He went to Maxima’s room, entered without knocking. “Something’s not right,” he said, holding up the shoes. She was sitting on her bed, looking at an IKEA catalogue. “Who are you talking to?”
She sighed and rubbed her eyes, like they’d been arguing for hours and she’d finally had enough. “I’m talking to men.”
“What men?”
“From the Internet.”
“Internet. Like online dating?”
“Dating. Me?” She let out a laugh, shook her head. “No. I’m not dating.”
“Then what’s going on? Tell me.”
She looked back at the catalogue. “I have a profile on some websites. Sometimes men find it, and if they like what they see, they contact me. If they seem nice, we talk on camera.” She pointed to a webcam on her desk. Excel had never seen it before, and he stepped back, suddenly worried someone could be watching from the other end.
“What do you talk about?”
She shrugged. “Lots of things. Life, I guess? The ups and downs. The good days and the bad days. And sometimes, if there’s a connection”—she looked up at Excel, then away from him—“I ask for help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Money.”
He looked back at the camera on the desk, imagined Maxima sitting in front of it. “Is this . . .”—he trailed off, not knowing the right way to phrase a question he didn’t want to ask—“a sex thing?”
Maxima shot up from her bed and shoved him against the wall, kept him there. “I do not do that,” she said, the force of her hand crushing into his chest. He could not believe how strong she was.
She stepped back, took a breath. “Ano ba? Why should I defend myself? Why should I explain?” But with no prompting from Excel, she told him about OK Filipinas, A Kiss across the Ocean, Pacific Catholic Romance, websites where men—most of them middle-aged and American—searched through profiles of women from Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines. “They want the perfect Asian wife. And you know what ‘perfect’ means. Hardworking. Housecleaning. Loyal. A maid in the day, a whore in the night. These men, that’s the kind of thing they say, believe me.” The men assumed she was in the Philippines, someone looking for a way to America, via marriage. Once she felt a connection was made, mutual trust established, she’d make up an elaborate tragedy or hardship, something that only money—both small and large amounts—could fix, and the ones she could convince would wire the cash.
“I only take what I need,” she said. “Enough to make rent, pay the bills. Anyway, it’s my business, nobody else. You don’t have to like it, but you have to live with it.” She sat back on her bed and opened the catalogue, flipped to a page showing an all-white kitchen, plates stacked perfectly next to the sink.
“Fine,” he said, “but I’m not wearing these shoes.” He left the room.
Later, he asked Maxima to at least keep her voice low, but there were still nights, even some days, when he heard her through the wall—flirting and giggling, cheesy lines she’d use again and again (“I am a simple woman who believes in the two L’s: the Lord and love.”). Sometimes he’d learn the names of men and where they were from, their hobbies and interests, the thing that they loved: Jermaine from Saint Louis lived for the Yankees, Werner from Milwaukee collected German beer steins, Roberto from San Antonio loved the US of A. Maxima could indulge them all, could make them believe she loved the same things too, and somehow find the perfect opportunity to pivot the conversation toward that moment when Maxima would go from giggles to heartache, and reveal a tragedy (a typhoon that devastated her village, the sudden death of a sibling, even a cousin held hostage by Muslim insurgents) that would require her to ask, with shame and humility in her voice, for a little money (“Life in the Philippines”—she’d say, right before breaking—“is hard.”). Excel would listen with his ear to the wall, embarrassed and ashamed, but also, admittedly, riveted—how convincing could she possibly be? How did she come up with the perfect sadness to make the men believe her, want to help her? But for all of Maxima’s stories and lies, he learned that a bit of truth could sometimes slip into the conversation, as he did on the night before he left for Hello City: stuffing clothes into his backpack, he could hear Maxima through the wall, weeping about the son she lost, the broken heart that would never heal. When the man on the other end asked, “What can I do, mahal? How can I help?” Maxima had no requests—not for money, not for prayers—then told him there were some things in the world that simply could not be fixed.
ON THE PRICE IS RIGHT, JAKE LOSES THE TRUCK, BUT HE’S STILL SMILING for the audience, fists in the air like he’s a winner. “He lost,” Maxima says, “why is he celebrating? Dummy.” Excel rereads the Christmas card, and remembers, suddenly, that he didn’t send one to Maxima. He hadn’t called at that point, but he’d meant to write a card, had even made sure that Sab saved an extra stamp for him to use. He doesn’t know what Maxima did for Christmas, if she did anything at all. He hopes, if nothing else, there was someone online for her to talk to.
He puts the card down, tells Maxima that if he can get his job back, he’ll try to help out with rent. “Bahala na,” she says, punching The Bod, “I can manage.”
5
It’s a twenty-minute walk from the apartment to The Pie Who Loved Me, a spy-themed kiddie pizza parlor with games, rides, and animatronic animal characters dressed in trench coats and fedoras. An online reviewer called The Pie Who Loved Me “the Chuck E. Cheese of the damned, where pizza goes to die” and in high school, being voted “Most Likely to Work at The Pie” wasn’t so much funny as it was cruel: it meant that your classmates thought you were doomed, that whatever qualities you displayed, none was more apparent than your lack of ambition, your zero potential. Excel doesn’t know who won it the year he graduated, was just relieved it wasn’t him—an upside of nobody knowing you, he thought.
A new sign hangs above the entrance—the red lettering is bright and cheery, the o in Who and Loved is a pepperoni pizza—but the rest of the storefront is as grim as before: gray stucco wall, cracking red-tile roof with missing tiles all over, the one window a small dark square on the door. It’s almost business hours, but when Excel enters, half the lights are off, no kiddie music plays, the cash registers sit unmanned. But a familiar stink of industrial mozzarella and oven cleaner is in the air; someone is prepping for the day. He goes to the dining room, notices the Spy Ring Hip Hop Players is missing a member—Ivanka Iguana on bass—and the ones remaining look maimed or dead, heads hanging to the side with half-closed eyes and half-open mouths, like someone tried decapitating them but gave up halfway. Sloth the Sleuth is in especially bad shape, both arms dangling from their sockets by wires and tubes, his gray, shaggy fur matted and crusty. In Hello City, there were artists who could take a broken animatronic body and repurpose it into furniture or make it part of a sculpture. Something functional and new.
Somebody says, “X?”
Excel turns around, sees an elderly man in a floppy baseball cap alone in a booth, a small dictionary on the table. He walks over, sits across from him. “It’s good to see you, Z,” Excel says. For the first time in days, he smiles.