City of Angels
In all possible timelines, Carlo’s parents break the news to him in the summer of 1937 after a home-cooked dinner of freshly made pancit and chicken adobo - his two favorite dishes. He’s still spooning up the remaining bits of rice in his bowl when his parents begin telling him about their plans for him after he graduates high school.
Abner’s too young to work in the United States, Carlo’s parents say. And just think about how much of an opportunity this is - living and working in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
But what Carlo hears is that he’s being sent away from the Philippines to earn dollars to send back home. And while it’s true that his younger brother isn’t quite old enough to work abroad, it’s also true that Abner is some kind of genius.
Despite being four years younger than Carlo, Abner learns everything before Carlos does - multiplication tables, Pythagoras, imaginary numbers. Already, at the age of fourteen, Abner is listening in on classes at the University of the Philippines on most school days.
The differences between the two brothers are apparent to everyone in the barangay. On weekdays, Carlo plays basketball with the other teenagers in the neighborhood after school whereas Abner stays home to read the daily newspaper, cover to cover. And on weekends, Carlo goes on dates with girls drinking rum and colas along the Pasig River while Abner attends the late night open play sessions at the chess club in the University of the Philippines.
Occasionally, their mother encourages Carlo to bring Abner along given Abner’s trouble with making friends at school. Sometimes, Carlo responds by saying they already have ten people for the basketball game. Other times, Carlo says he’s worried about his friends teasing Abner for his inability to dribble a basketball.
Most of the time that the two brothers spend together is on the fifteen minute walk to and from school on weekdays. In the weeks before Carlo's trip to the States, Abner asks Carlo if he wants to accompany him to the fish pond of Ka Feli, a family friend.
“I’ve got ten minutes until they start picking teams for basketball,” Carlo says. He’s already walking faster than his brother, but the reminder of being late causes him to pace ahead even further. “Maybe another time.”
But in a few timelines, Abner asserts himself. He calls out to Carlo, saying that it’s important for Carlo to come. Confused, Carlo turns around and follows Abner along the windy dirt path to Ka Feli’s house - Abner is rarely this opinionated about anything.
When they both go to Ka Feli’s house, she lets them into her backyard where there’s a fish pond around half the size of a basketball court and as deep as two houses. The water is crystal clear from the previous night’s rain and hundreds of tilapia fish are swimming just below the surface.
In these timelines, Abner tells Carlo that his earliest memory is of playing with Carlo in Ka Feli’s backyard, running waist-deep into the fish pond, trying to reach for the tilapia before their parents would yell at them to come back to shore.
Abner tells Carlo about how much he looked up to Carlo even at a young age - that day Carlo was fast enough to even get ahold of a few fish before they slipped away. He tells Carlo that he feels the same way whenever he sees his brother sprinting full speed across the basketball court or soaring for a layup on a fastbreak.
But in nearly all timelines, Abner and Carlo never go to the fish pond. Almost always, Carlos insists on going to his basketball game instead. Sure, another time, Abner tells Carlo as his brother jogs on ahead.
A decade after Carlo arrives in the States, Carlo invites Abner to come stay with him. There’s a certain guilt attached to the invitation. Getting sent away to the States - while initially unappealing - actually meant avoiding the Japanese invasion, the occupation, and the American reconquest.
Carlo's now a manager for valet drivers at the Fairmont hotel in downtown. He tells Abner that he can get him a valet job, along with a free couch to crash on in his apartment. Carlo finds it strange to talk to Abner in this way. Since moving to the States, he only speaks to his brother over the phone during birthdays and Christmas. And even on these rare occasions, their conversation is peppered with long pauses.
Abner is unsure about how to respond to Carlo's invitation. He’s just wrapped up his undergraduate degree and is studying for entrance exams for PhD programs in mathematics. And he’s gotten even closer to his parents in recent years, particularly during the war - when 7:00 pm curfews imposed by the occupying Japanese forces meant long nights huddled together at home.
