Unfinished Story Joy T. Dayrit (1) Bore. To bore is to tire oneself thru tedious iteration or dullness. To iterate is to repeat. Dullness is dullness. Dull, dull, dull. If to iterate is to repeat, the word reiterate is redundant, dundant. This is the quality of state of my being. It sways from tedious to dull. (2) When I come home from work there is my boyfriend to talk to. Hello, he says, how was work? Okay, I say, even if it wasnt. (3) I work as an usherette in a movie house. Stationed at the loge my job is to accept the loge peoples ticket stubs and guide them to a seat with my flashlight. Dull. Except when they showed the super show The Mountain. (4) The Mountain is the story of a man who grows to be very, very old. He grows to be one hundred and twenty years old and naturally grows to be as wise. It is a religion story for modern people and everyone came to see it. All seats were taken up for ten days and for ten days I pushed through to guide people to aisle steps or to a piece of floor on which to sit. When at last The Mountain went on its last day and they showed Bixbi, it was dull again. (5) Dull is not as bad as tedious. Tedious is worse than dull. When my work becomes tedious I play secret games with my flashlight. In my work my flashlight is my only real companion. I flash it against my palm and see the translucent red outline of my hands, its green veins, the creases on my knuckles, the fingernail line on my finger, or flash it on and off on someones foot rested on the back of a seat until the foot slinks down. Loge people are not allowed to rest their feet on the back of the seats, although at times I let them. I have power over the loge peopleI let them do or not, and guide them well or not. In guiding I sometimes flash a light on a step short of the steps down and someone always trips. It entertains me but it nevertheless ends in boredom. (6) In drama there is an element called comic relief. It releases the audience form a hold and allows them to breathe. A flashlight game I play gives me this relief, relieves me from boredom. In guiding people to seats I swing my light along a row and as I bring the light back, I flash it against a face. The face viewing the movie reacts, and as I catch its instant expression, I click off the light. It all happens in half a second; it takes mastered calculation and a quick thumb. Then I go back to my station at the bottom right of loge and sit on my stool and play in my mind the expression I d seen (no two have been the same) and in a few seconds I am bored again. The comic relief after its relaxing effect brings the audience back to a more intensive hold, Dante said. Dante is my boyfriend.

*** (7) Dante and I live in a room not far from the movie house I work in and the university he attends. He is a scholar studying English and Drama and one day he would like to write for the movies. In a drawer is his treasured folder of ideas for movie stories, but more important to him now his play. The play, a last requirement for his completion of his university degree, is about a country girl in a city, who comes to do any odd job just to eat, and for shelter. Her pitiful ignorance is abused, but in the end she survives. In truth, Dantes play is about me, but he leaves from it important biographical items about my own city life.

(8) For instance, I bore myself ushering because its pay allows me my room, some food, and a Friday night mathematics course (I am to be a certified accountant) at the university Dante goes to. We met there. On a Friday night, too wet outside to walk, we sat on the same damp bench at the university faade and talked about our courses. I understood much of what Dante was telling me about drama, and when the rain let off, it baffled him to know that I first of all ushered for the movie house a block down. The strong, unexpected rain made my face and bare arms glisten against the faade light. I have a fine face, after my mother, whose provincial life formed year after year the ardent cool in her expression. My eyes, like hers, slant slightly up; I hardly paint them, they are of themselves dark. Wet hair pressed against my nape, I and grew sharply aware of but ignored Dantes incisive gaze. You dont look like an usherette, he said. I am out of uniform, I said. Dante leaves this out of his play. In his play his country girl suffers so much. (9) One week after Dante moved in with me, we had our first big quarrel. We fought over the papaya he had brought in with him, a gift for me, which I left to over-ripen severely on the window sill. (10) You ignored it! Dante smashed the papaya into our garbage. (11) I only forgot about it! (12) It was there for a week, couldnt you even smell it! (13) I had imagined a first fight with a lover to be out of romance, but ours was extremely strange. As we battled, he hotly asked me to a movie house to quietly talk our quarrel out. What? I shouted. I was there all day, I will be there all day tomorrow. (14) We went to a movie house. Dante finds movie houses quiet places to talk in. All our fights have been fixed, and sweetly, in movie houses, although not once has Dante brought me for a talk to the movie house I ushered for. (15) The room Dante and I live in is one of five other small square spaces in an old, leaning two story house, and in it we have put everything we own. Two steps from our bed is Dantes desk, full of books and papers. On our window sill is a burner on which I cook our food. A bureau with three draws stores our clothes and is also our dining table on which we place our meals, have coffee, keep our canned or cellophaned food, and occasionally set a plate of fruit. Under our bed are shoes, things, newspapers, and our suitcases. We have a chair for Dantes desk. When we talk or eat he sits on his chair and I sit on the floor or bed beside him. (16) After work I help Dante with his play. I type it out for him in his rented OIlivetti, using two or three fingers from one hand while resting my head on the other. Tired from work I type slowly, but in time Dantes country girl amuses me, and begin to go more rapidly. (17) She is about to begin her fourth pathetic adventure in the city and she enters it with as much enthusiasm and cheer as she did her first. She will not learn her lesson. She accepts work from the next strange man who shows kindness, and is again used for activity other than the job agreed on. As pub waitress, Dantes country girl lures contacts for her employer, and big swindling occurs. When the syndicate is exposed, it is she who goes to prison.

