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  “Turn that off, please,” I said.

  “Don’t be such a fucking prude. Why don’t you come and sit here next to me.”

  “At least let me turn it down.”

  “Why? What’s there to hide? You remind me of a girl I had in Yale. The poor thing was shocked when she came to my room for the first time and saw a Sports Illustrated calendar on my wall and my Playboy subscription. As if it were a big deal, for Christ’s sake. She said it turned women into objects. We didn’t last ten days after that.”

  On the screen I could see a man lying back on a sofa and a woman dressed only in high-heeled boots jiggling around him.

  “Her name is Tory Lane and she’s one of the nastiest bitches. You can’t imagine the things I’ve seen her do; once she let them tie her to a cross and penetrate her with a lit candle.”

  I grabbed the control and turned the television off.

  “Some other time this just might be fun, but not now.”

  “You’re more naive than I thought, peanut.”

  I sat down beside him. On this same bed: him, me, a few years ago. Days I thought were foretelling a new period of happiness and growth in my life. It takes talent to make that big of a mistake, and youthful naiveté that I hadn’t lost yet, despite all the discouragement.

  He lit a cigarette and set off the smoke alarm. We had to open windows and air the place out.

  Fabián started humming a Dylan song.

  “Last night I saw myself sitting in a chair beside me,” he said suddenly. “I got bigger and then I shrank as if I were made out of sponge. At first I thought I had overdone it with the uppers, but no, it was all me. I wanted to get up and shake my hand but I couldn’t. I felt inebriated but I hadn’t drunk anything, so I said it would be good to drink something so that my body would feel the same way again, it would balance out. I tried to remember my name, but I couldn’t and that scared me, but I remembered other things, like the old watch I had left to be repaired and forgot to pick up a long time ago, when Mayra was still living with me.”

  “What am I going to do?” he said, and I realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question: there was real anguish in his expression. “Seriously, what?”

  “You’re going to get better. I’m going to help.”

  “I can ask for a year off and we can go anyplace where there’s a beach. I would love to go to Mar del Plata; my parents used to bring me there when I was a kid. You can draw, and I’ll watch movies.”

  “You’ll write your book, this time seriously. Go on now, get into bed. I’m feeling so generous tonight that I’ll even let you have the whole bed to yourself.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  He opened the closet and took out a tiny plastic bag. He cut a few lines on the cover of an anthology of new Latin American literature that was on the desk. I sat on the bed, left him to it while I tried to gather my strength. The shadows of the objects in his room seemed to be swelling threateningly.

  “Want some? My dealer showed up today, I couldn’t say no. It’s the good shit at the good price.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It’s either that shit or me,” I said, staring at him.

  “You’re out of your mind. Come on, join me.”

  “I said I’m done. If you want my help . . .”

  “If you put it that way then, sweetheart, it would be best if you left me alone.”

  I immediately stood up and walked out. I could hear his insults as I walked down the stairs.

  “Cobarde, go on, just leave. Don’t bother coming back till you learn how to fuck, silly bitch.”

  Once I was on the street, I breathed in the chilly night air and hopped on my bike.

  I had to concentrate on my illustrations. On my stories.

  He never really loved me. The sooner I accept it, the less time it will take for me to get over him.

  And yet.

  Three blocks later I stopped. Did I know what I was doing?

  It didn’t matter. I wanted to go back to Fabián’s house.

  Fabián went back to Buenos Aires three days before Christmas. I went to Houston. I returned to Landslide the day after Christmas. The restaurant paid a bonus for working during the holiday season, and I needed the money.

  The nausea first came a little while after that. I would throw up for no reason at all.

  It took me a week to figure out what was happening.

  2

  Ciudad Juárez, Villa Ahumada, 1994

  He’d gone to prison with a slight limp, and it had become more pronounced. Jesús let his hair grow long and a downy mustache had sprouted too, so when he arrived in Juárez wearing grimy, worn-out clothes—dingy coffee-colored boots and a pair of skin-tight jeans he’d been given in a Goodwill store in El Paso—he didn’t expect anyone to recognize him. Yet his face and body type were still perfectly identifiable.

