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Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Yap: Janrax reloaded
By Januar E. Yap
Meanwhile
“Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here,” so says the architect, but that’s another movie.
And so it happened that one summer, the boys walked all the way to a hospital a few blocks away in our sincerest efforts to submit ourselves to the initiation queue towards manhood.
If one chickened out that summer years ago, one would have had another year of inferior existence, which was outside the exclusive circle of the big boys club. One could bluff one’s way out, but that’d only be good for a few weeks, and the eventual discovery would reduce one cringing in an embarrassing corner of the world, or of the classroom, if you may.
Being such a small pile of bones, I was viewed by the rest of the boys like a feeble insect one could crush with utmost ease. Being small, I was pushed to the head of the queue.
Behind me was some muffled laughter. I was going to be crushed, I’d be crying my heart out on the table at the sight of a glimmering scalpel or a surgical scissor held against the light by some merciless masked man in green suit, they thought. There were five of us in separate tables, and we all agreed we were going to get the so-called German cut, which I imagined would have had the end-product that’d look like a Gestapo bulldog.
Held under the knife simultaneously, I glanced at the rest of the gang, and saw tears streaming down their eyes. “Mama, mama!” some cried out. “Aaaah!” the bravest of us all screamed his heart out. And then I found out only silence in my corner. I didn’t feel anything, neither terrified nor in pain. I felt like a real man for the first time, and they were mere boys.
“Precisely,” says the architect in another movie, “as you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly’s systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.”
So many summers after, we hear talks that the Cebu City Medical Center is going to be closed down. Something in me gets mighty sentimental.
(June 4, 2003 issue)
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