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Thousand YEAR EVE by Angelo Rodriguez Lacuesta

Understanding the Self (Rizal Technological University)

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THOUSAND YEAR EVE by Angelo Rodriguez Lacuesta (2005)

I HAD never been to a radio station before, and I was shocked that it looked so ordinary.
Even the offices adjacent to the disc jockeys’ booths resembled those government agencies where
you got your license or paid your taxes: a row of desks, clicking typewriters, worn-out, obsolete
computers in a dirty beige color, a bunch of hardened secretaries, and a gaggle of people shuffling
around and waiting in vague lines.
Off to one side, facing a corridor filled with people, were big square glass windows. Those
were the disc jockey’s booths. From small speakers perched above the windows came the sound
of a woman’s voice. Presumably that was what was on air at the time. Sure enough, in a corner of
one of the windows was a little sign that said <On The Air=–just as I had expected it to be. The
woman was weeping while speaking, and from where I stood, in the main office area, I thought I
could see the figure of the woman in one of the booths, through the glare of reflections on the
window.
The woman was calling for her missing mother. She was 68 years old, about five feet tall,
with graying hair, and had worn a dress with blue flowers on the day she disappeared. They had
gone to the zoo a week before. They had gone there because it was a Sunday and animals fascinated
her. After separating ways with her daughter for a half an hour, the old woman failed to show up
at a small rest area, which was their prescribed meeting place. A three-hour wait ended in a search
involving a gaggle of security guards. When closing time came–
The woman’s voice was interrupted by the deep, booming voice of the announcer. His tone
was kind and concerned. I was surprised that it didn’t sound tired, or hurried, or irritated, as I
would most likely have been. It sounded just like that–exactly like that radio announcer we imagine
in our head, a dislocated voice overriding everything, but a kind voice. With enough character so
you could talk back to it, regard it, but with a kind of indifference that comes from authority. It
sounded as if it came from another world.
The woman then resumed, explaining that her mother had Alzheimer’s disease. It was
strange hearing the word Alzheimer’s within the tones and textures of that voice, because I could
tell the woman wasn’t used to saying that word, and it sat in the middle of her sentences, perfectly
enunciated, like a newly built landmark that divided the past and the present. The term had been
taught to her by doctors, experts, but it had surely never arisen between mother and daughter.
As I joined the people huddled outside the booth I could see into it. The booth was small,
and the acoustic boards that lined the walls were covered with posters of movies and singers and
bands. There were old memos and announcements. Wires sprung out from a stack of equipment.
The announcer sat behind a panel decked with buttons and sliding switches. He was
wearing headphones and moving some of the switches. After a few moments I recognized him as
a television personality. He hosted his own afternoon show. In the show he sat on a couch and
fielded a string of guests. That show had a little oval inset in the corner that showed a woman
performing sign language. I realized now that the show was a public service program–a televised
version of the radio program he was running now.

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And just like that television show, his guests took their turn in front of him, entering the
booth and speaking into the microphone. Their voices emerged from the speakers. After they spoke
the host would speak. Then the booth door opened, a name would be called and someone from the
hall would enter and sit in front of the announcer.
From time to time the sequence would be broken by a string of commercials advertising
soap or insurance. Briefly, the sound would brighten and a jingle would play; after some minutes
someone punched in the program ID, which was a short musical passage played on an organ that
had the effect of a 1950’s horror or mystery show. That was because the radio show was all about
unsolved cases. Then, the announcements would resume.
One of the staff in the main office area called out my last name and I approached the booth.
Before I could reach it the door opened and a little girl came out, tears streaming from her cheeks.
In my hands I tightly held a little piece of paper. On it I had scribbled some things that I
imagined would be important. I had written out a long list, fearing I would forget something that
turned out to be crucial information.
Inside, the air smelled of cigarette smoke and damp air-conditioning. There was a little
three-foot high Christmas tree in the corner, with light bulbs that blinked on and off and a little
foil hanging that said <Happy Holidays.= The announcer looked at me briefly and squinted at a
clipboard. He gestured to a chair and took a long drag from a cigarette.
He called my name and I nodded. He switched on the microphones and announced my
name on the air. All through this I was turning the paper over and over in my hands until my hands
and the paper had rubbed off on each other and shared the same color. I was folding and unfolding
it, until I could barely read the pencil marks. I had written out phrases and underlined key words,
listed details down to the minutiae, and now they were lost to grayness.
There was a microphone on a stand in front of me. I gripped the mike, adjusted its position
and began to speak. I glanced down at the paper without looking, without reading, and spoke. My
voice reverberated through the studio as I began relating all the details, stringing them together
with prepositions, adjectives, words.
My father, last seen New Year’s eve, wearing a striped collared shirt, jeans and red slippers.
Medium build. Black hair with white and silver streaks. 58 years old. Missing, lost, or kidnapped
since New Year’s Eve, four days ago. I was looking at the announcer, guessing when he would
interrupt me with his silky voice.
The announcer looked at me briefly, perhaps to see if I was done, and picked up the tail
end of my fading announcement with a loud burst that was meant to add excitement to my case.
The announcer looked at me as he spoke, and I recognized that he was giving me words of
encouragement, telling me to leave his name and contact numbers on the master list outside. I felt,
in that brief glance of his, that I found all comfort and solace. Then he switched his gaze to other
matters: the control panel in front of him, the cue cards passed to him by an assistant. As he looked