But then again, the PhD programs are more prestigious in the States, Abner thinks to himself. And his parents, although approaching their sixties, are still healthy and supportive of Abner moving to the States. We can always bring them here after a few years once we get more settled, Carlo says to Abner over the phone.
The only remaining hangup for Abner is Lettie, his girlfriend of two years. Although Lettie’s the same age as Abner, she runs her own food stall selling sisig just outside the neighborhood church. It’s some combination of her family’s secret recipe and her girl-next-door looks that causes there to be a near constant line at her shop.
Abner agonizes about Carlo's invitation for several days. He tries flipping a coin - heads means going to the States and tails means staying - as a means of figuring out what it is he really wants. He feels anxious, regardless of the coin toss result.
In timelines where Abner goes to the States, Carlo arrives three hours before Abner’s scheduled to land. Carlo worries that planes have gotten faster since the one he took all those years ago.
Carlo also worries that he won’t know what to say when he sees Abner for the first time in eight years. He worries that he won’t remember all the things he needs to apologize for - for forgetting to write to Abner, for not visiting his family in the Philippines after all these years, for being a jealous older brother.
Carlo wants to apologize for all these things and more, but when he sees Abner, all he can muster up is a question about whether Abner slept well on his flight.
There are also timelines where Abner never makes it to Los Angeles.
“No disrespect to your brother,” Lettie tells Abner in Manila as she squeezes a quarter lime over a sizzling pan of pork sisig. “But a valet driver is still a valet driver. Here or in the States, driver pa rin siya.”
“This is the United States we’re talking about, Lettie. He’ll sponsor us both and we can go to USC, the nearby university -”
“For Jose,” Lettie calls out to the group of waiting patrons as she portions out the sisig onto a paper plate with white rice. After Jose picks up the order of sisig, Lettie turns to Abner. “You go on ahead if you want Abner, but I’m staying here. The people, the food… It’s all here for me.”
Although no one knows this yet, Lettie is on the cusp of fame. Two weeks later, the lead food writer for The Philippine Star will get off at the wrong bus stop, and the savory scent of charred pork from Lettie’s stall will catch the food writer’s attention, causing him to order a plate of the sisig, which seems to strike the perfect balance of acidity from the lime juice and fattiness from the pork. “A must visit sisig spot for anyone who even remotely enjoys the dish,” he’ll later write.
Overnight, waits at Lettie’s stall go from five minutes to two hours. She hires two other cooks and purchases two more grill tops, all while shrinking her menu to just rice and sisig to improve the efficiency of her now burgeoning business.
In timelines where Abner stays in the Philippines, he gravitates towards doing all the accounting work for Lettie’s business. Given the pace of business expansion, Abner doesn’t have the time to pursue his dream of getting a PhD, so he never quite discovers the extent of his mathematical capabilities.
Within a few years of the review, Lettie expands to dozens of locations across all of the Philippines. The rest of her life then alternates between writing cookbooks, attending morning talk shows, and crafting special catering menus for the upper crust of Manila society.
There are, however, a few timelines where Lettie goes with Abner to Los Angeles, just days before the food writer from The Philippine Star gets off at the wrong bus stop. In these timelines, Lettie is allured by the promise of a better life, one where she has a backyard, a car, and enough money to send back to the Philippines.
When Lettie does move to the States, she never lasts for more than a year. The kitchen in their studio barely has enough counter space for a cutting board. The grocery store at the end of their block sells different types of tortillas and salsas, but not a single jar of fish sauce. To Lettie, home has never felt further away.
When Lettie returns to Manila, she does so without Abner who has gotten deeply involved in some strange side-hustle that Lettie never quite learns about. Lettie leaves for the airport early on a Sunday morning and leaves a short note on the kitchen counter for Abner who hasn’t been home in three days.
Lettie reopens her sisig stall when she returns. While the stall never comes close to the heights it reaches in other timelines, it’s still the busiest food stall in the neighborhood - after all, the quality of Lettie’s food speaks for itself.
