Ch. 1: The Market and the Flood

The ice was already sweating when Pilandok arrived, beads of water sliding down the styrofoam blocks like the river itself was weeping in advance. He balanced three buckets of bangus on his hip, flip-flops slapping the wet concrete of Quiapo Market, and ducked under the tarpaulin roof that had sheltered three generations of his family from sun and monsoon alike.

“Oy, Pilandok!” called Aling Rosa from her karinderia three stalls down, her ladle pausing mid-stir over a bubbling pot of adobo. “Your suki from Makati is here, the one who buys three kilos of tilapia every Tuesday. She's asking if you have the fresh kind, not the frozen one you tried to pass off last week.”

“Pass off?” Pilandok pressed his free hand to his chest in mock offense, setting the buckets down with a practiced clatter. “Aling Rosa, that fish was merely enjoying a deep meditation. Very spiritual. I was doing her a favor—enlightenment comes cheap at forty pesos a kilo.”

The buyer, a stern woman in nurse‘s scrubs, cracked a smile despite herself. “You’re a liar, Pilandok. But you're the only liar in this palengke who makes me laugh.”

“Ah, see?” He spread his arms wide, sando pulling tight across his wiry frame. “Laughter is the best medicine. Though if you want actual medicine, Lola Ising has something for your blood pressure two stalls that way.” He winked, scooping the tilapia with hands that knew every scale by instinct. “Three kilos, fresh as this morning's gossip. I swear on my flip-flops.”

“Your flip-flops have more holes than your promises.”

“Exactly. Nothing to hide.”

The transaction complete, the nurse pressed an extra twenty pesos into his palm—utang na loob for the laughter, perhaps, or for the way he‘d once chased off a pickpocket who’d targeted her bag. Pilandok tried to refuse; she pressed harder. This was the mathematics of the market: favors compounded interest sweeter than any bank.

He was arranging his display—bangus, tilapia, the occasional sad-looking lapu-lapu—when Mang Tino arrived with a basket of mangoes balanced on his broad shoulder, provincial accent thick as the fruit's perfume.

“Have you seen the sky, pare?” Mang Tino set the basket down with a grunt, selecting a mango and tossing it to Pilandok without asking. “My cousin in PAGASA says the typhoon is coming faster than they announced. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning.”

Pilandok caught the mango, examined its blush of yellow and red, then bit into the flesh without peeling it, juice running down his wrist. “Your cousin also said last year that the rains would miss us completely. We spent three days bailing water with tabo and prayers.”

“That was different.”

“Different how?”

Mang Tino's gruff face softened into something almost vulnerable. “Because this time I believe him. The pressure, he says. The pressure is dropping like—” He made a gesture, hand falling through air.

“Like Don Emilio's promises?”

“Like a stone in the river.”

They laughed, but the laughter had edges. Everyone in the palengke knew about the pressure, the invisible weight that had been building for months. The rumors of buyouts. The surveys conducted by men in polo shirts who never bought anything, who took photographs of stall awnings and measured alley widths with yellow tape. The riverfront mall, they whispered. A development that would “revitalize” the area. As if the palengke wasn‘t already vital, as if the old women selling candles for the Black Nazarene and the fishmongers calling prices since dawn and the tricycle drivers napping between fares weren’t life enough for any city.

Pilandok was finishing his mango—sweet to the fibrous core—when the shouting began.

It came from the main entrance first, a ripple of raised voices that spread through the narrow alleys like water finding cracks. He saw Aling Rosa clutch her ladle to her chest. Saw Mang Tino's jaw set hard as durian shell. Then the men in security uniforms pushed through, not barangay tanods in their mismatched uniforms but private guards in crisp black, boots polished to mirror the coming storm.

They carried rolls of paper. They carried staple guns. They did not make eye contact.

Pilandok drifted closer, mango forgotten, his body moving with the loose-limbed grace that made him invisible in crowds until he chose not to be. He insinuated himself between a candle stall and a sari-sari store, close enough to read the notice as a guard stapled it to a wooden post:

NOTICE OF EVACUATION AND DEMOLITION

By order of Razon Development Corporation, all unauthorized structures within the designated riverfront improvement zone are hereby declared hazardous and subject to immediate removal following the anticipated meteorological event. Compensation for displaced vendors will be determined at the sole discretion of Razon Development Corporation…

The words blurred after that, a fog of legal Taglish designed to obscure while appearing to inform. But Pilandok had been reading between lines since childhood. The message was simple enough: when the flood comes, we will say you left willingly. When the flood comes, we will say the river took what we merely finished.

“Immediate removal following the anticipated meteorological event.” He said it aloud, tasting the phrase, turning it like a suspect coin. “Very fancy. They make it sound like the typhoon is their employee.”

The guard's eyes flickered toward him, then away. Pilandok smiled, quick and bright and utterly without warmth.

“Tell your boss,” he continued, just loud enough for the gathering crowd, “that we‘ve survived bigger storms than his stationery. Tell him the river was here before his grandfather’s grandfather, and it‘ll be here after his grandchildren’s children have turned to gossip and dust.”

The guard's staple gun clicked empty. He reloaded, methodical, professional, afraid.

