“Whatever comes to you in the Manila depletes just as quickly. Your creativity. Your mental fortitude. It all bleeds dry until you are an empty, responding vessel. Not unlike the capture drones themselves with prey mantis claws. With beetle shells. The ones that look just like you. You don’t own anything in Manila. It all belongs to the Giants. The drones. Their drones. Metamatics owns everything. Distro. CinSurround. Intervid. Delta Reel. Every idea is drained out of you. Sucked out of you. Mosquitoes, anteaters, vacuums, the whirlpool that is this city.”

I did not know the man who spoke. I could tell he was homeless. He lay in a corner of an MRT terminal station. It was somewhere in Mandaluyong. I recognized it. I had passed it many times. It could be Shaw Boulevard station.

More importantly, I recognized who the homeless man was speaking to.

The listener was not an impressionable person. He was younger than I had ever fathomed him as. In this dream-like recollection, he must have been in his early 20s. Just like me. I had never seen him, either, with this much fidelity.

Even through this daydream, my eyes started to water. I had to speak. “Papa?”

He did not respond.

“Is that all?” my father asked the homeless man.

“No, actually, it’s not.” His beard was stained yellow. He had a beard. Most Filipinos couldn’t grow beards, which marked this man as a foreigner. A foreigner homeless in Manila. It was a reminder that, even back then, the city didn’t favor anyone. It swallowed every soul.

The man had made a tent fort out of cardboard. People eyed him as they passed. Papa, too, towered over him. He looked like he could kick the cardboard fort down, but I knew Papa wouldn’t do that.

God. Seeing him then. He was a far cry from the helpless man I had taken care of for years. I hadn’t even stopped to consider why he was here now. I was too… ‘mesmerized,’ I guess was the word. A better one would be ‘confused.’

So confused.

“Who are you, anyway?” I asked.

The woman never stuttered when she answered me. “Call me the albularyo.”

The word meant witch doctor or faith healer. It was a folklore reference. I wasn’t really into folklore, and that’s when I thought this was an interactive movie I hadn’t watched before.

“You didn’t ask your father much about his time before, did you?” asked the albularyo, returning us to our original conversation, as if avoiding the topic. I didn’t know why she referred to herself as a faith healer. She didn’t seem to be healing anything.

Though, maybe she was trying to.

“Quantity is quality, my friend,” said Papa. “Every rant is heard. Even now, drones watch. You’ll be on a documentary by evening. Is that what you want?”

The foreigner stared at my father, uncomprehending, as if one of them was crazier than the other. “You’re unhinged, my man.”

My Papa didn’t say anything. “It’s our duty to find originality, and I have to say what you’re going through is pretty freaking original.” He knelt to the man. “Now. You don’t want to give those assholes your original story, do you?”

The homeless man looked up to a capture drone fluttering above him and Papa. The thing was an older version of a Q-95. A Q-80 or Q-70. This was more than twenty years ago, though. I wasn’t even born yet. Maybe I wasn’t even in the picture.

“You’re one to talk,” said the man on the ground.

My Papa looked down at the badge hanging on a lanyard over his neck. I squinted as the camera of our daydream zoomed in.

“You should have spoken to your father more,” said the albularyo. “Before you could not.”

I wish I did. After seeing that, I realized there was a mountain of information I hadn’t yet scratched.

Papa and I had been close, but even as close as people can be, you can never fully know someone else. Everyone has made mistakes. Everyone has loved. Everyone has regrets. And, of course, everyone has secrets.

The badge hanging from my father’s neck belonged to a company. Not just any company, either, but Metamatics.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“What?” I asked.

“Keep watching.”

My father did not reel at the homeless man’s comment about his contradiction. Papa—I now knew—worked for Metamatics. When he was my age, too. It was like my own life was playing out before me.

“Consider yourself safe from everything,” Papa said. “America does not have to deal with capitalists coming in and stealing your ideas.”

This seemed to sober the homeless man up, perking his back and pulling him out of whatever trance he was in. He turned up to my father and tilted his head. “You don’t think so, eh? You think we were spared from all this?” He smirked, looking around. “What about our ideas back home? What do you think happened to all of that?”

“You still have them.”

“What? What do we have?”

This appeared to give my father pause. He stood up, thinking. “Well, for one, all those superhero movies.”

“Shit.”

“What about the rom-coms?”

“Shit, too.”

“The…” He went on to list several series I hadn’t heard of. Probably because they weren’t famous anymore.

