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Hell, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

Warning: Graphic and depressing.

The vice-president of the Mariah Carey Fan Club had spent the last 44 days, including most weekends, in what felt like a continuous, enervating video conference with his office, and on the day before his birthday he was consumed with thoughts of cake.

Of course time is not something their sovereign acknowledges, but he had already lost weight from Work From Home stress. Besides, his S&R membership came with a free birthday cake, and he was never one to pass up an incentive. He needed the comfort of carbohydrates, sugar, and empty calories. So after he had logged out, he got his shopping bag and started walking to the supermarket.

Just past the checkpoint, he saw a man defying quarantine by selling quail eggs on the street. Birthday Boy was used to meeting peddlers on his grocery run; he knew they would not be violating quarantine if they had a choice. He bought quail eggs he didn’t want, gave the peddler some extra money, and asked him why he was outside at all. The peddler explained that he had diabetes and needed to earn money for his medicine. Besides, the peddler said, the barangay gave his family five kilos of rice and some canned goods every two weeks, and it was not enough to feed everyone. So he had to sneak out and work, even at the risk of arrest.

As Birthday Boy walked on, he saw about half a dozen people lying on the sidewalk. They looked like they had been living there. There was something odd about the people on the concrete—he realized that they were patients from the mental hospital. He had encountered this before: when the mental hospital was overcrowded, non-violent patients were released to make room for the serious cases.

When he was growing up outside Metro Manila, he had seen mental patients getting off the bus and wandering around his neighborhood. One of them even had a pet cat. His aunt owned a sari-sari store, and they would give the patient lunch ahead of everyone else, and at night before they closed the store they would give her dinner. They let her take a bath in their house and gave her clean clothes. She always seemed more lucid after she’d eaten—he guessed that part of the reason she was mentally ill was because she was hungry.

He gave the people lying on the sidewalk the quail eggs and some money.

At S&R the birthday cake promo had been suspended on account of the pandemic. Birthday Boy bought some fruit and walked back home. On his route he met a vendor selling dried fish. He didn’t want any dried fish, but he bought some anyway, because what are you going to do? People break the law because they’re desperate, what are you supposed to do, walk past them? The vendor had an ID hanging on a string around his neck. He was living in an evacuation center. He’d been living there since November. Before the pandemic this was already his life.

Birthday Boy continued walking. It was ridiculous, walking so far for cake that did not appear. That’s when he saw the man crying and writhing on the ground. The man’s arm lay at a strange angle, as if it were broken, and he reeked like something rotten. He looked to be another mental patient. Even if Birthday Boy could go near him, he was groaning and thrashing about in pain. He could be violent.

In the face of this suffering Birthday Boy felt so useless he could weep. He put a bag of fruit and some money on the ground, what else could he do? And the injured man actually smiled at him through his agony. Birthday Boy heard himself thinking that it would be more merciful if the man died, then his torment would be over. It occurred to him, then, that this was hell.

And there are no consolations in this story, no soothing epiphanies about the triumph of the human spirit. Terrible things happen. We go on living.