It happened on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where every bridge is a checkpoint manned by young men in fatigues. Esmael Mangudadatu, Buluan vice mayor, threatened with violence, sending his wife Genalyn, his sister, his nieces and his lawyers to file his certificate of candidacy because he believed women would be safe. Esmael Mangudadatu, inviting a pack of journalists to cover the event, because he believed his family would be safe where the media were. Esmael Mangudadatu, answering the last phone call from a wife who told him they had been stopped by Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr.’s private army.

Witnesses say they heard the gunshots. “Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat,” says the barefoot man with the face browned by sun. He heard it, at ten in the morning. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat. He says it did not last long.

A road, winding past clapboard carwashes and houses of crosshatched palm, bamboo fences trailing soft pink blossoms. A sky, blue, sweeping over sprawling green. A cliff-side, under a yellow sun. This is where they were found, men and women, Mangudadatu’s caravan of untouchables, bleeding into the dry earth, some still sitting inside the white vans with doors flung open. One by one, the others are dug out of a great gaping pit. Bodies, buried in tiers six deep, bloated huge and white, shirts browned by blood, pants bunched at the knees, faces like mashed clay. They unearth a UNTV van, a red Toyota Vios, a crumpled Tamaraw FX. The investigators offer what dignity they can. Newspapers are laid over faces, over crotches, over dirt-encrusted stomachs swollen to the size of overripe watermelons. Some of the dead once wrote for the papers covering their heads.

The flies flock over the bodies. A young man from UNTV stands over the six new corpses. He is looking for his friends, he says. When he finds them, he steps back and watches a drinking buddy wrapped in sheets of red plastic, secured by masking tape, hauled up on a stretcher. The smell of dead stretches down the hill. A backhoe sits at the bottom, one long arm stamped with “Province of Maguindanao.”

Witnesses say they saw armed men, more than 50, walking down the hill, off to the direction of Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao’s provincial capital—where the sprawling peach-and-pink mansions of Andal Ampatuan Sr. and his son Andal Jr. face each other on a street littered with soldiers, on the same street of the enormous peach-and-pink capitol building. It was the capitol where Presidential Adviser for Mindanao Jesus Dureza landed his two helicopters to pick up Andal Jr., the same Dureza who waited for Andal Jr. to “voluntarily come in for questioning.” Of the Ampatuans, Presidential Spokesperson Lorelei Fajardo says that “just because they’re in this situation doesn’t mean we will turn our backs on them,” as if this government has ever had any compunction about turning its back on allies. This is what an “appalled and outraged” president does when the last democratic institution is gunned down on a public road: she offers government helicopters and permits a suspect to ride a private plane, allows evidence to disappear while suspects twirl their guns, lets her executive secretary appeal to suspected murderers to “surrender to authorities” instead of insisting they be ripped out of their holes, and then she expects the nation to applaud her like her moronic deputies.

Fifty-seven (according to the Armed Forces of the Philippines) were murdered last Monday. Thirty of them belonged to the media, 30 men and women whose presence in this benighted country has become the one assurance that the worst will not happen. No guns will be drawn while a camera rolls, but even that safety is gone. Not once in the history of journalism has carnage like this happened to so many. There are no more rules, no lines left to cross. The government would like to give Andal Jr. his dignity, they want to make sure he is treated fairly, they trip over their own tangled lies for his sake. And yet there was no dignity left in the men and women found bloated and half-naked in Sitio Masalay, stripped of notebook and camera and wallet, stripped of face and name, until some unfortunate daughter recognizes Papa’s shirt or Mama’s pants.

Remember their names. Benjie Adolfo, Gold Star Daily. Henry Araneta, Radio dzRH. Mark Gilbert “Mac-Mac” Arriola, UNTV. Rubello Bataluna, Gold Star Daily. Arturo Betia, Periodico Ini. Romeo Jimmy Cabillo, Midland Review. Marites Cablitas, News Focus. Hannibal Cachuela, Punto News. John Caniban, Periodico Ini. Lea Dalmacio, Socsargen News. Noel Decina, Periodico Ini. Gina Dela Cruz, Saksi News, General Santos City. Eugene Dohillo, UNTV. Jhoy Duhay, Gold Star Daily. Santos Gatchalian, dxGO. Bienvenido Legarte Jr., Prontiera News. Lindo Lupogan, Mindanao Daily Gazette. Ernesto “Bart” Maravilla, Bombo Radyo. Rey Merisco, Periodico Ini, Koronadal City. Reynaldo “Bebot” Momay, Midland Review. Marife “Neneng” Montaño, Saksi News. Rosell Morales, News Focus. Victor Nuñez, UNTV. Ronnie Perante, Gold Star Daily. Joel Parcon, Prontiera News. Fernando “Rani” Razon, Periodico Ini. Alejandro “Bong” Reblando, Manila Bulletin. Napoleon Salaysay, Mindanao Gazette. Ian Subang, Socsargen Today. Andres “Andy” Teodoro, Central Mindanao Inquirer.