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away he added that I would know in a few days. I stood up, afforded the announcer a nervous
smile, but he had turned to his list and was calling for the next guest.
In the main office area there was another line of people, all waiting to sign the master list,
which was merely a set of clipboards arranged in alphabetical order. There was a woman at the
desk who acted officiously, reminding people to hurry up or fill in the proper blanks. After a while
I noticed that the people respected her concern for order. After I filled in the blanks she offered
me a Christmas greeting and reminded me that they would call me if there was any word. I stepped
out of the office, past a fresh crowd that was gathering, and took a taxi to work.
Though it was the first day of work after the holidays, everybody knew that my father had
gone missing. My wife and I had made sure to call every one of them over the past days. By New
Year’s morning, we had gone through the list of friends and neighbors, people we knew to know
my father; by the next day we had gone even through those who didn’t know him. It was quite an
awkward thing, having to greet them for the holidays and then asking them if they had seen him,
or heard from him. My father was a loud, gregarious man, and it was not unusual for him to call
one of his friends, out of the blue, for a chat or a drink.
The office was still slumbering in the Holiday spirit when I timed in, with only a handful
reporting to work. My cubicle, normally unadorned except for a wall calendar and an appointment
book, was cluttered by Christmas gifts from co-workers. I turned on my computer, mindlessly
sifted and reorganized files, looked at the time, and made a few tentative calls.
When lunchtime came around, someone came over to my cubicle and invited me to lunch.
I could tell his tone was guarded and unsure. I accepted the invitation with a voice that I hoped
would not be so tainted with grief and exhaustion. I realized that the last time I had heard my own
voice, besides the small remarks I had made to the taxi driver, was in the radio announcer’s booth.
Hearing my own voice now, exchanging pleasantries for the New Year’s and agreeing to have
lunch, seemed a strange and dislocating experience.
Whether it was because the holidays had drained all our funds or because we were in a
somber mood, we chose to have lunch at the company canteen, a few floors down. The company
had set aside half an entire floor as a dining area, brightly lit and nondescript. A long stainless steel
counter ran the length of the canteen, and although it was past noon, only a few people were lined
up along the railing.
Over lunch they asked me what had happened. I heard my voice once again telling them,
over the din and the soft music, with an accuracy that startled me, every detail of our separation.
After a small dinner, my father, my wife and my child went to bed to rest before the
festivities. I sat in the living room, watching TV and drinking beer. An hour before midnight, my
father appeared and sat with me. He said nothing, merely coughing a little now and then. Some
minutes later my wife emerged with the baby. She frowned at the sight of us sitting there and
immediately went into the kitchen to prepare.

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We had all wanted to go somewhere else to spend the holidays. My wife had wanted to
take our one-year-old child up to the beach in Ilocos, where her family would be staying, and
Christmas and New Year’s would be light and cold. I had made hotel reservations for myself and
possibly a few friends, where I could sit and stew through the season.
After a while, my father and I took four worn tires from our garage and rolled them out to
the street, piled them carefully in the middle, sprinkled a little kerosene and set the whole thing on
fire. By that time our entire street was studded with tire bonfires and lined with people who had
come out to watch the explosions and count the minutes.
That New Year’s Eve was the millennium’s eve. If anything, it meant that the explosions
would be louder and the fireworks bigger and brighter. A half-hour away from midnight, the night
sky was lit up with swirls of color, and from time to time, the swirls would reach down and ignite
the street like lightning. On CNN they had followed the millennium celebrations as the stroke of
midnight crept across the world, jumping from country to country, showing an assortment of
cultural celebrations and fireworks. They had been doing this since early evening, and by the time
it was almost our time, the whole thing had begun to weigh heavily on me. My wife was still in
the kitchen with the maid, preparing the New Year’s Eve dinner. There were only three of us living
in the small apartment, but my father always had visitors–all old men–coming in after midnight,
until the morning hours. By dawn our living room would be filled with old men, and the smell of
old men, and the smell of cigars, cigarettes and liquor. I decided that after the midnight celebrations
I would retire to my study and do some reading.
Because it was the millennium, we had stocked up on more fireworks than ever–and more
than was necessary. By five minutes to midnight, the whole street was filled with fire and smoke.
My ears were ringing and a thick fog of gunpowder smoke hung in the air. My father had changed
from his pajamas into a striped, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. This was all protection–he always
loved to stand close to the fire and toss in the fireworks, as though he were tossing garlic and
onions into a frying pan. When the fire had reached its full height, we sat on either side of our pile
of fireworks–worth a lot of money if you ask me, but still not worth much against the a sky that
seemed like a sea of explosions. We tested our noise levels with a few firecrackers, and we were
satisfied with the volley of small explosions they made, echoing back and forth against the high
walls of our neighborhood fences.
As the firecrackers split open in the fire my father looked at me and said something I could
not hear. By this time the explosions on the street had risen steadily into a continuous barrage. My
father stood up and gathered an armful of big rockets. I was looking at my watch, counting down
the seconds. I shouted for my wife to come out for the big bang, but she merely looked at me
through the living room windows. The baby was crying hysterically from all the noise.
From the corner of my eye I thought I could see my father walking up the street, picking a
path among the flare of fountains, the shockwaves of homemade bombs, and the sibilance of
rockets shooting into the sky. I was seeing this from the corner of my eye; I didn’t bother to call
out to him because, thinking harder about it, I had believed all along that it wasn’t him, it was
someone else walking down the street. As the night turned to midnight and the sky and the street

