Year 2007

New Short Story: The OFW





Ramon the OFW sits on the table surrounded by absolute stillness. It is so still it screamed. Words are calling him; words on books, in CDs, words - the very same words he struggled to learn as a young boy are the same words he now employs as an adult. Now, he uses these words to speak with patients, to write his rehab notes, to communicate with Doctors and with everybody else. He uses words to earn a living. He uses words to create his own brand of art. When his steps lead him towards a more subdued, lonely, solitary road, he uses words to comfort him. Words are in these books, he says to himself, as he looks and touches the books he longs to read given his limited time. Here they are, books piled up on his table: the classics, the contemporary fiction, the non-fiction dealing with nearly every topic. There are books stored in his PDA, books tucked in his laptops’ memories, books in CDs, books on his bedside table, books on floor, ah, and they’re everywhere! And he can only pick one book at a time. It’s absurd isn’t it? Why can’t a human eye and brain possess many extensions so he can consume, say, five books at a time? Imagine how much knowledge a human can accumulate if he’s got that genetic structure. He’d logically look like a spider and, well, Ramon doesn’t care how he looks like nowadays.

He is a reader, that’s what he is. There are so many books out there to read and he can’t wait to get his hands on all of them. Perhaps he’d soon find the necessary reading time. This is a hope he throws to the silence around him. Maybe he’d get more days off, take a flight and settle in a quiet country shack off a shore in, say, Ireland or Thailand or Greenland or any country ending in –land, and then walk, run, read. Walk, run, eat and read. Walk, run, eat, read, and sleep. All these sequences will do as long as they exclude work.

And what books would he like to read? He’d immediately devour Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bronte, Austin, Elliott, and Proust. The seven volumes of Proust alone would require an entire year in Paris. Won’t it be wonderful to sit down in a roadside café in Paris reading Proust? How about reading Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg Russia? Or reading Jane Eyre in an English countryside? Whoa!

For now however, he’d content himself reading a fraction of these authors in the confines of his Florida room, in a space stretched to accommodate what’s left of the OFW life he’s leading. A few pages of Walt Whitman fall on dead eyes and a brain emptied by fatigue half-understands the writings of Nietzsche. Anna Karenina introduction is all he can read for now. The Table of Contents of Proust Swann’s Way is all he can consume. Until later, someday.

Ramon the OFW enters through the automatic sliding glass doors of the library. The library is situated in the large expanse of ritzy TS Golf Country Club which is famous for its exclusivity, meaning, Ramon will never become a club member, in a sprawling city, which, if one were new and weren’t particularly used to exhibition of this type of opulence might get offended and accuse this city of sin and decadence; this accusation will consume him as he succumbs to profound alienation metamorphosing into Kafka’s cockroach.

That’s how Ramon the OFW felt the first time he came to this city. He was both fascinated and frightened by the old and new money driving it. Houses were each the size of a town. The roads were so hidden that driving them felt like driving on gold. He and friend Matt sometimes drove around the neighborhood to snap a photo of a particular staircase, a landscape, or the manner a particular light bulb was angled to capture the magnificence of the garden. They’d keep taking pictures until a police will appear from behind them. How they’d run from the police giggling was one of the thrill of their Friday afternoons. Before 9/11, that was. After 9/11, the security in this opulent city became more stringent and the fun vanished like the Twin Towers.

He is indifferent to this city now. Women, all blonde or white-haired topped by wide brim white hats with eyes hidden behind dark eyeglasses bearing accents not native to this city, sashay on the streets with their equally elegant dogs. Looking from afar, they are multiple copies of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanies. Or at least trying to be. They don’t greet people because they expect to be greeted. And they reserve the right to respond or not.

One time, Ramon the OFW visited one of them for home treatment. Her house was a mansion built beside the shore. It was a house priced equal to the GDP of one small country. It’s unimaginable some people, who mostly lived alone, would build houses with so many rooms, almost like hotels in scope, and would keep them locked for most part of the year because, heck, they are busy enjoying themselves in their quaint little flats in Europe or Manhattan. Megan was definitely a member of ‘those people’.

She beckoned him to see her at the back of her mansion, she was lying on a blue cot beside her swimming pool, tanning, and she was supposed to have Physical Therapy for broken hip.

Megan my dear, how did you manage to get down to the pool, Ramon the OFW asked in a sweet but reprimanding tone.

I used crutches the way you taught me dummy, Megan replied curtly as she stared at Ramon with an accusing look, like saying, Are you stupid? Why won’t I walk to my swimming pool? Should I limit myself because of a stupid broken bone?

But… Ramon lost the nerve to proceed with what he was about to say. He was about to say, in his Filipino accent, that she was not supposed to walk on surfaces too risky to walk on. She can easily slip and fall on a wet floor. But his voice faltered, many eyes were staring at him. Besides Megan, other bikini-clad old ladies were present around the pool drinking daiquiris from some glasses that obviously were bought for their brand that screamed ‘price has no limit’. They scrutinized him.

Is this your Therapist Megan? One of them asked, she’s much older than Megan who happened to be eighty years old. Her question was asked in a tone that blended with the cool breeze coming from the ocean, matched by the rustling of palm leaves.

