Touchmove

:-*By Peter Mayshle

I am playing chess with Roman when I tell him the story of the chick.

He looks up from the board. The real thing? he asks. He thinks his kuya is teasing him again.

The real thing, yes.

Go on, Roman says, breathing over my queen.

This is what I tell him.

One night in August, when typhoon What’s-Her-Name was beating down all over the city, when no
customer had come knocking yet and we were all just sitting around with our balls hanging out, she
came. She arrived quietly; no rumble of thunder, no flash of lightning marked her entrance. None of
us guys would’ve realized she was there if not for the gasp that came from the old f*g**t Ruby. We all
turned to the doorway and there she was, wet and shining from the rain. She was wearing a red
blouse and skirt and clutching her shoes to her chest. She murmured something to Ruby and then
turned to us. We never get any woman customers in the place, you know, so we straightened
ourselves up as we had been taught and puffed our chests out and smiled broadly than necessary.
Though she was soaked and maybe even freezing from the cold, only her eyes seemed to quiver as
she stared at each one of us. Eventually her gaze rested on me. Her eyes traveled down and settled
for a moment below my waist. I felt myself twitch. Then she raised her arm and pointed at me. I felt
as if I had won in the races, leaving all the other stallions behind.

I quickly made my way up the stairs at the back. When I reached the top, I turned around to wait for
her. She was still holding her shoes close to her chest when she appeared at the landing.

“Can you lend me a towel?” she said. Her voice was soft and hoarse, and she had this habit of flicking
her tongue out to wet her lips before she spoke. I got her a fresh, warm towel from one of the rooms
and led her to the bathroom. When I heard water running, I dashed off to my room to prepare.

In the small room where I usually work – a cubicle, you know – I patted the white sheet of the single
bed and turned over the pillow. On the short side table, below the red bulb sticking out of the wall, I
arranged the tiny bottles of oil, lotion and powder neatly in a line. I rubbed my hands together and put
the air conditioner on low cool.

When I went back to fetch her, she was leaning against the bathroom door. She was tall – taller than
me, Roman – and maybe even older. She had straight black hair that rested on her bony shoulders.
Her nose was small and upturned so there was a small wrinkle just below where her eyebrows met.
Her eyes were round and bright and glassy, like the opening of a gin bottle. The way her face was put
together you’d think she was on the verge of singing or spitting. She had covered her breasts and her
stomach with the towel but her bush, moist and glistening, was showing.

“Your towel is too small,” she said when she saw staring.

I stammered, “I could get you another one.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, walking past me. “I wouldn’t want to deprive your other clients.”

“There are no other clients.”

“Oh?” she said. “Slow night.”

She was suddenly so confident, so sure of herself. Minutes ago, she moved like a shy, unwelcome
guest; now she walked as if she owned the place. She went to the room I had set up and waited for
me to enter before she locked the door. For a moment I felt I was the customer.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked back.

“For one thousand pesos, everything.” And she dropped her towel, just like that. She hurriedly
stretched herself out face down on the low bed. In the glow of the red bulb, she looked like she was
brushed with honey. I picked up her towel from the floor and spread it on her back. Then I got
another towel and spread it across her ass.

How did her ass look? Roman says.

I don’t know, I say, irritated. Like huge balls of sago, I guess.

Hmmm, Roman says, wetting his lips.

So I spread the towel across her ass made of sago.

“Undress,” she said.

I thought I heard her wrong.

“What?”

She turned on her elbow to face me.

“Take your clothes off.”

With everything that had happened so far, I had forgotten to remove my clothes. If she had been one
of those faggots that often visited the place, I would’ve entered the room wearing only my briefs, you
know. I realized that she was, after all, a customer, and should be given the same treatment, too.
Hurriedly I stripped off my shirt and maong.

“Don’t forget to remove your underwear.”

I blinked at her. “Why?”

“So I wouldn’t feel so naked.”

After a thought, I pulled my briefs down. When she saw my cock erect, I couldn’t hide an embarrassed
smile.

