Six O'Clock Avenue, Manila

At first, sunlight leaves the city a film of faded light that stretches across its sidewalks, dampening its vibrations and stifling its movements. Classes are dismissed and timecards are punched out and a collective stretching of arms occur in celebration of crossing out another day. For most, the curtain has been unreeled for the first act, leaving time for an audience to exchange comments and observations, and for critics to mull over the spectacle in chairs worn with dirt and fastened to the dark. Six o'clock has become, by virtue of evolution, a mental graft for the transition of sun that signifies an uptick in errors of judgement, where the confusing depth of shades cause things to approximate other things, and obscure scenes of immediate spaces are in reality, unhindered views of farther, less familiar places.


But when the traffic has settled down and all the flies has congregated in any stray wire to pray, a different kind of people springs from its silent, unassuming corners. For them day has barely even begun. For others even, who yanked their clockhands an entire turn and then some, six o'clock is the logical midpoint of the earth's rotation, and is lunchtime. Dusk is dawn for these people whose internal rhythms tick to the downbeat. Store fronts and streetlamps reveal their bat-like faces, people whose mind synergize well with artificial sources of light, and at this eighteen hundred I am up with the entrepreneurs whose products are tailored for the night, and the pallid horde of its nocturnal market.


Dr. Sixto Street. Today is when all moisture follows the exit of sunlight, half an hour from six o'clock, the time when the radical upturning of temperatures and air begin. And across this very street heat is a sweeping hand that non-chalantly whisks vaporized cocktails into the static air. A soup of smoke and sweat. I am in a building whose rooms whirr with bedcoil squeak, on a street that blooms with neon, in a city-savannah windless and dry. Appropriate is a daylight thing nobody will acknowledge, as if everyone is a bee, making honey in a lion's skull.


Seven o'clock is go-time. The prowl of gutter cyclops who scrape for nocturnal dirt. Two points form a line, and in human relationships three of them makes for a very complicated plane. I am a photographer, and I simplify things. My knees are sore two hours into the crouch. My joints are filled with sand and cheddar. I am an old man for these bodily contortions, but the task is otherwise easy, invert fiction, and keep the falsehoods in negative. The purest philosophical method of arriving at truth is by containing the world's reflected light, in direct contrast to the idea of interpreting shadows on ceilings and walls. So says Plato. But, the ability to manipulate light does not make of people arbiters of truth. And the absence of light is not a bad thing either. Somebody measured the world with nothing but shadows. I merely record stills of a tiny space, and move on.


I wait and I listen.


Nine o'clock. From a quick test click, the camera's flash is the nearest consecration that this room can get. A small kingdom for tyranny where a few undid so many, here, where leverage and ideals perpetually contend for the upper hand. I grant myself asylum in the embassy of its windows. Eleven o'clock and the door opens. From the mezzanine walls a lump of shadow shows and still, it is eleven. With the light footsteps of a king entering his vanquished foe's throne-room, a woman walks inside, who then ends her jaunt by slowly unspooling her beltsash. It is as if undressing is the logical conclusion that follows entering doors. My camera's apertures open wider to devour more of the light. Gravity clutches her robe and it reveals her skin. A stream of gentle water from a hose held upright and falling down, her fabric melds with a tiny circle of her shadow underfoot. I remember my poker game earlier. I laid my cards for all its worth. Four spades with a queen that is fat and red at its center and I remember the last Yuletide season when the land is white with snow and the Christmas tree awaits beside the chimney with the promise of gifts and surprises. Now is three past eleven. She informs herself of the man upstairs but the camera merely captured her eyes and not her stare. The gazing in itself made for a bold gambit that was neither hostile nor threatening. The naked woman wants to give up the strategic center.