There were threats against the media in the days after the massacre. But on the day they ripped swollen bodies out of Ampatuan soil, there were photojournalists lining the crest of the cliff like an honor guard, long lenses glinting in the sun. There was a cameraman who stepped away from a tripod to wipe away tears, a veteran in an orange hat with an arm around an orphan. It was both tribute and promise.

This is what the men who fired those machine guns last Monday did not know: that there is no journalist today who will not stand for those who were lost. Remember what happened here, on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where a blue sky sweeps over sprawling green. Remember Ampatuan, and remember their names.

Walk down the makeshift wooden walkway—another offering of Mayor Eusebio, claims the announcement drawn in great bold letters draped across the stiles—past the half-submerged man selling oranges at P18 a kilo, past waterlogged lots studded with “No Trespassing” signs, past the piles of fat shiny buns in the glass cases of BGE Baking Supply. The water rises to just the knee, and to the right, on higher ground, there are only puddles of muck on the ground. This is where 29-year-old Danson Desales lives, in a small box on the third floor of a skinny cement building, with five children and his wife Raquel. It is the perch from where he watched as the flood surged over his tricycle.

Danson grew up in Pasig. He had never finished school. His father was a tricycle driver. Danson drove a tricycle for as long as he could remember. When the storm decommissioned his vehicle, he pushed a plywood boat instead. And on a cold October night barely a week after the storm, he watched a midwife attempt to birth his wife on the one mattress spread over the linoleum patchwork floor. Raquel pushed, the midwife pushed Raquel, and in half an hour the midwife gave up and told Danson to take his wife to the hospital. So there they were, on a boat to the Pineda hospital: the restless man with the jittering eyes, the woman clammy-skinned and panting. When she stepped out of the boat, her water broke and gushed down her thighs. Danson carried her to the emergency room. A doctor told him to buy medication. It was another half hour when he returned, and found his moaning wife outside the emergency room. They told her they couldn’t treat her. Danson had no money.

It was a tricycle that saved them. Danson had a hundred he had borrowed from a friend. He hailed a tricycle, and the driver took them to a small birth clinic, a lying-in. It was Raquel’s mother who paid, because Danson had nothing left, it is Danson who says he will pay for it soon, because Raquel is his.

Danson laughs often, while his small boy kept returning for hugs and head pats from his Papa. Danson used to make P150 a day from the tricycle, free and clear. He pays P150 as boundary to the owner and a couple of hundreds for gas. He’d wake up to fix breakfast if there was breakfast to fix, which was usually not the case. He has been in and out of jail for robbery and drug trafficking, he does not regret it, he says his family needed the money. He may do it again. But today, Danson crouches by the side of the road, tattoos gleaming with sweat, carefully rubbing the spokes and corners of his dented green tricycle. It had just completed repairs; it is the first day he will take it on the road. He hopes the weather will hold, and he laughs when the engine roars. Nearly 2,000 tricycle drivers from Pinagbuhatan plied Pasig’s streets before the storm. Only a few have managed to preserve their vehicles.

Many have died here, he says. He doesn’t know what happened, only that the water smells like garbage, and those with exposed wounds died in pain. Many weren’t as lucky as he was, those carted to schools away from homes deep in yellowing water, those dependent on relief efforts and aid. He laughs. Wherever there are relief efforts, he says with a decisive jerk of his chin, Danson Desales will be there too.

On Christmas, Danson says, on Christmas they will still be deep in water. It is how it is in Pinagbuhatan, Pasig, where small boys scrub their front steps with water from the street, and every family is ready to move their lives to second floors. In the dying light of an October afternoon, three weeks after the storm, Danson drives off to take his chances, splashing water as he negotiates the flooded main road, past the house of the young woman who had pushed boats for a living when her husband lost their tricycle, past the makeshift platform by the side of the road where glass cases display secondhand cell phones and an enterprising young man offers mobile phone repair, past another tricycle chugging its slow way through the five inches of water, trailing a blooming bouquet of shiny red balloons.

I met him by accident, in a bar. There was music playing. The walls were green. It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There were laughing writers in long orange skirts and ponytailed old men sneaking sips from silver flasks of whiskey they snuck out of their pockets.

I remember being half-drunk, of weaving around tables on the way to the bathroom, of discovering my table empty of the boy I had decided I was in love with (I decide I am in love quite often).

