Touch
It had been living in this room since the day it became what it was, and it thought it had
been so long that sometimes it wasn’t sure how long anymore, although occasionally a few
memories would come back and it would remember. But it wasn’t as though it wanted to
remember, and in the occasion that it would, it would push them away, even though it knew that
memories were all it really had left.
Every so often the landlady would come and let visitors in―girls who wanted to see the
room, who sometimes came with their parents or sometimes with their boyfriends, and who,
upon realizing how old the building really was, would often start sharing stories they had heard
about “places like this.” Later on they would finally ask—it would note the slightest hint of fear
in their voices—and the landlady, of course, would laugh and brush it aside whenever they did
inquire. You believe those things? she would say.
But it knew it was there.
The small room never changed much. They would come and go, paint and repaint the
walls, put plaster to cover holes where nails had been driven, fix the pipes, and wipe the jalousie
window. But the room would always return to its old state, and the paint would fade, new nails
would be driven into the walls, water stains would blot the ceiling, and the window would gather
dust.
The cracks in the concrete stayed, and places where posters had been pinned up left
square patches that were a lighter shade than the rest of the walls. Dust and dirt and strands of
hair collected in the corners no matter how often the floors were swept. The metallic wall fan
turned red-brown in more places. The cabinet doors did not close completely, termites ate at the
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wooden table by the window, and the rusty bed creaked at the weight of whoever owned it. The
air remained heavy.
The girls complained about all this sometimes, and sometimes it was why they left. None
of them lasted a year. The longest any of them ever stayed was one hundred and thirty-seven
days, but of course there were the national holidays and the long weekends and the class
suspensions that they always seemed to take advantage of. But each time one of them closed the
door for the last time, it would stay in its favorite corner next to the table and wait until the next
time the door opened again. Those were all it could do, really. To keep count as the days turned
to weeks, as the weeks turned to months. To stay, wait, and then watch. And think, maybe. Or
remember. But it never liked remembering because it feared memories, and then at the same time
it was afraid of running out of things to remember.
***
It had been forty-two days since the last girl left when the knob finally turned again. This
one had long and wavy hair that reached her waist, and she was quite skinny like the last,
although the last girl hadn’t been skinny when she first moved in. The colder months have
probably just begun, as it noticed that the girl wore a jacket that was sizes too big for her; and it
took note of the brightness in her eyes as she nodded her head while the landlady gave her the
run-through.
Well, the building is a bit old—
Oh, no, I don’t mind that at all, the girl said, shaking her head quite fervently. What
matters is that it’s just a ride away from the school.
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Very well, then. We have good water supply. No curfew. The jeepney terminal is less than
a block away, and there’s a grocery store nearby, as well as a laundry shop. You’ve seen them,
of course?
Yes, you do have a very good location.
There’s also a pharmacy at the corner.
How much do you charge again?
One thousand three hundred per month. I charge an extra fifty for small appliances, and
an extra three hundred if you have a computer. I used to charge five hundred for that, but since
the building is old and the boarders keep complaining, I reduced the fee.
That’s all right, I’m only bringing my clothes and some books, anyway. The girl peered
out the window. The window is pretty small, though. Doesn’t it get too hot in here?
Not to worry, the wind blows in our direction.
The girl seemed to find that funny, and she laughed a big, melodious laugh. I see.
But tell me, hija, why are you looking for a place to stay in the middle of the semester?
Well, I couldn’t really afford the rent anymore.
They do charge ridiculous amounts, don’t they?
They do. She took a deep breath. Anyway, I think this room is good enough for me. I’ll
take it.
Before she left with the landlady the girl looked around the room one more time, and it
thought for a moment that she saw it standing at the corner by the window. For a moment also it
thought that she reminded it of something, but before anything more came, it restarted the
counter in its mind. One.
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***
They had all seemed to be the same person to it, the same girl, only sometimes they
would be taller, or bigger, or their hair would be shorter. They would all do the same things.
They would talk too loudly on the telephone, play the radio early in the morning and late into the
night, and sneak their boyfriends in. They would leave the room with the light still on and their
coffee mugs still half-full.
It believed it was good and it never meant serious harm, but it used to resent them, each
one of them, and in its resentment it used to try to throw them out or leave the room itself. It used
to try. It had tried countless of times to leave the room, but it would always go through the wall
to find itself back in the same place. It would move their things about or tap their shoulders and
blow into their cheeks—it did not own a voice—and often that did cause them to leave. But it
found that it never felt fulfilling, how they would leave, because despite how tightly it would
grip a girl’s hairbrush to hide it someplace, it could never feel its shape or its texture, and no
matter how deeply it would push what would have been its finger against their skin, despite how
their shoulders or their backs would turn black and blue, it could never feel their skin against
what would have been its own, could never feel warmth or softness.
