fiction

Departures
by Francis Paolo M. Quina

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
- Plato The Republic

Jon, debilitated, watched as Cara slipped through the busy airport crowd, perhaps for the last time.

And yet, standing there at the airport, watching Claire walk off into the departure area, I began to doubt this end that I had written for Jon and Cara. It has that bittersweet quality that people expect from a love story written by a man, though in my personal opinion, it is already bit too melodramatic. Thankfully I’ve managed to write the scene without having to make any of the characters cry or lash out, which is what I think makes it work. It should be the perfect end for a story that tries hard not to be a romance, in the popular sense of that word, but rather to be literary (I’ve been taught, implicitly, that there is a distinction between masa and bourgeois taste, and my stories, perhaps by virtue of the language they are written in, veer toward the latter; so forgive the pretensions).

I could’ve ended the story with Cara deciding not to leave the country and implying, for that is all I can do without turning it into a fairy tale, that they will live happily ever after in a house by the sea with their children named Anna, Belle, and Lee. But nobody would even buy that wholeheartedly; happily ever after is a fairy tale convention that even fairy tales don’t subscribe to that much anymore. Or if they do, they employ it tongue-in-cheek. We can now easily imagine, when it was once hard to fathom, the once-anonymous and respectable voice of the fairy tale narrator teasing you, “C’mon, now, you know, Prince Charming will mount the next damsel to come around trampling around his woods in distress.”

Today’s consumer market never allows for a happy ending, or any manner of ending for that matter. If a book or a movie sells enough, a sequel has to be made, no matter if one of the lovers died at the end of the narrative, or better, if the lovers were married, which is where a happy ending love story should stop. If they cannot conceive of a way to bring the dead lover back, then they make a prequel (With stories that end happily, they simply introduce an old flame of either one of the characters to create a ludicrous love triangle that will all turn out to be a misunderstanding in the end, but I digress).

As for this story that I’m writing, tentatively called “Departure,” the imagined life that my characters would have, should I choose to write for them a happy ending, would be difficult. Jon, with his literary ambitions, and Cara, with her thirst for life (and all its material wealth), are the kind of characters that end up unhappily married to each other, seldom talking, perhaps with children, who would be the proverbial ball and chain that holds together their chain gang of love gone sour.

The romance of this particular story comes, I guess, from the tragic and doomed nature of the relationship, which makes the time they’ve spent together more precious and poignant. You’d wish they stayed together, but you know they can’t.

And as the final sentence of a story of a doomed love’s end, I think it works beautifully. It’s too bad that that won’t be the case with this story, since that is where we begin, at the chronological end.

Now, a professor of mine once remarked that when an author begins his story at the chronological end, he’s just being clever. And when an author resorts to cleverness to make his story work it means that he knows it’s unoriginal; that better writers have told the story he’s trying to tell in a much better fashion, and many times over.

You might take a guess that this is what I was trying to do with Jon and Cara’s story, and I won’t argue with you, I know that my story, or a version of it has been told before, a hundred times before, and it is a trick to get the readers to go further. Instead of trusting the power of the story to interest and move readers, I am banking on curiosity, on the questions who (Who are Jon and Cara, and what is their relationship?), where (Where is Cara going?), why (Why is Cara leaving? Why is Jon debilitated?), and what will happen next (Will Jon go after Cara? Will Cara turn back and stay?); but not really.

I do have another reason for beginning “Departure” at (or maybe near, I haven’t completely made up my mind yet which one it is) the chronological end. In real life, a person can only make sense of things when he reaches an end (or what he sees as an end), and only then can one look back and find the narrative that has lead him to that point. But these so-called endings in real life almost always open up to a multitude of other possibilities, and those lead to more and more possibilities; Borges’ labyrinthine garden, if you will permit the reference. Definite endings occur only in fiction, a future may be implied, but the truth is that it all still ends with the final punctuation mark.

