First published in Pandan Weekly in July 2024.
From the author:
“Lost” is about what happens when the charismatic center of a friend group disappears. I’m an avid hiker, and I’ve heard many stories about Mt. Makiling and its mystical and destructive characteristics. I wanted to write a story emphasizing these qualities set in Makiling.
The last time Bert saw his best friend George, he was striding down the trail that wound around Haring Bato. He just needed to pee, he said. He’d be back in five minutes. Bert never saw him again.
They’d been climbing together for a year with George’s girlfriend Gina and her cousin Christine. They were so obsessed with mountains that last December they’d looked at the calendar for 2019 and immediately blocked off the three-day weekends for climbing.
It was April when they went to Mount Makiling. The weather was perfect—there was no rain, and thus no leeches, although the pitcher plants had shriveled in the summer heat.
They took the hardest trail, which snaked up over rocks, and was so steep that they had to clamber over boulders using ropes.
“Isn’t this fun?” George said. Bert wiped the sweat from his brow and nodded. He hated climbing rocks, but he would never, ever admit it.
George loved rocks, loved hanging from them and scrabbling over them. He said that it challenged him to know that there was something bigger than him that couldn’t ever be conquered, only sought after.
He was tall for a Filipino, just a hair short of six feet. George had spent his childhood in the States, and he said that the hormones in the meat and milk had added to his height. Being tall was an advantage in rock climbing. It allowed him to reach holds that Bert could only strain to grasp.
The Makiling climb was his idea. Bert hadn’t wanted to go, but George assured him that it would be good training for climbing Mount Guiting-Guiting, which they planned to climb in May. They convinced Gina and Christine to join them.
They reached Haring Bato by 11 o’clock. It jutted out over the trees, a proud king gazing down imperiously over his lesser subjects.
George reached out and put a hand on the warm rock. He wrapped an arm around Gina as they looked at the hills of Mount Puting Lupa, one hill humped next to the other like the bumps on the back of a Stegosaurus.
“What a view,” George said. He was looking at Gina. She smiled back at him.
“Babe, I’ll just go and pee,” he added. He looked over at Bert. “You coming?”
“No, I’m good.”
That was it. That was the moment when he could’ve saved George.
If he’d said yes, would he now have been lost like George? Or could he have somehow saved his best friend?
He should have done more. It had always been the two of them, Bert and George, George and Bert. They’d met when they were fourteen, a year after George came back from the States. He spoke broken Tagalog, but uttered his mispronounced words with the confidence of a native. No one had dared to correct him. No one, that is, until Bert.
“You’re saying maganda ka wrong,” he told George. “No wonder you can’t get any girls.” George had looked at him and curled the hand that was resting on his thigh into a fist, but Bert didn’t back down. He taught George how to harden his Ds and Ts, and that was how they became best friends.
When they were sixteen, George met Gina. Like him, she was tall and athletic. But Gina didn’t play on any sports teams. Instead, she climbed mountains.
Many people didn’t understand the lure of climbing, what drew people to trek hour after hour up a mountain, uncaring of the rain, or of the possibility that one wrong move could send them plunging to their death. Mountaineers could never see a mountain without wanting to climb it. They always wondered, what’s beneath those trees? What did the view look like from the summit?
George understood. He started climbing mountains regularly with Gina. After a few months, Bert got into it too. Gina introduced them to her cousin Christine, who was blessed with legs that rarely got tired during a climb. They started to climb together.
Christine and Gina bickered like sisters. But George always intervened before they got too annoyed with each other. He’d say something that would make them both laugh, and whatever they’d been arguing about would soon be forgotten.
He told Bert that he was used to running interference.
“My parents argue all the time. My dad’s constantly blaming my mom, then she just goes silent. They’d probably have split up a long time ago if it wasn’t for me.”
Bert knew what it was like. He’d been over for dinner constantly during high school. One night George’s father had knocked over a bottle of ketchup and then started to scream at his mother for putting it too close to his elbow. She’d turned stony.
“Look, look!” George swiped the bottle of ketchup and balanced it on his nose. They all smiled and the storm cloud of tension that had been brewing was swiftly blown away.
Now Bert kept waiting for the punchline. George would turn up at the ranger station and say, “Why’d you leave me behind?” with an aggrieved air on his face, even as he confessed that he thought it’d be funny if he hid from them and pretended that he was lost.
They would all be angry, especially Gina, but eventually, they’d forgive George. Everyone always did.
But long hours passed at the ranger station without any sign of George.
Bert, Gina and Christine had been interviewed by the Makiling rangers. Yes, George had been wearing a red shirt. No, they hadn’t heard anything or seen anything to indicate where he might have gone.
“When George still hadn’t come back after thirty minutes, I went with Christine to look for him,” Gina said. “We left Bert behind, in case George found his way back.”
Bert waited and waited. He strained his ears in order to hear any sound that might indicate arriving footsteps. He willed George to appear.
He heard footsteps coming. They were slow and heavy. Gina and Christine soon came into view. Gina’s shoulders were shaking. She began to cry.
“We couldn’t find him,” she said, in between sobs. “No footprints, no signs of a fall. I blew my whistle, but there was no answer.”
What had happened to George? They’d all heard the tales of Mariang Makiling, the diwata who dwelt in the mountain and wreaked havoc on all who dared to cross her. Sometimes she took men that she fancied as well.
“That’s a bunch of bull,” said Julio Estregan, the brawny Los Baños police chief, when they reported that George was missing. “Mariang Makiling only takes those who wish the mountain ill.”