It may be an outright rudeness but instead of being insulted for being ignored and for standing like a post, inanimate, dead, inhuman, Ramon the OFW settled for the perfumed wind. He inhaled the air. After many years of living in this city, he learned to block off the rudeness, the condescension, the belittling he receives almost daily. The city is too beautiful to get engaged with trivial lack of social etiquettes.

The old lady kept on. Her attention now tunneled to Megan, Is he a good Therapist Megan? If he were good, I will tell all my friends to hire him. Oh isn’t he good-looking Therapist?

Then, as if she realized Ramon was amidst them, she turned to him and said, so there you are young man. She feigned pleasantness required in a gathering of strangers, it was more of a ritual than a sincere act.

Ramon kept standing where he stood, hardly slighted, there was nothing wrong with this old lady’s impoliteness – for her, maybe, and a health care worker is no different from the other servants in the house. Ramon was categorized among the butlers and governesses and nannies and nurses that attended to these old ladies who did not know any other life outside the elaborate and compounded opulence that identified money their right, it is not earned. Ramon looked at them imagining how they could have looked like when they were young.

In the hospital, he’d sometimes linger in the room of a sleeping, old, broken, lonely patient. He would stand by the door and pretend watching the show on TV while, in his mind, he would imagine how this patient looked like when he was his age. Did this patient work hard like he does now? Did this patient, in his youth, ever see his future inside a hospital room like this where the sun cast a cold shadow in between sheets of vertical blinds? This patient could be a character written about in the novels of Kerouac or Capote or Miller. In books of this patient’s generation, he was the World War 2 veteran, the astronaut, the inventor of machines the world now enjoys. He was represented by Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe. Men who once were B2 bombers, women who were once models are sitting helplessly on wheelchairs or confined in beds, screaming, calling for some unknown someone out who would never come. Yet they sit on millions of dollars. Yeah, they sometimes don’t even know anymore they owned millions of dollars.

Sometimes Ramon would be torn by the sadness of all he sees. He never has problems with patients who have families willing to take them home. Yet, a fraction of them are abandoned. No family. No home. Just wealthy. Just moneyed.

He castigates himself for day dreaming in front of his sleeping patient. Imagining is not a task appropriate in his line of work. He is a health care provider, demanded to have the full attention to the task at hand. A surgeon who imagines a vacation in the Bahamas while cutting his patient, we don’t want that, do we? When it comes to our health and life and treatment, the one we want to take care of us is the one with undivided attention, fully alert, purely focused. We don’t want someone whose mind drifts with the slightest distraction, the way Ramon’s imagination drifts while watching these old ladies sitting by the swimming pool. He pulls himself back to reality.

The reason of this visit was to provide Physical Therapy to Megan who is recovering from a broken hip. That is what he is paid for, to provide treatment to Megan despite the other ladies fanning the flame of his imagination. Just look at them - Gone is their glamour that is the twin of wealth even though he could see the many attempts at plastic surgery on their faces. Ramon could just imagine these lady friends going to the same beauty parlor, the same shopping mall, the same park to walk their dogs, the same surgeon, the same dentist, the same – plastic surgeon. They were beginning to all look alike. The way Latoya looks like Michael. In fact, Ramon mused, if he proved himself to be a good Therapist he might be offered the title ‘official’ Therapist to their little league, a prospect which he dreaded. Ramon would not like to be the default Therapist of these types of people.

Now, after the treatment, Ramon finds himself walking into the library.

The doors make a swooshing sound. There are two of them, two doors to remind him that if he messed up after the first, the second will automatically shut down and security will handle him. He enters the library, a large building full of books, and books excite Ramon. There are rows and rows of books in racks from floor to ceiling, organized in a dizzying manner. The books that Ramon loves in this library follow a multi-faceted pattern, similar to the plants and flowers surrounding the library. One day he’d pick up fiction, another day, his reading will be about health. Sometimes he’d get this intense desire to read history. And at times, after being triggered by some news, he’d find himself stacking up books on Economics.

Too many books to enjoy, too little time.

This is his curse. Ramon as a child never intended to end up in this opulent city with rich people who order him to serve. As a young man he just wanted to read books and write stories and become a librarian in his small town until he retires a contented old man. As a young boy, he once visited the Municipal Hall of his town Lubao. In its abandoned and neglected library he saw a stack of books by Charles Dickens. He stared at those books promising him he’d learn English someday to devour all those Dickensian novels.

He learned English and it was not used only for reading. In his twenties, he saw his family’s poverty and promised to become a health care worker overseas to help. He did and did it spectacularly because he learned his English well. He abandoned the readings, he abandoned the writings. Working as a Physical Therapist in the US, he single-handedly improved the lot of his impoverished family.

Today, in middle life, after work, he always finds himself running to the library before closing time to get a glimpse of another bestselling book he has yet to read. He gathers books to read for the night, though he fails to read them all every time. Before he goes to bed, he plays with his word processor composing pieces of stories he knows will never see a day in print. With regret, he says, had he pursued his childhood dream, he would have been an acknowledged writer now, maybe a novelist, maybe a poet, maybe a newspaperman. He would be happy to be known as a librarian.

Mostly, during the days of work, he questions himself why he is in the company of the sick instead of books. Of course, in his line of work, imagining and daydreaming and questioning are not always welcome.