“I hope the weather’s better on Cebu,” the girl said. “I want to go to the beach.”

“Yes. Cebu’s known for its beaches. And for its mangos and beef.”

“Weird,” the girl said. “What else do I need to know?”

Perhaps I should have told her about pakikasama, social empathy, and amor proprio, personal dignity, which were the two tenets that Filipinos lived by, but I was discouraged by her large, wet eyes that seemed hopeful for things to be simplified rather than complicated. “The balut, the fertilized duck eggs? They’re not for everyone. Many Filipinos don’t eat them, including me. Try the bagnet, which is fried pork belly. And make sure the water you’re drinking is filtered.”

I lifted my chin to the driver in the rearview mirror. “Nasa corner ng Scout Tobias at Timog ang Cocoon. Okay?”

The driver nodded.

“You must excuse me,” I said to the girl. “I have a bit of a headache. I’m going to close my eyes for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”

The girl nodded in response and I, duty fulfilled, pretended to nap.

Nearly a year had passed since I had last visited Manila. I had been on assignment from Vice, covering newly sworn-in president Procopio “Copo” Gumboc, who had swept the elections in an upset and was now governing the nation in state-run terror. Under his rule, police had carte blanche to execute anyone suspected of dealing or using drugs, mostly shabu, a form of crack cocaine. The policy had been embraced by a corrupt police force, whose officers were gunning down anyone they felt like. I wondered if this girl knew, if she was aware that close to ten thousand people had lost their lives.

Vice had sent me to explain why, despite the killings, the president’s popularity rating had held at an astounding eighty percent. I had set up interviews with people that I found interesting­—­college-age socialists, a radical nun who had been active when the former dictator, Batac, was ousted in the eighties, a community leader whose neighborhood of Mandaluyong had lost many lives. Vice ran it as a centerpiece to an issue on populism. Since then, Gumboc had managed to insult an assortment of people that included the president of the United States and an Australian nun, who had, improbably, inspired his sexual fantasies. As I wrote the article, I felt as if I were inventing things, but it was all verifiable and, when it appeared, fact-checked, as if reality were something that earned its name through verification rather than by just being real. Barreling along the night streets, the taxi wrapped in an aqueous blanket, the driver constantly clearing the tiny porthole through the fogged windscreen amid the thump and screech of the faulty wipers, it was hard to feel that I was in anything but a dream.