  Miguel was the only one in the body shop left from back in the day, before he’d gotten lost on the other side. He greeted Jesús warmly and took him to a cantina where a blind fiddler was playing a bolero composed by Agustín Lara to an absent audience. In La Querida—where a sign on the mirror read: “I’ll trust you tomorrow”—they drank sotol and caught up. He told Jesús that Braulio’s headless body had been discovered one morning in a field. The body hadn’t been easy to identify.

  “Qué cabrón. They say it was a payback hit. Messed up with the cartel. The city’s getting more dangerous all the time. Worst thing is the dead ladies they keep finding. Cops say they ain’t no clues, bro. Say it’s some satanic cult. Like some foreigner’s doing it or something.”

  “Yeah, gotta be a seven-foot-tall albino dude or something. Didn’t they say the Subcomandante was a foreigner too? On account of them blue eyes and shit.”

  “Guess so. Gotta be more than one dude, though. Nobody can razor up fifty women that way on his own, güey.”

  The fiddler stopped playing and approached them, extending his hat for some coins. They ignored him.

  Jesús rented a room on Guerrero Street. Tony’s Burritos (made with watered-down mole) was a block away, in front of Borunda Park, where a rusty Ferris wheel went round and round, squeaking at the hinges. Worms with long coiling tongues and bulging eyes adorned the seats. The bumper cars spat showers of sparks, as if demon drivers were pushing them from behind. The twirling teacups spun so quickly the faces of the people inside looked deformed. Children shot plastic ducks with BB guns, fished in basins that were painted to look like ponds, threw rings at glass bottles.

  Jesús liked to ride one of the wooden merry-go-round horses, the bright yellow one with a broken ear. It made him feel like he was suspended in the air, hanging on to the metal pole that skewered the little horse like a pin so it wouldn’t get away. The tinkling sound of the music helped liberate his mind, let it wander. From time to time he’d come across a tight bitch and consider stalking her till he could jump her from behind on an empty street and fuck her brains out and gut her with a knife. But then he talked some sense to himself: better not get into trouble, carajo, just chill out.

  While spinning round and round on the carousel, he thought about what had happened to Braulio, which neither surprised nor hurt him. Fate had its own way of dealing with things; better to let it work itself out. The hardest part, the crucial thing, was finding the voice of fate and listening to it.

  Starke belonged to his past now, but what was in store for his future? What to do?

  One afternoon he saw the Unnamed sitting on the horse next to his. There were no eyes in the creature’s skull-like face, and its mouth was frozen in an expression of perpetual terror, ready to howl in the presence of something much more sinister than itself.

  Jesús wanted to jump down but couldn’t. Ants with huge pincers for jaws were pouring out of the yellow horse’s mutilated ear. He hid his hands behind his back, afraid the ants were going to bite him.

  The Unnamed got off the horse
and walked in front of him, transformed into the figure of a man with a hat and a handlebar mustache. He felt someone tap him on the back. It was María Luisa.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Sir, would you please dismount? The ride is over.”

  It was the woman who operated the merry-go-round.

  Jesús hopped down and apologized.

  Jesús knew enough to avoid being caught up in the city’s new surge of random violence. He had nothing to do with the cartel, but feared someone might remember his prior connections to Braulio.

  Miguel put him in touch with a guy who dealt in stolen cars on the other side of the border. It’d be a snap, he still understood their language. He’d make Juárez his center of operations, though he’d try to spend as little time there as possible.

  At first he concentrated his efforts on El Paso, staying as close as possible to Juárez. But after an arrest and a brutal process of interrogation, he realized it would be better to distance himself from the border area. He avoided crossing the line at the same stations; he wasn’t protected the way he used to be.

  Soon, without even meaning to, he gravitated back to jumping freight trains. He came and went, came and went, as if the border held no secrets.

