After a while, it's time for me to head home. I decide to take a shortcut through a shopping mall to get to the bus stop. I pass this way almost every day, so the shops are invisible to me, but once in a while something catches my attention. Like today: I notice one of those stalls in the middle of the hallway, one of those shops with the glass-paneled cabinets displaying their wares. A couple of salespeople are demonstrating this season's newest plaything - a toy plane made out of some lightweight plastic. I watch them for a while. Every time one of them throws a colorful plastic plane, it makes a quick perfect arc in the air, and then returns unerringly to his or her waiting hand. I have to wonder: what fun is that?

On the bus, I keep nodding off to sleep, and jerking awake at every sudden stop. I shift between dream and thought and memory. I dream about numbers and motion. I think about caps and floors and cash flows and decimal-point errors. I remember when Raya and I were classmates, and, later, participants in a summer writers' workshop. Those were fine times - we waged war on clumsy sentences and indelicate phrasings, we composed impromptu poetry around a campfire, we even unmasked a plagiarist. The air was alive with the sound of clashing egos and drunken song. For a while there I felt - I must have been drunk - I fancied myself a successor of sorts, an author of another chapter in the grand history of Philippine Fiction from English. But I knew in my gut that I could never make a living just writing fiction, and so in my third year I shifted to Computer Science. And now I make a good salary. I write routines for our software, constantly checking and rechecking our results against the output from the Bloomberg Terminal. I've learned about all this financial jazz from the ground up by immersing myself in book after fat book. I've even begun dabbling in investments myself. It's all very profitable and all very boring. I miss the stories.

My neighborhood. The bus stops with a jerk and the door hisses open. I jump off and hail a bright red tricycle. A couple of minutes of juddering motion - a near-accident, an irate pedestrian - and I'm home. I stagger into our house, the bungalow in Quezon City where I have lived with my parents for all my twenty-five years, wave a bleary hello to my mother, who's watching a TV infomercial in the sala, and crawl into my bedroom and crash headlong into sleep. Almost instantaneously, my mind is awhirl again, in the throes of a proper sleep-dream this time. Like teleporting to a new world in between eyeblinks. next>>