It was good part-time work, he told me, perfect for a student. I was hired. It wasn’t far from the port, and in warm weather, I could sit out front and smell the river where it opened into the wide harbor. It was enough for me to listen and know it was there: the hum and crash of ships being loaded and unloaded reminded me of why I had left, where I had come to, and all the farther places that awaited me. I tried not to think of home, and though I’d promised to write, somehow it never seemed like the appropriate time.
We sold cigarettes and liquor and newspapers to the dockworkers, and had a copy machine for those who came to present their paperwork at the customs house. We made change for them and my boss, Nadal, advised those headed to customs as to the appropriate bribe, depending on what item they were expecting to receive, and from where. He knew the protocol well. He’d worked for years in customs before the dictator fell, but hadn’t had the foresight to join a political party when democracy came. His only other mistake in thirty years, he told me once, was that he hadn’t stolen enough. There had never been any rush. Autocracies are nothing if not stable, and no one ever thought the old regime could be toppled.
We sold postcards of the hanging, right by the cash register: the body of the dictator, swaying from an improvised gallows in the main plaza. In the photo, it is a cloudy day, and every head is turned upward to face the expressionless dead man. The card’s inscription reads The King Is Always Above the People, and one has the sense of an inviolable silence reigning over the spectators. I was fifteen when it happened. I remember my father crying at the news. He’d been living in the city when the man first came to power.
We sold two or three of these postcards each week.
In the early mornings I wandered around the city. Out in the streets, I peppered my speech with words and phrases I’d heard around me, and sometimes, when I fell into conversations with strangers, I would realize later that the goal of it all had been to pass for someone raised in the capital. I never pulled it off. The slang I’d picked up from the radio before moving was disappointingly tame. At the shop I saw the same people every day, and they knew my story—or rather, the one I told them: a solitary, orphaned student from a faraway city neighborhood. “When do you study?” they’d ask, and I’d tell them I was saving up money to matriculate. I spent a good deal of time reading, and this fact alone was enough to convince them. The stooped customs bureaucrats in their faded suits came in on their lunch break to reminisce with Nadal about the good old days, and sometimes they would slip me some money. “For your studies,” they’d say, and wink.
There were others—the dockworkers, always promising the newest, dirtiest joke in exchange for credit at the store. Twice a month one of the larger carriers came in, depositing a dozen or so startled Filipinos for shore leave. Inevitably they wandered into the shop, disoriented, hopeful, but most of all thrilled to be once again on dry land. They grinned and yammered incomprehensibly and I was always kind to them. That could be me, I thought, in a year, perhaps two: stumbling forth from the bowels of a ship into the narrow streets of a port city anywhere in the world.
I was alone in the shop one afternoon when a man in a light brown uniform walked in. I’d been in the city three and a half months by then. He wore his moustache in that way men from the provinces did, and I disliked him immediately. With great ceremony he pulled a large piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and spread it out on the counter. It was a target from a shooting range: the crude outline of a man, vaguely menacing, now pierced with holes. The customer looked admiringly at his handiwork. “Not bad, eh?”
“Depends.” I bent over the sheet, placing my index finger in each paper wound, one by one. There were seven holes in the target. “What distance?”
“At any distance.” He asked, “Can you do better?” Without waiting for me to respond, he took out an official-looking form and placed it next to the bullet-riddled paper man. “I need three copies, son. This target and my certificate. Three of each.”
“Half an hour,” I said.
He squinted at me and stroked his moustache. “Why so long?”
The reason, naturally, was that I felt like making him wait. And he knew that. But I told him the machine had to warm up. Even as I said this, it sounded ridiculous. The machine, I said, was a delicate and expensive piece of equipment, newly imported from Japan.
He was unconvinced.
“And we don’t have paper this size,” I added. “I’ll have to reduce it.”
His lips scrunched together into a sort of smile. “But thank God you have a new machine that can do all that. You’re from upriver, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Which village?”
“Town,” I said, and told him the name.
“Have you seen the new bridge?” he asked.
I said I hadn’t, and this was a lie. “I left before it was built.”
He sighed. “It’s a beautiful bridge,” he said, allowing himself to indulge briefly in description: the wide river cutting through green rolling hills that seemed to stretch on forever.
When he was done reminiscing, he turned back to me. “Now, listen. You make my copies, and take your time. Warm up the machine, read it poetry, massage it, make love to it. Do what you have to do. You’re very lucky. I’m happy today. Tomorrow I go home and I have a job waiting for me at the bank. I’ll make good money, and I’ll marry the prettiest girl in town, and you’ll still be here, breathing this nasty city air, surrounded by these nasty city people.” He smiled for a moment. “Got that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Now, tell me where a man can get a drink around here.”
There was a bar a few streets over, a dingy spot with smoky windows that I walked by almost every day. It was a place full of sailors and dockworkers and rough men the likes of whom still frightened me. I’d never been, but in many ways, it was the bar I’d imagined when I was still back home, plotting a way to escape: dark and unpleasant and exciting, the kind of place that would upset my poor, blameless mother.
I took the man’s target and put it behind the counter. “Sure, there’s a bar,” I said, “but it’s not for country folk.”
“Insolent little fucker. Tell me where it is.”
I pointed him in the right direction.
“Half an hour. Have my copies ready.” He noticed the plastic stand with the postcards of the dictator’s hanging and scowled. With his index finger, he carefully flicked them over, so that they all tumbled to the floor.
I let them fall.
“If I were your father,” he said, “I would beat you senseless for disrespect.”
He shook his head and left, letting the door slam behind him.
I never saw him again. As it happened, I was right about the bar. Someone must have disliked the looks of him, or maybe they thought he was a cop by the way he was dressed, or maybe his accent drew the wrong kind of attention. In any case, the papers said it was quite a show. The fight started inside—who knows how these things begin—and spilled out into the street. That’s where he died, head cracked on the cobblestones. An ambulance was called, but couldn’t make it down the narrow streets in time. There was a shift change at the docks, and the streets were filled with men.
SHORTLY AFTER MY ENCOUNTER with the security guard, I wrote a letter home. Just a note really, something brief to let my parents know I was alive, that they shouldn’t believe everything they read in the newspapers about the capital. My father had survived a stint in the city, and nearly three decades later, he still spoke of the place with bewilderment. He went there shortly after marrying my mother, and returned after a year working the docks with enough money to build the house where I’d been raised. The city may have been profitable, but it was also frightening, an unsteady kind of place. In twelve months there he saw robberies, riots, a president deposed. As