And that is what I am attempting to do with this story; the character Jon is at an endpoint in his fictional existence; this is the time to choose between letting Cara go and holding her back. As he stands there, debilitated, he remembers, and we as readers, unstuck from time, move back through time, to the chronological beginning, when he first met her and follow the story up to where we started, at the end.

However, I also could’ve begun in medias res, and started with a charming inconsequential incident in the middle of the narrative. For example, and this is a true story, how a character borrows a book from the college library only to find out that a girl he has been corresponding with, but never actually met, has just returned it that very same day. After the character opens the book and realizes what has happened, our narrative is split into two, one moving towards that serendipitous moment where we began, and the other, moving away from that incident and looking at its consequence (Graham Greene begins his The End of the Affair in much the same way, though it is as charming as getting kicked in the face by a horse).

It is a fitting start for a romantic novel or movie isn’t it, a moment of divine providence that, when it happens in literary fictions, we rarely believe and almost always question, but finally accept grudgingly for the sake of our entertainment. When it happened to me three years ago, it seemed like I was in a dream; I was returning a book on postmodernism in literature (which I didn’t get to read), and I was in line at the return desk when the girl two places ahead of me returned a novel that caught my eye, because of its interesting title. When it was my turn at the desk, I asked the librarian for the book and it was while I was filling out the book’s card that I saw her name, and realized what just happened.

Before that moment, I honestly had doubted her existence, thinking instead that the girl who went by the name Claire Hermoso was as real as the television and book characters we both loved and chatted about over the Internet.

Once, when we met up with a friend of hers from college, Claire retold this incident with her usual flair for dramatics (she is after all a theater major, in production though) and hyperbole, remarking casually, if not in jest, that we were somehow destined for each other. I shrugged and smiled, feigning nonchalance, hoping that she didn’t see how happy I was that she thought of it, of us, like that.

Had I not already used this incident in a previous story “Perfect,” I would put it in this one, and do it much better this time. Though to be honest, I did like how it turned out in that story:

July was a warm month, a residue of summer that refused to fade despite the occasional rain that spelled the coming of storms. Jess found himself standing between Gardner and Hardy at the library, sweat rolling down his back, when his cellular phone went off. Like a gunshot, the ringing pierced through the pristine silence, and he almost dropped the books he was holding to get his phone.

One of the library staff, a student assistant who was shelving books a few feet away looked at him irritably. It was from Cheryl, one of those trite love messages that mobile phone companies send out in the hopes that love-stricken subscribers forward it again and again to their loved ones, until like some game, it comes back to the one who sent it first, though through another person and with slight modifications to the text.

And he remembered sending this particular message to her months ago, changing only a few words to soothe occasion of their online anniversary. But it still had him smiling, although he was fighting it. Cheryl had been corresponding with him through e-mail over the last year. They had begun innocently enough; discussing the stories she posted on an amateur fiction website. But soon it grew into something more. At least that was how Jess understood it.

Now they were constantly sending SMS, inane messages that range from comments about the weather (damn hot, isn’t it?), movies and television shows (omg! did u watch buffy last night?), and even the usual wishes (nyt babe! mwah!). He put the phone on silent mode, and slipped it back in his pocket.

Still smirking, he let his fingertips touch the book spines as he scanned from book to book. When he found what he was looking for, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair which was to be the subject of his final paper for Post-War English Literature, he sighed happily. Though he loved books, he despised being in the library because it reminded him of how poor he was. How there were so many books to buy, and he didn’t have the means to buy them.

He took it out slowly from the shelf; he had not read Greene before but was attracted to the book particularly because of the title. It spoke to him, though he himself had never been in an affair.

When he slipped out the book’s file card to fill it out he saw Cheryl’s full name written there, so plainly, in red ink. Until then he thought of her as a fiction, a lovely dream that would soon reveal herself as a bored sixteen-year-old boy or a married and closeted accountant.

