The Awkward Resurrection of The Marble-Eyed Marxist

Death, as it turns out, is just another thing Filipinos are too polite to verify properly.¹

My friend calls me one afternoon with news: our mutual acquaintance is dead. Well, he wasn’t exactly my friend—he was my mom’s friend, which is a different category entirely. One of those peculiar fixtures from her monthly luncheons where middle-aged intellectuals would gather to solve the world’s problems over wine and whatever dish my mom felt like cooking that week.²

The luncheons had stopped when my mom’s cancer metastasized and got worse. She didn’t want visitors anymore—wanted to face what was coming on her own terms, with just family. We had half a year to prepare after we found out, which sounds like enough time but never is. Still, she was gone. And with her, that whole world of loud debates and wine-fueled intellectualism just… dissolved. She’d been the glue holding that chaotic crew together, and without her, they scattered, staying in touch in that vague way people do when the center can’t hold.

They’d argue about politics with a ferocity that suggested friendships were ending in real time—voices rising, fingers jabbing the air, wine glasses punctuating points like exclamation marks. You’d think this was it, the final falling out, the dramatic end of a decades-long friendship. But a month later, there they’d all be again. Same table, same arguments, same wine-flushed faces debating the plight of humanity like it was their personal responsibility to fix it.

This particular guy, let’s call him what my mom called him: the Marble-Eyed Marxist. He was unforgettable in all the wrong ways.

His clothes looked like they’d been retrieved from a flood and never quite recovered—fabric that had given up on the concept of freshness sometime in the previous decade. His white hair had apparently declared independence from every comb in existence, standing at angles that defied both gravity and aesthetic sense. And his voice, Christ, his voice always sounded three drinks past coherent even when he was stone sober, like someone doing a bad impression of themselves.

But the marble eye, that was the centerpiece of his whole chaotic aesthetic.

His right eye was actual marble—not a metaphor, not an exaggeration, but literally a marble prosthetic sitting in his eye socket. Courtesy of a military bullet when he was young and stupid and full of Marxist ideals.³

Picture this: young firebrand on his knees, hands behind his head in the universal gesture of surrender, spouting revolutionary rhetoric right up until the moment someone decided he’d been spouting enough. The shot took his eye but somehow missed everything vital, which says something about either his luck or his skull density.

“Hard-headed bastard,” my mom used to say with this mix of exasperation and grudging admiration. “Not even a bullet could shut him up. Just took his eye and somehow made him louder.”

I never particularly liked him, if I’m being honest. He was exhausting in that way some people are—the kind who treat every conversation like a debate stage and every opinion like a hill worth dying on. My mom found him annoying but somehow addictive, the way you can’t stop watching a car accident unfold in slow motion. They’d argue until the neighbors complained, then hug goodbye like comrades who’d just survived battle together.

So when my friend tells me the Marble-Eyed Marxist is dead, my heart does this weird little skip. Not grief, exactly. More like the feeling you get when a long-running TV show finally gets canceled—relief mixed with unexpected nostalgia and the sudden realization that you’ll actually miss the annoying parts.

“Did you go to the funeral?” I ask, because that seems like the appropriate follow-up question when someone tells you about a death.

“Didn’t find out until weeks later,” he says. “Someone mentioned it in passing.”

Weeks later. The information had traveled through the Filipino gossip network at its usual leisurely pace, mutating slightly with each retelling until it arrived at my friend’s ears as established fact.⁴

That night, even though I’m about as religious as a broken rosary and haven’t said a sincere prayer since I was forced to at school, I whisper something into the dark for his journey. It seemed like the decent thing to do for someone who’d survived a bullet to the head only to lose to whatever finally got him—old age, maybe, or his liver finally staging a coup after decades of abuse.

The prayer was brief, awkward, probably theologically questionable. But it felt right, this small gesture for a loud man who’d made my mother’s parties more interesting by being aggressively himself.

---

Two years slide by the way they do when you’re not paying attention—just this blur of commutes and work days and the slow accumulation of minor disappointments that pass for adult life.