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erupted into each other I looked around our bonfire for my father. When the next lull came, several
minutes later, I realized that he had gone.
Is there any story that hasn’t been told? Any incident that can be told without anybody
thinking, I haven’t heard anything like that before. Everything’s been told, and told better. At the
radio station there was a man who was calling out to his older brother who had neglected to send
money from Kuwait, where he worked as an engineer. There was an old woman who cried for
justice for her son, who had been raped and beaten to an inch of his life, and whose pulverized jaw
could not even accommodate a whisper of the name of his attacker. And there are other stories,
other mysteries, wherever we go.
They had mysteries like this day in, day out, at the radio station, at the police precinct, at
the barangay hall. In fact, all these places and cases so closely resembled one another that the
pictures of the dead and missing, the telephone numbers to call and the people to ask for on the
phone, these names and things all vibrated into each other and began to look the same. Every 68-
year-old woman stood five-foot tall, had graying hair, and wore a flowery dress. Every old man
looked the same.
In the taxis I rode, the radios were constantly tuned to the AM band, where the mystery
show aired in the mornings and in the afternoons. Occasionally, breaking news came through the
airwaves, involving phone calls from lawyers offering help or concerned citizens reporting the
whereabouts of those lost and those who had run away. There were agencies and offices and even
individuals out there who concerned themselves with the lost and the disappeared and the
uncollected. I had earlier tried to solicit their help, but they told me the sheer volume of their
clientele meant I might be attended to in many weeks’ time. At that I resolved to do my own
searching. By the end of the second week my father was still missing and I had almost grown
desperate, but decided that it would be too late to go back to the help agencies.
My wife had delayed her move to Ilocos for the meantime. Whenever I got home, often
very late after long hours at work and a slow, thoughtful reconnaissance around our neighborhood
streets, I would be mildly surprised to still find her in her room, sleeping with the baby in her arms.
I would sit and watch TV in the living room and discover that the persevering presence of my
family had a difficult, grating character. By that time I realized I had owed her more than I could
ever hope to repay and repair.
During those moments I agonized over the unanswered questions. Was my father, in fact,
dead, killed at midnight by an explosion? I imagined a stray bullet falling from the sky, or a rocket
veering off course to strike my father’s slow-moving figure dead center. But I shrugged off these
possibilities as too impossibly fantastic. Surely the key to my father’s disappearance lay in
circumstances more spectacular.
I also reflected briefly on whether my father might have been the victim of a crime, such as an
assassination or a kidnapping. I took to scouring the papers for any news of salvagings and
unclaimed corpses. I was thankful for finding no such news, and decided that such a savage crime
could not happen to my father. We were not exactly rich folk, and my father did not maintain a

