Tomb of the less known soldier

"What do you think happens when we die, Joseph*?" I asked my guide as he rose from his haunches. A bead of sweat ran from my temple down my cheek. Comparatively cool, I declined to wipe it away.
"I believe nothing," he said, putting his Mao cap back on his head. "I believe we go back to the ground."

We had taken a jeepney and a tricycle and walked through the heat to the cemetery. It was a festival of life amid the grounds of death. The top forty tunes played by the cemetery DJ swallowed our words into a sea of back beats and sex-filled lyrics. What was this holiday? Who were these people? I knew one at least, Joseph. I liked him as soon as I saw him and I'd grown to believe in the things he said. Closed-shop, militant unions, necessary violence. But here, sweating on an unmarked grave admidst a carnival of rememberance reality flitted like newspaper in the wind- at the proper angle its only two-dimmensional.

"There are worse fates, I guess," I said, wanting to hold his hand, wanting to nap, wanting to be in the middle of an ice cold shower. Wanting anything than to be staring at the place where a man's name had been but now wasn't, at the ground where a man was buried but wouldn't be for much longer. The man had been a soldier in the New People's Army and had been shot in the back when he was 23-years-old. His parents couldn't pay on the gravesite anymore, so the cemetery was going to dig him up and dump him in a mass grave. The marker was already removed. The stone had been rolled away.

"Let's go eat fried chicken," Joseph said. He could have suggested we strip naked and run through the street. I would have gone, anwhere but here. On this Day of the Dead, families ate the favorite meals of their late loved ones. The soldier had liked fried chicken.

I peeled the skin off the meat and dropped it to the floor for the benefit of the cat sitting under the table. "It's good," I said, feeling a little gross about the grease on my hands, but loving the chicken anyway. Joseph ordered a liter of coke to go with the meal. This was a holiday after all.

"I believe in universal salvation," I told Joseph, wiping my fingers on the napkin square alloted to our table. "I believe we're all resurrected when Christ returns."

"That's a nice thought," he laughed, not being cruel. He sipped his coke and looked at me square. "I don't think I believe in God."

I shrugged and drank from my plastic cup. Having boycotted this crap for such a long time, I've grown to secretly covet it. It's quite expensive here, so I could not refuse Joseph's generous gift. Sometimes formalities are so convenient.

"It is a nice thought, except it means we'll all have to face each other for eternity. It means we'll have to see the people who hurt the most and we'll have to live with the people we hated," I said. There was one last mouthful at the bottom of the glass. I nursed the cup for a while, savoring the sweetness to come.

Joseph had told me earlier the only time he'd been in the hospital was when he'd been shot. Had it been in the same attack that killed his friend? Was Joseph a member of the NPA, too? I didn't ask. I didn't want to know, for the sake of never having to hide such a secret. Across the table he became a different man, he looked 23 and terrified, like me. He knew nothing about defeat but he did know desperation and poverty. And then someone gave him a gun. Or did he buy it for himself? And he ran into the jungle and never returned. And I found myself lost in there with him, imagining a life of such brutal honesty, of a time when I could think that sacrifices must be made. But those sacrifices always seem to be other people, other people's children. Unless you're shot in the back when you're 23; unless they can't even afford a grave for you and you're dug up and tossed out with the garbage.

"You're a strange kind of missionary," Joseph smiled and offered me more coke. I shook my head and took the last sip. It tasted like candy, but my mouth went dry.

"Don't I know it," I said.

*name changed