Ang Tigbuhat was watching television when it hit. It seemed hardly perceptible at first, just a strange sensation on the feet, which grew into a shudder. And then everything shook and vibrated, the TV screen, the coffee mug at the end table. Only at this point did his brain start asking the required questions: Was it the sound from his television? A big truck passing too fast on the road outside? An airliner passing too low over the house? An earthquake?
The sign became unmistakeable by the time the mind said, “Go outside into the street. But first make sure everyone goes out with you. Look for the children.” Rose is cooking lunch. She has the presence of mind to shut the burner before running out. Tigbuhat tells her to look for her little son Greg-Greg. He is outside playing in the street.
At the street, people slowly gather looking at each other for signs of affirmation they were getting it right. “It” being the right interpretation of this strange event. All are speechless as the vibration and sounds intensify. The roof on the house is shaking like a tin drum and issuing forth a sound it had never issued forth before. You hear it. It is an impossible sound. Even the pebbles on the ground seem to be dancing where they are. And then you see the concrete post that holds up your electric wires swing like a pendulum. You think to yourself, I never knew concrete could flex that way. The quake seems to go on longer than it ever went before. You actually expect things to start falling. And then it disappears, truly like sound fading into the distance, truly like a big mysterious wave.
And then, the people on the street, crowds by now, start recounting their personal narratives of the whole event. What they were doing, how they escaped and so forth, as if to validate to each other whether the event truly transpired. For everything had the quality of a dream—surreal, mystifying and only in hindsight funny. And after everything, that was exactly what people did. They laughed, excited and perhaps, without admitting it, relieved. They were survivors.
And how can they help feeling this way? They came face to face, indeed, were engulfed with power so awesome they forgot entirely if just for the moment how they were dressed, whatever problems they had, the state of their finances and everything else. They rushed. They did not walk calmly outside whatever building they were in. And they did all for dear life. Ang Tigbuhat was shirtless and half shod (meaning he had on only one shoe) on the street. And he did not even notice until much later. This was the closest he had ever come to a disaster such as he keeps reading about in the papers or had been watching over TV. It happened always somewhere else and to other people.
Thankfully, Cebu once again escaped the full force of it. Nothing fell here. No one died. All the victims still came from somewhere else. This evening he will pray to his God for this and especially for his own children and family. But in the back of his mind, he could not help knowing with clear certainty. Had it been any stronger or had it lingered even a bit longer, things would have been entirely different. Everything would have started cracking and falling. There would have been injuries, maybe even deaths. They had come to the edge and yet were saved. Blame it on fate, or chance or divinity.
And yet, Tigbuhat realized from all these how truly vulnerable they were, his own immediate environment, his family, his city, the island, the world in general and life itself. He had gone through life true to his own conditioning as an organism. Just like everyone else, he took his life under control, led others when it was called for, disciplined his children, guided them through many years and prepared them for most of the expected problems they might face in the run of life. But how can anyone prepare for things like these? Better to accept that there are things by far bigger than we can ever hope to be. And it will always be lurking out there.
The quake measured him. And he found his own true size in scale with the grand weight and mass of the planet.