While waiting on meat to char on her grill top, Lettie often chats with her customers, locals whom she always knows. They tell her how happy they are to have her back given that they no longer have to compromise by getting the blander sisig from Bert’s on the other side of town.
In these timelines, Lettie’s life is simpler. She owns a ceiling fan instead of an air conditioner. Every morning, she buys her ingredients from her neighbor Kuya Jimmy instead of a supplier in downtown Manila. And on Sunday mornings, she works at her church’s soup kitchen instead of sipping mimosas at a country club nestled in the mountains of Baguio.
Although Lettie doesn’t realize it, these are the timelines where she gets it right.
In timelines where Abner does arrive in the States, Carlo lands him a job as a valet in the Fairmont in Downtown.
Even after months on the job, Abner doesn’t understand how Carlo and the others can drive so decisively in such tight spaces. While Abner backs into tight spaces in starts and stops, the other valet drivers would practically accelerate backwards into a parking space, as though they weren’t just inches away from damaging a car valued at a year’s worth of salary.
“Alright,” Abner asks his co-worker Dallas after Dallas deftly maneuvers an Aston Martin through various double parked cars and into a tight corner space. “How do I learn how to do that?”
Dallas’ name is really James, but everyone at the Fairmont calls him Dallas because he moved to LA from Texas.
“From where in Texas?” People ask James when he first joins the Fairmont.
“If it’s all the same to you,” James says, “I’m going to keep that to myself. Not that you coastal types know any cities in Texas other than Dallas anyways.”
As Dallas gets out of the Aston Martin, he chuckles at Abner’s question. “There ain’t no learning to it, but just a feeling out. That make sense?”
“So just practice?”
“Ain’t it either kid,” Dallas said, shaking his head. “It’s like talking to women. You don’t think about it, you just feel it out.”
When he sees Abner’s puzzled expression, Dallas sighs and offers to be Abner’s mentor for the next month. Naturally, Abner can’t say yes fast enough.
But much to Dallas’ frustration, Abner appears to be a lost cause. When there’s a wide gap between cars, Abner thinks it’s too small. And if the spot’s tight, Abner looks over his shoulder half a dozen times before finally parking the car. When Dallas tells Abner to trust his gut, Abner nearly backs into the garage wall.
To Abner, problems are meant to be thought through. In Abner’s mind, understanding whether car A can fit in between cars B and C while approaching the space at a 90 degree angle at 15 miles per hour is definitively a math problem.
As Abner is explaining all this to Dallas, an idea comes into the Texan’s mind. The kid really is as smart as his brother says, Dallas thinks to himself.
It’s then that Dallas decides to introduce Abner to his bookie.
Dallas is from Plainview, a small town approximately 350 miles west of Dallas. In the weeks prior to his move to Los Angeles, Dallas has amassed a debt worth eleven paychecks, which is owed across three bookies in Plainview.
Dallas’ plan to tackle the debt always begins with cobbling together some cash from friends and family to make the necessary minimum payments for a few weeks. Dallas uses some of the borrowed money on moonshot parlays - Warriors to win the coin toss, the Celtics to lose the first quarter by at least two points, and Bill Russell to have at least five blocks - all in the hopes of winning enough to cover all his debts.
Regardless of the outcome though, the 20% week-over-week interest rates on his debt make his situation unmanageable. The last option for Dallas is always this: a night meeting in the parking lot of the local supermarket.
Dallas’ plan is to come clean. One year, Dallas plans to tell one bookie. You get half my paycheck for one year and we’ll be square. Dallas hopes that if he can get on the good side of one bookie, he can be protected from the other ones - at least for some period of time.
But what Dallas fails to realize is that bookies talk to each other. Regardless of which bookie Dallas chooses to meet with, he’s never seen again after that meeting in the parking lot.
The only way Dallas avoids this outcome is by watching television.