Of them all, it was George who’d been the most strict about keeping to the trail and bringing their trash down. He wouldn’t even go near animals to take a picture of them, because he said that it would disrupt them too much if they came into close contact with humans.
“They just want to be left alone,” he’d told Bert. “Some things just shouldn’t be messed with.”
Bert thought about wormholes. His friend Ian swore that he’d once slipped through a wormhole in Mount Makiling. On the other side of a wormhole, time was a strange entity. Ian thought that he’d only been gone for ten minutes, but when he found his friends again, he discovered that he’d been missing for over two hours.
If George had indeed slipped into a wormhole, Bert hoped that he’d emerge alive, unchanged.
They waited for George to appear, first at the ranger station, then at the Los Baños police station. But as the hours passed, no one came aside from volunteers who’d heard of a missing man and decided to help the rangers with their search. Bert called George’s parents.
They arrived the next day. The rangers had found no one. There were no footprints where George had disappeared, not even a glimpse of his red shirt.
“We’re going to keep looking, sir,” the head ranger told George’s dad, Ramon, who merely nodded his head.
He turned to his wife, Lita, who was standing next to him.
“I told him that climbing was dangerous. But you let him. You told me that he was old enough to make his own decisions. Well, look how it turned out. You let him die.” Ramon had worked himself into another rage. His face was rapidly growing red. His spit was spraying all over the place.
Lita said nothing. She just turned her back and walked away. George was no longer there to make everything all right.
During the next few days, she busied herself with making coffee and serving it to the people at the ranger station. She washed dishes and cleaned the bathroom, even though the rangers protested.
“There’s nothing else for me to do,” she said.
“Maybe I can help you, Ma.” Gina said as she tried to grab the mop.
“Don’t call me that! You led my son to his death.” She thunked the mop into the waiting bucket of dirty water, splashing it all over Gina’s feet. Gina retreated to the bench a few feet away. She slumped down between George and Christine and closed her eyes.
Ramon grew desperate. He consulted a well-known local spiritista called Melquiades Paterno. Bert, Lita, Christine and Gina all went with him to Melquiades’s hut, twenty minutes away from the police station. They sat on a wide bamboo bench in the spacious entresuelo, bright pink bougainvillea blooming riotously around them.
“George fell off a cliff and has a wound, but he’s still alive,” Melquiades told them. He was an old man with a face wizened from many years spent beneath a searing sun. “You just have to sacrifice a pure white chicken. Dab its blood on Haring Bato and your son will return to you.”
The rangers had already combed the cliffs around Haring Bato, but they did so again at Ramon’s urging.
Back at Melquiades’s hut, Bert, Gina and Christine watched along with Ramon and Lita as the spiritista slit the neck of a pure white chicken and drained its blood into a small wooden bowl. Bert gazed into the dead chicken’s unseeing eye while Melquiades gave the bowl to Ramon, who shook his head. “Thanks, but the rangers won’t let me paint Haring Bato with it. You keep it.” Melquiades nodded. He stood on the lower rung of his two front steps, stretched his arm, and tipped the bowl into the rich brown soil. A crimson stream flowed from the bowl, darkening the ground a few meters away from the entresuelo. A thick, heady scent permeated the air. Melquiades began to chant. The words were unintelligible, and Bert didn’t really believe that it would help George, but a part of him was willing to go along with anything as long as it brought George back. Ramon stood on the first step behind Melquiades, his mouth compressed.
On his right, Gina, Christine and Lita huddled together in silence. Gina had asked to come along to help search for George, but the rangers had refused. Lita refused to sit next to Gina, refused to even look at her, so Christine was forced to act as a buffer. She kept shooting Gina angry looks, as if to say this is all your fault. Bert didn’t blame Gina, but he knew that he wouldn’t keep in touch with her once they’d left Makiling. It was too painful to see her. Every time he did, he would always look for George.
The search was called off after a week. No trace of George was ever found.
His absence left a gaping hole that none of them knew how to fill. Lita endured three months of silence and glaring before she left Ramon. Gina grew thinner and refused to set foot on another mountain. Two weeks after George went missing, she got into a terrible fight with Christine. Neither would tell Bert what had happened. All they said was that they would never speak to each other again. George was no longer there to patch things up.
Bert continued to climb. He wasn’t sure why he kept on doing it, but he thought that George wouldn’t want him to stop climbing. His chest tightened every time he thought of George. The ache never ceased, but it eased a little bit every time he set foot on a trail.
George had once told him that he only felt truly alive when he was climbing a mountain. He said that the city, with its towering buildings and concrete sidewalks, smothered him. “I’ll take the mountains any day,” he’d said with a grin.
Bert was sure that George would have wanted to die on a mountain. Or maybe that was just what he told himself. It was the only consolation that he could find.
He wasn’t fanciful enough to imagine that he heard George in the plaintive cry of every bird, or felt him in the sharp sting of every leech. Instead, he liked to think that George’s bones had taken root, merged into the soil. George was now part of Makiling.
That was why Bert kept coming back to the sacred mountain. Whenever he reached Haring Bato, he would pause, place his hand on the warm rock, and remember.
He imagined George waiting just around the corner, perhaps leaning casually against a tree.
“What took you so long?” George would say. “Let’s go.”
Isa Lorenzo’s fiction has been published in PRISM International, Mud Season Review, Outpouring: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology, and the W&N website. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from the University of East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Bursary and won the UEA Orion Short Story Prize. She has attended national writing workshops in Silliman and Iligan. Isa climbs mountains whenever she can.
Instagram: @1diosyncrasies
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