Chapter 8 The Sinking City
The access road went at ten past seven, which put Hal Rivera fifty minutes ahead of his own estimate and in a foul mood about it.
“You said nine hours,” Mina said.
“I said the road goes nine hours before the building. The building is fine. Look at the building.” He was up to his shins at the end of the loading apron with a flashlight, looking at where the concrete stopped and the Marikina valley started. “The road is a separate item and the road is over.”
“So we are early.”
“We are on time. Being on time is what it looks like when you build in two hours because something always goes wrong.”
Behind him the soundstage stood on its slab at five point one meters with the rain coming off seventy meters of Japanese steel roof in a curtain, exactly as dry inside as it had been at midnight, exactly as useless.
Hal waded back up and looked at the vehicle.
It was, he had been told, an amphibious utility vehicle.
He had been picturing something with a hull.
What had turned up at four in the morning on a flatbed was a twenty-year-old Japanese fire service light rescue truck with a snorkel intake welded up the back of the cab, sealed axle breathers, a winch, and a raised electrical loom, painted a shade of white that had been chosen by someone who wanted it to look municipal.
It did not float. Hal had established this by asking three times.
“It is amphibious,” Mina had said.
“Baby, it wades. There is a word for that and the word is wades.”
What it did have was a decal on both doors, applied at some point in the night by somebody with a squeegee and a grievance, reading SAGIP TUBIG RELIEF NETWORK above a logo of two hands and a water drop.
“Is that a real organization?”
“It is now,” Mina said. “It was registered on Monday. It has a website, four trustees, a bank account with five thousand pesos in it, and a Facebook page with nine hundred followers, six hundred of whom are real.”
“And the back?”
“Look in the back.”
Hal went around and opened it.
The truck was full. Not full of equipment.
Full of relief goods: forty sacks of rice in ten-kilo bags, cartons of sardines, a pallet of five-liter water containers, four boxes of instant noodles, three of the folded blue tarpaulins that he had by now seen on every second roof in the country, two boxes of diapers, and one box, at the very back, of sanitary pads, which somebody had thought about.
Underneath all of it, in a floor compartment Hal had to move fifteen sacks of rice to find, were four cases in gray foam.
He stood looking at the load for a while with the rain coming down the back of his neck.
“This is not a cover,” he said.
“What?”
“It is a cover, but that is not what it is.” He put his hand flat on a sack of rice. “Baby, nobody puts real rice in a fake truck. You buy four sacks and you put them at the door and you fill the rest with boxes. That is what a cover looks like. This is nine hundred kilos of actual food.”
Mina came around the back of the truck and looked at her own load.
“We are going to a barangay under six feet of water,” she said, “and we are going to ask those people to help us, and I am not arriving at Mang Rey’s door in a truck full of empty boxes with a story.”
“So it is real.”
“It is real, and it is a cover, and I need you to understand that both of those are true at once and that this is what the entire job is.” She pulled the door down.
“That is the thing nobody tells you. Everyone thinks the lie is the hard part. The lie is easy. The hard part is that the true things have to be true.”
They cleared the valley by half past eight and the radio came alive as soon as they got altitude.
Hal drove. That had been a nine-minute conversation at four in the morning and it had ended with Tita Baby’s phrase, no load bearing, being repeated at Mina twice, and Mina in the passenger seat with her left arm across her body in the scarf sling and an expression of theatrical martyrdom.
The radio was the thing he had not expected.
He had assumed it would be news. It was not news. It was a woman with a completely level voice reading out roads.
“Espana Boulevard corner Lacson, nineteen inches, impassable to light vehicles. Espana corner Antipolo, twenty-four inches, not passable. Espana corner Dela Fuente, fourteen inches, passable to light vehicles with caution. Quezon Avenue corner Araneta, gutter deep, passable to all vehicles. EDSA Quezon Tunnel, thirty-seven inches, closed.”
She read for four minutes without stopping. Then a man read the same list in Tagalog. Then the woman started again with updates.
Hal listened to two full cycles with his hands at ten and two.
“This is the best thing I have ever heard,” he said.
“It is the flood report.”
“Mina, do you know what this is?” He took one hand off the wheel to gesture at the dashboard.