In the hours before his meeting in the supermarket parking lot, Dallas sometimes watches the Perry Mason show, a program featuring a criminal defense lawyer based in Los Angeles. Dallas doesn’t care for the plot much, but he notices the palm trees swaying in the background from the ocean breeze. He notices that the people in the show seem equally comfortable walking around with shorts or pants, something that would only be true for a month in Plainview.
Dallas wonders if Los Angeles is like this all-year round or if he’s just being fooled by cutting edge Hollywood video editors. He wonders how far Los Angeles is from Plainview and if he even has enough cash in his wallet to make it that far. He wonders if he can just hitchhike.
The timelines where Dallas gets it right are the ones where he just starts packing.
Carlo gets frustrated in timelines where both Dallas and Abner end up in Los Angeles. At some point, they’ll both spend most of their time on the job working on their sports betting project. Hushed conversations over lunch between them eventually bleed into the late afternoon, leaving Carlo to pick up the slack at the Fairmont parking lot.
It annoys Carlo that there’s little he can do about the situation other than firing his younger brother or his brother’s newfound friend. Both Dallas and Abner seem to know this, given that they always end up reverting back to their lackadaisical behavior a few hours after Carlo has a serious sit-down with them about their work ethic.
While Carlo doesn’t completely understand their scheme, he gets the gist of it. Every day, Dallas tells Abner about various bets that are being offered by his bookies. Abner does some mental math and figures out which bets to make. Dallas then shuffles off to some dimly lit dive bar to place some bets with a bookie.
“Why don’t you just place the bets yourself?” Carlo asks his younger brother. They’re in the middle of their usual morning routine at home - a fifteen minute breakfast of black coffee and pan de sal before driving together to the Fairmont.
“It would be too obvious,” Abner says as he sips his coffee. “They would stop taking my bets because I win too much.”
“And they take them now from Dallas?”
“Dallas is better at looking lucky than I am.”
Eventually, the bookies around the Fairmont realize that Dallas is not, in fact, just getting lucky. This process usually takes one to two years, depending on how well Dallas pulls off his persona as a degenerate gambler. Afterwards, Abner ends up traveling with Dallas to the various neighborhoods and cities within Los Angeles County, placing large bets with bookies who haven’t yet heard of their reputation.
During this time, Carlo grows concerned about his younger brother’s gambling habits. At this point, he’s heard rumors of Dallas’ gambling issues in the past and how that past could be Abner’s future if Abner isn’t careful.
Carlo explains to Abner the dangers of vices like gambling and how the house always wins. Not in this case, Abner tries to tell Carlo before telling his older brother about line movements creating arbitrage opportunities and how in the long run, he would always come out ahead given how carefully he’s approximated the true probability distribution of the events that he’s been betting on.
Carlo understands very little of what Abner says. To Carlo, the only way forward from an addiction was to abstain. To think otherwise was to think too highly of one’s self.
Almost always, the situation comes to a head between the two brothers, causing Carlo to fire Abner from his valet job while kicking him out of the apartment. It’s tough love, Carlo explains to his family back home. But it’s what needs to be done.
Carlo's parents would be more concerned if they didn’t hear differently from their other son. Abner has moved into the posh Hancock Park suburb of Los Angeles and has a visit to Manila planned for later in the year. Given that Carlo’s always been reluctant to buy a return ticket back to the Philippines, it seems to the parents that Abner must be doing just fine.
During this time period, there are certainly losing streaks for Abner and Dallas, but the winning streaks last longer and pay out more. Abner and Dallas become emotionally detached to the daily swings of fortune, knowing that in the long run, they always come out ahead.
In most timelines, Abner eventually ends up in Las Vegas. Through Dallas, Abner places increasingly large bets on the various sportsbooks in the city. Almost always, the sportsbooks notice.