And so I sat alone and closed my eyes and when I opened them again, there was a boy sitting across from me, a boy with a Jewish nose and Japanese eyes, who smiled and shook my hand and behaved as if there was nothing particularly odd about sipping iced tea talking to strange girls about the state of Philippine cinema. I don’t remember what he said, or what I said, or if I said anything at all. I did not remember his name the next morning, only that I was glad to have someone there.

Two years later, I had a phone call from my Rogue magazine editor, who told me my column’s layout was done, that I should call Alexis Tioseco, and I understood this as I should call an Alexis Tioseco about my column’s layout. And so I called Alexis, and he explained, very kindly, that he was not in fact a layout artist, that he was a columnist himself, and that he had written the article a page after mine.

I remember him reassuring me that I was not in fact an idiot, that he would be happy to meet me anyway even if he wasn’t a layout artist, and then he asked me to coffee because I was a writer and he was a writer and that he suspected we had very much we could talk about. It was only when I met him two days later that I remembered a boy with Japanese eyes who talked about film at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.

He had brought a book to the coffee shop – John Berger, I think – and he read aloud from it, right there, at the center table of a Starbucks in Tomas Morato where young girls in short skirts and flip flops giggled over photos in their mobile phones, and clumps of television producers rambled about ratings and the Kim Chiu-Gerald Anderson onscreen tandem.

He read and read, an entire chapter’s worth, and I suspect he would have read on to the very end if the coffee shop hadn’t closed. He wasn’t that good a reader, was Alexis, spoke in a monotone and would begin from the beginning whenever he made mistakes and all I wanted was to eat my Oreo cheesecake.

And this line, he said, listen to this line. And he read it out loud, and I felt that quick ripple of jealousy a writer gets when they recognize a perfectly-written sentence they know they can never write themselves.

He lived five minutes away, and he couldn’t cook and I never would and so we wasted money on risottos and panna cottas and chili burgers, trawled the length of Morato for new restaurants, and we would argue and he would read and I would pretend to listen and once in a while there would be that one glowing sentence that I would write down.

I’ll tell you what I remember about Alexis. I did not know him best, or longest, only that I knew him, and cannot believe that he is gone. We agreed on very few things – that the only real pizzas were cheese pizzas, that there is such a thing as true love, and that Everyman Library published the best hardbound books.

He was a film critic who refused to write about “Juno” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” who waxed poetic about Lav Diaz and Raya Martin, who had the greatest faith that if he pushed hard enough and wrote strongly enough, the public would rise in a body and applaud the work of Ishmael Bernal and Mike de Leon.

He believed that independence in cinema was not measured only by who spent the money. He believed the Viva Hot Babes could not act, and could never be convinced otherwise. He believed in relationships, in replying to messages and keeping promises, and was the sort who pulled out battered copies of much-loved books out of his bag as Christmas presents.

I remember one night, near midnight, when I found myself locked out of my apartment. I called Alexis, and did not have to beg when he offered his couch. I spent the night in front of his television. He put on some obscure film and I smiled in halfhearted appreciation five minutes before I fell asleep. I woke up to see him sitting across me, watching expectantly, and grinning when he saw I was awake.

Then he put on another film – he said this was something he felt I would enjoy – and I promptly fell asleep. And he did it again, three more times that night, film after film. He never gave up even when I said I was a plebian who had great love for “Jerry Maguire.”

That was who Alexis was. He would speak to six students with just as much passion as in a television show with a national audience. And then he would speak of his other love: about Nika, the girl he fell in love with in Slovenia. She was coming to Manila, he said, she was going to live here, for him, because he couldn’t leave. He said she was beautiful and intelligent and that she was the one girl in the world for him. I saw him less when she came, but I saw him happiest too.

I write this to share what I know of him, of this boy with the Jewish nose and Japanese eyes and the great love for moving pictures, the same way every writer and filmmaker who knew him is doing now, because I don’t want all that he was stolen away. I know that he was funny and kind, that Nika was bright and brave. There was only one sentence in his yearbook: Alexis Tioseco wishes to leave the world a better place than it was before he came. I know that I will miss them, that the world will miss them, and that even if the world is a better place for their having lived in it, it is a sadder, lonelier place now that they are gone.

This was the last time I saw them, two weeks ago. I needed a film, in a hurry, for a show I was producing. Alexis had picked up the films for me. It was 11 at night. Five minutes, he messaged me. And I went down to the street and Nika opened the car door and stepped out in jeans and glasses and both of them laughing at the sight I must have made, standing in the middle of the street rumpled and unshowered. Sleep, Nika said. I want copies of those, Alexis said. And then she went back into the car and grinned at Alexis and he grinned back at her and they waved goodbye and now I have copies of those films and I don’t know what to do because Alexis is dead and Nika is gone and I do not understand why.