shrill, snake-like hiss of the extra mass being vacuumed through unseen passages. Heavy machinery rumbling through and behind the chamber’s raw iron walls, getting faint. The heavy thud of a body dropping to the floor.
“What the fuck did you just do?”
That was Matt, emerging through the heavy metal hatch across the other side of the enclosure. His face was ghastly pale. He ran over to him, stopping just two meters away from Will, now looking down at the floor – at something that was on the floor. The bright overhead light inside the chamber blinded Will, and a white haze obstructed his view of the body lying on the floor. But even without seeing he knew who it was. He was, after all, still holding her hand. When his eyes had finally adjusted, he was greeted to the sight of her wife, lying in a pool of blood on the floor, her right hand tearing at the side of her neck. The shotgun had blasted off her throat. Under the harsh white lights the vision of burnt muscle, spine, and burst pink tubes drowned in a soup of angry, red blood took on an unforgiving clarity. Her other hand held his in a death grip. Her nails had dug through the skin on the back of his palm, drawing blood. Only Will couldn’t feel it.
Her feet thrashed violently at the floor, as if trying to kick an unseen vermin that was trying to climb over her. Shocked, Will let go of her hand. She had her mouth open, was, in fact, trying to speak, trying to cry. But no sound came except a viscous gurgling that would forever haunt both men’s dreams. Blood squirted through her lips, splattered down to her chin and the collar of her blouse. She was looking at Will, holding out the hand that he’d let go. But Will couldn’t take it, and both men stood paralyzed, unable to do anything but stand over her and watch her drown in her own blood. She was gone in less than a minute, but for William and Matthew it extended well through the entire night. The gurgling stopped, and Irene’s head, her arms and legs, all dropped to the floor with a dull thud, convulsing only now and then in quick, subtle bursts. Her face was turned to the side, at him. Eyes wide open. The life had left them but the terror stayed and kept a hard, piercing glare at Will.
It took exactly a week for the senior management at Sense/Net to resolve the issue of the dead woman that had turned up during a “test run” of the chamber, or whatever hash code it was referred to in the official documents. That same Friday night, after receiving an alert from the young physicist Matthew Salazar Varela, then serving as manager to the Eurydice project, the facilities were immediately vacated and all-night staff compelled to sign nondisclosures, their phones, laptops, and other personal effects inspected to prevent the exit of any recorded evidences (of which, fortunately for everyone involved, there were none).
The companion whom the project manager had apparently convinced to sign on as the first human subject to give Eurydice a test drive, and who had pulled out the corpse from one of the projections, was taken to a second facility somewhere in Pasay City where he spent the succeeding five days under the watch of a specialized medical team tasked with assessing him for any possible damages that the machine may have dealt. That evening on Wednesday, he was given his clearance and made to sign another pile of nondisclosure forms.
Because he was well-liked and admired by the senior management, and because Corporate Legal was more wary of what he might do – what he might reveal, not only about Eurydice but all the other projects he had worked on – once relieved of his capacity as project manager, Matthew Varela did not lose his job. He was kept on probationary status effective for the next two years and transferred to the company’s second offices in Ortigas, where he worked mostly desk jobs for the quality control division. The change in environment was something the young physicist was more than amiable with. In his own words, the sight of the dull grey corridors, resembling very closely the raw iron walls of the Neuroinverter’s enclosure, and the abysmal rumbling of the engines constantly running inside the research facilities filled his mind with visions of death.
The two men, despite appearances of having been quite close in the events leading to the encounter, stopped communicating afterwards. Neither made any further efforts to reach out to the other. Except for one – a short text message, free of any affectations, sent from the project manager to the companion, Wednesday evening just as the latter was coming home from the second facility in Pasay. The message bore only an address and a time. After the corpse inside the chamber was identified as the assassinated poet and newspaper columnist – or at least, an exact material replica produced by Eurydice and that hadn’t been disassembled after the projection, to wit a copy, or a reconstruction of a woman that had already been legally pronounced dead and buried by her family – she was tucked away inside a large opaque plastic bag reserved for the facility’s hazardous waste, and was scheduled to be incinerated with the rest of the company’s biohazard refuse on a Friday afternoon that same week. The project manager had informed the companion of where and when this was to happen. That was all. The companion read the message but did not reply.
That Friday, on the exact time specified in the message, William Cruz arrived at the empty lot behind the secret facility where the incineration was to take place. He brought with him only a six-pack of beers. He sat on the back of his car, a black Toyota pick-up, alone and drinking his beers as he watched the fumes from the giant industrial incinerator ascending to overcast skies. The fumes were black, thick, and very heavy. Heavy as the grief he nursed inside his heart.
Dominic Dayta 