Adventures in Love and Flooding

Prologue The Sluice Gate at Midnight

The call came at ten past two, which was the hour Benigno Santos had come to think of as belonging to the floodway. Nothing was ever decided at two in the morning. Things were only discovered then, and usually by him.

He took the service road with his wipers on the fastest setting they had, which was not fast enough, and which had not been fast enough for four years.

The truck was a white DPWH pickup with a bent antenna and a dent in the tailgate from a jeepney in Pasig that had never stopped.

Rain came off the windshield in sheets rather than drops.

Past the guardrail the Marikina moved in the dark like something with a shoulder.

He had checked the gauge before he left the office.

Sto. Nino was reading four point one meters and climbing nine centimeters an hour, and at four point five they would begin diverting into Laguna de Bay, and every engineer on the eastern side of the metro would stop sleeping until Friday.

That was fine. That was the job. Ben Santos had spent fifteen years learning the difference between a number that was rising and a number that was rising wrong, and tonight the number was only rising.

The dispatcher had said contractors. She had said it the way people said it now, flatly, because there were contractors everywhere.

The channel improvement works had been running for years and would run for years more, and half the men on the floodway on any given night worked for a company Santos had never heard of, hired by a company he had heard of, subcontracted from a name on a signboard.

He turned in at Gate 4 and put the headlights on the structure.

It was not much to look at and never had been.

Gate 4 was an auxiliary, a squat concrete throat with a single vertical lift gate, seven meters of channel, a service walkway with a railing that had been repainted so many times the bolts had gone soft and round.

The two big roller gates upstream at the control structure got the visitors and the photographs and the budget.

Gate 4 got Santos, and a logbook in a steel cabinet, and a hand crank for the days the hydraulics sulked.

He loved it the way a man loves a thing he understands completely.

Two vehicles were parked on the apron with their engines running. A gray pickup, and behind it a van with no markings and a roof rack, and the rain coming down through their headlights in long white threads.

Santos parked, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel.

Clipped to the sun visor above him was a photograph, curled at one corner from years of humidity, of two girls on the steps of a church in Antipolo.

Trina had been twelve then and had refused to smile because of a gap in her teeth she had since grown out of and now missed.

Bea had been six and was smiling enough for both of them.

Trina was nineteen now and studying civil engineering at PUP, which Santos mentioned to people more often than was strictly necessary. Bea was fourteen and had opinions.

He touched the edge of the photograph with two fingers, which was a thing he did without deciding to, and got out into the rain.

The two men came to meet him halfway. They wore black rain shells with no logo, and they moved like men who had been standing in the wet for a while and had stopped minding. The taller one had a tablet in a rubberized case held under his jacket.

“Engineer Santos,” he said. Not a question.

“Sir.” Santos raised his voice over the rain and over the sound of the channel, which at Gate 4 was a low constant pressure you felt in the sternum more than heard. “You called for maintenance?”

“We called for a signature.”

The taller man brought the tablet out and turned it so the screen faced the rain, and Santos leaned in with his hand cupped over his eyebrows and read it.

It was a hold authorization. It requested that Gate 4 be secured at thirty percent aperture for the duration of the storm event, citing mechanical safety, citing vibration risk to the lift assembly under surge loading, citing a structural assessment reference number that Santos did not recognize and a works order number that he did not recognize either.

He read it twice. The rain got into his collar and started down his back.

“Who assessed the lift assembly?”

“It’s in the reference.”

“The reference is a number, sir. A number is not a person.” Santos wiped his face with the flat of his hand, which accomplished nothing.

“I inspected this gate on the second. The lift assembly is fine. The seals are old, I have been asking about the seals since March, but the assembly is fine and it will take surge loading better than the gantry will.”

“The assessment says otherwise.”

“Then I would like to speak to whoever performed it.”

The shorter man had not said anything. He had come around to Santos’s left, unhurried, and was looking at the gate rather than at either of them, and Santos noticed this and did not yet know what to do with it.

