The film had started a half hour earlier, but starting times of movies in Manila were more suggestions of when you might want to take your seat. You watched the film until the end and if it was inspiring enough to make the beginning seem worth your while, you stayed through the trailers and continued on. Sometimes you liked a film so much you stayed to watch it a second time. Once, Chet and I had sat for five and a half hours in the Ali Mall cinema watching A View to a Kill.

All of the Purge films had roughly the same story: people were given carte blanche to kill whomever they wanted for one night a year, which gave those in power the license to rid themselves of undesirables and to use any force or person to realize it. I sat in the theater watching as the body count rose. I could tell by the smell that somewhere close by someone was eating fried chicken, and in the row in front there was a shrieker, a person who managed to be surprised at each new knifing and the resulting volcanic eruptions of blood from the various violated arteries. The movie was awful, but I had to acknowledge that I was having fun. I entertained the idea of screaming in a moment of calm—at the shock of it, as in this moment, when the film’s heroine was adjusting her blouse in the mirror. Finally, amid a communal relief as gratuitous as the previous violence, the film exhausted itself. As Chet and I shuffled out, I waited for him to make the easy joke, that every day was The Purge in Manila, that ten thousand dead and no convictions seemed a number that the world of The Purge could only aspire to. But the film had made Chet strangely pensive. I wanted to make the joke, but Chet gave his head one quick shake as if to warn me off.

“Let’s go to Makati,” he said.

“Why all the way to Makati?”

“I left my cigarettes in the new apartment.”

“Buy some here.”

Chet was texting on his phone, presumably to let Top Gun know to bring the car around. He sent the text and leveled a warning look in my direction. “We’re going to Makati. You are seeing my new apartment. Why are you being so difficult?”

“I’m not being difficult,” I said. “Does everyone in your life do everything you want, no questions asked?”