On New Year’s Eve, 2017, I backed my old Ford out of the garage of my mother’s house and drove it to a street six blocks away. The car had some honest mileage on it. I had bought it used, and the previous owner had driven it hard for a few years. The interior was grey and smelled of motor oil and stale sweat. Had it rained that day, I would have been forced to park and trudge through two hundred meters of mud in the dark. But it didn’t rain, and I parked under a young mahogany tree along the street without any problems. I had seen the tree before, and I liked it. I turned the headlights off and cut the engine.
The street was empty. Further up the road, where the only light came from a streetlight, a black cat hurried into the shadows. I had chosen the spot weeks before because the potholes and the dust kept traffic and pedestrians away. Now everything in the street was beautiful and dark and powerful the way the night is in Manila.
The rumbling of fireworks was growing steadily louder across the city as midnight approached. Curtains of smoke were drifting through the chain of slums in the hills above the city. Filipinos had long embraced the traditional Chinese belief that loud noises drive away evil spirits. They had long embraced drinking, too, as part of the New Year tradition. Everybody drinks relentlessly on New Year’s Eve: cops, government bureaucrats, and even priests stumble around in an alcoholic stupor in the wet markets and the streets. Now, the city was like a rabid dog straining against its leash. The noise of the revelry was tremendous: a snarling, popping crescendo, pierced now and then by the rattle of automatic gunfire. High above the city, the sky was erupting into a pyromaniac’s orgasm: blooms of blue and green, mesmerizing yellows, and pulsating reds: each spark hissing a heavenward trail to become a fairytale constellation in the far loom.
I opened the glove compartment and took out the revolver, which was wrapped in an oil cloth. I unfolded the oil cloth on my lap and took the ugly-looking snub-nosed .38 in my right hand. I lowered the pistol between my knees under the steering wheel and looked up and down the street. There was no one around.
I lifted the revolver up to the light, holding it under the chalky pink glow under the windshield. I dropped the cylinder, checked the ammo, and snapped the cylinder back into place. Then I put the muzzle into my mouth. The act felt like an empty threat. I felt the heavy, impersonal bulk of steel against the roof of my mouth. The front sight felt sharp and solid against the back of my teeth. But I did not feel threatened. There was only an anxiousness for it to be over.
There’s going to be a mess, I told myself. The blast would rip my head apart. My eyeballs would pop from their sockets as the slug bursts into my cranium, powdering the parietal and frontal bone in a fierce, crimson detonation. I had seen dead bodies in the streets all my life. Some freshly killed. Others left to gather a richness of maggots. Those that had been shot in the head were by far the worst.
Oh, my brains! My poor brains! They would be all over the dashboard, and all the sordid, stupid coils and circuitry of my being would be exposed. I’d be leaving behind a ghastly corpse, but I’d be dead. I would be exempt from caring. I would be free. I have never been a brave man, but the loaded revolver in my mouth suddenly felt like courage. I began to squeeze the trigger, tentatively at first, then deliberately, without sadness, guilt, or self-pity. I squeezed slowly, my jaws clenching around the barrel, my whole body tensing with anticipation. My mouth began to fill with a spidery rot. I felt the sear move inside the frame. My hand began to tremble against the last bit of pressure. Then there was the trigger break, and then I felt the hammer go — free at last! — into the primer.
There was a snap. I heard it.
I waited for a moment with the revolver still in my mouth.
Nothing. No bang.
I was still alive.
Abruptly, on their own, my legs began to kick violently as if they were trying to escape from under me. The revolver fell on my lap; and as soon as it did, my entire body went into a terror spasm. My arms and legs straightened out under the steering wheel. My jaws locked. My knees and thighs turned into stone. I began to urinate in my pants, copiously and seemingly without end. I heard a loud rhythmic knocking sound on the floor of the car. I looked down and saw my feet kicking rapidly against the footwell.
