Sleepless

Two a.m. and a sound comes from somewhere in the house that seems very much like a power drill screaming away in short bursts. Aaaak. Aaaak. It wakes up the father. He goes down to see if someone is trying to break into the house. Although it does dawn on him to ask himself: Why would anyone break into a house full of people with a noisy power drill?

He makes a lot of noise on the way down from the bedroom. Burglars are like snakes, his late father once taught him. Its always better just to scare them away. Forget about catching them. That’s the worst thing you can do. And so that’s exactly what he did: Make noise.

But still the sound kept coming. It came in short intermittent bursts. Aaaak. Aaak. And then an unpredictable period of silence before it came again. It had a clearly mechanical sound that he tried as best he could to interpret into something besides an electric power drill set in hammer mode, which was exactly what it sounded like.

It is 2 in the morning. His imagination is slowly getting the better of him. A power hammer drill is used to cut holes into concrete. Was someone trying to kill his whole family by drilling holes into the bottom posts that held up his house? How possible is that? If he did it himself it would take him weeks. And then the noise he would produce would not go short aaaaks like this one, which seemed as if the driller was trying to keep from waking up people. It would go very long un-self-conscious aaaaaaaaks. Ridiculous! No one’s trying to break into his house. No one’s trying to kill them with a power drill.

But he had been told his house was haunted. He had not ever seen the ghost himself though people talk. They hear noises in the basement in the dead of night like some lost soul wandering in the dark and aimlessly cleaning up. The basement doubles as storage area and workplace for him and his son. Here is where his assistants hammer and weld copper to produce sculpture among boxes of old things, books, miscellaneous art work, bags, unused household stuff gathering months of dust. Otherwise his eldest son practices metal rock music here with his band. The point is: it is always messy. And yes, it does scream for regular cleaning. But a ghost doing it? And in the dead of night? That sounds more wishful fantasy than real.

But it is the end of October and monsters are all over the news and cable television. So why not in his house at 2 a.m.? Earlier that very same day he saw his full share of Halloween horror. He watched as people lined up in the noonday sun to make the deadline for voter registration. They were all sizes and age of people. Only a few had umbrellas. The line wound into the shadows wherever it could. Otherwise, people stood under the sun and bore the heat. They stood in the streets half around the block where the Commission on Elections office was, near City Hall. It was such a sad horrible sight to behold. The sun beat down on what would be the voting constituency of the nation standing on a line that did not seem to move. And yet it seemed almost unpatriotic to ask: Why?

Why would people line up that way in the noonday sun just to get the right to vote in this country? Look at who they might have to be voting for? Hopefully, they line up this way to vote for the kind of people who will not make them line up this way under the noonday sun just for the chance to vote for them. But what are the chances of that?

The same chance as that there are ghosts in the basement.

It takes another night of haunting before the “ghost” finally shows itself. And like the literature says: Ghosts are only manifestations of all our hidden fear and guilt, all our secret longings. It is only an interpretation of perhaps random sights and sounds colored by the innate inclinations of our own imagination. And so a shrill mechanical sound becomes the sound of a ghost with a hammer drill whining away in the dead of night. But since this interpretation taxes the limits of what’s believable, it can only be something else. His daughter thought it sounded more like a bird. A night heron perhaps? They had seen them wild in the marshes of Dumanjug and Baclayon towns. The are beautiful birds, one of the few that fly out at night besides the kikik.

And it might have been issuing forth a forlorn mating call. Its habitat having been so degraded it might have been the last such bird on the island. And so it calls to no bird anymore. Instead, it sings its anger to haunt people from complacent sleep, which might have been the reason why its call of love now sounds more like an electric powered machine for drilling holes into stone.

Fine story. But as it turned out, the sound was only the branch of an Ipil-ipil tree scraping into the edges of the tin roof, a ghost easily exorcised with nothing more than a freshly sharpened bolo and a bit of rope. Well, it is Halloween. Happy kalag-kalag.