Training Max: Chapter 1

 

Chris was once talking with a foreigner with Yana, her friend, a fact about which Chris wondered increasingly why. She was a bitch. Plus, she was the sort of woman who was theatrical, ever colonizing the personal space of people around her with her exaggerated gesticulations. She was the sort of woman who would declare in their college cafeteria upon arriving, “M’lords and m’ladies, I have arrived.”

Spinning tales and spouting theories, perhaps in an effort to impress said foreigner, she later learned from Yana that he thought she was suffering from a terminal case of verbal diarrhea.

The criticism hurt her for a long time: all of five minutes. But it stayed in her subconscious all throughout this time, and having been subconscious, she developed a technique to never warrant that criticism again: she honed her words almost to the point of intuition, but making them make sense to the layman: like Sir Pratchett wrote of Death in the Discword taking a whetstone to his scythe until it can render molecules into puzzled atoms. After all this effort, she was able to wrap up a lecture on Heidegger’s phenomenology of death by saying, “It’s not YOLO. If death is within man’s being, then there’s no need to fear it. Just live, bitches,” with a wink and one finger gun, to her rather bemused sophomore students. They were used to her throwing almost vulgar phrases to her more profound, technical ones.

Anyway. This love of foreigners, no doubt inherited from her countrymen, continued way past the age when it was just a phase: it became a full-blown tendency guaranteed to win her over every time, and therefore make her lose. It was never a zero-sum game, this one.

It was not totally her fault, in the same way that character traits are not just biology’s fault: her family needed her to translate the Scottish accent of one rather handsome man buying what Filipinos called barbecue and what the Scottish pronounced as “pohwk sticks.”

“Uhm, what?”, her sister, beckoning to her, asked. “Chris, ikaw nga humarap. Di ko maintindihan kung ano binibili niya.” [“Can you be the one to face him? I cannot for the life of me understand what he wants to buy.”]

She smiled her professional smile, asked the Scot again, and turned to her sister: “He wants barbecue.”

No doubt appreciative of either her face or canniness, he ended up buying her six beers. Her sister encouraged that she sit on his table, keep him company, much like a whore keeps her customers company at the bar first before anything else. Chris wanted to be the one to buy her own beers, but seeing that that was absurd, she let the Scot do it instead.

Continuing with this family bombardment of socio-anthropological evolution, her brother-in-law Erick dropped by the table, asking the Scot, “Where are you from?”

“Sco’land.”

“Oh, Sco’land,” said Erick, now at a loss for what to say after being clever.

She ended up swimming in the ocean after that. He was on the shore, following her along.

He never showed up the next day. All she learned about him was that he was a fireman.