It was 2:30am when I was swung awake somewhat abruptly by an accusing dream. Voices in the back of my head, remnants from a murder I committed in my sleep. Was anyone hurt? Asked one. You're not the person you think you are, said the other.
I looked at my hands, the hands that gave up being kind and tolerant, to smash dead a Pinoy girl who kept pushing over my iMac. These hands rubbed against the sides of my head, my sinking neck, as I sat on the futon in my room, in the shoebox house Mom and Dad had retired to. It was a week or so till CNY (Spring Festival).
Did I look down on a person of a supposedly ‘lower caste’, who gave in to the Americans, the West so readily while exporting their young ladies as domestic help to our country? Whatever the answer, murder was wrong. Yet so near to our celebration day, I was at a loss to repair more-so justify my further existence.
On a very long outing to the mall with my folks, I picked up a box cutter. The same basic tool that terrorists had used to hijack 5 American commercial jets years ago, that cost thousands of civilian lives. Something in me had to have one, a stubby blade on a fish body handle. It was a Malaysian design, made in China. Through the translucent plastic, I could see its double ended reversible blade. I caressed its undulating shape fixed by a single shiny new central screw. ‘Grabbit’ was printed on the navy-smoke plastic.
Cult popular or should I say infamous events had propelled the box cutter to fame, just like the AK-47, the Uzzi, the atomic bomb. So having one for myself gave me a strange contradictory satisfaction. The same satisfaction I had, while I thought up terrorist solutions to breaching western defenses, the same that was used in 9-11. When it actually came streaming over our satellite, into our living room, I felt that odd emotion -they had used my idea.
Holding my box cutter helped me exorcise my demons. I hadn’t realized that they were around me, corrupting my soul. I hadn’t understood why the woman touching Jesus’ clothes unlocked healing for her family. I didn’t fully accept I was flesh and blood, kept alive by Spirit. Yes, ‘alive’.
There was a massage parlor in Kota Raya, downtown Kuala Lumpur, where Pinoy workers and maids went to send home their wages, eat Filipino food, and to exchange news from their upper class employers. I walked in and enquired of their services.
To touch a Pinoy woman and be helpless before her, what might that help my wounded soul? Take off your clothes, said the masseur. You can lay your bag there, she pointed to a corner of the room. Meanwhile, she took off her shoes. I lay on the thin mattress of the massage bed, eyes closed, feeling like a slaver getting his shave from his slave. But this was my whole naked self, being twisted and knuckled by her peculiarly different hands and feet. They were like brown sugar mixed with seal sweat, if seals sweated. I remembered holding Ashiv’s hands. Those gritty gay fingers that oozed with passion, like reaching into a vagina.
At the end of it, I had a soft droop to show the 30-something Filipino woman, with her curly hair. She looked down at me through her mascara and blusher as I began to acquire girth. You should put on your underwear, she said, controlling her emotions. I sat there immovable though, hands clasped and head bowed. And I asked her, what’s your soul like? Because I could so lose yours or mine now. Are you not afraid to be naked before God? She asked. No, I replied. Then, do you want my child? We looked at one another and I said, I guess I really wanted everything good and everything bad. There were beads in her hand and she told me, you’re forgiven.
It was the happiest I’d been in days. No doubt my happy dog’s paw prints on my school shirt, back when I was 16 were more treasured than our maid’s subtle scent on the morning’s pressed and washed uniform. But I now understood the meaning of so many things that God had created diverse yet the same. And the act of murder, a common corruption insinuated through lack of truth, was indeed put to rest.
Martina and I made love. Where have you been? She asked, smelling my body. To a temple, I said.
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