To Jess, she had always been binary codes, a string of ones and zeroes, and while he enjoyed chatting with her, he had always had in him the wall that prepared him to meet against disappointment. But now she was flesh and blood, and to him, she had bled on that card to prove it.

I didn’t write it exactly as it happened, choosing instead to not make Jess see Cheryl yet. Blissful coincidence in fiction, unlike in real life, is almost never welcome. When it was workshopped in fiction writing class, several readers raised the issue of believability; would this sort of thing happen in real life? And if it did, how can it be presented in realistic fiction without breaking the integrity of the realism?

I argued that yes, things like this do happen in real life and, as such, can be used in fiction. Our professor agreed with me and then quickly added that the fault of the author, as if I was not there, was to employ it in a completely sincere story.

“The author needs to be winking at the reader when he’s writing something like this,” were his exact words. After the class, I managed to talk to him briefly, and asked what he meant and more importantly, how he would have written the story if he was me.

“It means don’t be so serious with it. Make it fun,” he grinned and added, “But if I were you, I wouldn’t have written it at all.”

“It was that awful?”

He stood up from his seat, and laughed weakly.

“No, you misunderstand me. I don’t write stories based on my experience; I could never trust myself to let go of details and things in my fictions, how much more if it’s from real life. I feel that if I were to write an autobiographical story, I wouldn’t be able to finish it.”

“What makes you think that it’s autobiographical?”

“There was a conviction in your voice when you said that coincidences like the one in your story happen in real life,” he said picking up his things. “You were being defensive.”

“Well, I confess that a few of the details were taken from real events but a great deal of it is fictional,” I told him as we walked out of the room. “I mean what are we going to write about if not our lives?”

He didn’t offer any answer to my question, but simply handed his copy of The Rhetoric of Fiction and told me to read it, then he excused himself and hurried off to his next class. I opened the book and the first thing that my eyes fell on was the section on point of view. The single most important choice a writer makes when writing a story, it said, is from which point-of-view the story will be told.

Yesterday, I tried to free up some space in my computer’s hard drive by deleting documents that I no longer had any use of and while doing so I stumbled upon a vignette that I had written a few months ago, but have completely forgotten. I remember clearly now, after reading it how I had come to write the piece.

I had come home from having a quick snack with Claire at a nearby fast food place and I was struck by the feeling of loneliness, immense loneliness, while I was waiting for her to arrive. And it wasn’t just waiting for her that triggered the loneliness, though at the time of writing I thought it was just that, but I realized it was waiting for something to happen in life. But as a responsible author, I should refrain from telling you what my intent was in writing the piece and let you, as the reader, figure it out for yourself:

The fast food restaurant was brightly lit; fluorescent lamps, already too many for such a small space, were all switched on even though outside, the sun was crawling slowly towards noon. Jake looked around, sizing up the lunch crowd; families, cliques, and couples. There were a few like him, sitting silently at a corner table, eating quickly through their orders, so as not to suffer looking like a lonely loser.

He moved around the plastic tag the girl behind the counter had given him, on his table. It was to identify him as the customer who is waiting on the Big Man meal. He felt branded by it, drawing unwanted attention, though he was sure that he didn’t need the tag; the girl behind the counter, the one with Celine’s smile would simply tell her co-worker, “That’s for the big guy in the orange shirt.”

Jake suddenly had a mental image that he was one of those traffic cones; a big, fat traffic cone parked in a corner table.

He looked at his mobile phone, hoping for a message from her, though he knew it was futile, she had been robbed of hers the week before. Celine had said over the phone to meet her there at 10:30, and by Jake’s clock it was already, 11:15.

'Nothing makes loneliness more unbearable than the possibility of being stood up,' the words suddenly popped in his head. He thought that it was brilliant line, and that he could build a story around that. He saved it in his phone’s memory, already thinking of the characters that’ll play the part.

