“I don’t cry,” he said.
She looked over both shoulders, making certain no one was nearby, then back at Excel. “We’re not really here,” she said.
“Who’s not really here?”
“You. Me. Us. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“Be where?”
She paused, like she couldn’t name the place. “America,” she finally said. “You and me”—she bent down to meet his face—“are TNT.”
He pictured a stick of dynamite, the lit fuse, the explosion to come.
“It’s what you call a Filipino who’s not supposed to be here,” she said. “TNT. It stands for ‘tago ng tago.’”
“I don’t understand you,” he said.
“‘Tago’ means ‘hiding’; ‘ng’ means ‘and.’ Tago ng tago. Hiding and hiding.”
“We’re not hiding.”
“We are. Always.”
“From who?”
She sighed, as though there were too many ways to answer. “Police. Government. Immigration.”
“But I was born here,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I was born there?” He meant the Philippines. She shook her head again.
Not here and not there meant nowhere. “But we have”—he searched for the term—“green cards. Inside your desk.” He’d seen his before. A thumb-size photograph of his face, the numbers with endless digits, the Statue of Liberty, faded like a ghost.
“Peke,” she said.
Another Tagalog word he didn’t know. “‘Peke’?”
“Fake.”
He thought for a moment, like this was a problem he could solve. “Your passport. Don’t you have a passport?”
“Sa Pilipinas lang,” she said. “Doesn’t mean anything in the States.”
He looked out at the sea lions. “We’re not American.”
“No.”
She looked suddenly tired and rubbed her eyes, tried to explain: she was eight months pregnant when she got rid of the eye patch–wearing son of a bitch for drinking away half her savings, then blowing the other half on the Manila cockfight circuit. Despite her films, despite a Dynamite-Star! Manila Movie Award, there were no more acting jobs for her, no stunt work, nothing. “And my only family was your Auntie Queenie, but she was a live-in maid in Saudi Arabia. Do you know how they treat Filipina maids out there? You think I’d do that to myself? To you? No way.” Staying in the Philippines, unmarried and pregnant, was unacceptable.
Her best option was to call Joker. “Fifteen years, we didn’t talk, and you know what he said when I called? ‘Come to California. I’ll help you.’ That’s true family, believe me. He wired the money for a plane ticket, and a week later I’m on my way to California. Thank god for Joker. My only hope. Like Princess Leia and Obi-Wan, di ba?” She smiled, like that was supposed to make Excel feel better and salvage what was left of his birthday.
“Then what happened?” Excel asked.
“You,” she said. “You happened.”
He was meant to be born here. “I wanted a hospital room with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said. “Like in a movie I saw once. But no. You”—she jabbed his shoulder softly with her pinky finger—“you couldn’t wait. You were born on the plane.”
“On the plane?” Excel said.
“In the sky. Above the ocean.”
He knew how the world worked: if you were born in America, you were American; if you were born in the Philippines, Filipino. “So what am I?” he asked.
“You”—she looked at him for a moment, blinked a few times, as though she wasn’t completely sure who she was speaking to—“I don’t know. I don’t know what you are. Not yet.” She brought up the last visit to San Francisco, that day he’d spent in an office waiting room. She and Joker had met with a lawyer, hoping the circumstances of his birth might make him a citizen. “We paid that asshole seven hundred dollars,” she said, “just to tell us no.” Excel’s citizenship, technically, was like Maxima’s—Philippines. “But that’s not home,” she said, “this is.”
She told him being TNT was why she couldn’t get a driver’s license or a decent-paying job, why they couldn’t leave the country or cross California into another state, why their lives were the way they were. And Excel wanted to tell her to close her mouth and stop talking, that she was ruining his birthday, and she should go stand somewhere else and let him watch the sea lions on his own.
Then he remembered his arm.
“Is that why”—he lifted his short sleeve, pointed to the raised puff of hard skin just below his shoulder, the scar left from a bad fall on his bike two years before. The cut was small but deep and bled nonstop, and he reminded Maxima that she hadn’t taken him to the emergency room.
“I wanted to,” she said, pulling down his sleeve, “but I couldn’t. Joker was in L.A. with his brother, and if I took you to the hospital by myself, and if they asked for ID or a Social Security number or something I didn’t have, what if they found out? What if they took you from me? I was scared.” Excel had never heard Maxima admit she was scared, but he remembered the fear in her face as she sterilized the needle over the stove, then threaded it with dental floss, which she said would keep the wound shut. She pushed the needle through his skin, and when he screamed for her to stop, she told him to keep still, and what he thought was sweat running down her face was actually tears. The cut healed, eventually, and Joker said the scar was evidence of bravery, proof of strength. “A warrior wound, di ba?” he said, and Maxima nodded, tried to smile. But whenever he saw the scar he knew: This isn’t right. Now he knew why.
He stepped away from the railing and turned to leave (where to, he didn’t know), but Maxima took his wrist, pulled him close.
“Listen to me,” she said, “and do as I say. No matter what, never tell anyone you’re TNT. Understand?”
He sighed, nodded.
“Understand?” She took his other wrist, squeezed them both to the point of pain.
“I understand.”
“You’d better. Because you don’t want to end up like Lola NeeNee, the cookie lady. Remember her? She’s here for thirty years and one day she makes a right turn on a ‘No Turn on Red’ sign, the cops pull her over, they see she has no papers, no green card. Nobody has seen her since.” He’d almost forgotten her, the old Filipino woman who went door to door selling homemade coconut cookies out of a small, foil-lined laundry basket. She’d sometimes stop by and have coffee with Maxima and Joker, one of the few visitors they ever had. Now he imagined her alone on a curb somewhere, an empty laundry basket at her feet.
“If you tell,” Maxima said, “we’re all in trouble.”
He promised he wouldn’t. Then he asked, “Why did you bring me here?”
“For a better life. What else?”
“No. To San Francisco.”
She loosened her grip, let go of his wrists. “I wanted you to have a nice birthday.”
Below, the sea lions rolled off the platforms and into the water, one by one. “I want to ride the carousel,” Excel said.