A long time ago it thought that it would always choose silence over noise because it was
easier to make noise in silence than to find silence in noise. But eventually its resentment turned
to despair and its despair to a certain degree of apathy, in that it chose to stop its activities, and
now it hardly even bothered to come near any of them. Now all it would do was endure, until
something about the room, perhaps something as trivial as the dust in the corners, eventually
made them leave. And every time it was left alone to hang about in the room, it would—could—
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do nothing more than watch and listen. And soon enough the silence would be noise too, and
there was nothing it could do but to keep waiting.
***
On the third day it was sitting on the bed–or at least made as if it were sitting–when the
girl came back, wearing a sweater this time and dragging a suitcase into the room. First she
swept the floor and dusted the desk and wiped the inside of the cabinet. Then she laid the
suitcase on the concrete floor and unlocked it. It watched and listened as the girl unpacked while
singing to herself, and it took note of the few things she had brought along: four pairs of jeans
that she hung inside the cabinet whose doors did not close; and three pairs of short pants, two
pairs of pajamas, and twenty shirts that she unfolded and folded again before placing one by one
on the uneven shelves. On one shelf she lined up her toiletries, a few accessories, and some
medicine bottles. She piled up her books into stacks on the desk unlike the other girls who kept
them upright with bookends. It moved towards the corner when she beat at the mattress a few
times to rid it of dust and put on her bedcovers which were printed with bright orange, green, and
yellow circles. She took a small pillow from her suitcase and sprinkled it with some baby
powder, plumped it so that a cloud of powder formed around her, buried her face in and breathed
in deeply before setting the pillow on the bed. Then she sprinkled some more powder onto the
bed and patted the sheets, surrounding herself with another white cloud, and then she curled up
on the bed and fell asleep.
When the girl woke up it was already the fourth day, and she sat up, looking around her
as though she wasn’t entirely sure where she was. She seemed to take note of the stains in the
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ceiling, of the square patches on the walls, of the cracks in the concrete, and for a few moments
she frowned, as though looking for the right place for them inside her head. Then she closed her
eyes and breathed in deeply a few times—making it wonder how that must feel like again, to
have air flowing deep inside of you, to need it to keep you alive—until it seemed she had put her
thoughts in all their proper places in her mind.
She left the room that morning and was outside until about noon, and she returned,
singing to herself as she entered, with a small curtain just big enough for the small window, as
well as a rolled-up poster and some mums wrapped in clear plastic. The curtain had green and
yellow prints on it, the same shade as those in her sheets, and the girl climbed up the table to
hang it up and then tie the end with a piece of string. She then unrolled the poster which turned
out to be the enlarged photograph of a sunrise by a beach, and she carefully taped it over one of
the square patches on the wall across her bed. The mums were of various colors, and she placed
them in a makeshift vase, a plastic bottle still half-filled with water, which she then put on top of
the desk.
When she was done she stopped singing and sat at the desk and looked out, and it
watched her closely as she did. It itself always looked out that window, even though all there was
outside were more concrete and tin roofs, some trees whose leaves looked more grey than green,
and a lone streetlamp that could only be seen from the room during the night. But the girl looked
out as though she forced herself to see past the tin roofs, as though she could if she wanted to.
And it watched the girl, a wispy little smile forming on what would have been its face.
***
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A long time ago it believed it had been a girl too, but it had no proof because it could not
see itself in mirrors, or touch what would have been its hair or its hips, or speak to hear what
would have been its voice. It would pretend to speak sometimes, and mouth the rules and
regulations with the landlady whenever she brought in someone new. Or, because it sometimes
liked to imagine that maybe it would be able to touch and feel if it willed itself enough,
sometimes when it was alone it would kneel next to the bed, and then make as if it were
smoothing the sheets, imagining how they must feel if it had skin to feel with. But how does one
fulfill an act when one cannot appreciate the result? And so the sheets would always remain
wrinkled, and it would return to its usual corner and go back to watching until the door knob
turned.
But it knew that it used to have a beautiful face once, and it used to have long hair. It
used to have a voice and skin, and a long time ago it could sing and it could feel. Now, though,
all it could own were its thoughts, which it feared, because it feared time. It feared to while away
the time with thoughts because time would never pass. In fact, after every boarder that came and
left, it only seemed as though time repeated and repeated itself.
Nevertheless it contemplated, and if it were to be honest with itself, it did have one
memory that it wanted to keep. If all other memories would be wiped out, and it were asked to
choose only one that it would leave untouched, it would perhaps be the memory of that one late
afternoon so long ago, when it had been more than an it and had been a her, and they were all in
a jeepney that was driving down to where the country was, and they were singing songs together.