I was alive. Every corner, every color, every smell, and shape – all the lights and edges of the world — leapt into my eyes with uncanny clarity and vividness. But for the life of me, I could not stop wetting my pants.
What just happened? I looked down at the revolver on my lap. I tried to reach for it but could not. My hands refused to obey signals from my brain. My legs were twitching so ferociously the pistol fell to the floor of the car. I knew the gun was loaded. I was sure of it. Could it have been a misfire? Misfires due to a defective primer are rare. If you use good quality ammo, you might hit one per three hundred thousand rounds. It must have been that. I must have hit a bad round. How could it have been anything else? It was dumb luck. That was the only possible explanation. I could have just as easily won the lottery.
But did I really want a bang? Did I want to die? If I did, why was I so relieved to be alive? The snap sounded like salvation. It sounded like a second chance. When I finally managed to roll the window down, I thrust my head into the New Year’s glittering mouth. “Welcome twenty-eighteen!” I bawled into the depths of the night sky. “Thank you, twenty-eighteen! I love you, twenty-eighteen!”
I sucked in a lungful of air and gasped at its seeming purity. Every molecule in my body laughed and cried at the same time. My pants were warm and sopping wet. I was still pissing myself uncontrollably.
INT. LARGE RECTANGULAR ROOM – DAY
The scene is a large ward with white cinderblock walls and a high ceiling. There is a spacious hall beyond the ward. Bright white daylight streams in from the entrance at the end of the hall.
In the reception area, a FEMALE NURSE and a MALE ORDERLY are talking.
NURSE: He hasn’t spoken a word since he arrived.
ORDERLY: Who brought him in? The cops?
The nurse flips through papers on a clipboard.
NURSE: Let’s see… He was with his mother and his ex-wife. He tried to kill himself.
ORDERLY: How? Don’t tell me. Pills, right?
NURSE: No. He used a gun.
The orderly shakes his head.
ORDERLY: Why do you suppose they do it?
When people ask me why I did what I did, I try not to speak about sadness. Sadness is a feeling. Everybody feels sad from time to time. Not everybody puts a gun to their mouth. I know people don’t get it. But I tell them what happened because, by now, everybody has heard about my “meltdown.” I may as well tell my side of it. I don’t have to talk about sadness. I don’t think it was sadness.
In the end, I think I liked where I found myself, anyway. I enjoyed the quiet. I enjoyed being left alone. People leave you alone when they think you’re crazy. I liked how simple things were.
The ward was large and spacious with four or five army cots in one corner. There was a nursing station and the medication dispensary. Down the hall, there was an isolation room for misbehaving patients. On the other side of the ward was a reception desk. Behind the desk was a hallway that led to the private rooms. Mine was through the third door on the right. There was a hard, narrow bed and a rectangular window with iron bars. The window looked out over a vegetable garden in the yard. I wore a hospital robe. I swallowed the pills. I ate the food at mealtimes, and I slept. Behind the ward, beyond the murmurs of patients weeping in their nightmares, there were coffee cups, paper clips, stacks of envelopes, filing cabinets, computers, and a communal area for the staff. Sometimes, I heard a TV in there. The nurses and orderlies liked action movies. The orderlies bet on basketball games. I heard them whooping, laughing, and talking deep into the night. That was the sound of life moving on.
We played board games in the recreational area in the mornings. One sun-drenched Tuesday, a lovely female doctor came and sat me down at a table. She had shoulder length hair and a beautiful smile. She gave me a sheet of paper and crayons. She said I should draw something that made me happy.
I drew a tree.
Carlos Castillo studied literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila. He began honing his craft under the guidance of the renowned Filipino poets, Ophelia Dimalanta and Nick Joaquin. His father, Erwin Castillo, is a poet of some note in the Philippine literary milieu.
Castillo published short fiction and poetry in college. He was literary editor of The Varsitarian in his freshman year. He has since written professionally for several American and Australian digital marketing outfits and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine government.
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