(in this section, Luis the student/journalist is in bed with Maria Rosa the city coroner. He is talking about his relationship with his father.)

“I think of my father sometimes, his huge hands like bricks. I remember them on my shoulders as a kid. I was born in the desert and I spent my pre-memory years there. By the time my life takes any structure, my mother had taken the two of us out of the desert and we were in our very modest, but nice, house here in San Rafael. I don’t know what she did those first years, she was lost in that mysterious ether of the adult world. I suppose I’d rather not know. Eventually she became an elementary school teacher. She took it very seriously. But my father. Oh, my father. He was a preacher, he always said, a proselytizer for the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. A nomadic preacher. He would show up every so often at our door with no bags, no nothing. I remember how he would sit at the table, ravenous and so skinny, but his hands were still so formidable and stern. He sat very dogmatically and devoured whatever my mother made him. We wouldn’t eat - he always showed up very late at night or very early - and we’d just watch him shoveling food into his sun-chapped face. My mother would ask him what he was doing and, very seriously, he would say, ‘Doing God’s work, Esperanza.’ They would talk late into the night, and I would try to listen from bed but she always put on music so I couldn’t hear them whispering. Once, I came out of my room, pretending I’d woken to go to the bathroom, and they were dancing, very formally and staidly. There was no romance in it, not even a breath of sex. They just moved formally through our living room, both looking past the other one at some indeterminate middle distance. My mother saw me and smiled this meaningless, empathetic little smile, like she was saying ‘Oh, you wanted to see this silly thing?’ I never saw them do it any other time, never heard them dancing, but it was very clear it was this ritual they had. It was obvious in how easily the steps came, how perfectly they matched each other. And then, the next morning, my mother would pack me a suitcase and drive the three of us into the desert, into whatever the hell village Dad had left his things in, and she would drop us off there, kiss me on the head, and drive off. I’d spend the next month riding around the desert with my father. The first few summers, I rode on the back of his horse, but eventually I became too big and he had to teach me how to ride my own. We’d ride into and out of the canyons. He never carried a map. The trails, the connections between places, were a part of his genetic fiber. He just knew. I would follow him, watching his horse muscling up and down the switchbacks, the old trunk that held all his belongings. The sun was more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt. Out there, I felt the shear force of the thing, how incommensurable it is. We would emerge from a canyon into a cathedral of light, that’s the only way I can describe it. The weight of it was religious. The stars, as you can imagine, were divine. The country out there is ascetic, it makes you believe fully in God, or at least in something bigger and something fierce and maybe vengeful. He went from village to village, some of them nomadic themselves - though even those he knew how to find - and he’d preach to whatever villagers would congregate. I don’t think I ever saw him convert a soul, nor do I ever remember him trying. Everyone knew him, and he knew everybody. The borders were familiar, who was already saved, who was pretending to be saved, who had no desire to be saved. I’d watch him preach, and I can’t begin to express the pride I felt in the man, that this was my father, the man everyone was listening to as he read his verses and told his stories. ‘I’m a story teller,’ he once told me. ‘I love telling stories.’ I can’t convey strongly enough how profoundly I admired the man, how deeply I wanted to become my father. I wanted to wander and tell stories, to move people with my stories, to make them laugh and cry the way he did. It seemed like most noble profession in the world, even though I knew, even as young as I was, that he was profoundly poor, that he survived entirely on the generosity of the villagers and fellow nomads. They gave him money, probably out of pity. Offerings he insisted on calling them. I remember the agave farms and the mango farms. Jesus, we ate more fresh mango than you could ever imagine, and then stayed up all night shitting it out. I remember the artisans with their meticulous pottery, the mystics who were peripatetic like Dad, the fortune tellers and the seers, all of them women, older than time, who materialized and dissolved like rain with their sets of cards and their preposterous jewelry. I remember these poor, incredibly poor people listening to Dad talk about Jonah in the whale‘s belly or the prodigal son coming home. He always looked at me when he talked about the prodigal son, always winked, and I swelled with pride. He‘d pass around this hand carved, wooden bowl while he was preaching, and these poverty stricken folks would drop in coins, out of bemusement or pity or God knows what. And I’d be grinning like an idiot, so proud of my father with his outlandish stories, stories they‘d heard a hundred times, probably. As I got older, he started to let me lead us on horseback. He’d turn to me and nod, and then slow down and let me pass him into the open desert. But something was missing inside me. Whatever was in his blood, his father’s blood, his father’s father’s blood, wasn’t in mine. We’d quickly become lost, and he’d have to extricate us. And the languages! He spoke every one of them, every peculiar dialect. He would try to teach me, but each summer he’d have to start over again. I’d forget everything. I started to dread his appearances. I knew I was failing him. He was a very simple man to read, usually impassive, but if you hurt him or betrayed him, the look was unmistakable. And my despair seemed to affect him, too. Or, he seemed to be faltering, too. My last summer with him, we nearly drowned in a flash flood in one of the canyons. He said, for years, that he could smell rain in his bones a hundred miles away. I believed him, because he always knew, we always got out before the rains, but this one time we were in the bottom of a canyon, and the walls started to shake, there was this astonishing, guttural roar. It was pure terror, and I’ll always remember the look on his face. Not the horror of it, but the disbelief that he’d been mislead by his senses. It sounded like the world was breaking into pieces around us. We got out, just barely. But he was shaken for the next week, going blank during his sermons, forgetting words and names. I’d never seen him like that, or maybe I’d just never noticed. It’s amazing the things we overlook as kids when we develop these myths. The empty spaces in the desert, between villages or troubadour tribes, grew ever larger. We barely spoke. I couldn‘t bare to look him in the eye.”

“So what happened?” she asks.

“The next year, he just never showed. Summer came and passed and he didn’t materialize. That September, one Saturday, my mother drove the two of us to one of the towns he sometimes used as a jumping off point. We asked around, but no one had seen him in at least half a year. My mother left our phone number with everyone she could, and begged them to call if they ever heard any word. No one ever called. He never showed up again, but for most of my adolescence, I dreaded his presence. I dreaded that he would show up, unexpectedly, and say that he was taking me back into the desert. I hoped he was dead. I prayed that he wouldn’t come back because I couldn’t bear the shame of knowing that in these villages he would be embarrassed by me, that I didn’t speak the languages or that my feet were blistered from the heat or that I hesitated to eat the food they offered.”

He smiles very faintly, like a quarter moon, shaking his head.

“I can still remembering him preaching, gesticulating with those huge, bulky hands. He looked like a fucking raving madman. He probably was, they probably all spoke ill of him when he left and called him the lunatic. But he preached with this incredible clarity, this confidence I’ve never found. He was never afraid of calling something what it was, never afraid that he would sound redundant or trite. He just didn’t worry about the artifice of it, right? There was an undeniable power about him. Maybe it came from the desert itself, this lunatic emerging from the monastic desert, sunburned and wind chafed and gaunt like a rock that’s endured a million years of erosion.”