“This is a live network state feed. This is what I would build if somebody gave me eleven million dollars and a year. Every arc in the graph, capacity updated on a four-minute refresh, broadcast free to every vehicle in the city.”
“It is on every morning for about half the year.”
“That is what I am saying. You have got this and it is boring to you.” He shook his head. “In Atlanta a bridge closes and I find out from a driver in Chattanooga screaming into a phone.”
Mina looked at him sideways for a while.
“You are enjoying yourself,” she said.
“I am not enjoying myself. Nobody is enjoying themselves.” He signalled and came off the flyover.
“I am doing the only thing in this entire situation that I am actually good at, and I would like to be permitted to be good at it for about four hours before we get to the part where people shoot at us again.”
“That is fair.”
“Thank you.”
“You are still enjoying yourself.”
“I am completely enjoying myself,” Hal said, “and I feel terrible about it.”
Somewhere on the Skyway, with the whole gray city out to the left and the rain coming at the windscreen in bursts, Mina said, “Ask me something.”
“You are bored.”
“I am in a truck with one arm and a woman reading road names at me. Ask me something.”
Hal thought about it.
“What happens to you,” he said. “After.”
“After what?”
“After this. Whatever this turns out to be.” He changed lanes around a bus. “Say it goes well. Say Simone gets her forty-two million into a form somebody can use and the doctor comes home and Calderon gets what he has got coming. What happens to you on the Monday?”
Mina was quiet long enough that he glanced over.
“I do the show,” she said.
“That is it?”
“That is it. Tanghali Na, Pilipinas, Monday, twelve fifteen, three hours, a game and two guests and the letters.” She looked out at the rain.
“In 2023 I spent nine weeks on a thing in Jakarta that ended with four people going to prison and about six hundred million dollars being returned to a pension fund, and on the Monday I flew home overnight and did a segment where I judged a singing competition for dogs.”
“You are making that up.”
“There were seventeen dogs. One of them could genuinely do it.”
Hal laughed.
“And nobody knows,” he said.
“Nobody knows.”
“Your brother does not know. Your mother does not know.”
“My mother thinks I am a woman who works too hard at television.” Mina shifted the sling. “Which is, in fairness, also true.”
“Does that not.” Hal stopped and started again. “I am going to ask this badly.”
“Ask it badly.”
“Does it not get lonely, mi reina? Not the danger. The other thing. Doing something that big and then going home and not being able to say it at dinner.”
The wipers went. On the radio the woman started her list again from the top.
“There was a period,” Mina said, “of about eighteen months, where I did not think it did. And then in the middle of that period I was at a wedding, and my cousin’s husband, who is a lovely stupid man who sells insurance, spent nine minutes explaining to me why corruption in this country is because Filipinos have no discipline.
” She turned the ring on her right hand.
“And I sat there and I agreed with him, and I said, ay, kuya, ganun talaga. And then I went out to the car park and sat in the car.”
“Yeah.”
“So that is the answer. It gets lonely at weddings.”
Hal drove for a while.
“For the record,” he said, “you can say it at dinner now.”
“I know.”
“I want to be clear that I am volunteering for a lot of dinners.”
“I know,” Mina said, and put her good hand on the back of his neck, and left it there through two intersections and a flooded slip road.
Here is how Hal Rivera crossed Metro Manila on the third day.
He did not go the way anyone local would have gone, because he did not know the way anyone local would have gone, and by hour two he had worked out that this was not the disadvantage it appeared to be.
Everybody else on that road was driving a memory.
They were driving the route they always drove, adjusted, and the adjustments were putting them into the same four bottlenecks as everybody else who had adjusted.
Hal was driving a graph.
He wanted elevation and he wanted through-capacity and he did not care about anything else, including distance, which he explained to Mina somewhere around Cubao while going what she insisted was the wrong way.
“We are going north.”
“We are going up.”
“Hal, Tondo is west.”
“Tondo is west and it is also two meters below where we are standing, and everything between here and there is at the bottom of its own little bowl.” He tapped the windscreen.
“Baby, water is not an obstacle. Water is a floor. I do not have to beat the water, I have to stay above it, and there are exactly four things in this city that are reliably above it and every one of them was built by somebody who was trying to solve a completely different problem.”
“Which four?”