The opening scene is set beneath the flight path of jets arriving at Manila Airport. In this bleak wasteland there is a factory that produces human skeletons from the bodies of derelicts - and from the victims of police death-squads. In these few precise pages we learn that in this poor anarchy, nothing is forbidden in the struggle for survival, and that the state is as dangerous a criminal as any gangster. The four interwoven threads of the plot involve a burntout English TV journalist, trying to understand a whole society running amok; a cool upper-class archaeologist drawn into the weird oligarchy that rules the Philippines through memories of her diplomat father; a courageous women keeping her disintegrating family together in a squalid shanty-town on the edge of a cemetery where the dead of the gangsters and the politicians have better facilities than the living poor; and a rough, not more than normally corrupt cop who cannot shake the ghosts that he, like all the characters, is visited by. His ghosts, however, demand appeasement with some kind of justice in the present.