I’ll begin with a story that my father told me. When I was nine, he brought me to his home town in the Philippines. Tayum is a small village in the northern part of Luzon, the biggest island of the Philippines, a 8- to 10-hour drive north of Manila. Longer with traffic. I sat in a whole day’s worth of traffic when we drove there. It seemed like we never moved. Young boys came to the window selling snacks, little bags of shrimp chips. They were shirtless and tan from peddling in the hot Philippine sun. My father told me this story in the car, he told me this story even before that, and he told me this story after that. Often our memories are not remnants of the experience itself but of the stories we tell and retell.

Two young boys, Gabriel, my father, and Anastacio, his friend, used to play a game when they were children. Gabriel was nine and Anastacio was a bit younger, maybe 7 years old. In the forest behind Gabriel’s house, they would walk a mile out and come across a canal that ran at a shallow angle down a sloped hill. Gabriel and Anastacio would sit on the bank and wait for logs to float down the canal. Once a log came into sight, they would both jump into the water and race to the log. Whoever reached the log first went for a fun little ride downstream. The loser of this game swam behind, grasping for a branch or for the other boy’s ankles, but would often just slap at the surface of the water and return to the bank, hoping for a head start when the next log came floating down the canal. The winner, after riding the log downstream a bit, would then collect himself back onto the shore and run back up the shallow slope. The boys would wait upstream for another log and the game would start again.

As my father tells me this story, I put myself in it, as if I were a child there with him. I was the same age as Gabriel as I watched them one bright Saturday from some distance that wasn’t close enough to talk to them but not far enough to hide. I sat on hardened mud, long grass pressed into the dirt. My father had just taken me there the other day, told me about monkeys that used to live in the trees, pointed out a large water buffalo fifty feet away while I rode on his back. But the animals were gone now. I distracted myself with the sounds of birds and the shapes of leaves high above us. Anyway, I could not swim very well, and even if I could, the boys probably would not invite me to play their game. They probably didn’t even consider it, really. I was afraid that if I asked they would taunt me, so I resigned myself to watching them from a safe distance. I watched as Anastacio just slightly lost his footing on the bank. He stumbled but awkwardly caught his little body with his arms, spindly for his tiny height. It did not faze him and Gabriel didn’t notice.

The boys let out a yell as another log came floating down the canal. They leapt into the canal, not diving but just running onto the water as if they could run across its surface. Water leapt up all around them. The murky brown canal water seemed to rise up in stalks like tall grasses that whipped around in the wind before a storm. Through the stalks, I could just barely see Gabriel pulling ahead.

As Gabriel approached the log, the stalks of water parted and I could see him a bit better. Gabriel slapped the wide log with wide fingers and flat palm, tagged it as he reached it. As it floated downstream, I noticed that it looked a little grey. Gabriel wrapped an arm around it and the log started to rotate, softly dunking Gabriel into the water. Anastacio was still desperately swimming toward Gabriel and the grey log. Even though he lost, he could still bat his little hands at Gabriel to try to fight his way onto the log himself.

Then Gabriel screamed, a high pitched scream not different than any scream he let out when he and Anastacio fought over logs in the river. But Anastacio hadn’t reached him yet. Gabriel let go and, eyes shut and mouth wide and screaming, turned back toward the bank and thrashed as hard as he could, arms like windmills, water splashing and rising like surging tears. Perhaps there was a snake on the log, I thought. My father was always terrified of snakes. As Gabriel screamed and blindly swam toward the bank, Anastacio followed him, turning back, screaming, grimacing. As they neared the bank, I finally saw it: the log revealed a face.

What came floating down the canal was not a log but a corpse, eyes closed and mouth slightly agape. His skin was grayish white with shadows of green and brown and black, as if he were painted on Halloween. He was pruned all over and the small black hairs on his chest stood up in small curls like tiny worms as the body turned again to face down into the water.

The body floated downstream, passing me, as the boys reached land. Mud squished between Gabriel and Anastacio’s fingers and toes as they hurriedly climbed out of the canal and ran through the forest. Eyes still shut and mouths wide open, they screamed and screamed with their hands held out at their sides as if they wanted the rush of wind to clean their arms in the spots where they touched the decaying body and the water it floated in.

I watched them run through the trees and then realized that I was grimacing, but not screaming, both hands slightly sunk into the soft dirt as if I were to vomit but only silence came from my mouth. I did not want to look at it but in the corner of my eye the body was again just a cloddish gray log. It floated downstream, turning and bumping slowly and awkwardly against the opposite bank. As they ran further and further away, the screams of the boys gave way to the soft trickle of water, the chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves, the silence of the little handprints in the mud. The man in the canal floated face down in a stream of his own tears.

Years later, at age 48, little Gabriel, my father, would terrorize us. At age 48, he became a violent man. I don’t think it’s because of what happened at the canal. Who knows why he did such terrible and violent things? It could be because his mind was ill, it could be because his father did the same, it could be because sometimes he was filled with a rage that he was too scared to confront himself. Is it worth it to guess? To give any more thought to this man who did things that no one should ever do, that no one should ever experience? That no one should ever see, no child should ever see? Was Gabriel at age 48 even the same person as the little boy who screamed as he ran away from the body in the canal?