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Aprovecha, BuncanesaBy Mark Gabriel Dee QuailBellMagazine.com The old people in the new building smelled like wet plaster. They were neither dry nor wet, though complaints of constipation and incontinence were frequent. "Mr. Benedict," Amor said, "you need to take your prescription. How do you expect to get better slacking off? You're always talking about hard work and this and that. C'mon, sir." "Bah," Mr. Benedict said, spitting at her. "Bah, whatever, [mumble, mumble, poor excuses]." Despite her prestige interning as a "hospice care administrator" for her tito Rodel, Amor grasped nothing, except where Ms. Andy last put the remote control, or how Mr. Benedict tainted the mashed potatoes with his unwashed hands—he forgot to wipe—or what Ms. Phillips intended to do on the weekend for the umpteenth time. Ms. Philips forgot everything she told anybody, so a party on Wednesday, a party on Thursday, a party on Friday; Ms. Phillips partied every weekday and she told Amor every day. And whenever the seniors forgot, Amor experienced a stunning cognizance, a transference, nether electricity, gripping, dazzling, stupefying: all the seniors thought she was slow and that was why she worked a sinecure, why she delayed her response to when the party was or where the remote control lay. But Amor not only collected the minutiae; she relived the day Ms. Phillips was married. She relived Mr. Benedict's combat tour in Vietnam. She hiked the Himalayas and danced in Nepalese villages. How many songs had she memorized already in the Alps? The lyrics to tunes few but scholars might've heard, dying languages in the Amazon, teary poems of love to drowned children off Isabela, Basilan in Mindanao. Amor had never been to Zamboanga, where her parents hailed from in the Philippines, though she learned "todo que tiene sila," everything they had, from an invalid Zamboangueño who'd died. Amor knelt before the Santo Niño de Cebu, praying, demanding a better life; she fished for tilapia in garbage mounds leaking putrid discharge; she touched a boyfriend brightened with Asian flush, while they cowered during whirlwind terrorist attacks besieging their city; they were thinking suicide during the attacks; they were thinking to escape to America or Spain, where they could pick up English and Spanish easily and kiss easily. Amor swore she had PTSD after every transference, but no symptoms ever manifested. She lived memories as movies, a gift from Diyos, as Tito had put it. If anything, though, Amor resented the old people for making her feel bad. "I'm guilty of theft," she'd tell Rodel, "I'm stealing from them somehow. These--" she lacked a name for what haunted her, as they weren't dreams, they weren't made up "--are theirs and I don't want them. I don't want to live other people's lives. I want my own. Sometimes I'll suddenly wake up and find myself yelled at to 'stay alive'. But that's hard when I'm living other peoples' deaths." |