I went to bed that night fully intending to turn Laird’s laptop over to the American embassy or some other authority. I wasn’t sure who would be able to make use of it. Perhaps I could ask Yoren, who seemed to be plugged in to that world, but I was unsure. A part of me felt that the computer had been willed to me, that Laird wanted me to have it.

My charger worked with the computer and I sat in bed, looking at the screen saver—a picture of Laird and Cheryl on a California mountain in hiking gear—then turned to the email. There were two accounts, a Gmail that hadn’t been used much since his arrival in the Philippines and a Hotmail that had a different password and I couldn’t open. I tried “Cheryl” again and then “Machiavelli.” Neither worked.

He had only a few photos, and none were recent except a cluster of ten taken at Jim and Cha Cha’s house. Laird’s documents were unenlightening, papers from grad school and social justice pieces for the Daily Californian. I looked over a syllabus that he had constructed for an introductory poli-sci class: it required an unreasonable amount of reading, particularly of Marx and Gramsci. A file titled “Personal Directives” was a hodgepodge of inspirational quotes that I guessed was some sort of book or essay that Laird was pulling together.

There was also a draft of a forty-page document, likely his master’s thesis, “Martial Law Under Batac.” I clicked on it, fully expecting to learn about the various human rights violations that had occurred at that time, but it was a much stranger read. Although the opening started with a clear-eyed look at life under Batac’s iron fist, the paper soon shifted, bizarrely, to an analysis of Caesar’s dictatorship in Rome. It was not a final draft, and there were notes in the margins: What is moral? Kant? And: Reread Mill’s On Liberty. What did seem apparent was that as Laird worked out his thesis, he was taking issue with Batac’s implementation of martial law but finding less to fault with martial law itself. I wondered what his thesis adviser had had to say, and then I realized that I was unsure if Laird had actually received his master’s degree. As I read through, it appeared that Laird was, at best, confused, but also someone flirting with a dangerous ideology. I shut the screen.

Nothing I found seemed important, and for the first time, I felt a genuine wave of sorrow that Laird, with all of his ambition and intelligence and unhinged sense of purpose, had left nothing behind but the sort legacy pulled together by any student of promise who had failed to realize his potential.