Quarantine Tales Part 1: Into the heart of the weird

By Reyshimar Arguelles

Quarantine fever is just as bad as any kind of modern illness. In your third week, you lose track of time. The days are stretched into eternity and you start to question if the City’s streets would look the same the last time you walked along them, under clouds of dust and barbecue smoke and through drunken conversations in places like Valeria.

You have stayed indoors for so long you start looking back to a time when traveling was no less dangerous than getting infected by SARS-CoV-2. But at the very least, your survival depended mostly on your propensity for risk-taking — which is exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t have nurtured, even after a pointless adventure up north.

I was working as a content writer for a BPO company in the City. It was January 2014, Panay’s festival season. A high school friend, V, was planning a road trip to Kalibo for the Ati-Atihan Festival. He had a 150cc Rusi that, much to my lack of knowledge about motorcycles, had all the basic components of a decent two-wheeler. But V wasn’t a basic rider, owing to his impulse for unplanned excursions that either scarred or traumatized me. I don’t know which is worse.

What I did know was that V was itching for a trip to Kalibo to spend the weekend at his girlfriend’s place there. He wanted me to tag along, seeing that nothing much was happening in my life except for hastily-crafted online articles about business-to-business marketing.

I hesitated when he called me in the middle of a work day, but a part of me wanted to take an unplanned leave on a Friday just to get relief from brain-draining corporate activity. I agreed and we had stayed overnight at V’s place in Mina before we began our journey up north via Passi City. I brought along two days’ worth of clothes and the essentials: a toothbrush, some underwear, and a copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I packed lightly as per V’s advice since he needed more room for his own supplies. He secured these and my bag at the back using cables. I swear this bulk of clothes and frozen food kept me away from certain death as I sat on the secondary pad of the Rusi.

I wasn’t all too familiar about the routes that lead to Kalibo, but we avoided the dusty, unfinished roads of Mambusao, Capiz and traveled along the routes where V could take the Rusi to 110kph, past speeding buses and into the certainty of having our mangled bodies blurred out for the morning news the next day.

Riding a motorcycle at top speeds is said to give riders the ultimate high. There is nothing to explain the sensation, only that it blurs the surrounding landscape and leaves the road intact; you get to a certain point where you both affirm and deny life; you feel “alive” and “in your element”, so much so that you would rather smash your head into the windshield of a Ceres Liner than ride like any law-abiding citizen would.

V was very much aware of his addiction, but being devoted so much to crazy speeds and the possibility of death made him all the more indifferent towards risk. Whereas reaching 100kph was to him “taking it easy”, it felt as though the concrete had turned into the River Styx and I was being ferried by Charon on bath salts. I could hear my helmet crack as we reached past 90kph, but I wasn’t sure if it was the glass of the face shield or my frail skeleton that was breaking.

Stopping over somewhere in Altavas, we got off the bike and smoked cigarettes at a time when I used to buy Camel Lights by the pack. We were surrounded by hills and, wearing a dark green jacket and a black and white scarf around my neck, I felt as though I was a Palestinian freedom fighter — that, or a pretentious hack with an aching crotch.

We got on the bike again, and things didn’t get any less weird and dangerous from that point on.