Roman giggles. Horny prick, he says.

“That’s okay,” she said. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Pointing at my cock, I asked, “Is this what made you pick me over the others?”

She frowned, not understanding.

“I saw you staring at it downstairs.”

Her forehead relaxed. “I was looking at your hands. They seem – capable.” And with a quick
movement she was lying face down again.

Though it was cold in the room, the lotion felt very warm in my hands.

Burning, you know, I tell Roman.

Like putting them over hot coals, he says, eyes wide.

So I started working on her. The first woman customer to walk into our place and I was working on
her, Roman. I couldn’t stop shaking, you know – like I was born again, you know. Her smooth,
creamy flesh under my hands was the most welcome sensation. I reached for her feet and held them
to my chest. With my thumbs, I gently pressed the soft cartilage behind her knee. Using the ball of
my palm, I rubbed the length of her thighs. And her ass, Roman – no, they were not made of sago;
they were made of leche plan, the kind Lola used to make for us. I squirted lotion onto her back, and
using my forearm I spread the lotion like a knife over soft bread. She was sighing and squirming with
delight all the time, but there were moments I couldn’t figure out, when I thought she was crying into
the pillow.

After about an hour of working her backside, I said, “Turn over,” and I noticed she jerked her head
slightly, as if I had just woken her from sleep. She was hesitating, maybe thinking about whether to
obey me or not, and then finally she turned to lie on her back. What I saw made me stop breathing.

You should have seen her, Roman. I didn’t see it before because she had been laying face down all the
time and before that – outside my room – she had her towel around her, you know. Her stomach had
cuts all over; some of them were fresh and clotting. The skin above her bush was marked with what
looked like a dozen cigarette burns. One of her breasts had a dark bruise the color of purple. It was a
terrible sight; I wanted to get out of there.

“Go on,” she said. “Please.”

What else could I have done, Roman? My feet were telling me to run away, but I was fixed to that
spot next to her. I did the only thing I could do; I used my hands. I massaged her thighs. I kneaded
her stomach. I pressed the areas around her breasts, careful not to hurt her, if that was any more
possible. When I finished, she held my hands and, gazing at them as if they were made of precious
stone, she said, “Your hands, they were beautiful.”

“I never thought of them that way,” I said. This was true; I thought my hands belonged to a monster.
My fingers are long and slender but they are attached to hands that have grown coarse from only five
months of massaging hard muscles. My palms are dark with deep lines. The backs of my hands are
darker with hair sprouting like caterpillar bristles. A woman’s fingers welded to manly hands, they’re
not beautiful at all.

And then she did something that, even now, I can’t really put out of my mind. She took my ugly
hands and placed one on her p*ssy and one on her breast with the purple bruise.

This is starting to get exciting, Roman says, leaning forward over the board. Then what happened?

Nothing, I tell him. I held her like that for a few minutes and that was it. She put on my shirt and
maong, took her wet clothes from the bathroom and left the place. Disappeared in the rain again, you
know.
Roman frowns. He stares at me for a few seconds, wondering if I’m playing a joke on him again.
You’re an idiot; he says finally and turns his attention back to the chessboard. After a moment he
says, Check! – threatening my king, but clearly trying to capture my queen.

And I see that Roman doesn’t understand. As I rescue my queen from his dogged pursuit, I see that
he is just a kid, untaught in the ploys of the heart.