(18) It is in prison where she is loved, and finally survives, but Dante has not written the plays end yet, and as his thesis deadline approaches, he rushes his work, snapping at me for things I do that might disturb his thinking. He howls at me one evening for cooking fish. Intense concentration and the hot night had made him perspire, and I stand at attention while he howls. When he returns to his work I turn to flip the frying fish in the pan. He will eat the fish when it is cooked, and forget that it had filled our already very warm room with food smoke. (19) Two days before deadline, midway through the last act of the manuscript, the c of Dantes rented Olivetti catches, and he continues typing wildly without the cs. I am made to fill in the cs with a black felt-tip pen. It is work as tedious as it sounds and soon my cs dance, leaning all to the left and then to the right, or they stand very straight like soldiers. *** (20) Dantes university scholarship is a gift from his widowed cousin in Batangas. In return, Dante promises her his thesis, and in the summer, a day after his graduation, with his play in his bag, we go on a bus to the town of Balayan, where his cousin lives. (21) She is a short woman with thick arms and hands, and is boss of her polished house. Two servants hurry, fixing our lunch, and she shouts at one for not setting me a place. Shrewdness is stressed as she talks austerely of managing her small field of coffee, of planting and harvesting, and she shouts again at the foreman who comes in, tardy with his report. Nevertheless, she is obviously generous. At lunch we learn of a servants two small children she is caring for, of other young students she sends to school, of money for a sewing machine she has lent the foremans wife. The two small children sit at table with us and they run back to play as rapidly as their meal is eaten, but not without a quick kiss on the guardians cheek. Elderly, and loved simply the way she is, the woman is called Tyang by Dante and those around her. (22) After our lunch, Dante takes his thesis from the bag. This is for you Tyang, he says, with an arm about her tough shoulders. It is a gesture thought extremely noble by the much older provincial cousin, and Tyang cries terribly as she receives Dantes Xeroxed copy of his badly typewritten play. *** (23) As summer sets in more harshly, a change in Dantes temperament slowly occurs. All day he sits quietly at his desk doing nothing. He brings out his folder of ideas for movie stories, but does not study them. He gets up before I do in the morning and has nothing for breakfast. He nods goodbye when I leave for work, and greets me, not always with a kiss, when I come home. He says nothing about the dried fishes I now fry thrice, or more, in a week. Nothing I do makes him snap at me at all. (24) Work on your stories, Dante, I scold him one morning. (25) I am thinking about my thesis. (26) Your thesis is finished.

(27) I worked hard on it, I deserve a rest. (28) I then plan to one day shock him out of his complacency, and during a quiet time at work, guarding against falling asleep on my stool, I write a mental list of possibilities: Come home with Clement, the downstairs maintenance man. Come home walking like Ursula, the orchestra usherette. Not come home at all. (29) But I cannot not come home at all because there is no other place I know I can go home to, and Clement, who is in fact more feminine than I, already walks like Ursula. (30) So then I begin to talk to Dante about my Friday night math class. The Egyptians, our teacher said, were profound practitioners of mathematics. The pyramids they built are structures of precise and highly refined measurement. Mathematics was then directly connected to nature and God. The architect was also a priest, and in some of the pyramids are felt until today divine vibrations. Each Friday I pondered on what our teacher said about the Egyptians and their mathematics, and told it to Dante with enthusiasm. Did you know, Dante, I said to him one evening, that the Great Pyramid is made of over two million blocks of concrete, and each block weighs between two to seventy tons? How the Egyptians lifted the blocks up to four hundred feet is a mystery. The Egyptians used a secret mathematical process yet unknown to us, and one theory says it was levitation. Dante would sit and listen to each new piece of knowledge I brought home for him. In time, he began to go out evenings, to a bookstore that stayed open late, to post a letter, for a walk. Then, so painfully swift, he one day did not come home at all. *** (31) At work the next day I load fresh batteries into my flashlight and in the dark flash it brightly against my palm, fingers, knuckles, and blindly into the loge peoples faces until they squint. I flash lights on and off anyones foot resting on the back of a seat. Loge people are not allowed to rest their feet on the back of seats. Guiding a lone man to his seat I flash a light short of a step up and he trips. Ursula visits my station to being me cheer. I tell him that Dante has brought with him my suitcase instead of his. Mine is of straw and his, of leather, and Ursula convinces me to Dantes thoughtfulness: It was a gift, dont you see? I tell her that he also did not bring the burner, the chair, and some books on the desk. Ursula convinces me, before she hurries back to her station at the orchestra, it means nothing else but that Dante will come home one day.