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Photo by Benjamin Talon

The Defenestrations
Chapter 2
by Allan Carreon

Part 1

He thought he was dead.

Two seconds later, he realized he was thinking, so he was probably not dead.

Iñigo leapt to his feet, a throbbing mass of pain, then saw his phone was damaged. How the hell was he going to stream now? His 934,903 followers would be disappointed.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, swiping up on his phone. To his surprise, it flickered on. It had sustained a large crack on the screen but otherwise was still recording. What luck. Not only had he survived falling out a window, so had his brand-new iPhone.

He would ask for a new one from a sponsor tomorrow, he decided. Right now, he had to get back to his fans.

“Sorry for that, guys,” he spoke into his phone. He stared into the void from where his viewers gazed back. “Lost my balance. I swear, this ugly building in Prag…” He trailed off as he looked around him.

This was not Prague.

Did I actually die after all?

A 30-ish Asian woman walked past him, staring quizzically. “Sawasdee kha,” she said.

Towering over Iñigo was a temple. It looked as though he had fallen out of it, but there was no window. There was only a fading portal closing near the roof, and it seemed to taunt him. A short distance away, there was another temple busy with tourists. Around them were rolling greens and ponds.

Iñigo knew this place. He’d been here before.

He was in Thailand.

“I… I’ll get back to you guys,” he spoke into his camera then finished his live stream.

Photo by Benjamin Talon

Part 2

How he ended up in Thailand, Iñigo had no idea. The last time he was here, it was with his family.

The summer after his father fell out of his office window, his mother took him and his sisters on a package tour of Thailand. Bored with his mother and sisters, their endless shopping, dining, and temple tours, he sought other entertainment.

That was when Iñigo started vlogging. The moment he set foot at the Grand Palace and started streaming himself live, and random strangers started tuning in to praise him, he knew it was his duty to broadcast himself to an audience.

Nature bored him; he preferred vlogging about Bangkok’s wild night life. The one nature thing he liked was an elephant sanctuary where he leapt on the back of a rescued calf. Amidst protests from caretakers and tourists, Iñigo rode the wailing elephant on Facebook Live. He was forcibly removed by several burly Thais.

It was the first time Iñigo got a taste of online bashing – oh, the whiny social justice warriors – but it was also when he became viral. The stunt got him a hundred thousand reactions: likes, loves, and a ton of angry reacts. He was shared half a million times.

Famous or infamous, he didn’t care. He did more silly stunts for his followers. He began getting freebies. He was getting so many X-deals that he put off getting a normal job.

He was now Iñigo Villa-Real: influencer.

Photo by Allan Carreon

Part 3

Now, inexplicably back in Thailand, Iñigo tried to reach his friends – but his phone refused to cooperate. Calls and messages would not go through. His passport was back in his hotel room in Prague, and it did not occur to him to find the Philippine Embassy. His credit card did not work, either.

Nothing worked except his phone camera and his Instagram Live.

He hitched a ride with a Peruvian tour group (where was Peruvia, he wondered) to the nearest city. At dusk he was lingering around a temple when an old monk approached him.

“Sawasdee khrap, Khun Iñigo.” How did the monk know his name? And did he just call him crap? “You will find answers in Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple of Chiang Rai.” Then the monk walked away.

So Iñigo found himself on the four-hour bus ride to Chiang Rai. He had used his charms on an elderly British woman near the bus terminal to get a ticket. This trip was probably a wild goose chase, but he didn’t know what else to do.

He did not care for the view outside the window. All trees and mountains looked the same to him. Surrounded by nature’s splendor, he preferred to watch his own Instagram Live. It was there, all of it. Stepping backwards into the Prague window. A blur of motion as he tumbled down. Darkness as his phone landed on its face. The twin pagodas. His bewildered face.

And the online comments scrolling upwards.

“OMG he feeeeell someone help!!!”
“Iñaki!”
“cool story, bro”
“grabe! tegi na yata!”
“Yeah, right. Looks fake.”
“pa-peymus ampotah!”
“Shout out naman dyan, kuya!”

Pathetic, but he couldn’t comment back. Nothing worked on his phone.

Except his camera and his Instagram Live.

And he now had even more followers.

Photo by Benjamin Talon

Part 4

It was midnight when Inigo arrived at the White Temple, and it was closed.

Outside, he noticed a white cat sitting there like a little prince. It turned to look at him, and it had the most unusual blue eyes. It held his gaze, daring him to look away. He could not. “You made it,” someone said beside him, startling him. It was the same old monk. “The artist Chalermchai Kositpipat built this place in 1997. It’s as old as you. Come!” Too stunned to say anything, Iñigo followed the monk. He did, out of habit, pull out his phone and start broadcasting on Instagram. The cat walked with them.

