Chapter 3 Dinner in Makati, Eyes in the Mirror #3
He noticed that she had sat with her back to the parapet and had put him in the chair facing the towers, and that this had felt at the time like a kindness about the view.
He noticed that she was not afraid. That was the part he could not fit anywhere.
A frightened person in a kitchen doorway has a particular set to them, and Hal had seen it, he had pulled a man out from under a pallet jack in 2019 and he knew exactly what fear looked like standing up.
This was not that. This was a woman listening to a street the way he listened to a diesel engine, for one specific wrong sound among all the right ones.
Then she opened the door.
The rain hit him in the face. She went down the metal steps ahead of him fast, two at a time, still holding his hand, and the fire escape rang and shed water and somebody’s air conditioning unit dripped down the back of his collar.
They came out in an alley two feet wider than Hal’s shoulders, between the restaurant and the building behind it, into standing water over the ankle and the smell of frying garlic and drain.
Mina stopped at the mouth of it and did not step out.
She looked left for about a second, and right for about a second, and Hal understood that she was not looking for danger, because you cannot see danger, you can only see the places it is not.
“Left,” she said.
“Baby.”
“Left, and then we are going to walk normal. Not slow. Normal.” She adjusted his arm so it lay over her shoulders, which put his body between her and the street they had come from, and Hal felt her do it and felt her feel him feel it. “And you are going to laugh at something in about ten steps.”
“I am not going to be able to laugh.”
“Ten steps,” Mina said. “You will manage. You are extremely charming and it is your only real weakness.”
They came out of the alley onto a different street from the one they had gone in on.
She let go of his hand, and took his arm instead, and slowed to a stroll, and laughed at something he had not said, and steered them into a sari-sari store on the corner where she bought two bottles of water and a pack of chewing gum with a five hundred peso note and talked to the woman behind the counter about the storm for ninety seconds.
Cash. Hal noticed that too, and put it with the rest.
Ninety seconds was exactly how long it took, because he counted, and because by then he had started counting everything.
The car came around the corner four minutes later.
Not the same car. A silver one, with a driver Hal had never seen.
Inside, with the doors shut and the rain going over the roof, Mina finally let her face do what it wanted, which was nothing at all. She sat with her hands loose in her lap looking out the window and her whole face went off like a light.
Hal watched her do it.
“Okay,” he said, quietly. “You want to tell me what that was?”
“There was a van.”
“A van.”
“On the other side, forty meters down, facing the wrong way for that street.” She did not turn her head.
“It has been there since before we went up. Engine had been running, because there was no condensation on the back glass and it is ninety-one percent humidity out there and every other vehicle on that block is fogged.”
Hal did not say anything.
“And there was a glare off the second floor of the building opposite,” Mina went on, in exactly the tone she had used about the sausage.
“Which is a vacant unit. And the card machines went down on the whole street at the same minute, and the network with them, and that is a thing that happens when somebody is running a device that does not care whose network it eats.”
“Mina.”
“So we came down the back.”
The wipers went. A tricycle went past them the other way with a whole family on it under one poncho.
“You are going to have to say something,” Mina said, “because I cannot see your face and it is making me insane.”
Hal thought about it for a while. He thought about the corridor at the studio, and the man rubbing his neck, and the prop cart with the gap in it, and the quarter turn at the airport that he had missed with his own two eyes.
“I’m going to ask you a question,” he said, “and I want you to know that I have decided not to ask it twice today, so I am spending it.”
“Okay.”
“Are you in trouble?”
The car went two blocks.
“No,” Mina said.
And Hal, who moved freight for a living, and who had spent nine years listening to people tell him a truck was on its way, heard the specific quality of that no. It was not a lie. It was worse than a lie. It was a true answer to a smaller question than the one he had asked.
“Okay,” he said.
She turned then and looked at him, and there was something in her face that had not been in any of the smiles.
“Ask me tomorrow,” she said.
“That is not a no.”
“It is not,” Mina agreed. “It is a Wednesday.”
Out past the glass, on the far side of the flyover, the rain came across the low ground in a wall, and the first of the outer bands of a storm still four hundred kilometers offshore went over Metro Manila and kept going west, and in Tondo a woman named Josephine got up in the dark to move a rice cooker onto a shelf, the way she had eleven times last year.