I was struck at how the sentiment of this short piece perfectly fits in with the story that I am trying to write and realized quickly that I had found, not just a small piece of “Departure,” but its direction and mood. This is going to be a story about waiting; and that opening scene at the departure area, where Jon and Cara part, seems more right now than ever.

Earlier in the day, I bumped into Francis in the hallway, one of my classmates from the fiction writing class I mentioned earlier, and he asked after “that library girl” from my story; was I still seeing her?

I had just come from a Classical Literature class that was spent discussing the myth of Orpheus and Orphism. But mostly it revolved around Orpheus and Eurydice’s love story and the tragedy of Orpheus looking back at his beloved only moments before completely freeing her from Hades. Only a handful of people remember anything else about Orpheus besides that one mistake, just like Lot’s wife. It must be awful to be remembered, and often, be judged solely by one thing you did, good or bad, and nothing else.

“Oh, her,” I murmured trying to sound cool. I had long given up trying to explain which part of that story was based on fact and which are fictions; my imagination’s own doing. “She left actually, a few days ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said trying to make a gesture by patting me on the back. “Relationships are a mess nowadays, isn’t it? It’s no wonder people aren’t that much into reading fiction anymore; they have enough drama as it is in their lives.”

“For the province, I mean. She left Manila, not me,” I interrupted quickly. “I mean, not that she could leave me in that sense. We’re friends, just that. We’re not in any sort of romantic relationship.”

We laughed at how ridiculous my last two sentences sounded, and moved on to other things, including the recent death of one of our friends from fiction class from leukemia. As we parted ways at the jeepney stop, he told me that he had liked her, and wished that he had at least had the courage to ask her out to see where it could have gone.

“You don’t wait on things like that,” he said. “Now, Dina’s gone and I’ll never know.”

On my way to Philcoa, I recalled one particular session in fiction writing class where Dina, she of the rose-colored eyeglasses, had attacked one of my stories. She read aloud the opening sentences of the story, as it was customary in that class to read aloud scenes and parts of stories we were about to criticize or praise:

Joseph looked up at the dark clouds gathering in the horizon and wondered whether it was an omen. He checked his watch for the fifth time, and his cell phone, perhaps, for the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes. Carmelle was still nowhere to be seen. The crowd in the library steps thinned considerably as one o’clock approached fast.

Waiting there, the minutes piling upon each other, he imagined her arrival with the coming rain.

“The dark clouds, they’re there looming large over the characters,” Dina followed through quickly. “But what is the significance of pointing it out if it does not contribute anything to the story as a whole.”

Francis jumped in on the fray (when he himself was fond of ignoring the so-called ‘rules of fiction,’ now I know why) and so did the rest of the class, letting out a constant stream of technical jargon like pathetic fallacy and foreshadowing, then explaining it and giving examples, as if I haven’t heard of these things.

“I know what they are,” I said irritably when it was finally my turn to speak. “But the clouds are not there to reflect the mood of the story and character. They’re there because they are there.”

“Where exactly is there? Over the Main Library steps, while you were waiting for, what’s her name, Carmelle?” Dina asked.

Professor Buendia cut in before I could say anything, “Well, the way I see it, what we have here is a common problem of fiction based on real life; choosing between staying true to the material basis of a story and the integrity of the story as literary fiction. As a writer of realistic fiction, you have to decide which details to include and which ones to let go of.”

I received an e-mail from Claire saying that she had arrived perfectly safe and was happy to be home. She described the hearty brunch she had and wished that I could be there to taste the amazing food, especially the seafood which she knows I’m deathly allergic to. She was, literally, killing me.

It was only a few days ago when we last ate together. We were at a restaurant and we had just come from watching a movie, a happy-enough romantic comedy that involved a male prostitute, a desperate singleton, and a wedding. That was when she told me that she was going home for the holidays, possibly staying there for good.

“How about your job?”

“It’s a good job, sure. But you know me. I have no idea what to do with my life. I think I just took that job out of sheer boredom,” she said picking at a stir-fried vegetable dish. “Besides, I miss my family. I don’t want to spend Christmas alone like last year.”