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high position anywhere. If he was anything, he was simply and merely my father. It would have
been a case of mistaken identity.
Still, I went to a newspaper to report it. A reporter asked me about the incident and, tired
from the nth telling, I merely rattled off the details into his dictaphone. You forget the meaning of
words the more you say them. But as I recited them I imagined the numbers and the details would
bring my father from the void and contain him. I felt like a magician, a medicine man, uttering a
spell composed of strange words, a litany of broken Latin that had to be repeated again and again,
ad nauseum, until your familiar agreed to appear.
In a few days a small article appeared in the broadsheets, repeating my words, tucked under
the bigger news of the current political expose. It also appeared in the tabloids, where it graced the
pages where the small, sensational crimes of the day were reported.
More than once, the thought occurred to me that he might have faked his disappearance,
that he might have walked away from our disintegrating life and marriage in order to save it. Or
that he had turned an old pair of eyes upon himself and, seeing an old man growing older and
unneeded in his son’s household, decided to skip town and join his old gang in a journey to points
unknown. After all, I seemed to remember that he had a thoughtful look in his eyes on the night
he disappeared. Such possibilities lay open and waiting before me as I sat in my living room,
looking at the news on TV and pondering my next move. I knew that such possibilities were very
clear to my wife. After all, she had known my father all these years and she had come to know
everything he was, as much as she knew everything about his son.
It was becoming an unsolved case. I remembered the organ stinger from the radio show
and the woman at the radio station who had lost her mother at the zoo. I remembered hearing of
old men and women going missing for days, even weeks, and I could see these old folks wandering
from bus stop to bus stop, sleeping at the foot of buildings and begging for food. I imagined that
after a while, they would have to build an entirely new life for themselves, without previous
memories, like babies born to a new world.
It was at that time that I thought of summoning other, metaphysical means. A friend of a
friend knew of a medium who specialized in lost items, and, wondering whether my father would
count as a lost item, I contacted him. This time I was asked to bring a personal item of the lost
individual. I could not bring anything very substantial, since my father had brought his wallet, put
on his only cap, worn the watch I had given him many years before, and taken his only pair of
shoes with him. I only managed to present a very old pair of bathroom slippers to the medium,
who seemed to cringe at the sight of them.
The medium himself was an old man who wore a dingy robe whenever he performed his
<readings.= He clucked his tongue and declared that the item I had brought would certainly not do
much, but added quickly that he would try, slapping down a worn down deck of Spanish cards on
the table. He made reshufflings and rereadings and offered several vague guesses about my father.
Then he glared at me and decided that the old man might not be in the realm he was searching, or
that he could be eluding his third eye. For a fee he agreed to perform periodic searches in the
ethereal plane and assured me that if my father wanted to contact me, he would find a way

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True enough, that night I dreamt of finding my father. I dreamt that it was a clear night,
like the night he disappeared, except there were no fireworks, nothing in the sky, not even the
moon or the stars. In my dream he wanted to return and to signal his intention he lit the fireworks
he had brought with him. Each rocket burned perfectly and burst perfectly in the night sky,
exploding cleanly, like five exclamation points.
In my dream world the phone rang: <We’ve found your missing relative.= I dressed quickly,
feverishly, even forgoing my pants and socks. But when I arrived at the station to claim him, they
showed me a different old man, sitting on a chair, sipping Coke from a small plastic bag. On the
table beside him lay a half-eaten sandwich. In dreams, it seems, food is always half-eaten and
everyone, most especially the dreamer, is almost always half-dressed. In dreams there are only
half-discoveries. In dreams we expect to be tricked and are constantly jumpy, awaiting the strange
twist or the inevitable fall. In the event of the latter, even a peaceful death is denied us, and we
awake, sweaty and eyeballs still moving. As we spend the first waking moments trying desperately
to remember our dream lives or wondering if a death in dreams provokes our real deaths,
everything is soon forgotten and we move and live in the natural world.
The morning I awakened to was bright, oxygen-rich, with the sounds of my wife and child
in the next room.
I had dinner with my wife on the eve of her departure for Ilocos. She had prepared a simple
meal, spare but thoughtfully prepared and accompanied by wine, as we had always had in the
beginning. We did not speak at first, but after a few minutes I stammered a few compliments about
the meal and thanked her for her support during the whole affair. I didn’t know myself whether I
was talking about my ordeal about my lost father, or the seven-year marriage. She smiled and as
she spoke I could see in her eyes a new clarity and a great hope for her future and the future of the
baby. Still, I was foolish enough to imagine that her pity for me and my continuing predicament
would compel her to stay. Over coffee she gave me her contact numbers and e-mail addresses and
offered an open invitation to visit. I returned her invitation.
Some weeks later I found myself at the radio station again, taking my place in the line
across the booth. I looked at the announcer expectantly, to see if he remembered me. He didn’t, of
course. When it was my turn to speak, I discovered that time had rubbed the details down to an
old, dull, unremarkable list of descriptions that could have matched anyone’s. I might have been
describing the old stranger I had dreamed of. I might have even been describing myself thirty,
forty years later.
I imagined my own voice filtering through the mesh gate of the microphone in my hands,
transported through the wires. I imagined it bursting through the overhead speakers like fireworks,
bouncing off satellites, picked up by radios and skimming off the minds of listeners, sitting in their
cars and their afternoon reveries.

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