She had her hair down, and she struggled to keep it from her face as it got blown by the wind. He
was watching her as he played his guitar and led the singing, and she caught him smiling at her.
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She looked away and continued to sing, catching a glimpse of an orange sun about to set,
saddened by the thought that they were nearing the country.
***
As the days progressed since the girl agreed to rent the room, it had more or less grown
accustomed to her usual activities. She would wake in the morning and make her bed, and then
leave the room to take a shower. When she returned she would already be dressed, and she
would proceed to fixing her things in the only bag she had. She would then leave and be gone for
about twelve hours, and when she returned she would toss her bag onto the bed and often fall
asleep without changing her clothes. Sometimes she would undress herself and change into
pajamas, and occasionally use the telephone to chat with some friends before going to sleep.
But it had also begun to notice a few other things about the girl, such as how she would
tend to stop her singing all of a sudden, and then stare into space as though she had accidentally
caught something deep in the recesses of her memory. It thought that that was quite noticeable,
because it did often find itself—calmed?—by the sound of her singing; although what it
eventually discovered about the girl could be counted as an observation of more significance,
something which to some extent it might perhaps associate with how she never replaced the
flowers in her makeshift vase after she had displayed them on the table, and how they had now
dried, and how dirt now floated in the water. The room had changed quite a bit since the first few
days, because it found that the girl did not always have the habit of putting order to things as how
she had meticulously done so in the beginning; or perhaps she had only realized that things
simply returned to their old state in this room. And now her sheets had turned the slightest shade
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darker, the creases more distinct and discolored in some places. The desk and the wall fan had
collected dust—and how must dust feel like, again, between one’s fingers?—just like how the
corners of the room had gathered strands of hair.
At night the girl would crawl up to bed and cover herself to the chin with her blanket,
staring at the water-stained ceiling until she fell asleep. Around the fifth night, though, she fell
asleep without her blanket on, and whether it was because she had been very tired or because that
night had not been particularly cold, it could not have known. But it caught sight of the girl’s
arm, and, realizing that it had never really seen it before, noticed that the inside of her arm had
scars all over, some already brown and others still pink where scabs had been picked. It thought
they looked like counting sticks, and they caused it to suddenly remember and remember, most
of them things that it would normally push away.
***
The mattress on the bed had only been replaced about thrice in all the time that it had
been staying in the room. The landlady would only occasionally take it out to air when there
were no boarders, leaving it outside so the sun would absorb all the memories that were left in it.
Maybe the landlady knew what they were. But it had only been fifteen years since she had
become the landlady, and though before that it had been the landlady’s mother who watched over
the place, it was quite certain that the landlady’s mother could not have known its memories, and
the landlady herself could never know them, because even a long time ago it had already known
the art of keeping memories, of knowing which to hold close to one’s heart, to treat with care so
as not to taint them with imagination, which only persisted in forgetting that memories were
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created to simply be remembered. Or of knowing which ones to hide away as though they had
never become memories in the first place, as though they never happened; of knowing which
memories to turn into secrets. And so the landlady could never know about that night long ago,
when there were less tin roofs and less concrete and the leaves of the trees outside were more
green than grey. When it had been a girl, and she could see stars outside the window because the
sky was dark enough. And she lay beside him, her hair flowing across his chest.
***
After the fifth night it began to be a bit more watchful of the girl, carefully observing how
she made her bed, how she fixed her things, how she looked out the window, waiting for her to
perhaps do something different. It was on the eighth day, though, when the girl began returning
to the room before sunset, and it had to move away from its favorite corner because she chose to
sit there that night. Some time ago it would have normally been quite possessive of that spot, but
the girl had not looked well, and it excused her. It was then that it first saw how she would do it,
how she would only sit in that corner with her knees close to her chest, until it grew dark, never
bothering to switch on the light and only sitting there silently with no expression on her face
even until her eyes glistened and welled up. And then she would hide her face and wrap her arms
around her knees, and it would watch until her body began to shake and her back heaved. It did
not understand why, but it understood the rest. Its memories allowed it to understand, because it
believed that a long time ago, it could have been this girl too. And each time it wanted to hold
her or to catch her tears, or even if only to smooth her hair because she was but an arm’s length
away. But just when it felt compelled enough to try, the girl would stand up and walk to the
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cabinet to take out a piece of razor. And in the moonlight it would watch as she positioned the
blade against her wrist, her arm, sometimes her thigh—it would remember coldness—and would
press it against her own skin—it would remember pain—deeper until it saw her blood trickle out
slowly, black in the moonlight—it would remember, it would remember—and she would watch
it seep out of her skin as well, until it formed a long black line on her wrist or her arm,
sometimes her thigh. Two times she did it more than once in one night, before the wound from
the last had healed. And then in the mornings she would choose to wear clothes with long sleeves
to cover the open cuts and fresh scabs.