I’m standing in line at the electric company, experiencing that special kind of bureaucratic purgatory that makes you question every life choice that led you to this moment. The air conditioning is broken, naturally. Some sad plant in the corner is dying slowly, which feels appropriate. Numbers are being called with the enthusiasm of someone reading a phone book at gunpoint.

I turn around to check how many people are behind me, mentally calculating my suffering timeline, when I nearly shit myself.

There he is. The Marble-Eyed Marxist. Very much alive. Very much loud. Very much calling my name across a crowded government office like we’re long-lost lovers at an airport reunion in a movie nobody asked for.

“Hoy!” His voice cuts through the administrative drone like a rusty knife through butter—jarring, impossible to ignore, vaguely threatening to the general peace.

My brain short-circuits. Does this computation: ghost versus mistaken identity versus my friend being a fucking liar versus the possibility that death in the Philippines is just another bureaucratic process that sometimes gets reversed due to clerical error.⁵

Time does that thing where it simultaneously speeds up and slows down. I’m having three different reactions at once: surprise that he’s alive, relief that I don’t have to feel guilty about not attending a funeral, and immediate regret that I prayed for this man’s soul when his soul was apparently still occupied with buying things at government offices.

Politeness—that great Filipino curse, that cultural straitjacket we all wear—stops me from saying what I’m actually thinking, which is: I thought you were dead, you marble-eyed bastard. I MOURNED you. I whispered PRAYERS. You were DEAD in my head for TWO YEARS.

Instead, I ask how he is, like a civilized human being who hasn’t just encountered their own mistaken assumption wearing a denim jacket.

There he stands, munching on Skyflakes crackers like a man who has never experienced death, imagined or otherwise. Crumbs cascade down his unkempt beard—which has apparently also refused to meet a comb or a trimmer—onto a denim jacket that’s seen better decades. Multiple decades. Possibly seen them from a distance while lying in a flood.

He responds in that half-drunk cadence I remember, asking about my life, my family, my work, while simultaneously spraying cracker fragments like a human confetti cannon. Each word launches a small shower of Skyflakes into the space between us.⁶

The absurdity crystallizes in my mind like ice forming: I am standing in a government office having a conversation with someone I mourned. I am watching him desecrate innocent crackers with his enthusiasm. This is my life now. This has always been my life. This will continue to be my life because the universe has a very specific sense of humor about me.

I manage some appropriate responses– “I’m good,” “Work is fine,” “Yes, the city is still terrible”—while my brain screams static. We chat for maybe five minutes that feel like five hours. He tells me about something political, probably, or economic, definitely, with the passion of someone who still believes talking loudly about problems will fix them.

I don’t ask how he is still alive. I don’t mention the death rumor. I don’t explain that I’ve spent two years casually assuming his non-existence.⁷

We part ways. He goes to pay his bill or argue about his bill or whatever loud thing he came to do. I go back to my line, my number, my slow bureaucratic death.

The encounter haunts me for weeks. Not because it was traumatic, but because it perfectly encapsulates something about my life that I’m only starting to recognize as a pattern.

---

Almost a decade passes. I’ve gotten older, presumably wiser, though evidence for the latter is questionable. The world happens—politics shift, technology advances, everyone gets smartphones and forgets how to make eye contact, the usual march of progress and regress happening simultaneously.

Then the pandemic arrives, and with it, all sorts of unexpected visitors.

One morning, there’s a knock at the gate around 7 AM. Early enough that I’m still in bed, definitely early enough that I haven’t done anything resembling personal hygiene. Not unusual to have visitors—delivery drivers, neighbors, the occasional lost soul looking for an address—but unusual to have them before I’ve even washed my face.

I look out to see something that could only happen in my life: the Marble-Eyed Marxist on a mountain bike, accompanied by what can only be described as his acolyte.

A younger guy, maybe early twenties, who’s apparently decided that following a one-eyed political philosopher around the city on bicycles during a global pandemic is a legitimate life choice.⁸

They want to chat. About politics, probably. About the state of the world, definitely. About why they’re biking around during a pandemic when everyone’s supposed to be locked down, possibly. The rules don’t seem to apply to men who’ve survived bullets to the head—they’ve already negotiated with death once and apparently secured a lifetime exemption from following social norms.

