Chapter 8 The Sinking City #3
The winch was the easy part. The hard part was the jeepney driver, who upon understanding the plan immediately abandoned his own vehicle in the middle of the road to help, and then the two men from the sari-sari store on the corner, who came out into the water with a plank, and then a boy of about fifteen who arrived from nowhere with an actual proper ratchet strap and refused all payment for it and then hung around to watch.
The motorcycle came up onto the rack behind the cab. The owner stood in the water and did not say anything at all while it happened, and when it was done he shook Hal’s hand with both of his for a long time.
They took him with them. He rode in the back on a jump seat and gave directions for six kilometers that Hal could not understand, which Mina translated, and which were better than the radio, because he knew which streets had been resurfaced last year and were therefore an inch higher than the ones that had not.
His name was Arnel. He got out at a footbridge in Sampaloc with his motorcycle, and he asked Mina for a photograph, and she said yes, and he took it with the dead motorcycle in the frame.
They came down into Tondo at ten past one and the city changed.
Hal had thought he understood what he was looking at.
He had spent five hours watching Manila deal with water: annoyed, competent, chest-deep in places, complaining, moving.
Espana at nineteen inches. Taft at nineteen.
EDSA at the tunnel, thirty-seven and closed.
Bad numbers. Real numbers. Numbers that a city argued about on the radio and would still be arguing about next week.
Those numbers stopped meaning anything about four hundred meters past the North Harbor gate.
The road ahead of them went down and did not come back up.
It was not a flooded street. There was no street.
There was a brown surface with things standing up out of it: the tops of walls, a sari-sari store sign at chest height, a basketball ring at knee height with the net gone.
A row of what had been two-storey houses had become a row of roofs with people on them.
A refrigerator went past on its side, turning.
Hal stopped the truck at the last dry meter of the world and got out and stood in the rain.
He looked at his own dashboard, which said the water at the front bumper was six inches.
Then he looked at a woman about ninety meters out, standing on something he could not see, with water at her collarbone, holding a plastic bag above her head with both hands.
“Mina,” he said.
“I know.”
“That is six feet.” His voice did not sound like his own. “That is six feet and we were at nineteen inches on Espana and that is four kilometers back.”
“I know.”
“It is the same rain.” He turned around. He wanted her to explain it and he knew, even as he wanted it, that she had been explaining it since Wednesday morning and that he was the one who had needed to stand in it. “Baby, it is the same rain.”
Mina got down out of the cab on her good arm.
She stood next to him in the rain at the edge of Barangay Isla Puting Bato and looked out at four hundred houses with their roofs at water level, and after a moment she said, quietly, in a voice with nothing performed in it whatsoever:
“It is the same rain.”
He stood there a while longer.
“Say the rest of it,” he said.
“Which rest of it?”
“You have been carrying a number since Wednesday morning and you have not said it to me and I have watched you not say it about nine times.” He did not look at her. “Four hundred millimeters. That is what you told me the override was raised by. Sixteen inches.”
“Yes.”
“And I have been thinking about that for two days as a number on a page, because that is what it was, it was a number on a page in a kitchen.” Hal nodded out at the water. “So how much of that is the sixteen inches?”
Mina did not answer straight away.
“That is not how it works,” she said. “It is not sixteen inches of that. If the stations had run from the start, on the old setpoints, the water would have come and it would have gone. It would have been bad. It is always bad. It would have been two feet in the road for a day and everybody would have been furious and nobody would have been on a roof.”
“So all of it.”
“Not all of it. There is a typhoon.” Her jaw was tight. “But the difference between a thing you survive eight times a year and that.” She stopped.
“Say it.”
“The difference is three numbers and a mailbox,” Mina said.
Out in the brown, a wooden bangka came around the end of a submerged wall with four people in it and a man standing in the stern working a bamboo pole, and turned toward them.
The man in the stern was in his fifties, silver in his hair, in a shirt that had been washed to the color of nothing.
He brought the boat in against the last dry meter of the road with one economical push and looked up at the white truck and its decal, and then at Hal, and then at the tall woman standing beside him in a cheap rain shell with a cap pulled down.
He looked at her for about two seconds.
Then Aurelio Ramos took his cap off, in six feet of water, in the rain, and said, “Ate Mina. Salamat at dumating ka.”