The Descartes Highlands. Eric Gamalinda

and believes she is dead. The city is by all appearances alive, and only when you look closely, not up at the lights and towering high-rises but down in the gutters and tunnels, do you realize it’s in an advanced state of decomposition. It’s propped up by a life-support system of billboards, shops, train tracks, tourists, money, noise, and seemingly purposeful mayhem. But it’s a lost cause. It’s rotting in its bones, its innards infested with cockroaches, mosquitoes, and rats, its services inept, its dissonant ghettoes teeming with the refuse of the human race, the homeless, the crazy, and the poor. It’s a city sewn together from many cities, people from all over the world bring their shit here and call it a life: a Frankenstein’s monster of a city, born without a soul and doomed to die, if not already dead. No wonder Lorca’s impression of it was morbid:

       Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes

       como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.

       In the neighborhoods sleepless people stagger

       like survivors of a shipwreck of blood.

      I am happy to stay home with her all day. The city discombobulates me. Its farrago of everything causes my head to spin. Just the idea of having to go out already makes me feel nauseous. The shortest trip to a Rite Aid three blocks away, where I have to get her medication, feels like I’m walking through a gauntlet, past the rebellious gun-toting teenagers streaming out of Martin Luther King High School, the hawkers of fake Gucci bags, the Chinese takeout cyclists who will run you down for no reason. Anything within three feet of the building’s front door only makes me want to slink back home.

      Wild animals seek some place of solitude when they’re injured. They wait out patiently for nature to take its course, for the body to heal itself. I am certain Mother’s body will do the same thing.

      Either that, or she and I will have to blend into the shipwreck. She and I will have to disappear.

      * * *

      In 1889, Jules Cotard, a neurologist and former military surgeon, finds out that his daughter has contracted diphtheria. He has been living in Vanves for fifteen years and is already famous for having first described what will be known as the Cotard delusion, the belief that you are dead, don’t exist, or don’t have bodily organs. Cotard refuses to believe that his daughter is dying, and doesn’t leave her bedside for fifteen days. Eventually she does recover, an event that, though no records show it, I imagine Cotard may have interpreted as proof that disease is at bottom a manifestation of the mind. Ironically, he contracts the illness himself and dies a few days later.

      I take copious notes about the disease, but to what end I can’t imagine. I come up with a story. Cotard, through some demonic, Faustian transaction, saves his daughter by exchanging his life for hers. It appears to me that, in the small universe in which we operate not through will but ultimately through patterns, I will eventually have to do the same thing for my mother. The idea of such a sacrifice fills me with a sense of purpose, a destiny, but also with dread and a simmering resentment toward her stubborn refusal to heal. In short, my mind is getting really fucked.

      It takes me days to unpack. Boxes choke the apartment, and I eat my dinner on them, write my journal on them, masturbate on them. When I finally find the energy to open them, I discover a bunch of folders from mother’s files, records of patients, deeds of sale, tax returns—and a browned and crisped document that will, if this didn’t sound too dramatic, change the course of my life.

      It is a typewritten bequest prepared by a notary public whose scrawl I can barely read. It is tucked among the documents she drew up before the Life Crusaders destroyed the clinic. It specifies the money that Andrew Breszky wired back to Mother, a few months after I was born: fifteen thousand and five hundred dollars, half the amount Mother told me she paid to adopt me. By today’s standards I reckon that has appreciated and must be worth twice as much, maybe even more. So I guess Mother did get a full refund.

      Then it occurs to me that this is evidence that Mr. Breszky did in fact exist, and maybe still does. That he is indeed my father, and that all her incredible stories about Manila, the storm, the dead air on the day I was delivered, aren’t just embellishments to an otherwise incredible history. But I really don’t care whether it is fact or fiction; history, as far as I’m concerned, is dead matter. What I never knew, and discover only when I read the document, is that Andrew Brezsky also bequeathed the exact same amount to another son, who, it seems, was born on the same day that I was.

      His name is Mathieu Aubert. Grew up in Paris, or the south of France, or the Philippines, or all of the above.

      He is, it seems, the only family I have left.

       WSOWOB