Abner eventually gets hired as a lead mathematician by one of the major sportsbooks in Vegas, helping set the betting lines alongside PhDs from Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard. Abner and his co-workers quarrel late into the night over equations written in chalkboard and discuss various optimization strategies over cocktails at the VIP lounge of the sportsbook.
During these discussions, Abner occasionally smiles to himself thinking he certainly didn’t expect that gambling would be the vehicle to his dreams of becoming a mathematician.
Abner gets introduced to many women once he becomes established at his job at the sportsbook. There isn’t the “one” for Abner, a woman who becomes his wife in the large majority of his timelines. Unlike most people, the major fork in Abner’s timelines does not have to do with his choice of a life partner.
In Abner’s life, the critical juncture lies elsewhere.
Carlo doesn’t stay much longer at the Fairmont once he fires Abner and Dallas. After over ten years on the job, he figures it’s time for a change anyways.
But opportunities are limited for Carlo in the States. He soon finds that being a Filipino without a college degree in the 1950s doesn’t translate well to lucrative job opportunities. In many timelines, Carlo goes back to the Philippines. The reasons vary for each timeline, but it’s almost always a random set of events that precede his return back home.
In one timeline, it’s a piping hot spoonful of sinigang soup from a new Filipino restaurant that opened around the corner from his apartment, the sour notes of tamarind causing Carlo to long for the aromas of his family kitchen.
In another, it’s a photo that Carlo receives in the mail from his parents. It’s a photo featuring several of Carlo’s high school friends, taken from a wedding that Carlo’s parents recently attended. Carlo’s attention isn’t drawn to his friends’ receding hairlines or their sharp-looking suits. Instead, he notices how they all seem to have gotten married.
When Carlo goes back to the Philippines, he ends up staying with his parents in his childhood home. He hasn’t seen his parents in over a decade, and it saddens him how much they’ve aged - his father now walks more gingerly and his mother squints whenever she reads her Bible. With his savings, Carlo hires a contractor to renovate their bathroom. He buys reading glasses for his mother.
Carlo also decides to invest more time in dating, given how much he’s neglected this part of his life. With his relative wealth and American passport, Carlo is a very eligible bachelor. He usually ends up marrying a friend of Lettie whom Carlo gets to know since Lettie’s sisig stall is just a few houses down from the house of Carlo’s parents. By this point, any awkwardness from Abner’s break up with Lettie is water under the Quezon bridge.
A key moment in Carlo’s life happens while he drives his parents to a recently-built mall near the airport. They’re stuck in the typically deadlocked Manila traffic on a humid, cloudless day with the sun bearing down on them. The air-conditioner in the car can barely keep up.
Carlo’s mother talks of all the recent changes happening in their neighborhood - the supermarket being built next to the highway overpass and the new highrise being built on top of Ka Feli’s house. She talks about Ka Feli securing several units in the new highrise in exchange for selling the land.
“But what about her fish pond?” Carlo asks his mother.
“She had a fish pond?”
When Carlo returns home that day, he calls his brother. He wants to give Abner a blanket apology. Whatever you’re angry at me for, whatever it is I’ve done to hurt you, I’m sorry for all that, Carlo says.
Abner wants to ask Carlo what it is exactly he’s sorry for, but Abner’s in a rush. In the majority of timelines, Abner is running late to a meeting with an executive at the sportsbook. In other timelines, he’s on his way to some new show on Las Vegas Boulevard. Either way, the call only lasts a few minutes. Life in Vegas moves fast, Abner explains to Carlo before hanging up.
In one timeline though, Abner does not hang up.
As Carlo waits for Abner to pick up his call, Carlo thinks of the day he picked up Abner from the Los Angeles airport all those years ago.
He thinks of the thunderous sounds of planes passing by and the dry desert heat of Southern California. He thinks of arriving three hours early to the airport, nervous to see Abner. He thinks about being a mediocre older brother at best.
On the phone call, Carlo speaks slowly to Abner, giving each apology the time it deserves. They speak until it’s unclear whether they have spoken through the night or into the morning.