Patron Saints of Nothing, page 1
PRAISE FOR
PATRON SAINTS OF NOTHING
“Brilliant, honest, and equal parts heartbreaking and soul-healing. I’ll give this astounding book to all the teens and adults in my life. I suspect you will, too. I’d give it 50 stars if I could.”
—LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON, author of SHOUT
“In Patron Saints of Nothing, Randy Ribay seamlessly takes the cultural texture of the Philippines, the complexities between ethnicity and nationality, political tension and the propaganda that buttresses it, and, most importantly, teenage life, and weaves them all into a thick braid that asks one question: What is the truth? And the necessity to know that truth—the fight it takes to find that truth—somehow gets right to the core of who young people are. This is nothing short of a tremendous feat and will certainly solidify Ribay as a singular voice in the world of literature for years to come.”
—JASON REYNOLDS, author of Long Way Down
“Patron Saints of Nothing explores race, class, identity, and truth in a world that few readers have experienced. A must-read.”
—ERIN ENTRADA KELLY, author of Hello, Universe
“I can’t stop thinking about this beautiful book that left me in tears. A searing, soul-searching novel about grief and identity. This book makes me proud to be Filipino American.”
—MELISSA DE LA CRUZ, author of Alex and Eliza
“Lyrical. Stunning. Searing. Patron Saints of Nothing is the real deal, a unique and intimate look into the extrajudicial murders in Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines. Ribay’s arresting narration and knack for characterization drive a story that is unlike anything else you’ll read this year.”
—MARK OSHIRO, author of Anger Is a Gift
“A riveting, brilliantly told and deeply moving story about a young man’s search for truth and personal redemption in a world that is both strange and strangely familiar.”
—FRANCISCO X. STORK, author of Disappeared
“Complex, gripping, haunting, and deeply human, Patron Saints of Nothing is a powerful journey into some of life’s most important questions—Who are we? What are we worth? What do we owe one another?—and a story alive with longing and pain and grace.”
—KELLY LOY GILBERT, author of Picture Us in the Light
“How lucky we are, to live in a moment when magnificent books like this are finding their way into the world. Randy Ribay has done a brilliant job of bringing horrific events happening far away to life for readers who may know little about them, in the process showing us our own inaction, and complicity—and power.”
—SAM J. MILLER, award-winning author of The Art of Starving
KOKILA
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2019 by Randy Ribay.
Patrick Rosal excerpt from “Notes for the Unwritten Biography of My Father, an Ex-Priest”
from Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. Copyright © 2003 by Patrick Rosal.
Used by permission of Persea Books, Inc (New York), www.perseabooks.com All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ribay, Randy, author.
Title: Patron saints of nothing / Randy Ribay.
Description: New York, NY : Kokila, 2019. | Summary: When seventeen-year-old Jay Reguero learns his Filipino cousin and former best friend, Jun, was murdered as part of President Duterte’s war on drugs, he flies to the Philippines to learn more. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044009| ISBN 9780525554912 (hardback) | ISBN
9780525554936 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Murder—Fiction. | Cousins—Fiction. | Family life—Philippines—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Fiction. | Philippines—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / People & Places / Asia. |JUVENILE FICTION / Law & Crime. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / General (see also headings under Social Issues).
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R5 Pat 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044009
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket art © 2019 by Jor Ros | Jacket design by Dana Li
Version_1
CONTENTS
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Wisdom from on High
Unanswered
How He Lived
An Improvement to Society
A Narrower Country Than Expected
Let Me Go
Grounded
Things Inside
Like a Fog
The Strength of My Conviction
A New Silence Arrives
Some Small Rebellion
Every Single Surviving Word
Not an Answer to the Question
Lead the Way
You Can Hold on to Me if You Need To
All That It Means
A Visit
The Word of God
That Last Part Aloud
A Complete Waste
Fail Him in Death
This Poem Is a Typhoon
Let’s Do It
The Wide Eyes of the Lost
A Universe Where People Do Not Die for Doing What Is Right
Everyone Loses Their Shit
To Flood
Its Center Unsolved
Another Day in the Minefield
Go Back to Sleep
Bravery as if It Were My Own
The Darkness Uninterrupted
New Life
Headfirst Across the Muddy Grass
To Resurrect
How to Live Without Him
All the Darkness in the World
A Seed
Every Detail of This Finite Moment
Our Separate Ways
Patron Saints of Nothing
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Recommended Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For the hyphenated
This is your story
This is your son These
are our sins
and how
did we ever get here
without them
—Patrick Rosal
IT WAS A DAY OF SOIL, SUNLIGHT, AND SMOKE. Curtains thin as bedsheets glowed gold as roosters called out from the backyard on the other side of concrete walls and single-pane windows. On the floor of the room my father and his two brothers had shared growing up, my mom held me as I held a lifeless puppy and cried. The oscillating fan hummed, blowing warm air on us every few seconds.