“So when do you plan to leave?” I asked before taking in a mouthful of rice.

“The end of the week.”

I chewed thoughtfully, buying time to think of something clever to say. I’ve learned that the best way to deal with things like this is to crack a joke, even though I’m bad at it. It must have taken me quite some time because Claire asked me if I was alright.

“Sure, I was just chewing,” I said. “Wow… You’re not wasting any time are you?”

“I’m just bored and lonely here.”

“That was rhetorical, but I don’t blame you for being bored. I bore myself a lot of times,” I shrugged coldly.

“I didn’t mean you,” she smiled then added the word ‘babe’ instead of saying my name.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Call you what?”

“That… babe. It’s feeding this delusion I have that you like me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said looking away.

I took a sip from my iced tea and cursed my stupid mouth. “I’m sorry,” I began, “I’m stupid sometimes, you know that don’t you? Saying words I’m not supposed to say.”

“Look, if it helps. It’s something about me, not you. I’m messed up, you know this,” she said quietly. “I haven’t felt that way for a long time now. The last time I did, it didn’t go too well and I got burned.”

“Ah, yes. Well, the same thing happened to me. I got burned a few minutes ago,” I said trying to smile. “But thank you for making it more, palatable.”

“It’s the truth, I’m not trying to fib you. I’m just weird.”

“Well, that’s one of the many reasons I like you.”

It was the last time I saw Claire before she left. I did not take her to the airport like I had said before, that was, like so many things I’ve said, a fiction.

The driver helped him load her bags into the trunk while she watched and waited. Jon sighed as he slammed the compartment shut, and looked at her. “I’m coming with you the airport.”

“No, you don’t have to,” she said coolly.

Scratch that.

“No, you don’t have to,” she said, trying hard to smile.

No, not like that.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“But I want to,” he reasoned and with this she did not argue, but slipped into the backseat.

The ride to the airport was short and fast. In the early mornings, Manila seemed so peaceful, so sedate. The streetlights, strangely dim, cast a soft glow over her face as they sped past them. Jon caught himself staring at her and looked away, just as Cara turned to look at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he smiled. “I’m just going to miss you a lot. But that’s stupid, there’s always e-mail.”

She nodded and leaned towards him, kissed him on the lips, lightly. “I love you, you know that right?”

No, this is wrong. It shouldn’t happen like that.

“I’m going to miss you,” Jon said, looking past his reflection on the window, to the darkness outside of the taxi. Manila, even in the early mornings, seemed like a beast on the prowl.

She patted the back of his hand. “I’ll be back soon. Besides there’s e-mail.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” he gritted his teeth. “E-mail, sure. Maybe we can text, too.”

“I’m not sure about that. Prices are steep there; a single text message might cost you an arm and a leg.”

“I love you, Cara.”

“Love you, too.”

“I meant it in the romantic kind of way.” He faced her, waiting for an answer.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, after what seemed like an hour. “Do you want me to stay?”

Yes. “No, I don’t want you to give up on this opportunity.”

Cara looked at him, and tried to smile, she knew him well enough that it was the truth. “You’re going to be great, you know.”

“At departures?”

“No, whatever it is you want to do with your life.”

“You say that like you’re never going to see me again.”

I stopped there and saved my work. I looked over the story again and read the opening line, and realized how much I hated Jon for simply standing there like it was the end of the world. And Cara, she wouldn’t even look back at him.

Where would the story go after that, anyway? Jon would certainly go home and be heartbroken. He might even write a story about it. It was a pathetic scenario that I had written him in.

I opened a new file and copied the first line there and proceeded to rewrite it as an ending for a new story. I remembered reading that the single most important choice a writer makes is the point-of-view from which the story is told.

Cara turned to look at Jon, but he had already gone. All she saw of him was his back as he slipped through the crowd. She knew then that she had lost him, forever.

The End

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