The President of the Philippines and I begin our jobs on the same day. I sit in a glass room getting oriented by my supervisor, while everyone outside watches his inauguration ceremony on a wall of flat-screen TVs.
His shoulders stretch from corner to corner in the gleaming office. Before this, he was a mayor, and had swept a city in the south clean of crime.
“They say that my methods are unorthodox,” he says, “and verge on the illegal.” The voters liked that he knew how to aim a gun, and that he had peppered his campaign trail with curse words the other well-trimmed candidates paled at.
He promises, just as I scratch my signature onto my contract, to kill every last drug dealer in the country.
“You certainly chose the right year to get into journalism,” says my supervisor.
On my first-ever shift, a head writer tells me to make a title card; ten minutes after I email back “OK,” she yells across the room to hurry up. On another shift, I finish all my tasks early in the afternoon and exit the office in triumph; on the drive home, my phone jolts with messages from my supervisor asking where I am, and I learn of the concept of working hours.
I lose files. I miss lunches. A coworker finds me in the kitchen, hiding from emails. “You’ll get used to it,” she smiles. They knew what would happen when they hired someone whose college diploma was barely three weeks old.
Bumpily, I do. My job, I learn after the initial panic, is to put an image to the news: a marker on a map, a chart tangled with arrows, sometimes even a political cartoon. The Opinions section boasts the most flamboyant visual metaphors about economic policy and the most unflattering caricatures. I get alarmingly good at drawing politicians.
The easier work is photos. At the end of each day, the photographers come in, smudged with the city’s dirt, and send me hundreds of images from their beats. A grand opening at the mall. A protest on campus. A religious procession through the streets. A garbage-clogged canal. I dredge for the best shots, stamp them with the company logo, and upload them into our database for use in relevant stories.
I learn to tell time by inbox. Mornings are stories from America; afternoons are arguments in Congress; evenings are actresses spotted in bars. I hurl myself into the nonstop churn of the company. I realize one day that my job is easy. I get to sort the world into neat rows, label it, and file it away.
The first dead body arrives in my inbox on a damp July evening. Sprawled across a sidewalk, spotlighted by the camera’s hard flash, its head is wrapped, mummy-like, in packing tape, and on its chest is a piece of cardboard with black script that reads, “I AM A DRUG PUSHER.”
The photographer had come across the man, encircled by hushed locals. It’s been a few weeks since the President was sworn in, and a few days since he gave the police license to shoot and kill anyone they suspect of drug possession. No warrants or trials. The message on the cardboard is enough.
The dead man is sent to me from multiple angles: from above, zoomed in, distant and small on the dark street. The photographer had hovered around him like a bird. I ask my supervisor, “What do I do with this?”
He motions at my screen. “You do your job.”
This man, we name “cardboardkilling072016.” But we come up with something less sensationalist, and quicker to type, as more of them surface over the following evenings: “ejk” for “extrajudicial killing.” Sometimes the tape binds the arms and feet. Sometimes the words on the board change. I sort them into a folder with the date. Soon each day of the week is accounted for.
The President prefers to hold his press conferences at one in the morning, so we all sit awake with him. I learn how to subtitle rants that drone on without punctuation. Closed-mouthed screenshots are better than open. My folders grow subfolders when more than one body is found in a day. Seven months in, there are over seven thousand deaths.
Eventually the bodies don’t even need tape over their faces or scraps of cardboard justifying their presence. They lie across main roads, which makes wide-angle shots easier. In the midst of me sorting through an album of bodies, the company’s CEO emails me their own professional headshot and asks me to edit the wrinkles out of their neck. I get it all done.
Another killing in the night. A rival paper splashes their front page with the victim, enfolded in the arms of his grieving wife on the hard cement. The internet compares it to La Pietà. The New York Times reprints it and the world turns its heavy, massive head in interest. My office is upset we didn’t get the shot.