“Sir,” Santos said, “I want to be clear about what this document is asking. Sto. Nino is at four point one. We are going to be diverting inside of three hours, maybe four. When we divert, this gate needs to be able to open. That is the entire purpose of the structure. If I hold it at thirty percent through the event, two thirds of what should be going into the lake does not go into the lake. It stays in the channel. It goes downstream.” He pointed with his whole hand, west, into the dark and the rain, at forty kilometers of city he could not see. “It goes there.”

“That’s a hydrological question,” the taller man said. “This is a mechanical hold.”

“It is the same water either way, sir.”

Santos took his phone out of his breast pocket.

He did it the way he did everything, which was according to procedure, and the procedure was clause 9.

4 of the operations manual, and clause 9.

4 said that where a verbal instruction conflicted with a written works order the duty officer was to record the instruction and refer it upward.

He had used clause 9.4 twice in fifteen years.

Once over a truckload of aggregate that had never existed and once over a foreman who wanted to weld something at two in the afternoon in a confined space.

He held the phone at his chest, screen out, so they could see it, because that was also in the clause.

“I am recording this conversation under section nine point four,” he said. “It is the fourteenth. It is two thirty in the morning. Please state your names and your works order.”

The taller man looked at the phone. He looked at it for what Santos would later have called a long time, if there had been a later.

“Put that away.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“Engineer.” The man’s voice did not rise. That was the thing Santos would remember, in the eleven seconds he had left to remember anything in. It did not rise. “Sign the hold. Go home. You have been on since six.”

“I have been on since six, that is correct.” Santos was aware that his hands were steady, and was professionally pleased about it. “How do you know what time I came on?”

Nobody answered him.

The shorter man had crossed to the control housing while they talked. Santos heard the cabinet, the particular complaint of that particular hinge, which he had oiled in April and which had never once stayed oiled. He turned.

“Hoy. That’s a locked panel.”

It was not locked. It had a padlock that had been cut and was hanging open on its hasp, and it had been hanging open since before he arrived, and he understood then, all at once and far too late, that the signature had never been the point.

The signature had been the polite version.

The signature was what they had offered him first because it was cheaper.

He moved. Not toward the men, because he was forty-seven years old and a maintenance engineer and had never hit anyone in his life.

He moved toward the truck, toward the radio, because the radio went to the operations desk in Pasig and the operations desk kept a log, and Ben Santos had believed his entire adult life in the power of a thing being written down.

He got eleven steps.

The rain kept coming. Down in the housing the manual crank turned, and turned, and the vertical lift gate came down out of full aperture with a sound like a long breath through a pipe, and stopped, and was pinned, and the channel changed its note.

Thirty percent.

Upstream in the dark the Marikina went on rising, patient, indifferent, four point two now, four point three by morning, and every centimeter of it that should have gone east into the lake would instead go west, through Marikina and Pasig and into the Pasig River proper, under the bridges, past the pumping stations whose maintenance budgets had gone somewhere else, and into the low flat streets of a city where two million people were asleep and had been told there was a storm coming, which there was, and had not been told anything else.

The two vehicles left at fourteen minutes to three.

They took the tablet. They took his laptop out of the truck cab and his ID and the logbook from the steel cabinet, and one of them checked the pockets of his jacket, thoroughly, and found nothing because Santos had never carried anything in his jacket.

They did not take the truck. There was no reason to take the truck.

They did not find the phone, because he had not been holding it when he ran.

He had set it down on the dashboard at the start, screen up against the windshield, the way he always did when he was going to need both hands, wedged into the seam where the dash met the glass, tucked up against the bottom edge of a photograph of two girls on the steps of a church in Antipolo.

It was still recording.

It recorded the rain on the roof of the cab for six hours and six minutes.

It recorded the channel changing pitch as the water came up.

It recorded, at four twenty-one in the morning, the automated diversion alarm at the control structure a kilometer upstream, which sounded eight times and then stopped, having done everything it was designed to do.

Then the battery went, and the screen went dark, and the file saved.