By Dean Francis Alfar
Every disease is a story, every illness has a beginning, middle, and ending. Sometimes, we are there at the start, when the characters and plot are introduced. We notice the body’s subtle betrayals like sudden ripples across still waters. Your occasional headache, a shortness of breath, the ignorable small pains easily attributed to too much of this or too little of that or the simple onset of age. It’s just aging, you tell me. And yes, yes, I believe you. We’re all getting there, after all.
Often, we are there for the middle, when the complications of the narrative situation are unveiled. The disease is unmasked, and we learn its name, knowledge that means much to us but is of no consequence to the body it ravages. Like characters in any good piece of fiction, we struggle against fate. You fight it, I fight it, we both fight it, because it belongs to both of us, this terrible thing within you. There’s always hope, you tell me. And yes, yes, I agree. This is war. We are warriors. We cannot lose hope.
But always, someone is there for the ending, when the climax and conclusion are rendered with terrible finality. There is little left of you, and it becomes a matter of counting days and nights, as we wait together, your hand in my hand, our eyes dry, all tears spent. Don’t be sad, you tell me. And yes, yes, I agree. I say I am beyond anger.
But not really.
The curse of both of us being writers is this awareness of everything, when we keep still and quiet, when we look around and notice details (the faded color of your hospital gown, how you keep your eyes locked on mine when I trim your beard) and overhear conversations (the relentless sound of sympathy, the whispered pleasantries when obviously nothing about anything is pleasant). We are filing things to use in future fiction, I tell you. Not me, you tell me.
We are aware that we exist in a series of scenes, and because we know how to best write them, we demand that they make sense. That all dialogue is succinct and character-building, with epiphanic revelations lurking in strings of words offered casually but with deliberate thoughtfulness. We long for meaning to reach out to us, in metaphors as cliché as the morning sun gently transforming the hospital lawn outside into a field of iridescent diamonds.
Tell me a story, you say when you open your eyes. What sort, which one, I ask. Something with you and me in it, you say. Something with dragons, you say.
I close my eyes and try to remember. In my head events and experiences are already colored, intertwined with details I know I must have either exaggerated or created out of whole cloth. But you and I were never truly concerned about the truth. What matters more than the facts are the truths we take away, the ones we pack and take home with us along with all our souvenirs (hotel soaps for you, uncountable digital pictures for me, and of course, dragons for us both), the memories we agree we will both remember. The tiny but powerful fictions that become the brick and mortar of our shared life.
So I tell you stories about dragons, and about us.
In Bangkok we were so excited that we forgave almost everything. It was our first time to travel together, and we decided to go cheap on accommodations, gearing our budget instead toward food and things we could get at the endless crowded markets. We greeted the tiny hotel room with stunned laughter, lifting our suitcases over the bed to get to the other side. We will not be spending much time in here anyway, you said. Except to sleep, I said. And we looked for pulled tea and monks and elephants and massages and sex shows, your hand in my hand. You told me about a story you read by a Thai author, about a soup so deliciously unearthly that people lined up for days for a spoonful. Your big reveal was that it was made by the regenerating flesh of a dragon. Let’s find it, I said. It’s just a story, you said. You never know, you said and I said and you said, and we found our dragon soup in a small restaurant tucked away in an alley.
In Ho Chi Minh City, we packed light and imagined ourselves as Viet Cong traversing the Cu Chi tunnels, reenacted Miss Saigon to the understandable irritation of practically everyone, inhaled the fragrant spices at the colorful stalls you insisted were possessed of hidden magical herbs that the sellers would offer, if we only knew what to ask for. So we asked for sprigs of rau ram of a particularly spicy virtue, grown not in a garden but in a ceramic pot that permits the herb to spill over the edges. The vendors shook their heads in confusion. We need it to attract a rong, you told me. Yes, I said, because we both knew the story about what the old Vietnamese dragon finds irresistible. The plan was just to catch a glimpse of its châu, that precious jewel it carries in its mouth. Just to see it. We consoled ourselves instead with bowls of steaming pho that we found somewhere in the hive of streets and shops that offered other wonders of silk and handicrafts and peculiar fruit. Questing is hard work, I said. True, you said.
Our plan for Indonesia was to spend three days in Jakarta doing the tourist thing (and so we did – climbing Monas for the view, gorging on bakwanundag in Pasar Baru while you patiently picked out all the shrimp for me, haggling for a vintage 1989 grey Gameboy in Glodok and failing miserably) before heading for Komodo National Park. It will be worth it, you told me, as I struggled in the heat as we sailed for what seemed like days through an archipelago of volcanic islands. When we finally saw one, your smile made me forget my fatigue. Look, you told me, pointing to the dragon in the distance. It drools, I told you. So do you when you sleep, you told me. Our guide refused to take us any closer, so we settled for my camera, intent on capturing the Komodo’s lazy forked tongue. This is as close as we get to the real thing, you said. This is as close as my nose can stand, I said. And I remember how we kissed, the scratch of your beard against my skin, and how our guide just kept staring at the dragon.
In Singapore, we used the combined the small royalties from our books (yours more than mine) to stay in a better hotel, and laughed when we realized we could not afford the hotel restaurant, which was outrageous. We bought hats and figured out the workings of the trains and buses that went to places we wanted to visit. This place is so small that you can see most of it in one day, I told you. And we have four, you said, four days to see all of it four times over. And so we took in everything we could, with special attention to the Singapore Stone. The story goes: a man once freed a genie and was given amazing strength. He defeated all comers from across the region and defeated the powerful champion of the King of India, by hurling an immense stone into the Singapore River. The stone was destroyed decades ago, but fragments remained in the British Museum. You wanted to see it because you believed it was a dragon and not a genie, and that somehow all of Singapore got the story wrong. It happens, you said, stories change, details shift. But not like this, I told you. Some stories are just as exactly how they are told, and there is no use in altering details because you prefer it to be something else, I said and you said and I said and you left. I found you later at the hotel. I want to go home, you told me. And so we did.
I’m sorry about that, you say.
Don’t be, I say.
We lapse into silence, and my thoughts are about stories and endings and us and you. You ask me to pull the curtains so you can see outside. Your room at Medical City overlooks Valle Verde, and if you squint during daytime you can see Antipolo. But it is evening, so what we have is the dark sky illuminated by a pale moon.
You point your finger toward the moon, then toward me.
I remember a story about holy men who believed that only the moon held the truth and that their fingers represented words.
You are my story, you say.
Later, when you are asleep, I sit and watch you like I do every night that we’ve been here. I know what I’m waiting for and I hate that I know that. Every disease is a story, and every story has an ending. But I’m thinking that maybe the reverse is also true. That every story is a disease, a glorious illness that devours and transforms those who read or hear it, imbuing their flesh with immaterial magic and ethereal hope, as powerful as the promise of dragons and as true as the moon and you. And the ending is just the part of a greater story which is part of something bigger and so on, and we who are infected are in fact the fortunate ones.
I’m telling myself this.
I’m thinking this as I hold your hand, because in the span of silence between us, I will own our ending.