By midday the notices fluttered from every post like obscene white leaves, and the market had developed a fever. Pilandok moved through it, dispensing jokes that landed wrong, reassuring suki who suddenly needed no fish, only confirmation that their world would hold. He gave what he could. He had always given what he could, ever since his parents' jeepney had met a drunk driver on Roxas Boulevard and Lola Ising had taken him in, small and furious and already practicing sleight-of-hand with stolen coins.

But the coins felt heavy today, and his fingers felt slow.

He found Lola Ising at her stall of herbal remedies, arranging dried sambong in bundles tied with thread salvaged from old dresses. Her floral housedress was the same pattern she‘d worn for years, flowers fading like memories, and her bun was pinned with the ivory comb that had been her mother’s before the war. She did not look up when he approached, but her hands paused in their work.

“Mano po,” Pilandok said, taking her knotted fingers and pressing them to his forehead.

She made a small sound, neither approval nor dismissal. “You smell of worry. It does not suit you. Worry is for people who have not yet learned that tomorrow will arrive regardless of our preparations.”

“Mamita.” The childhood name slipped out, the one she'd used when he was small enough to carry on her hip through market floods. “The Crocodile has sent his notice. You saw?”

“I saw.” She resumed her bundling, fingers moving with the automatic precision of decades. “I saw the same notice in 1990, when the first mall came to Recto. I saw it in 2006, when they wanted the land for parking. The face changes, Pilandoquito. The teeth remain the same.”

“But this time—”

“This time what?” Now she looked at him, dark eyes unreadable as river water. “This time the typhoon is real? The typhoon is always real. The danger is always real. What changes is whether we believe the crocodile when he says our only choice is to enter his mouth.”

She reached beneath her table, past bottles of lagundi syrup and packets of dried ampalaya, and withdrew something wrapped in oilcloth. It was a book, small and thick, pages swollen with humidity, the cover showing a line drawing of a deer-like creature perched on a crocodile's back, both of them grinning.

“I thought you knew this by heart,” Pilandok said, though he sat on the low stool she indicated, drawn despite himself.

“I know one version.” Lola Ising opened the book carefully, pages crackling like old joints. “There are many. In some, Pilandok is a deer. In others, a mouse-deer, small enough to hide in bamboo. In your grandfather's province, he was a man, a trickster who lived by the river and stole from the rich to feed his barangay.” Her finger traced the illustration. “But in all of them, there is the crocodile. Hungry. Powerful. Certain of his victory.”

“And Pilandok wins because he's clever.”

“Pilandok wins because he understands the river.” She closed the book, held his gaze with the weight of her seventy years. “The crocodile thinks strength is in his jaws, his armor, his place at the top of the food chain. He forgets that the river moves everything, carries everything, transforms everything. The crocodile thinks he owns the water. The water knows better.”

Pilandok felt something shift in his chest, some door opening to a draft he couldn‘t name. “Mamita, this isn’t a story. This is a man in a barong with lawyers and bulldozers and—”

“And what do you have?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“You have the river,” Lola Ising said softly. “You have the stories. You have the hands that know this market better than any surveyor's map. What you choose to do with them—” She shrugged, the gesture encompassing everything and nothing. “That is the only story that matters.”

The wind shifted then, carrying the smell of rain before rain, that particular ozone tang that made old wounds ache and dogs howl at nothing. Pilandok looked toward the river, though buildings blocked his view. He imagined it anyway: the Pasig, brown and patient and full of secrets, carrying the city's refuse and its prayers in the same indifferent current. Once it had been clean enough to swim. His grandmother had stories of that too, of boys diving for coins tossed by American sailors, of water so clear you could see the river stones like scattered jewels.

Now it was swollen with plastic and industrial runoff and the slow accumulation of forgotten things. But it was still the river. It still rose when the rains came. It still remembered, in whatever way rivers remember, the paths it had carved through softer earth, the channels buried and built over, the places where water would go if given the slightest invitation.

The sky, when he emerged from the market's shelter, had turned the color of old nickels, heavy and tarnished. Where morning had been humid bright, afternoon descended in shades of gray and green, the light taking on that underwater quality that preceded the worst storms. Vendors were pulling tarps tight, weighing corners with concrete blocks and rusted rebar. Children who had been playing in the alleys were called inside, their voices carrying that particular excitement-fear of typhoon days.

Pilandok walked to the river‘s edge, where a crumbling concrete embankment held back—or failed to hold back—the Pasig’s patient advance. The water was rising, he could see it now, brown froth accumulating around the pilings of pedestrian bridges, debris beginning to gather in the eddies. A refrigerator door, white and meaningless. A clutch of plastic bottles bound together by some accidental mathematics. The body of a doll, arms spread as if in welcome or surrender.

He thought of Lola Ising‘s book, the deer on the crocodile’s back. He thought of Don Emilio's notice, the careful phrasing that made destruction sound like progress. He thought of his father, who had driven a jeepney with rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror, who had once caught him practicing card tricks and said, “Magic is just making people look where you want. The real trick is knowing where you want them to look.”

The first fat drops of rain hit the river's surface, each one making a small crater that filled immediately, leaving no trace. Pilandok stood there, getting wet, watching the water rise and remembering how to make people look where he wanted.

Behind him, the market huddled under its tarps, waiting.