Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(65)
“Wind your watches often and make sure you move your wrists,” the demonstrator said, turning the knob on her watch. “Your pulses keep the watches from stopping.”
The girls sitting next to me wound their watches. Everyone at school had made the rather unusual switch from digital to analog—from Casio Baby-G water-resistant watches to hand-wound, no-battery, Swiss-made timepieces. I sat back as they all hunched forward, manipulating their tickers and studying the mechanics of pre-digital design.
The principal took the stage. She warned against food shortages, electricity blackouts, and scheduled water rations. My classmates believed her. They murmured to each other and gestured with their hands: “What in the world?! What will we do?”
I smirked in my seat as they busied themselves with foolproofing against the doom that was to come.
Later that day, our science teacher had us watch a VHS movie called Y2K Family Survival Guide. The documentary encouraged using the stairs and avoiding air travel on the last week of the year. The narrator warned about billions of wires, computer chips, and codes self-destructing at the turn of the century. I watched my classmates and teacher take fright and become overwrought. They stared at the television screen almost without blinking and in a daze of dread. I had read from an old issue of Time that belonged to the library that the media cycle was two weeks long. That meant that every two weeks, the television people and the newspaper people and the magazine people got to decide what would occupy our minds: hope or fear.
The film bored me. Nothing about it alarmed me because I had been living through what it foreshadowed. Although I had my own panic, my own survival to plan, I could not help but hide my face in my hands—and laugh.
The film went on. It recommended installing generators and stocking up on bottled water, canned goods, matchsticks, candles, and mosquito coils. It referenced the use of Doberman guard dogs against looters and suggested special authentication procedures against swindlers. My classmates agonized over the possibility of hell on earth. They bit their nails and jittered before the apocalyptic images flashing on the screen.
Ticktock. Suddenly, the world had to get prepared to scrounge, scour, collect, keep safe, keep momentum, and stay alive. At the end of 1999, the world and I finally became in sync—and all because of zeros in a computer chip.
We were running, running, running out of time.
The only parts left unaffected by the scare were the convent next door and the mansion. The nuns had long ago taken a vow of silence, of simplicity, and of poverty, and so technology never became their way of life. And we in the mansion had long ago lost all things worldly, all things material, and all things normal. Norman had stopped paying the water and electric bills once again. And so the threat of losing something, or everything, did not frighten us one bit. If anything, Mama and Norman took advantage of the hysteria and the peril predicted to come. They preyed on the paranoid.
“Estrella!” Norman hollered as he walked up the main steps. “Call a meeting with the sheriff! I got a plan!”
I snooped from behind the lanai door.
Mama met him by the console mirror and said, “Tell me.”
“We use the leftover silk-screen paint to make Y2K shirts. We sell them on the street, boom! Easy money.”
“I like it,” Mama said, her head still bandaged.
“And we use the old press to make more deeds. Everyone will be panic buying. Why not sell them property, you know?”
They walked to the breakfast room and ordered Tony to bring merienda. I ran upstairs, worried that they would, yet again, entangle me in their business plans and propaganda. I went into my room and sat on the edge of my bed, thinking that fighting the Common Enemy was no longer enough. I needed a greater motivation: a destination and not merely a place from which to depart. I took a notebook out of my backpack and made a list of things to find: a normal home, a family, and the ocean.
I was not simply leaving the mansion. I was going somewhere.
At school the next day, the waiting area smelled just like afternoon: sweat, cut grass, fumes from cars driving by, and the aftermath of a three o’clock sun-shower. High school girls stole minutes with suitors, pressing their faces between bars for kisses and receiving bouquets. Younger students checked their wristwatches as they waited for their rides home. The air buzzed with teen gossip and cars honked to summon passengers. The noise was familiar. But then a swarming sound traveled from down the road and toward the school gate: a disharmony, a cacophony of teen boy trouble. The whole waiting room turned toward the direction of disturbance and found a throng of students from an all-boys school with batons and bats. The boys rushed toward the group of suitors stealing kisses and passing flowers, and in a unified motion clobbered the infatuation out of their pubescent bodies.
A heavyset boy took a lanky one by the shirt and slammed him repeatedly against the metal gate. The girls in the waiting room stepped back with every pang! A group of five circled around a boy who was still holding on to his bouquet of gerberas. They kicked him and he recoiled. The boys blasted at one another until the security guards came, whistle-blowing and handcuffing, and sorting the group between hospital-and jail-bound. And as the fight quelled and we in the waiting room sidled back toward the gate, I found him—manacled to gate bars and bleeding from one eyebrow.
“Kuya?”
He looked up.
“Kuya, what are you doing here?”
“I’m happy to see you,” he said, choking up and realizing that his delinquency had brought him back to me. “I wasn’t sure if you were still at this school, you know, or if Mama had pulled you out.”