  He spent a few months in the Kentucky tobacco fields, and worked another month in San Diego for a company that supplied Porta-Potties for stadiums, parks, and highways under construction. His job was to clean out the latrines, which made him vomit constantly. Fucking shit job, he’d say under his breath, happy with his double entendre. What got into people in these shitcans? he asked himself. So clean in their own homes and so disgusting in public.

  He reported to different parks or streets around the city at dawn, the sites where people went to find illegal workers for underpaid labor. Compañeros would confide their stories to him, their rabid fear of the Migra, how much they hated the coyotes who brought them across and kept their savings, their belongings. One person had spent thirty hours in a fruit crate. Another crossed at Tecate through a hole in a metal curtain and had to wade across sewer canals full of shit. Another snuck through the cyclone fence in Tijuana, then followed the coyote to a van parked on the side of the road, with the Migra flies in hot pursuit the whole way. After they dropped him off, he had to hightail it across a freeway. One Salvadoran crossed in Tijuana on a moonless night through snake- and rat-infested brush, climbing into the hills till he found the bridge where a pickup truck with a camper shell was waiting. A skinny white man hid under a train, crouched in the corner for ten hours, praying he wouldn’t fall and be sliced into bits. A woman with trembling hands had been detained by the Migra and deported twice, then raped by the coyote. She finally made it on her third try. A Oaxacan man had crossed in a van with no seats, squished in a nook in the back. The dogs came sniffing, but he prayed hard and they left him alone. A Colombian got lost in the desert with his wife and watched her die of thirst before the coyote showed up and saved him. Another who crossed the wilderness was spared by a well that had a puddle of stinking mosquito-infested water near a cave with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “That’s bullshit, cabrón,” the fat man next to him exclaimed. “I might buy the well story, but no Virgin.”

  “I swear on my old lady, who’ll get crippled if I’m lying, buey.”

  “Well, now she is.”

  “What about you, hermano?” they asked. But Jesús kept his mouth shut. He had stories to tell that were a hell of a lot more interesting than theirs, but they had nothing to do with crossing the border. If anything, he identified more with the coyotes, who went back and forth across the line like it was the most natural thing in the world. He was like them, not this pack of imbéciles who had no clue what real life on the border was like, they’d all been swindled and were lucky to have survived. It’s about having guts, not being scared. Fear makes people smell differently, and the Migra hijos de puta knew it.

  Jesús found work as an electrician, a gardener, a bricklayer. He hated doing grunt work for the gringos. It wasn’t fair that he only had twenty bucks in his pocket after a full day’s work. He shot it on booze and bad coke and stayed in homeless shelters for food and lodging. They were run by different religious organizations, the Salvation Army, or other human rights groups. He grew accustomed to a diet of lentil soup and fried chicken. At night he stretched out on camping cots; he was a light sleeper, restless, there was always noise in the background of men masturbating or fucking each other when the lights went out. There were blacks, whites, Latinos. Every once in a while someone tried to have their way with him, lured by his baby face and slight build. He’d have to sneak out and sleep in an alley on pieces of cardboard. A few times he had to negotiate being left alone by masturbating black guys; one time a big, beefy dude raped him repeatedly, and Jesús denied that the pain also gave him pleasure.

  “No no no no NO. don’t get noplace with pasience of saints. ebryone has to DIE. what you think animals don’t know who you fucking with. who you think you are. can’t do nothin to me, want to destroy but can’t do nothing. i am the ANGEL OF REVENGE. One day only me left on earth. the imortal one is me. animals, all animals. KILL THEM ALL.”

  Occasionally he would sit on a bench next to a lilac tree in Borunda Park and write down sentences in his notebook like “my hart is shatterd” and “pane melts in my insides” and “the steel man find him the kriptonite, it melt him, him it melts” and “i mark of my chest and point and shoot the bulitt to the middle of the unicorn.”