The monk went on talking in Thailandish or whatever, and he didn’t know what else to do but trail after him.

They crossed a gleaming bridge over a lake to the White Temple. “This is the Bridge of the Cycle of Rebirth,” the monk said. Iñigo had a nagging feeling he had met this monk before. As they crossed, the monk whispered, “Neung, song, sam…” The white cat purred. “And this is the Gate of Heaven.” They were now at the entrance, which was flanked by two stone creatures. “Death and Rahu guard it.” Iñigo hurried inside. “Your shoes, please! And recording is not allowed inside,” the monk hollered.

Iñigo ignored him. “I’m in Wat something, Chiang Rai’s apparently famous White Temple.” Iñigo smiled for his viewers. “Photography is normally not allowed, but I got an exclusive tour!” The walls were lined with murals of Buddhist images interspersed with Superman, Hello Kitty, Bin Laden, and Freddy Krueger, all entangled in some bizarre battle between good and evil over a landscape of nuclear warfare and oil spills.

Part 5

Iñigo ended his broadcast. The monk was waiting outside, a smirk on his face. The cat led them away, strolling down a path lined with trees hung with sculptures of decapitated heads. They stopped in front of a golden building.

Hong naam?” the monk asked.

Toilet?” Iñigo replied. A restroom? A golden restroom?

The monk laughed. Ka. The building is a toilet. But let’s go upstairs. Khun Chalermchai has quarters there.

It was dark on the second floor. Iñigo tried to find a light switch to no avail. The cat leapt onto the sill of a window where moonlight shone through. Iñigo walked over and peeked outside. The small buildings surrounding the White Temple seemed to breathe. “There’s no one here,” Iñigo said. The cat meowed, making itself comfortable on the sill.

Do you know why this building is gold when it houses toilets?

The monk’s face seemed to shift in the moonlight.

Because it reflects a fundamental human truth.

The monk’s face was now inches from his. Iñigo leaned back against the window as the monk looked deep into Iñigo’s eyes, as though he were searching for a soul.

That unquenchable human desire for material things is fit for nothing but the loo.

Iñigo felt the monk’s hand on his chest just as recognition struck. The white cat with the blue eyes hissed.

“That you may seem golden outside…”

It was the tour guide in Prague.

“But inside you’re really just a piece of shit.”

And with a shove, the monk sent Inigo flying out the window.

* * * * *

What happens next?
A. Inigo lands in another country
B. Inigo has to make his way on his own.

Next week: Chapter 2B (in which Inigo died) by Roni Matienzo.

All photos by Jessica Zafra

The Defenestrations
Chapter 1
by Jessica Zafra

Part 1

He should’ve known better.

Granted, it does not follow that if your forebears met untimely deaths through a window, a similar doom awaits you. Windows, as far as we can tell, cannot commit murder.

And yet, if he had given a modicum of thought to his family history, he might’ve been a bit more attentive. He might have noticed his surroundings. He might have read the Warning signs in several languages, seen the stanchions and the heavy rope, and the two workmen arguing loudly beside the famous window. He might have heard the tour guide shout, “Watch it!”

But Inigo Villa-Real, 22, social media influencer, was not someone who let thought get in the way of his actions. “Don’t think, do,” declared the T-shirt he had collaborated on with a fast fashion retailer. In the time you spent thinking of whether to publish this photo or that story, someone could post it first and get all the likes. He didn’t have to be right, he just had to be first, and anyway “right” was whatever got the most likes.

So he kept his eyes on his phone screen as he walked backwards into our story.

Part 2

The window looked like every other window at Prague Castle, and there was no particular reason why it was chosen for this purpose. A window on a higher floor would’ve been more effective. But all that was required was a window of sufficient size, at a distance from the ground that would lead to grave damage if not the grave itself, a window that was there.

In 1618 the city of Prague in the kingdom of Bohemia in the Hapsburg Empire was convulsed by dissension between the Catholics and the Protestants. It is hard to imagine a time in history in which societies were not riven by factional discord. No doubt when the first human had the idea of walking erect on two legs, she was attacked by neighbors accustomed to crawling on their hands and knees. Who does she think she is? You think you’re above us?

In this case the discord boiled over into violence, not that this was out of the ordinary, either. History really is rather predictable and boring, if we were to examine it from a distance, as through a large, open window, but we do not see it until we fall right through.

