Issue #96

The Bureau

by Avril Shakira Villar

The man who could not leave the Philippines discovered his condition on a Thursday, which is the least dramatic day of the week, and so the discovery felt administrative rather than catastrophic — a clerical error in the ledger of his life that would surely be corrected once he spoke to the right department.

He had his visa, stamped and valid. He had two pieces of checked baggage at twenty-three kilos each, weighed three times on the bathroom scale with elaborate care. He had his carry-on containing instant pancit canton and a small Tupperware container of his mother's dinuguan, sealed with three layers of plastic wrap against the cold logic of international customs. He had a boarding pass printed on paper because he did not trust his phone with things that mattered. The plane was visible through the window, patient and enormous, a silver animal waiting.

The gate agent scanned his boarding pass. The machine made a sound he had not heard before — something lower, longer. The gate agent looked at the screen. She looked at him. She looked at the screen again with the focused attention.

"May problema po," she said.

She called a supervisor. The supervisor called another supervisor. The second supervisor had a radio. The radio produced a voice that said something the man could not hear. The supervisor nodded at the voice and then at the man and said he would need to go to the Bureau.

"Which bureau?"

The supervisor was already looking at the next passenger.

The Bureau of Unleavings was not on any map he had been given, but when he asked the taxi driver, the driver nodded without surprise.

The Bureau was housed in a building in Manila that appeared on no list of government offices, a squat concrete structure the color of a document, situated between a 7-Eleven and a store that sold only door handles. The sign above the entrance had been partially eaten by something and now read only BUREAU OF UN, which the man found was, in its way, the most accurate signage he had ever seen on a government building.

Inside, the air was the temperature of a waiting room in the early 1990s and smelled of carbon paper and the specific anxiety of people who have been waiting long enough to forget what they are waiting for. There were plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rows. In the chairs sat perhaps forty people, all of them at various stages of the same condition he had just discovered he had. He could tell because they all had luggage. One elderly woman had a lei of sampaguita around her neck, slightly wilted, and was turning it in her hands with the focused attention of someone performing a ritual whose original purpose had become unclear.

He took a number from a machine near the door. The number was 7,412. The display above the service windows read: NOW SERVING 7,391.

He sat down.

The woman next to him had been at the Bureau for what she estimated was eleven days, though she acknowledged this estimate had become increasingly approximate. She was from Iloilo and had been trying to get to Riyadh. She had a phone but the battery was permanently at four percent regardless of whether she charged it, which she had found an economical condition if psychologically destabilizing.

"Did they tell you why?" he asked. Why you can't leave.

"They gave me a form," she said. She produced it from her bag. It was a form of considerable length, divided into numbered sections that did not appear to be in numerical order. Section 1 asked for his full name. Section 4 asked for the name of the last tree he had climbed. Section 12 was a map of the Philippines with instructions to mark the location of every place he had ever felt at home.

"What happens when you complete the form?" he asked.

"You submit it to Window 3," she said, "and they give you another form."

"And then?"

She looked at her wilted sampaguita with an expression he recognized as the particular Filipino face for ganoon talaga — that is really just how it is — an expression that had crossed the boundary between acceptance and something that could, if you looked at it in certain light, be mistaken for peace.

He approached Window 3 during what appeared to be office hours, though the schedule posted above it listed times in a format he could not parse — designations like Masakit and Pagod Na and Hindi Pa Tapos. The clerk behind the window was a small man whose face suggested he had been answering the same question for so long that the question had worn grooves in him.

"I need to understand why I cannot leave," the man said.

The clerk consulted a document. He consulted another document. He opened a drawer and consulted what appeared to be a third document that had been folded into the shape of a boat. He unfolded it carefully, read it, refolded it.

"You are documented," the clerk said finally, "as essential."

"Essential to what?"

The clerk gestured at the general air of the room, which the man understood to mean: to this. To the forty people in their chairs with their twenty-three-kilo bags and their wilted leis. To the 7-Eleven next door and the door handle shop and the building the color of old government documents and the city beyond it and the seventeen million people.

"There must be a process," the man said, because he was Filipino and therefore understood that there was always a process, even if the process was designed primarily to produce the experience of process rather than its outcome.

"There is a process," the clerk agreed. "You may appeal to the Subcommittee."

"When does the Subcommittee meet?"

"When there are enough appeals."

"How many is enough?"

The clerk looked at him with something that was not unkindness. "More than there are now," he said.

That night — it became night, eventually, though the Bureau's windows showed the same quality of light regardless of the hour — the man opened his carry-on and ate the dinuguan cold from the Tupperware container his mother had packed. It tasted like a Sunday in a house he had been trying, for several years, to leave without managing to leave, even before the Bureau, even before the machine's low questioning sound at the gate.

He ate it with a plastic spoon he had taken from the 7-Eleven and thought about the woman from Iloilo and her permanently four-percent phone and her form with the too-small map. He thought about how small the map was and how many marks he would need to make, and how several of them would fall in the same location, and how several more would fall in locations outside the map's borders entirely — in a kitchen in a city abroad he had not yet reached, in a room he had only imagined, in the idea of departure itself, which had been, for as long as he could remember, where he had felt most like himself.

He wondered whether that was what the form was trying to establish. Whether essential meant what he had always believed it meant, or whether it meant something the Bureau understood that he did not yet, something written in the untranslatable registers of a language that had words for the urge to squeeze something overwhelmingly cute, for the specific withdrawal of affection that expects to be noticed, for the bone-deep tiredness that is tired in the history.

The display above the service windows still read 7,391.

Outside, through a window he had not previously noticed, the plane was still there.