“All shit,” said the homeless man. “It’s all sludge. Every scene. Every story. Sludge from the stream. Stream sludge.” The man barked at himself as if telling a private joke to himself. “Yeah. Stream sludge. You know what I mean?”

Stream sludge. My father loved that turn of phrase. He used it every day. At least, when he was still able to speak. This must have been the time he first heard it.

My father pondered on the homeless man’s words. He eyed the MRT. I noticed it was heading to Mandaluyong, where one of Metamatics’s old offices was.

I had to know more.

“I’m afraid that’s all I can show you today…” said the albularyo.

“No,” I said. “Wait.”

I thought she wouldn’t let me see anymore, cutting me off from what little glimpse I had into my father’s past. The aged woman, however, seemed to have other plans. Or maybe she was toying with me. Either way, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to see Papa.

The next part of his story kicked in when my father walked away from the homeless man, still on the ground, though with a 500 PHP peso bill in his hand, waving it. The man got up and danced around.

I knew Papa was generous, but not this much. This was borderline philanthropic. Maybe I didn’t know much about him at all.

This was my only window to know more.

I rode with the camera zooming away. It followed my father as he kept to himself on the MRT, not lifting his head as others asked him questions about the homeless man he interacted with.

“What’s he doing here in Manila?” asked a woman. “Why not go back home to your own country?”

“Things are better there, surely,” someone else said.

“Good riddance, I say. If you’re lazy, you can’t work hard; if your life is spoon-fed to you, you deserve to be on the streets.”

My father ignored all the words and looked relieved to be away from them when he disembarked from the station and walked to the Metamatics Mandaluyong office.

“What?”

“Keep watching.”

I didn’t know what my father was doing here. Why would he need to go to this place? I had heard of this place in company memos. I barely read them. Now, I wish I had.

The place was barely the radiant visage of the Metamatics I had the unfortunate opportunity of working for. Absent were the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby, and the marble counters. Instead, the decor was austere and old-looking. The floors barely shined. It surprised me that I could gaze into a past when the Giants weren’t rolling around in riches.

And a past when my father worked for them.

He made his way upstairs to a cubicle. A cubicle. It was a place I never would have thought to see my father. Worse, he seemed to fit in there.

“How did you get all these angles?” I had to ask. The question just came to me.

“Extrapolations. I wasn’t in there at the time. I wasn’t born yet.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I got the gist: this mainly was an estimation of past events, not exactly what happened. I hoped the albularyo had employed most of her creative liberties.

Especially for the next part.

As soon as my father settled into his desk, a man approached. I could tell from just his gray suit—contrasted to my father’s turtleneck and jeans— that whoever this was, they were important. The new arrival was Pinoy. He towered over my father, the same way Quoreflux did with Seskone. However, unlike The Crest, there were no signs of dominance or ill will. The two even looked to be friendly.

The suited man clasped my father’s hand in his and shook it. “They say the way to climb the ladder is to show up an hour earlier than your boss every day,” he said.

“I have no interest in climbing the ladder here.”

“Bah!” The man pulled away. “You say that, but I can tell we just need to put you in the right spot.”

So, he must have been my father’s manager. I hadn’t seen him before in any corporate memos. Maybe he was further down the hierarchy.

My father opened his mouth to speak, then appeared to be thinking of something. “Hey, Boss?”

“Bost, Kenneth. Or, Boston. Just not Boss.”

My father smirked. “As if you can hear the difference.”

‘Bost’ frowned. “But what’s up, Kenneth?”

My father breathed out. “What’s it really like over there? In America. You were there recently. In New York.”

He was thinking of the conversation he had with the homeless man.

My father’s boss didn’t answer right away. He dwelled on the question, perhaps deciphering it and thinking of the answer a man like my father would want to hear.

“It’s… doomed,” he said. “Creatively, Kenneth… it is doomed.”

That was enough for Papa.

He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by a girl peering her head around his cubicle. She wore a summer dress and looked to be around 10 years old. I didn’t recognize her, either.

Papa, however, seemed to.

“You’re up and about again,” he jokingly told her, smiling.

The girl frowned. Not playfully, either. It was the way kids do adults pry in on their business.

“Pumpkin,” said the man. “Introduce yourself. Come on. This is Kenneth, my oldest friend in the office. You can trust him.” The man knelt to who I guessed was his daughter and whispered something loud enough that even I could hear. “You can let him into the circle.”

‘The circle’ must have been something fantastical grownups conjured for children to play along.

Mentioning it did the trick for the girl, however. She approached Papa and offered her hand. She stood tall and prim now.

“Francesca,” she said.