Glenn Diaz

During a regular shift at the call center, Alvin Estrada discovers a way to embezzle money from the American telecom giant for which he mans the phones. Soon a couple of friends join in, and the operation proceeds smoothly up until they quit, vowing to take the secret to their graves. A month later, a phone call at 4 in the morning tells Alvin that the police are on their way. At once a workplace novel and a meditation on history and globalization, The Quiet Ones is a grimly humorous take on a soul-sapping, multi-billion-dollar industry. In interlocking narratives, it explores lives rendered mute by irate callers, scripted apologies, and life’s menial violence, but which manage to talk back every now and then, just as long as the Mute button is firmly pressed. Winner, 2017 Palanca Grand Prize Winner, 2018 NBDB and Manila Critics Circle National Book Award

A Novel

The Quiet Ones

Regret: it felt rhythmic, like a mild but endless asthma attack. Regret rippled from core to the fringes.

He took certain comfort in this, telling himself that each memory was another moment he would share with her, another vicarious breath she'd take.

How to tell him that it would get better, that it would pass? A child who could only inhabit the present, with no idea of a future, its relief.

His firm acceptance of things was something he had always cherished as a virtue, a form of strength, but it was unprecedented, this hunch that his life was now scarcely one, and it confirmed what all of literature had preached, ultimately: things could just fall apart; it was an inherent capacity. 

At the hotel, he discovered that loneliness and regret, things that otherwise noisily grated, assumed a certain silence when muffed by material comfort. Loneliness didn't snore or shift if one slept on three hundred thread-count Egyptian cotton. Regret chewed quietly during thousand-peso meals. They were there, nonetheless: saying something desultory about the late night news, wishing him good night before he turned off the bedside lamp ("Good night!" Alvin would sing-song back). 

Something happened when one was alone for too long. A wasting, a peeling off, like the duhat tree outside his window that remained standing even as its leaves had all but wilted. To be sure there was peace, too, a kind of joy, in this inward turn, but weren't a lot of things—ennui, disinterest, nothingness—like peace. 

"What is a city without inhabitants? You see? Nothing but plains and hills and rivers. Or flood plains and esteros. But look at me. I've been living in Manila for, what, three years? I won't feel at home in Seattle if I return. I will probably not return, to be perfectly honest. You see? The city is not a place. It is a social," he paused, "arrangement. Defined by concession. By consensus. It is us. A city ends when there are no longer people to define it."

One moment, you're convinced he was brilliant, the next, you wondered if it was all just eloquent bullshit.

"Moving from one place to another, meeting people then saying goodbye to them. Then meeting new ones again. Being, you know, placeless."

"I thought you're no longer seeing each other?" She raised her hand. "Listen to what I will say, OK? Are you listening? OK. Until someone leaves you and then you have to work as a toll booth operator in the middle of SLEX at 3 o'clock in the morning, you don't know—you have absolutely no clue—how it feels to be lonely." 

"So, talking about coffee," Scott said now, "I've been thinking, when we 

 shed off something and we just don't shed that thing off, you know, we also shed 

 which anchored us onto it. Our favorite components, you know? Bitterness in coffee. Cheap pubs in a city. Brilliance in a beloved."

"Ha!" he cried. "But seriously, it's all about that now, no? Anchors. In a world where distance is a function not so much of miles but sheer willingness, that's what we need, that's what we aspire for. Well, most of us, at least. It's the antithesis to placelessness."

The Quiet Ones quotes

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