The deaths join the restless grind of everything else: the basketball scores, the mergers, the beauty pageants. We keep a stock folder of killings for when another commentary on the regime is published and needs an image. It helps when relatives inform me that what I do is hard. It helps more when they tell me that what I do is important. I feel proud when I work a holiday.
My supervisor grants me a reprieve and lets me cover Entertainment for an evening. The team— the Entertainment Editor, a writer, and me—stations itself in a coffee shop near an annual celebrity gala. The photographer captures stars as they arrive on the red carpet, then sprints across the roaring road and into the cafe to breathlessly hand me her SD card.
I load the photos like I always do, but suddenly I don’t know how to sort or name them. They all look equally beautiful.
The editor pounds at her keyboard. “Our numbers are dropping very fast. Where are the photos?” I label some with today’s date and zip them over. She gnaws on her fingernail. “This is a mess. We need a Best Dressed list up in ten minutes. There goes our SEO.” She spins her screen and points at a tiny thumbnailed actress. “Who is this?”
My hands falter over my laptop. “I don’t know.”
“You can’t just tell me you don’t know,” she shrieks at me and the entire café. “Do your job!”
I steal a look at another network’s feed and unearth her name. Dawn Zulueta, model and actress, wife of a politician—I will never forget you as long as I live.
The articles on the celebrity gala are a booming click-rate success. The next morning, I ask to be put back on deaths coverage.
My shift ends one evening with a dark, warm downpour. I say goodnight to my supervisor—who grunts at his screen—and pass the photographer on his way in, his plastic coat heavy, his precious camera protected under his dripping hood.
I book a ride, but everything outside is drenched. Five strides from the building to the car door are enough to leave me pelted with rain.
“You work here?” asks the driver as I squelch into the passenger’s seat.
“Yes,” I fumble the seatbelt into the buckle. I usually lie, but this time, booking the ride right outside my office with its glaring, righteous logo has me caught red-handed.
“A journalist,” he hums. “People don’t like you very much.”
I show off my practiced sheepish smile. My safeguards are already in place: I have a prepared list of subjects to veer toward with rideshare drivers, and my drop-off point is a train station some streets from home. “Do you drive full-time?”
He pulls into the main road. “You say such bad things about our President.”
“When did you start working today?”
“Why? He’s just doing his job.”
Red and yellow lights tightly bead the highway and melt onto the windshield. I pinch a part of my damp trousers away from my skin. “Me too.”
“He keeps us safe.” The car shrugs forward. “He only kills criminals. If you’re not a criminal, you have nothing to be afraid of.”
“We don’t know they’re criminals.” I try again, staring ahead, “Have you been watching basketball?”
“They are. That’s why they’re dead.”
“But don’t you think they deserve a trial, a chance?”
He smacks his palm on the dashboard. “Their victims didn’t get a chance.” His voice overwhelms the murmuring radio and even the rain. The car sits at the center of a stretch of traffic. “If you take drugs,” he recites, nodding his head, “if all you do is steal and hurt people—you deserve to die. Do you agree?”
I watch his belongings rattle with the engine: the rosary dangling from his mirror, the coins in his cup holder. “I don’t really…”
“It’s true,” he turns from the road and looks at me, grinning. “Dangerous people should die. Don’t you want to be safe?”
I cross my feet, cold in my socks, and fold my hands together. I count the miles to home.
“Say it with me!” he leans over in the dark, and grips the sides of his steering wheel like a neck. “They—deserve—to die!”
The rain drums over us. The lights along the highway surge and burn together like licks of fire. “They deserve to die,” I say, just above a breath.
“See?” he’s giddy as he finds an opening and glides down an empty, slippery lane. “You agree with me!”
I alight at the train station an hour later. And then I walk, uncovered, home. I enter through the darkened kitchen, where my family has left a cold plate of dinner on the table and my dog trots in, ears pricked. Without changing out of my clothes, I sit down and switch on the TV. Blue light flickers over the room. It’s the news.
I sit there, not eating. My dog sniffs and laps at my wet shoes. I sit, watching the screen as my clothes drip, clinging to my skin until it begins to itch, until it begins to burn.