I was ten, and it was my first time back in the country where I’d been born. A few days earlier, my family had driven the eleven hours along frightening roads from Manila to Lolo and Lola’s house in the Bicol Region.
When we arrived, we found that their dog—an unnamed mongrel chained to the cacao tree out back—had just given birth to a litter of puppies. Only one lived. The mother refused to care for him, so I had taken the task upon myself. I held him close to keep him warm. I tried to feed him by hand, dipping my finger into a bowl of evaporated milk and then offering a drop to the puppy’s impossibly small mouth.
However, the puppy would not drink the milk. Maybe because of the grief from losing his brothers and sisters, or maybe because of his mother’s rejection. Whatever the reason, his breathing grew shallow. His movements slowed. Each time he blinked, his eyes remained closed longer and longer until they never reopened.
At that point in my life, I had encountered death only in fiction. I had heard about other people’s relatives dying. But I had never seen death up close. I had never held it.
“Listen,” Mom said in that moment, hugging me closer. So I did. Baby birds chirped just outside the window. “One thing dies, and another is born. Maybe the puppy’s soul now has wings.”
Gradually, I calmed down and stopped crying. But I still felt heavy with sadness as the warmth left the tiny ball of brown-and-gray fur still cradled in my arms.
When I finally stepped outside, almost all my Filipino titas and titos laughed. Not in a mean way, I think, but more like it was amusing that a dog’s death affected me so much because it was nothing to them. Another day. Another dog. My cousins did
It wasn’t long before the family’s attention drifted away like the smoke from the garbage being burned a few houses down. My brother and my sister resumed the card game of Speed they’d been playing. My dad and Lolo returned their attention to their bottles of San Miguel. My mom gave my shoulder one last squeeze and then went over to the outdoor kitchen to help Tita Chato, Tita Ami, and Lola finish preparing lunch.
Tito Danilo rested a hand on the top of my head and spoke of finding comfort in God’s love, while Tito Maning told me to stop crying and took away the puppy’s limp little body. He returned a few minutes later, brushing his palms as if he had just taken out the trash. He moved to pet the puppy’s mother as he walked past, but she shied away. He continued on, took out a new bottle of beer from the cooler, and sat down next to Dad and Lolo. Tito Danilo stood by in awkward silence for a few more moments before joining them, leaving me there alone.
But I was not alone for long.
My cousin Jun walked over and hugged me.
“I am sad, too, Kuya Jay,” he said, using the older brother designation, which never seemed right. I had been born only three days before him, and besides that, he was one of those people who moved through the world as if he had been around for a long time. An old soul, as they say.
I almost asked Jun what his father had done with my puppy, what he had done with its brothers and sisters the previous day. But I didn’t. We can only handle so much truth at any given moment, I suppose. So instead, I said nothing.
He looked at me with sympathetic eyes, eyes so brown they were almost black. “Do you want to go inside and read komiks?”
I nodded, grateful for the chance to escape from everyone without being by myself.
He threw his arm over my shoulders. We went inside. We read comics.
A few days later, the vacation ended. I flew back to pine trees, overcast skies, and a Michigan winter that could sputter till May. My tan faded. My tongue forgot the taste of tocino and Tagalog. I stepped out of tsinelas and back into my suburban life as if I had never left.
WISDOM FROM ON HIGH
Seth and I are walking across the roof of my old elementary school, which is covered in a layer of round stones that knock together like skulls with each step. A charcoal, overcast night sky hangs overhead, and the air is warmer than usual for mid-April.
We reach the end of the roof and sit down on the ledge. Seth takes up about twice as much space as me because he’s basically a bear in human form. The kind of white kid who’s been shaving since middle school and who’s spent the last four years rebuffing the football coach’s recruitment attempts. Meanwhile, I’m the kind of senior sometimes mistaken for a freshman.
We settle in and fall quiet, letting our legs dangle over the west side of the building. It’s the quietest side, the one that faces the unlit field that stretches out in the darkness at our feet. The playground and parking lot are to the south, while the neighborhood pushes up against the other two sides of the building.