The Protestant members of the Bohemian Estates had sent a letter to the King in Vienna expressing their grievances. We will not go into the details because this story is not about them. The King sent a condescending response which made them angrier. The time for negotiations was over.

On the morning of 23 May 1618, the Protestant conspirators went to the Castle and occupied the offices of the royal administration. Six of the officials had expected this kind of trouble, and conveniently arranged to be out of the office. Of the four officials who were present, two were moderates and were allowed to leave. The two remaining officials, who had stood against the Protestant conspirators for many years, were seized and thrown out the window. One of them clung to the window sill until someone pounded on his fingers with the hilt of a dagger.

Meanwhile, a secretary was caught trying to sneak out of the room, so the conspirators grabbed him and tossed him out the window as well.

All three men survived their defenestration. The height of the fall was insufficient to cause certain death. Explanations of their survival followed party lines. The Catholics declared that a miracle wrought by the Blessed Virgin had saved the falling men. The Protestants said the three men had landed on a pile of excrement (Flush toilets had not been invented yet).

When news of the defenestrations got around, there was widespread rioting, ransacking of churches, and murdering of monks. As with all religious wars through the ages, a mob marched on the Jewish town to kill Jews.

Part 3

If Inigo had bothered to read a guide, he might have learned a bit of the history of the Thirty Year’s War, but he had no interest in “old stuff”. He was not so much stupid as willfully ignorant, and at school was exactly the kind of student who would sneer at classmates who knew the answers to the teachers’ questions.

That the Villa-Real (not to be confused with Villareal) line would come to this, that generations of intelligent, accomplished women and men should culminate in this undistinguished specimen, was a tragedy that made the concept of a family curse seem plausible. As far as anyone could tell, Inigo did not believe in anything and aspired to nothing, other than to increase his following on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Perhaps it was too much to expect him to follow in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather Patrocinio, who had been a friend of Rizal and the Ilustrados. During the Commonwealth period Patrocinio had gone into engineering and construction, building some of the Philippines’ best-known landmarks and making a great fortune in the process. “Infrastructure is real and useful, unlike politics,” snorted the old man, who seldom missed a day of work unless it was spent with his beloved wife and children. Long after his contemporaries had retired, he visited building sites, tapping on walls and testing doors to make sure everything was in order.

On that day in 1935, Patrocinio was inspecting a ten-storey building in Binondo, Manila when he tried to open a window on the ninth floor. It was stuck. He gripped the latch and pushed, but it would not budge. The old man, never one to give up, put his weight on the recalcitrant window, which came off its hinges with a crack and plunged to the street below, taking Patrocinio with it.

This was not the first time a Villa-Real had been killed in proximity to a window. Patrocinio’s own great-uncle Eladio, a poet and an ardent admirer of woman, was reading romantic sonnets to the comely young wife of the lighthouse keeper when a shadow fell over them. It was not, as one might expect, the lighthouse keeper, but one of the many young women whom Eladio had dedicated sonnets to. Before Eladio and the lighthouse keeper’s wife had time to react to this intrusion, before Eladio could stand up from his perch on the lighthouse window, the young woman had pushed him to his death on the rocks below.

Part 4

Perhaps it was a family curse, because what other explanation could there be for the death of Patrocinio’s son, Lauro, who was brushing his teeth by a fourth floor window when he was seized by a heart attack, his fourth, that caused him to crash head-first through the glass? Or to Lauro’s son, Claudio, Inigo’s father, who was smoking a cigarette in his 35th floor office when the son of his most important client had a psychotic break and ran screaming down the hallway. Claudio, who went to the gym twice a week, attempted to arrest the skinny young man’s progress, but the young man’s momentum carried them both towards the hallway window and they fell out, enmeshed in a fatal embrace.

And now we get to Inigo Villa-Real, the second of four children, a young man who had never known privation in his life, who had gone to the best schools money could buy entrance to, who had never exerted himself or had need to, who was on a seven-day tour of seven European countries sponsored by an artisanal organic energy drink, and had exactly eighteen minutes to cover the entirety of the Prague Castle complex. His guide, whose edifying lectures on Czech history and culture he had managed not to hear, had led him to this large, mostly empty room. Inigo decided on a quick walk-through for his vlog, filming what he considered the only thing worthy of attention in that room: himself.

“I thought this castle would be cool,” he declared to his phone camera as he walked backwards into the room, past the warning signs, past the stanchions, past the arguing workmen, “But it’s like a bunch of old build…” and then he walked backwards through the window.

What happens next?

Chapter 2 (by a different author) begins on Monday.

This is the window at Prague Castle where the Defenestrations of 1618 happened. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, poster by Bubblestan.

