A sort of apocalypse

Forecast: Thunderstorms of separation anxiety. A sense of dislocation, laced with guilt at being a selfish twerp.

My sister Cookie got married. Well, she is the "normal" child, and her concept of family is "genetic relationships," while mine is, "Let’s ensure that our recessive traits never surface ever again!" So she got hitched – to Bryan, who was her classmate at Ateneo – and moved out of my apartment. The change in living arrangements was fairly stress-free for me because I was in Paris while she packed up and hauled away her stuff. By the time I returned, the floor of my apartment was visible again, and I had twice as much closet space. There was no custody battle over the three cats, who are too lazy to move anyway. To signify her entry into adulthood – and my refusal to leave childhood – Cookie let me keep the Lord of the Rings action figures. (I have an extra King Elessar if anyone wants to swap a Boromir for it.)

I see my sister at least once a week – we go to the movies – and she lives 10 minutes away, so it’s not as if we’ve parted ways completely. I haven’t lost a sister, but my favorite traveling buddy is gone forever. We’ll probably never go on one of our silly trips again; if we do, her husband will likely tag along. Cookie was great to travel with because she appreciated the ridiculous, and she took charge of the funds. On our trips she kept the wallet tightly shut: no taxis, no frills, no frivolous spending. In fact the concept of "spending" would vanish from our lives altogether. We once went on a Hong Kong package tour that included breakfasts – and she kept the McDonald’s breakfast coupons locked in the hotel room safe. In New York we subsisted on hotdogs and Snapple because she disapproved of restaurant prices.

In Prague she actually agreed to shell out for opera tickets, but only because we were accosted on the street by a nice man who offered us cheap seats. (It did not occur to us till much later that the tickets might be fake. Fortunately they weren’t, for I have no doubt Cookie would’ve hunted him down and rearranged his spine. She was on her college judo team.) We were staying on the outskirts of the city, in a pension she found on eurocheapo.com. It was pretty, cozy, and cheap – though not as cheap as her first choice, a converted lunatic asylum and Soviet interrogation chamber (If you listen closely, you can hear the shrieks of patients long gone!). Cookie was worried about being late. Naturally, we got to the opera house so early, the building was still closed. When we got tired of circling the building, we sat on a nearby park bench. It was supposed to be spring, but snow began to fall. "It’s c-c-cold," I said. "Let’s go inside that bar and have a drink." "No," she said. "We’ll wait right here." "We are going to get hypothermia," I pointed out. She only agreed to go indoors when we could no longer feel our faces.

We took our first out-of-town trip in October, 1997. I remember because I’m reading my journal from 1997. She was on semestral break, and I was going stir crazy. One day I woke up and said, "Let’s get out of here. Let’s go somewhere. I don’t know, Baguio." She said, "Okay." We tossed some clothes into backpacks (we didn’t have cats yet), went to the airport, and caught the first flight to Baguio. (Actually we did this the next day because a super-typhoon caused the cancellation of all flights north. Also, our first choice was Palawan, but there was "smaze" – the smog and haze caused by Indonesian peat fires and El Niño. It just sounds more spontaneous and action-packed this way.)

It was convention season, and the hotels we called were booked solid. Fortunately I remembered an article Sol Vanzi had written about a hotel called The Swagman. That’s where we went. We got a large, clean room that smelled only faintly of mildew. Whiteboards, the kind you write on, had been screwed onto the bathroom walls; somehow I resisted the urge to find out what lay behind them. The towels said "Manila Peninsula." "Maybe they own the Peninsula, too," said Cookie. We laughed hysterically. Then we ate at a ‘50s-style diner that looked like a car had smashed into its facade.

Our tour began with a visit to the Baguio Museum. Rather, an attempt to find the Baguio Museum, complicated by the fact that no one could tell us where it was. Somebody said it had moved to Club John Hay, so we took a taxi there (Cookie allowed cabs if the rates were lower than in Manila). We still didn’t find the museum, plus there was no public transportation going out of the camp, so we ended up walking. It was a long trudge. "The mummies hate us," Cookie said, darkly. We laughed dementedly.

We stayed five days, did the touristy stuff, ate too many strawberries. Every time we returned to our hotel we dashed up the stairs because we didn’t want to meet any of the other guests. We bought copies of the classic The Fireless Inferno, and dined at the Safari Lodge, an inn furnished with stuffed dead jungle animals. It looks like the aftermath of a taxidermists’ orgy: one dines in the shadow of a dead elephant while a stuffed rhinoceros glares balefully from a corner. "Next time we should stay here," I suggested. "No!" Cookie cried. "What if the dead animals’ souls come back?"

The Swagman hotel package included free airport transfer. This meant that when we checked out, the receptionist stepped outside, hailed a cab, paid the driver, and told him to bring us to the airport. Free airport transfer. The flight to Manila was delayed for four hours. We sat in the lounge watching television. There was a public service ad about population growth: it said 5,000 babies were born in the Philippines daily. "That’s 150,000 a month," I said. "1.8 million a year! We’ll be flooded with humans!" "Don’t worry," Cookie patted my shoulder reassuringly. "Many of them will die." It sounds cruel and horrible, but we laughed insanely. We were always laughing like madmen, even at stuff that wasn’t particularly funny.

At last the plane arrived, and less than an hour later we were looking upon the rusty roofs and clogged highways of Metro Manila. "Enjoy your stay in Manila!" said the flight attendant. My sister rolled her eyeballs. "Duh, I live here."

That’s the end of the world as I knew it.

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