The microwave beeps; Excel speaks up. “I should’ve called before I came back. I meant to. Things just got busier than I expected.”
Maxima brings the food to the table, sits. “Bahala na, Excel,” she says, a phrase he’s never been able to completely understand. Oh well. Don’t worry. That’s life. Fuck it. What it means when followed by his name, he doesn’t know.
He joins Maxima at the table, is about to scoop up the mix of rice and chow mein when Maxima slaps his hand. “Pray first,” she says. They’re not Catholic—they’re not anything, really—but for all his life Maxima and Joker chanted what they called orasyones—“martial arts prayers,” was how Excel understood them. There were orasyones for heightened senses in combat, protection against sudden ambush, ways to weaken your enemy; an orasyon could even reach the dead, which Maxima said kept Joker’s spirit close by. But most seemed made up on the spot; once, right before a sparring session with Joker, Maxima recited an orasyon calling for an earned and respectful victory over her opponent, then asked that the lottery scratchers she’d bought that morning bring more than just a lousy five bucks.
What she prays for now she keeps to herself. Head bowed, eyes closed, she mouths her orasyon; mostly it just sounds like breathing. Excel keeps one eye open, looks at the illustration of Maxima in the bottom corner of the poster. He knows that scene well, but the first time he ever saw it—he must have been three or four years old—he thought that the baby in her arms was actually him, and that at some point early in his life, Maxima cradled him as she shot down enemies blocking their way. He remembers how let down he felt, when he finally understood it was just a movie.
Maxima takes a breath and lifts her head, eyes blinking open like she’s waking from sleep. She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it back, and Excel notices that it’s blacker now, her eyebrows too. Far as he knows, she’s never dyed her hair before. Maybe he’d just forgotten how dark it is, after all the time away.
She scoops food onto Excel’s plate. “So tell me. How was it? Did you make important discoveries?”
He smushes the rice with his fork. “Discoveries?”
“You said you were going to the desert to make”—she quotes with her fingers—“‘important discoveries.’”
Excel has lied so much in the past nine months that it takes a moment to remember the one he’d told Maxima. “Discoveries,” he says, “right.” Nine months before, he told her that he’d found a job digging for an archaeological excavation in the California desert, that evidence of a lost civilization might be recovered. Room and board covered, $2,500 a month in cash. He told her he’d be gone for two.
“That job is still going on,” he says, “but I needed a break. Guess I’m feeling a little aimless right now.”
“Aimless. Not knowing.” She shakes her head. “No purpose, then no life. Just la, la, la. So American.”
Let her talk, he thinks. It only makes leaving easier.
“And your friend?” she says, “is she still making important discoveries too?”
“Sab is not my friend. She’s my girlfriend.”
“Well, I never got to meet her.”
“She’s still out there. But we might be on a break right now, too.”
She nods, sighs. “It happens. Even when it’s true love. If I was smart, I would have broken up with that eye patch–wearing son of a bitch a lot sooner.”
Maxima almost never mentions his father, and Excel never asks. Why wonder about someone you’ve never met and never will? His whole life, he’s imagined the man exactly as Maxima describes him, and taken it as the truth: that he sits at some roadside cantina in the Philippines countryside, drunk and playing gin rummy all day, an underage girl on his lap.
“If you’d left him sooner,” he says, slicing through clumps of chow mein with the edge of his fork, “I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t say bad things like that, Excel.” She hits his shoulder with the back of her hand, harder than necessary. “No matter what, you’d be here”—she slaps the table twice—“one hundred percent.”
“Maybe,” he says, and hopes it isn’t true.
3
A dark morning, nine months before, September. Maxima was leaning against the arm of the couch, hands deep in the fraying pockets of her pink terry cloth robe. Excel was at the front door and down on a knee, tying the laces of his Converse high-tops. “Triple knot, triple knot,” she said, “so you don’t trip and fall.”
“Double’s enough,” he said, but he tripled it anyway, biding his time in what he knew were the last minutes before leaving home for good; he had no clue how moments like this were meant to go. He tied one shoe and started tying the other, noticed a tiny tear in the mustard-brown carpet, revealing the grain of what looked like dark hardwood. He’d never seen it before, and he felt a sudden urge to rip it further, to see what else might be hiding underneath.
Excel got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “guess I’ll be going,” and Maxima moved toward him for what he suspected was a good-bye hug, though neither of them was a hugger. But instead of reaching out to pull Excel in, she took an envelope from her pocket. “Cash,” she said, handing it to him. “Just in case.”
The gesture caught him off guard. Maxima had been silent for days and pissed off for weeks, ever since Excel told her about the job in the desert. “It’s just a couple months,” he’d said, “maybe a little longer,” and she said, “Leaving? So soon after Joker?” But Joker had been dead for a year, which seemed enough time to heal, or at least endure, and wasn’t that how he was raised? You fall, you get up. Someone hits you, you hit back. Someone dies, you still have to live.
He took the envelope—there were five twenties inside—tucked it in his front pocket. “You didn’t have to,” he said, “but thanks.”
“I hope it helps.” She retied the sash of her robe so tightly she looked like she was trying to cut off air.
“Well,” he said, slinging his bags over his shoulders, “bye.” He opened the door and almost stepped through when something slammed so hard against the back of his knee that he dropped to the ground. He tried getting up but fell back down, his arm suddenly twisted behind his back, and Maxima’s chin pressing down hard against the top of his skull. “If this happens to you,” she said, grip tightening, “what do you do?” He tried untwisting his arm, getting to his feet, his whole body squirming and stuck. He knew this move: the Maximattack, she’d called it. There were tricks to breaking free but he could never get them right, and by now had forgotten them all.
“Let go,” he said, “now.” He heard her whisper something—an orasyon to keep him down, he assumed—until she finally released his arm and stepped away.
She offered a hand to help him up; he refused, stood on his own. “Nothing will happen to me,” he said, then walked out the door.
He hurried through the complex and out the front gate, saw Sab’s Corolla parked at the curb. He opened the door and threw his bags in the back, leaned in to kiss her when he noticed purple streaks in her brown hair; the day before, they’d been blond. He took a strand, rubbed it between his fingers. “Bad?” she asked.