How it works:

1. “Defenestration” is the act of throwing someone out of a window. The Defenestrations is a serial novel that begins in Prague, site of the most famous defenestrations in history. Each chapter is written by a different author.

The Defenestrations begins on Monday, 21 January.

Every week, we will post a fresh installment that ends with the question, What Happens Next? followed by two options.

Yeah, we got the idea from Bandersnatch in Black Mirror and interactive mystery plays.

2. You, the reader, get to choose the option that appeals to you.

3. The option that gets the most votes will be the basis of the new chapter that appears the following week.

The option that gets fewer votes will appear in the new chapter the week after that.

4. Every new chapter ends with two options, so one beginning results in many different endings.

5. If you’d like to join our serial writers pool, email us at saffron.safin@gmail.com or DM @jessicazafrascats.

6. Don’t throw your ideas out the window!

* * * * *

I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in the mid-90s, just before the Merchant-Ivory movie came out. I may have speed-read it and missed many of its subtleties, and it is the sort of novel where the most devastating revelations are purposely unsaid.

Every time I read Ishiguro I am lulled by the tranquillity of the language, only to be whacked upside the head by a sudden emotional upheaval. Here are my notes on re-reading The Remains of the Day. (Spoilers abound.) Please join the discussion in Comments or send me your notes at saffron.safin@gmail.com.

– The protagonist is Stevens, a butler, and his entire life is summed up by that one word, “butler”. His manner is formal, very careful not to give offense, sometimes pompous. This is a man who never forgets his place in the class hierarchy.

– We see the gap between what Steven knows and doesn’t know—the situation gives him away. Note how Faraday quickly guesses Stevens’s feelings towards the former Miss Kenton, and how flustered Stevens becomes.

– All this ruminating on “greatness”, Stevens really is a snob. Then he spends a lot of time defining “dignity” and stresses that it requires emotional restraint. Haha, he’s not so much restrained as sealed-in.

– Wincing at his very formal relationship with his father, who was also a butler.

– Stevens attempts to explain sex to his employer’s godson. Comedy ensues. In the movie the godson is played by Hugh Grant. There is much hilarity.

– Like St Peter, he denies his beloved Lord Darlington to the villagers.

– Ribbentrop the Nazi foreign minister was a frequent guest. Granted, most people had no idea what the Nazis were at the time, but it never even occurs to Stevens to ask questions. To him, Lord D can do no wrong, even after the matter of the Jewish maids.

– Stevens’s defensiveness when he is caught reading a romance novel. He is so trapped in proprieties he even discontinues the daily meetings that give him so much pleasure. Not that he admits his pleasure.

– Similarities to An Artist of the Floating World and Never Let Me Go: Intelligent, thoughtful narrator/protagonists who are clueless about themselves: one because he can’t deal with the truth, one because the truth is kept from her, and Stevens because he is willfully obtuse.

– Stevens is somewhat alarmed at the farmers who “do not know their place”. The place he has chosen for himself is ignorance—his employers’ guests use him as an example of why the masses cannot have power. The perfect butler has no opinion; he exists to smooth edges.

– When Miss Kenton makes that announcement, I yell at Stevens.

– “Today’s world is too foul a place for such fine and noble instincts” = Um, yes he was a fascist sympathizer, but he had good qualities.

– When I read it for the first time, I thought Stevens a tragic figure. Now I think he is a clod, a self-important buffoon, a man to be pitied.

– When the emotion is too huge, simplicity works. “…at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

– “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes…what dignity is there in that?” A moment of self-awareness.

On this PODCATS (not a typo)

Can your parents charge you rent? (Hell, yes.)
How do you write a will?
Can you leave your property to your cats and dogs?
How do you get someone certified bonkers?
What’s a common-law marriage?
If a gay couple splits up, who gets the condo they both paid for?
Does an executor have a broadsword or a guillotine?
Shouldn’t the partner who keeps house be compensated?
Why does “intestate” sound like “castrated”?
Can you adopt your mentally-challenged sibling?

And other questions that we’ve asked over the years but never got real answers to.

Our expert: Lawyer Von Cuerpo, who answered all our questions despite nursing a massive hangover that made him feel like he was taking an exam. Our kibitzers: Roni Matienzo, Allan Carreon, Deo Giga, Bubbles Magpayo.

We enjoyed this session so much, we’re going to make this a regular feature. Post your questions for the next Know Your Rights! with Von in Comments.

You can also get this episode at Podbean.

https://therealjessicarulestheuniverse.podbean.com/e/episode-5-know-your-rights-with-von-cuerpo/