It was now the nineteenth night, eleven days after that first night, and it was once again
watching her cut her skin, and it felt tired of watching her, felt tired for her. And by the
nineteenth night it no longer found itself disquieted by its memories, and it did not push them
away like it would some time ago. Instead it accepted that it felt something it could not quite
explain, as though this was a secret that it now shared with the girl, and at the same time it
believed it also felt fear for her, as though it could see things from beyond that it would never
have hold of. And that night it made as if it were sitting beside the girl, letting what would have
been its hand float over the girl’s bare arm, back and forth as though it were stroking it, hoping it
would somehow warm her if she felt cold.
***
What the girl counted, it never knew. She had stopped using the razor, and had begun
spending more time examining the scars that looked like counting sticks etched on her arm and
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thigh, perhaps watching as they tried to heal completely, or perhaps wondering how they had
formed themselves on her skin. It was now the twenty-fourth day.
Scars were things that it was familiar with. It remembered scars from long ago when it
had been a girl, from skinned knees and occasional accidents in the kitchen, and cuts that took
long to heal because the scabs would be picked to reveal the smooth pink underneath. It believed
it even missed the feeling of pain at times, of wincing every time a piece of clothing brushed
against a wound, because the cuts would always heal anyway. That was certainly better than
having wounds that never managed to heal into scars.
It had been a girl in its past, and it had been younger. All that girl had wanted to do was
to go far away and to find dreams that she could follow. It had never thought that she would
learn the things she eventually did, that if you learned to love, you could love too much, and that
when you loved, you lost as well. And those were good lessons to learn, but it supposed that she
had not yet learned what she’d really needed when she started getting sick in the mornings, and
when she realized what she had done.
She never left the room in the later days, perhaps hoping that if she starved herself the
thing would disappear inside her. And finally she decided, and it was in fact a knife that she
used, and she watched as it cut through her thin, white wrist, and watched as her blood formed a
puddle beside her, until it became what should have been her last memory, before she became
what it was now.
It was the twenty-fourth day, and the girl was at the cabinet again, taking out from it a
medicine bottle, which she then brought with her to the bed where she carefully sat herself down.
For a few moments she only stared at the plastic bottle in her hand, before turning the cap and
removing it. She tipped it over and its contents rattled onto her palm, a mound of small white
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pills that she studied, as though counting them each. She picked one and put it in her mouth, and
then followed it with another, and swallowed them both.
No, it said to the girl in its mind, hoping it had a voice that she could hear. Please.
She had some tears in her eyes as she put another round pill in her mouth and swallowed
it. Did it go smoothly down her throat, it wanted to ask. It wanted to grab the bottle from her and
throw it across the room, it wanted to spill the medicine onto the floor. But that would only
frighten her, it thought, and it did not want to frighten her because there was no point in that.
You have to see, it said to her in its mind, you have to understand. It reached out and for
the first time tried to touch her arm. It was all wispy nothing, hardly even air, and it had been so
long since it touched anything that it had quite forgotten how. But it allowed what would have
been its hand to make as if it were holding the girl’s arm, the one that held the bottle, and it heard
the girl catch her breath as it saw its grip on her skin. The girl dropped the bottle and dropped the
pills, and slowly it thought that it imagined feeling flesh against flesh, and so it gripped a little
harder.
Please, it repeated in its mind, hoping she could hear.
A tear rolled down the girl’s face as she drew in ragged breaths. It continued holding her
arm, until it felt—felt!—soft skin and became aware of what it was doing to it. It let go, and the
girl started sobbing, and suddenly she seemed smaller and skinnier than she had looked before.
In what would have been its heart it felt it could comfort her, in what would have been its heart it
felt it had to. And so it came nearer and placed its hand—for it did feel like its own—on the
girl’s back, and started stroking it as it shook, now feeling the folds of her shirt, the texture of its
fabric, and even how warm it was against her back.
It is all right, it tried to whisper into the girl’s ear, quite unsure if she heard, all right.
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The girl turned her head and it thought for a moment that she could see her. Nevertheless
it looked her in the eye and, Thank you, it said to the girl, looking up towards the sky outside the
window, just as the girl did the same. And that moment it believed that they both saw the same
thing, that beyond the concrete and the tin roofs, they both saw light.
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