  The pages of the notebook were filling up. How many times had he begun so carefully, with precise sentences, before his rage took hold of him and everything became a monologue with no punctuation or accent marks? Yet another notebook for the growing pile of, how many were there now, nine or ten? Each one was dedicated to María Luisa, who didn’t deserve them.

  When there were no more blank pages left he quit writing, his hand stiff and cramped. He hid the notebooks in secret places around Juárez, scattered like clues that when unearthed would chart the process of his breakdown. He hid the first one on a shelf in the Municipal Library, tucked between copies of Porrúa’s “Sepan Cuántos” collection of classic literature (Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician by Stefan Zweig and El fistol del Diablo by Manuel Payno). Another was in Miguel’s basement, concealed by photo albums that nobody ever consulted. A third had been placed in a metal box and buried in a hole he’d dug with his foot at the bottom of an acacia tree near the climbing path to Monte de Piedad. What to do with this new one?

  The collection of notebooks constituted his Book of Revelations. He couldn’t explain how, but the time always came in the writing when visions appeared of burning towns, forests engulfed in flames and smoke, children drowning in storms and floods, horses dying, women in epileptic seizures, retarded children, and rivers of blood. Everything was covered in ashes, as he imagined the world after the end. Then came the incarnation of a prophet with long black hair who shepherded the sole survivors to a promised land. He was the Unnamed.

  When he was so broke that he couldn’t drink or buy coke, his cheeks would flush and his body shake so much that at times he couldn’t hold anything in his hands. His mouth got dry and cottony. Anything—dog crap, a headless chicken at the butcher—would make him nauseated and sweaty. He missed the doctor at Starke, who used to give him tranquilizers. The pharmacies on the other side wouldn’t give him anything without a prescription, and in Juárez the generic drugs weren’t cheap and didn’t last very long (at one point he was popping five alprazolams a night), so he preferred doing lines of coke instead.

  Jesús had a hard time sleeping at night. He would dream with his eyes open: he saw alebrijes that came to life and tried to devour him. He listened to the Unnamed’s voice and copied out in his notebook the sentences dictated to him. “BUTCHER ALL IDIOTS. Women and children first. WOMEN and children FIRst. half man half angel. manangelmanangel.”

  Only alcohol and drugs could calm him down. He
had to get some money.

  He went back to breaking and entering houses near the train station. He selected the houses as carefully as possible: they had to be empty, the only thing he wanted to do was steal.

  He started accumulating money and jewelry again, hoarding them in a locker in the Juárez bus station.

  The Niners were back on their way to the Super Bowl. The quarterback, Steve Young, wasn’t half bad, but Jesús missed watching Montana throw and soon got bored with the games.

  He tried to write a letter to María Luisa. He didn’t know what to tell her. He mixed sweet childhood memories—playing together in the hollow tree—with insults for having treated him badly, for being so rude to him.

  He wanted to focus on other things, but the urge to get a few things straight with María Luisa wouldn’t be appeased. Maybe it would be easier to see her face to face and talk. What’s she like? A hot babe? How’s she different?

  The idea made him anxious. She might not want to see him. Would she shut the door in his face if she opened it and saw him standing there?

  He’d faced worse fears. He’d get over this one.

  One early morning a bus dropped him off on a street in Villa Ahumada, and his steps steered a straight course to his childhood home. Would it still be there?

  Yeah, there it was. The one-story home with a tin roof and stucco walls, with a hundred-year-old tree in the patio. He nudged the door open; it was unlocked, as if they had been waiting for him. The hinges squeaked. There was noise coming from the kitchen. His mother, wrapped in a black shawl, was preparing a pot of beans and warming tortillas in a skillet. Jesús sat down in a chair, waiting for her to turn around.

  A plethora of crosses hung along the walls, in all shapes and sizes, as if his mother had begun collecting them: made of tin, wood, or aluminum; big ones and small ones; some in flamboyant colors and others funeral black; with agonizing bloody Christs hanging, or else empty.