Even though I’m the one that lives nearby, it was Seth who, in the summer before we started high school, first realized we could get up here by climbing the fence that surrounds the HVAC units. I wouldn’t do it that first time because it was the middle of the day and I was afraid of getting arrested, but he eventually persuaded me to go back later and climb it with him under the cover of darkness. It took a few more trips before he could convince me to sit on the ledge. The school’s only two stories high, so if we jumped we’d probably only sprain an ankle or something. But it was high enough to make me feel scared back then, high enough to make me feel philosophical now. It’s been our nighttime hangout spot ever since.
Seth swings his backpack around so it’s in front of him like a kangaroo pouch and starts riffling through. It’s Friday night, so I’ve got a pretty good guess as to what he’s looking for.
Sure enough, a few moments later he pulls out a joint, grinning like he’s reuniting with a long-lost friend. He lights it and takes a hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs for longer than seems possible and then exhales slowly, letting the thick smoke unfurl into the evening. He offers even though he already knows I’m going to decline. This time’s no different, so he simply shrugs and takes another hit. Not that I have anything against it. My desire to smoke has not yet surpassed my fear of getting caught.
The wind picks up, rustling the leaves of the surrounding trees and tossing our hair. I reposition myself upwind so I won’t go home completely reeking of pot. We sit like that for a long time, sinking back into silence as we consider our numbered days. With spring break around the corner, and then only a few more weeks after that until graduation, the future is a wall of fog obscuring the horizon.
“Oh, shit,” Seth says, “I almost forgot. Hold this.”
He hands me his joint as he roots through his bag again. This time he pulls out something in a white plastic shopping bag. He tosses it in my lap, and despite only having one free hand, I catch it without falling off the ledge.
“Surprise,” he says.
“What is it?” I ask, passing back his weed.
“Open it.”
I reach inside and pull out a hoodie, soft and smelling brand new. I hold it up in front of me. It’s a deep yellow gold that’s bright even in the darkness, and by the faint orange light from the parking lot lamps I can read MICHIGAN printed out in bold capital letters across the chest.
I force a smile. “Oh, cool. Thanks.”
I refold it, stuff it back into the bag, and set it to the side.
He turns and stares at me for a beat. “That’s it?”
“What?”
“‘Cool’?”
“Yeah. It’s cool. I appreciate it. Thanks.”
“Not going to put it on?” he asks. I can’t tell if he’s actually offended or not.
“I’m good.”
He takes another hit, eyes still on me. “Why aren’t you more excited, dude?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I know I should be. Every other senior at school’s been rocking their future college’s apparel since the day their admissions decision rolled in.
“Still sad because of all those rejections?”
I shrug. Lean back on my hands and stare out over the quiet field.
“Seriously, dude, you’re dumb as shit.”
“Oh, is shit sentient?”
“You know what I mean. Like, out of all the schools you applied to, how many were Ivy League?”
I don’t answer.
“All but Michigan and Berkeley, right?” He shakes his head. “Didn’t anyone tell you about applying to safety schools?”
I try to laugh. “Come on, man. They weren’t completely out of reach. Solid GPA and test scores. Plus, student government.”
He considers this. “Dude. You’re a treasurer.”
“So?”
“Class treasurers don’t get into Yale or Harvard.”
“Some do.”
“Maybe the treasurers who are also Olympic skiers or world champion Irish dancers or something.”
“Whatever. You know how my parents are. I took the path of least resistance because if I didn’t send in those apps, they would have said they were cool with it but they wouldn’t have been. Can you imagine their faces if I told them I applied to some school like . . . I don’t know . . . like—”
“Like, Central?” Seth finishes, smirking because that’s where he’s headed in the fall.
“You know what I mean.”
“You do know they have, like, the ninety-third best comp sci program in the nation, right?”
“That is certainly impressive.”
He flips me off. I shake my head and laugh.
When I texted my family the news this afternoon, right after I found out, I could virtually hear their collective sigh of relief at the fact that I was finally accepted somewhere. My sister, Em, replied first with, “Fuck yea, baby bro” followed by, like, fifty exclamation points. Mom messaged, “Oh, honey! We’re so proud of you! (And watch your language, Em!)” while from Dad I got a “I mean, it’s not Harvard . . .” joke that wasn’t fully a joke. My brother, Chris, still hasn’t responded.