Mayshle Explores Memory and Presence

in Manila
By Hobart and William Smith Colleges on October 3rd, 2014
In his study of Filipino heritage, Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Peter Mayshle explores
the relationship between public memory and “presence.”
Mayshle, who joined the faculty in 2014, is in the process of revising his Ph.D. dissertation —
“Walled Memoria: Presencing Memory Sites in Intramuros, Manila” — for publication. The
dissertation examines Intramuros, the ancient walled city of old Manila.
“Intramuros has largely been imagined as a Spanish heritage site of Filipino nationhood by the
Intramuros Administration (IA), the government agency responsible for its restoration and
promotion,” Mayshle says. “However, several memory spaces and practices within its walls question
and complicate the dominant discourse that IA continues to perpetuate. Moving from the concrete,
physical space of a museum to the peripatetic space of a walking tour to the ephemeral spaces of
websites and blogs, my dissertation traces how presence informs the public memory-making
practices located within each site and considers what and how meaning is made from such
presencings.”
Mayshle’s project “reinvigorates memoria or memory, the fourth canon of rhetoric, by interrogating
the concept of presence, as formulated by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New
Rhetoric.” His work also “broadens the scope of spatial rhetoric and public memory studies by
focusing on a non-Western space.”
With this project, Mayshle hopes to expand the notion of “presence as occurring beyond the textual,”
as it occurs in “the material, the spatial, and even the performative. Ultimately, presence can serve
as a useful tool for scholars to help delineate the contours of memoria‘s partiality and can become
an invaluable resource for marginal and marginalized publics to mobilize power against a dominantly
imposed representation.”
As a rhetoric scholar, Mayshle imagines his work as part of a growing interest in non-Western
rhetorics and transnational subjects and their formations.
“With the growing ethnic and immigrant population, I see multiculturalism playing a bigger and bigger
role in challenging traditions of writing and rhetoric studies,” he says. “As more students from diverse
backgrounds enter the university and the field of writing and rhetoric studies, writing and rhetoric, in
this multicultural backdrop, would become writings and rhetorics, the plurality in the terms
recognizing the plurality of experiences.”
But first and foremost, Mayshle considers himself a writer. He spent years working as a copywriter,
eventually becoming creative director of his own boutique agency in Manila. He went on to earn his
M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and his Ph.D. in composition
and rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all the while writing and publishing fiction.
As a result, he says, “my approach to teaching and writing has largely been interdisciplinary, in the
sense that I look at writing genres and their conventions and figure out with my students how to
excel within those conventions, and later on, how to break out of those conventions.”
This semester, Mayshle is teaching WRRH 100, Writer’s Seminar, and WRRH 202, “Going Places,”
the department’s travel writing course, and hopes to expand the curriculum to include a course on
professional writing designed around visual rhetoric and advertising, as well as a course “that
combines my interests in spatial rhetoric and public memory.”
That course would take two forms. In the “home version,” Mayshle says, “I would have my students
explore the varied ways that Geneva constructs its public memories by examining its memorial
spaces. I envision a course that would devote some time to exploring significant public spaces, e.g.
museums, parks, memorials, public events, in and around Geneva. Similar to what I’m doing in my
own fieldwork in Manila, I shall ask my students to engage with officials, residents and tourists and
investigate the following questions: How are public memories uniquely constructed in Geneva? And
how do these singular memorial spaces inform, shape or resist how Geneva as a city and the Finger
Lakes as a region are imagined by larger publics?”
The “study abroad version” would ask students to “explore and compare the memory sites of two
capitals that once shared a fraught relationship as colonizer and colonized, Madrid and Manila.”
“This will take some time to design, of course,” he admits, joking that “thinking about the logistics of it
all would give me nightmares,” but Mayshle sees its potential as “a rich experience for our students
to experience and see up close the built environments that constitute the continuing legacies of
colonial histories between Europe and Asia.”
My research interests include the rhetorics of space and public memory, visual rhetoric,
ethnography and postcolonial subjectivities, all of which inform my teaching of writing to varying
degrees. I am working on a monograph, Walled Memoria: Presencing Memory Sites in
Intramuros, Manila, about the narratives and counter-narratives of various memory sites located
within the former Spanish colonial center of the Philippines. I have a chapter, “Writing to Name:
Documents and Disruptions of a Non-Native Teacher-Scholar,” in Lingua Franca: First
Generation Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication, currently in review with the
NCTE. I also write plays, screenplays, and fiction. My most recent story appeared in Flash
Fiction International, published by W.W. Norton.