I make coffee because that’s what you do when ghosts come calling, even living ones, even when you’re barely awake and definitely unwashed. We sit outside, properly distanced, while he pulls out a plastic bag of durian.

Now, I love durian. But it’s 7 AM. I haven’t had breakfast. I haven’t had coffee yet. I have barely achieved consciousness. There’s a hierarchy of needs when you first wake up, and durian sits somewhere below caffeine and basic facial hygiene.

I decline politely. He shrugs, eats a piece, and then—I swear to God, I watched this happen—pops a chunk of durian into his coffee. Into the coffee I just made him. Just drops it in there like it’s a normal thing people do, like he’s adding sugar or cream instead of the king of fruits.⁹

Maybe he was trying to flavor it. Maybe he just wanted somewhere to put the durian while he talked. Maybe this is what happens when you survive a bullet to the head—you develop unconventional beverage habits and stop caring about social norms around coffee preparation.

He holds forth on whatever topic his brain has decided is urgent today, the durian bobbing gently in his mug like a small, pungent island. His voice is the same—that distinctive half-drunk cadence that makes every sentence sound like both a question and a declaration. The marble eye catches the light occasionally, a small reminder that this man has survived things that should have killed him.

The acolyte nods along, taking mental notes or perhaps just enjoying the show. I’m doing my usual thing: listening, observing, being present but somehow not quite a participant, all while trying not to stare at the durian floating in what was perfectly good coffee. The cosmic bystander at someone else’s revolution.

Here’s the thing though—he never drank it. Never touched that coffee after dropping the durian in. Just let it sit there throughout the entire conversation, this strange brew of caffeine and tropical fruit going cold in the morning air while he talked about politics or the pandemic or whatever revolution he was planning on his bicycle.

They eventually leave, pedaling off into the pandemic streets like prophets on bicycles, off to spread whatever gospel the Marble-Eyed Marxist is preaching this week. The untouched coffee with its durian cargo sits on the table as evidence that this actually happened, that I didn’t just hallucinate the whole thing in my pre-caffeinated state.

---

As far as I know, he’s still alive.

I hear about sightings from mutual friends occasionally—spotted downtown on his bike, white unkempt hair catching the light, denim jacket flapping in the wind, cycling shorts that have probably never met a washing machine. He’s become a kind of urban cryptid, this one-eyed philosopher on wheels, cruising through the city like he owns it.

I saw him once myself, from a taxi. Pure instinct kicked in—I ducked down in the backseat like I was dodging sniper fire, hiding from a man on a bicycle who probably didn’t even see me. The taxi driver gave me a look like I’d lost my mind, which was fair. But I couldn’t handle another encounter, another resurrection, another conversation where I’d have to pretend I hadn’t mentally buried this man multiple times.¹⁰

Still arguing with anyone who’ll listen, I imagine. Still refusing to die properly, like a bad habit or a catchy song you can’t get out of your head. Still eating Skyflakes with his mouth open, probably. Still sporting that denim jacket like it’s a political statement rather than a crime against laundry. Still dropping durian into perfectly good coffee and not drinking it.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what immortality actually looks like—not graceful eternal youth or vampire elegance, but stubborn persistence in the face of every reason to quit. Marble eyes, unkempt beards, and the absolute refusal to let something as minor as death, imagined or otherwise, stop you from having the last word.

The bastard’s probably going to outlive us all.¹¹

And somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of me who went to his actual funeral, who mourned him properly, who never experienced the profound awkwardness of encountering your own mistaken grief buying crackers in a government office.

But I don’t live in that universe. I live in this one, where death is negotiable, resurrections happen at utility companies, and prophets on mountain bikes show up during pandemics to remind you that assumptions are just another form of fiction we tell ourselves to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense.

This is my life. This has always been my life. The universe keeps casting me as the witness to other people’s improbable continued existence, and I’ve stopped asking why.

At least it makes for good stories.