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REEL ONE
He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.
-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
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FADE IN:
1. INT. FONTANILLA RESIDENCE – LIVING ROOM – LATE AFTERNOON
ASISTIO FONTANILLA, forty-seven, grossly overweight, in a florid pink bathrobe, hair still damp from the shower, is right in the middle of a grand mal fit of inspiration.
As if leeching brilliance from the occasional table he stares at fixedly, he announces, “She will be a poor little rich girl, spoiled, yet totally misunderstood, who falls in love with their house boy, a young, hunky probinsiyano who shares the homespun wisdom of his upbringing with her, teaching her to be a better, kinder, and more compassionate human being.”
He pauses, blinking rapidly, eyes wet with rapt, intense emotion.
RUBEN MERCED, twenty-nine (though he rabidly insists he's only twenty), is clacking away on the slim, slightly battered laptop that perches on his knees, knees which seem to be super-glued together, affording the laptop a much sturdier and more reliable platform than his boss' occasional table.
As he commits these divine utterances to silicon memory, his head bobs up and down, like one of those dashboard dogs with coiled spring necks.
“And for this to work,” Fontanilla resumes, “she will have to played by…”
Ruben holds his breath, his head continuing to bob, though at a slower pace now, as if the car to whose dashboard he is velcroed, has stopped in heavy EDSA traffic.
Ruben watches as his boss begins to mime opening a sealed envelope, and slowly pulling out a card, eyes going wide, mouth dropping into a perfect imitation of the 15th letter of the English alphabet, and announcing in a breathy voice, “Constance Eusebio.”
Ruben's head stops bobbing; the dashboard dog is quite suddenly roadkill.
Oblivious, Fontanilla suddenly begins to clap, right-hand fingers striking the heel of his left palm in a rhythm most machine guns would envy.
Ruben, poor, poor Ruben, personal assistant and doormat, is quickly trying to work out what to say so as to avoid being thrown out of his boss' bed and the spotlight of his feverish focus.
Constance Eusebio, you see, is dead, her wake evening news material for three nights running, her funeral, a dress rehearsal for EDSA IV, and a ratings record breaker.
The young starlet being groomed to be the next Judai, had made the mistake of crossing Asistio Fontanilla, head of SuperNova Films, and had gotten a half-dozen pins and a rather fatal case of voodoo for her troubles.[1]
Ruben, the now dead dashboard dog, is about to become, at best, a doormat, and at worst, a dead personal assistant, if he chooses to say the wrong thing to upset his boss' outpouring of brilliance.
“Aaahh… pero, Sis, diba,” relying on the official press release regarding the cause of the young actress' sudden death, “nabangungot siya?”
Asistio freezes. Ruben freezes. One fully expects jerky end credits to start rolling.
But Asistio blinks, then pouts, then sighs. Ruben has still not moved.
Asistio straightens all of a sudden, eyes agleam. “Mannikin!” he exclaims, and Ruben has a sudden visual of a clothes store dummy, then, a corollary image of Andrew McCarthy and a pre-Sex and the City Kim Cattrall (accompanied by an audio track: “… and if this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each other, nothing's gonna stop us, nothing's gonna stop us now…”).
Ruben chooses to stare blankly at his boss, knowing that neither image could possibly be right, trying unsuccessfully to exorcise Grace Slick's voice from his head.
Asistio, beaming at his own brilliance, glances at the image of catatonia that is Ruben, and sighs once more.
“We will make a star, dear,” Asistio confides indulgently. “And this film-- Bukas, Kahapon Na Ang Ngayon-- will launch her into the stratosphere! Into the galaxy of stars! Ate Shawi, Ate Vi, Ate Guy. She will join them, and she will be ours, all the money from all her endorsements, ours, Ruben!”
Ruben's eyes light up (the sound of Starship finally fading away), what he believes to be understanding, dawning. “The Starburst winner,” referring to the on-going reality TV show to Discover Tomorrow's Stars Today, which was currently rating high, and one of Channel 8's cash cows (and for which Asistio was acting as head-executive-consulting producer).
Asistio frowns, a particularly florid bull irritated with a pesky fly. “Hay! Text-based divination takes too much time! And a lot of the aninos are losing interest, and you know that's where most of the text votes are coming from. Ano naman ang gagawin natin sa ectoplasm, aber? Saan ang datung?!”
Ruben nods, sadly, aware that his maternal grandmother, who passed away three months ago, has stopped voting for her Starburst favorite-- the perky go-getter Georgina, who may not be able to act, but can at least dance like Britney Spears' slutty evil twin-- because the texts take too much away from her ectoplasmic substance.[2]
This Ruben knows only too well, as his Lola Isiang has taken to visiting him at the most inopportune moments to have a little chat, ask for the nth time after the gross impossibility of a grandchild from Ruben's loins, and to pester him to vote for Georgina.
“No,” Asistio decrees, “we can't wait for the Starburst finals. Besides, Georgina might win, and she can't act.”
Ruben looks about wildly, hoping Lola Isiang isn't around, or else some of his boss' very expensive vases could start whizzing through the air, and end up very expensive debris.
“Like I said, Roo, we're going to make a star.” And he smiles, enigmatically, the Mona Lisa meets Jabba the Hutt, with a come-hither look thrown in for good measure, promising extra treats for Ruben tonight.
“And for her leading man,” Asistio points to Ruben imperiously, to the laptop perched on his knees, and he knows exactly what his boss is referring to, quickly opening another MSWord file (LIST.doc) and looking at the name at the top.
“Luis Conrado,” he reads, and Asistio, forty-seven, grossly overweight, aswang, smiles.
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1 Constance had, quite suddenly, due to her desire not to work with a leading man with body odor which easily qualified as a biohazard, stormed off the set of E, Ano Ngayon?, causing the production to come to a grinding halt, and driving the poor award-winning actor to tears.
Said actor, needing desperately to be comforted, had no one to turn to but the film's executive producer, Asistio Fontanilla, who thus endured a seemingly endless half-hour in the sweaty embrace of the distraught man; Asistio still has dreams of being trapped in a humid greenhouse, rather exotic and indescribable odors flooding the thick, milky air.
Sadly, it seems Asistio has forgotten his impulsive decision regarding poor Constance. [back]
2 Ghosts, by definition, are dead. Being dead, they get bored easily. Bored, they eventually end up watching TV, often along with their families, watching the same shows they enjoyed in life.
Now, already a part of the aether, it's easy for them to simulate texting a message and shooting it into the telecommunications network, far easier than making static-filled phone calls over land lines, at any rate.
It still costs though, and, instead of spending credits for their SMS messages, they instead spend all that is left of their incorporeal selves to get those text messages sent, wasting away bit by bit, text by text. (Many were the wraiths who discorporated completely just to give Mig those extra votes for Rock Star: INXS.)
At present, the telco giants are trying to discover ways to circumvent this flagrant act of hacking. (Just as soon as they find a way to profit from it. Just those damned ghosts wait!)
Strangely enough, ghosts cannot seem to contact their relatives through this means; it's as if they don't have the cell numbers in their memory anymore. They can however (and do) contact complete strangers, using the opening gambit of “Puwede ba maging text-mate?” (A ploy which seems to work well enough, until the living party innocently requests for a F2F.) [back]
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