There is another face in the mirror. Excel turns around, sees a small boy in striped pajamas standing in the living room doorway, holding a toy airplane in his hand. The Sharmas’ son, he guesses.
The boy stares at Excel, oddly calm, as though the sudden appearance of a stranger in his home happens every day.
Excel moves quietly to the window, a finger to his lips. “I’m not here,” he whispers, and just like that, he’s not.
2
When he was gone, Excel thought Maxima might turn his room into something else—storage space or a home gym, maybe a sewing room, though as far as he knew, she’d never sewn a thing in her life. It’s what you did when someone left, he thought, made use of the space left behind. But the room is still the same—the gray army blanket spread over the twin mattress, the milk crate nightstand, the top two drawers of the dresser half-open and empty. The place feels like a crime scene, everything untouched and kept in place.
He removes his shoes, sets them by the bedroom door. He pulls out a roll of T-shirts from his backpack, suddenly fears the implications of unpacking. Does it mean he’s back for good? That he’ll stay longer than he intends?
He thinks: ten thousand dollars. That’s how much he needs to leave Colma, to get back to Sab.
He crams the shirts into his backpack, zips it up.
EXCEL FLIPS ON THE LIVING ROOM LIGHT AND SEES MAXIMA EVERYwhere.
Above the couch on the wall: two eight-by-ten photographs, one of Maxima in midair and midkick, a sword in each hand; the other of her in a shimmering gold gown, holding a rocket launcher.
On the cinder block bookshelf: a Polaroid of Maxima knee-deep in jungle water, flanked by men in army fatigues, wielding machetes; another where she sits on an overturned jeep, blowing a kiss to the camera, wearing a wedding gown spattered with blood.
Atop the TV, on a stack of old IKEA catalogues (why does Maxima save them? She never buys furniture), sits a gold statuette of a stick of dynamite, a star at the end of its fuse, with an engraving on its marble base that reads:
MOST PROMISING ACTION HEROINE
STAR OF TOMORROW
DYNAMITE-STAR! MANILA MOVIE AWARDS
He picks the trophy up, surprised by how light it is—the whole thing is plastic, the marble too—sets it back down.
He goes to the kitchen. On the wall above the table is a framed movie poster of Malakas Strike Force 3: Panalo Ako, Talaga! Excel translates: “Strong Strike Force 3: I Win, Really!” Something like that. The poster is an illustrated collage of the movie’s big-drama moments—jeep explosions, big-muscled thugs firing machine guns, and curvy ladies in tattered blouses, desperate and on the run. Maxima’s role in the film was small and uncredited—an assassin disguised as a nurse, her one scene a death scene—but she’s there at the bottom of the poster, staring straight ahead, swaddled baby in one arm and a pistol in her hand, aimed right at you.
Before he left, the walls were blank; it was a way, Maxima said, to make the dinky box of their two-bedroom apartment look less small, which, to Excel, sounded like they were living in an optical illusion. But maybe his absence made the walls too blank, the apartment too big, so that she had to crowd it with pictures from a former life. Years before (pre-Excel, pre-America), Maxima had starred in a handful of action flicks made for cheap in Manila; “lowest of the low-budget, talaga,” one critic called them. But Maxima was always proud. “I could have been the Michelle Yeoh of the Philippines, believe me,” she used to say, and in darker moods, she’d watch her bootleg VHS copy of Malakas Strike Force 3: Panalo Ako, Talaga! on an all-night loop, hunched forward on the couch like the story meant something new with each viewing. Once, when Excel was watching a TV show about the world’s deadliest birds, Maxima stormed into the room, grabbed the remote and put in the tape, said she needed to check something in Strike Force 3. “Check what?” Excel said, but Maxima brushed him off, muttered things in Tagalog that Excel couldn’t keep up with. “You’re barely in the movie,” he said. She turned, shot him a look of instant anger or genuine hurt. He apologized immediately, left the room and went to the roof, where he decided he wasn’t really sorry, not at all.
“I found that poster online,” Maxima says, entering the kitchen. “Ten bucks. And for a collector’s item like that? On that Antiques Sideshow, it’s ten times that amount, believe me.”
The poster is slightly tilted; Excel straightens it out. “It looks nice,” he says, “the living room, too. The pictures, the trophy. You’ve never displayed this stuff before.”
She shrugs, opens the refrigerator, rummages through. “I thought it was time to decorate, ‘make a house a home.’ And it’s better to look at pictures of me than of other people. You can’t miss somebody who’s still here, di ba?”
“Guess not,” he says. But on the refrigerator, held up by a Domino’s Pizza magnet, is a photograph of Joker, Maxima, and himself. They’re standing in the sun at Evergreen Lawn Cemetery, a pair of concrete sphinxes in the background. Joker waves hello, his silver hair slicked back into a stubby ponytail; Maxima stands beside him, arm around his shoulder. They’re both smiling, but Excel looks removed and a bit oblivious, slightly smaller, even dimmer, like he’s standing in shade two steps behind them, an accidental bystander in the background. Excel hasn’t seen the photo before, can’t remember when it was taken or, even more puzzling, who took it. But he knows from the hunch in Joker’s shoulders and the knockoff Louis Vuitton fanny pack at his waist that it’s a few months before he died, just shy of his seventy-fifth birthday, almost two years before, when Excel was seventeen. Heart attack, out of nowhere.
A stranger might call it a family portrait, three generations in a single moment, and though Joker could pass as a grandfather, he wasn’t. “Grandmaster Joker,” was what they called him instead, a term Excel was embarrassed to say aloud (“It’s like we’re living in a kung fu movie,” he’d complained), though Maxima had insisted it was the correct one. “That’s who he is,” she said. Back in the Philippines, long before Excel was born, Joker had been Maxima’s grandmaster in the Filipino martial art of escrima. She was his top pupil, a village girl who he believed could one day become a grandmaster herself. But when she was nineteen, a Manila movie talent scout with an eye patch (a fashion statement, not a necessity) who’d seen Maxima perform a hand-to-knife demonstration approached her with an offer. “Stunt work today, action star tomorrow” was his promise; Maxima fell for it, then for him. For Joker, there was zero chance of compromise; low-budget action movies out of Manila would cheapen everything he’d taught her. Not long after, with no other students and no family of his own, Joker moved to California to join his brother, and for almost fifteen years had no communication with Maxima, not until the day she called him from Manila, telling him she was pregnant with no job, no family, and nowhere to go. “I broke the old man’s heart, and he still took us in,” she’d said. “We owe Grandmaster everything,” which made life itself seem like one long debt they could never repay.
Maxima closes the refrigerator, a Tupperware of fried rice in one hand, a Panda Express takeout box of chow mein in the other. She dumps them into a bowl, pops it into the microwave. “I haven’t had dinner,” she says, “but there’s enough, if you want.” For ninety seconds, they stand in silence against the microwave’s hum; in someone else’s life, Excel thinks, his return would come with triumph and cheers, a home-cooked meal during which he’d tell stories of his travels, then distribute souvenir gifts thereafter. But they are not those kinds of people, not even in the photo on the refrigerator.