“I’m sorry------”
“Is he hurt?”
“Badly hurt---------- But he is not in any pain.”
“Oh, thank God----- thank God for that. Thank-----”
- W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw

My son Archie lay in the morgue, wrapped like a mummy in a dripping blanket. I said I wanted to see his face, and they undid the blanket at the head. Numbly I embraced my child, running my fingers on his thick curly hair. There was a strong odor of chlorine. He was soaking wet and bloated to the touch. Something was wrong with his shoulders, but I didn’t have the courage to open the blanket further and look at them.

It was almost two that afternoon when I was told somebody called at home telling my daughter that Archie had met an accident at the factory. His condition was grave, and the doctor wanted to talk to the parents. Immediately I rang the caller’s name. A woman answered.

“What happened to my son?” I was shouting as if to drown out the bad news.
“He’s in the hospital. We are with him. The doctor wants to talk to you.”
“What happened to him? Is he hurt badly?”
“The doctor wants to talk to you.”
“Has he been shot? What in God’s name happened to him?”
Then she uttered the news I dreaded to hear: “He’s been caught in the machine.”
“How is he doing? Is he dead? Tell me what happened.”
“You should come. That’s all I can say.”
When she hung up I called my wife at the school where she taught and told her to come at once. From San Jose City, Nueva Ecija we sped to Pulilan, Bulacan in a borrowed van. Along the way I rang the caller repeatedly but nobody answered the phone. I visualized my son torn and mangled, suffering but not quite dead. I wanted to believe this was all a joke, just a terrible nightmare from which I would wake up soon. On the one hand I wanted to arrive at once and hold my son in my arms, to comfort him and tell him everything would be okay. On the other I dreaded whatever lay waiting for us. I was almost certain my son was already dead, but still it came as a shock when the guard who greeted us informed us he was already at the morgue. My wife became hysterical.

I asked the attending doctor, a woman, what happened to my son. She said he was dead on arrival, but they still tried to revive him. Then, almost against my will, I demanded to see the scene of the accident at the plant. A representative of the company who had come from Manila to fix things up took me there. It was almost dark when we arrived. The place was sanitized, and you had to step on a chemical pad at the doorway. As we entered I was met by the repulsive odor of chlorine and I remembered Archie’s body. A number of personnel waited for me. I was unnaturally calm throughout the proceeding. I asked them how it happened, did he suffer much, was there a safety officer around? They told me everybody was a safety officer: every worker had been oriented and told about the risks. They made it sound like it was all Archie’s fault. I demanded to see the room, and we went there through a short route, like a fire escape. This was the room where dressed chickens were steeped in chlorine prior to being packaged and shipped to fast food chains to be fried and roasted: it was my son’s job to check chlorine levels. That was when he was caught in the moving meat mixer. But there was no machine in sight. The place had been drained, but still wet. I found the machine outside, or parts of it, in the junk heap.

Archie’s been buried but I can’t get over it. Maybe I won’t ever get over it. I’ve been reading the entries in his blog every day, things I never took the trouble to read. I never knew he could write: he had this piece about “Happiness”, a satire that concealed the hidden angst, the haunting loneliness in him. I thought of him only as a little boy I used to cuddle as a child. I thought Friendster was only for young people who took life in jest. If only I knew.

I recall the story of The Monkey’s Paw: I’d read it long ago and I remember being turned off by the company rep’s sudden announcement that in return for the services of their son, the parents were to receive a couple hundred pounds. Yet I can’t help comparing the unbearable agony the company put me into by refusing to tell me my son was already dead at the time they called. “He is badly hurt, but he is no longer in any pain,” would have been balm to our minds compared to the vague “He’s badly hurt, the doctor will talk to you,” crap they kept repeating on the phone.