were gone: she was naked beneath a shapeless white hospital gown. A fan twirled overhead, hung from the rafters below a high ceiling of corrugated steel.
In the room was a small table and a chair, and the cot where she lay. On the table, a plastic cup and a plastic water pitcher, a plastic dish with a meal of rice and sardines. On the floor at the foot of the bed was a metal chamber pot.
No windows. One steel door with no knob, no handle. A single light fixture high on a wall, but no switch. Marivic rose from the cot and started toward the door, three steps away. But she was still woozy from the drugs. She lost her balance and lurched into the table. It banged hard against the wall.
Marivic steadied herself.
“Wilfredo, is that you?” called the voice of a young man, speaking Tagalog.
Marivic was startled. The voice seemed to come from nowhere.
The voice said, “Did you return, Fredo? Was it a trick? I’m so sorry.”
Marivic looked up. The high walls were open at the top, a ventilation space about a foot high between the concrete block and the ceiling, covered by a wire-mesh grille. The voice was coming from the other side of the concrete wall.
“I’m not Wilfredo. I’m Marivic.”
“Oh! You’re new. Did you just get here? I heard a plane. Was that you?”
Marivic’s last solid memory was sitting in the back of a van in Manila. But now she hazily recalled an aircraft engine’s drone in her ears, and half-opening her eyes to glimpse an airplane’s cockpit instruments. They were flying. Through the windscreen was the sea far below. The image seemed dreamlike, but she knew it was real.
“Yes,” she said. “That was me. Who are you?”
“Me, I’m Junior. Junior Peralta. From Vigan City.”
Marivic took the last couple of steps toward the door, moving slowly to keep from getting dizzy once more. She placed her palm against the cool steel and pushed. The door didn’t budge.
“I am a prisoner,” Marivic said, as much to herself as to the disembodied voice on the other side of the wall.
“Yes. Me too.”
“Were you kidnapped from Manila?”
“Yes.”
“Why are we here?” Marivic said.
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. Foreigners, that’s all. But it’s not so bad. There’s lots of food. And anyway, we’ll be leaving soon.”
“How do you know?”
“Wilfredo told me. He figured it out. Fredo is very intelligent.”
“Who is Fredo?”
“He was in the place you’re in now. We talked all the time. He was here for almost one month, and he paid attention. He said they were getting ready to let him out, and then this morning they took him away, so I guess he must have been right. He really did leave after all.”
“What makes you think he left?” Marivic said.
“We’re on an island,” the voice said. “A small one. I didn’t see it, but Wilfredo said he got a good look when they brought him here. He said it’s small. You can probably walk around it in ten or fifteen minutes.”
Another dreamlike image drifted up into Marivic’s consciousness. She was being lifted out of a boat. … No, it was the airplane, a plane that floated boatlike on the water, tied up at a dock. She was put into a motorized cart, bright green and yellow, and then driven up a hill toward a clump of concrete buildings among some coconut trees.
That’s where I am now, she thought.
And yes it seemed to be an island. Not a big one.
“Think about it,” Junior said. “If Wilfredo is not here, where else can he be? He must have left.”
Somewhere outside, an engine stuttered to life. It made a loud buzz that flowed in through the grille at the top of the outside wall and rattled around the concrete cell.
The plane, Marivic thought.
“The plane!” said Junior. “You see? Fredo must be leaving.”
The buzz became louder and more insistent. It grew into a roar that reverberated off the concrete walls, reaching an angry pitch so loud that neither of them tried to talk.
Then it began to recede. Gradually the sound diminished. Marivic knew that the plane was flying away. She imagined it climbing into the sky, disappearing. It had brought her here, and now it was leaving.
The thought saddened her. She was lost. Truly.
Junior and Marivic chatted for hours that day, each talking to a blank concrete wall, never seeing each other’s face. Junior was twenty-two years old, son of a fisherman, fourth in a family of eight. A poor family,