She parks - he does not drive - and they merge into the flow of people, minnows into a school. The gibbous stadium lights burn against the smoldering sky, ethereal lodestars in the distance. The blocks surrounding empty towards them; pilgrims drawn towards Mecca. People are singing and chanting, swilling beer as they pass the ramshackle homes, the impromptu scrap yards formed like ominous oases in the dester of slums. They move like a symphony towards Parque Triunfo de la Republica.

He is in love with the vulgar rhapsodies of the crowd, its brutish swagger.

“Tus madres son unas putas!” the mob serenades an island of men wearing Tijuana jerseys. “Tus madres…son unas puuu-tas!” they sing, elevating the insult to a measure of artistry.

Grown men bump into her, groping her ass and thighs furtively under the guise of alcohol. They howl lewdly in her face. Luis merely shrugs before he throws the hooligans high-fives. He begins singing, gluttonously. When it does not infuriate her, she adores this childishness in him, this naïve predilection for communal gatherings and movements.

As he expands and dissipates into the mass, she finds herself more isolated, an observer of a phenomenon she doesn’t begin to understand. Sports are so trivial when you trade, daily, in death and decay, she thinks. Rudimentary contests of pride. She surveys the heaving swell of bodies and notices only one other woman.

She used to think in larger contexts: philosophy, anthropology, the catalysts behind movements and revolutions and belief systems.

Now, weary, she seeks out a kindred soul. The other woman - short, buxom, with a stern Aboriginal jaw - sees Maria Rosa and smiles in commiseration. They are here against better judgment, swept up in mysterious and probably frivolous tides.

They cross a bridge over one of the open tributaries in town, its trickle a neon Aegean. Its banks are a stagnant bog of plastic bottles and aluminum cans. There is no water treatment plant in San Rafael. If she inculcated every injustice, she would die from the rage. Surely there must be some civic group run by a forlorn widower whose husband and daughter died from contaminated water already, futilely, on the case. They have a shoddy website and handmade placards and pixilated, magnified photos of fetid water.

Yes, yes, life is unfair, unfair and brief. Get over it.

The singing propels them, alar, into the rickety old stadium.

They sit in the bleachers at the pitch’s northern end. Already, the stands are mostly full. The whole structure undulates and quivers beneath the swaying, singing horde; they are one fluid organism. As the Tijuana players emerge from their tunnel, they are pelted with insults and, more trenchantly, full bottles of beer.

“How do you deal with this?” she asks him, yelling, her throat already coarse.

“What?”

She brings her mouth to his ear. “How do you do this?” She feels immured, walled in by a terrifying and uniform body.

He does not answer. His face is distorted maliciously in a fanfare of obscenities

Again: She admires his un-distilled emotion while also reviling it. The volatility, the violence of such drastic swings, is anathema to her.

The stadium is a rollicking rhapsody of low language, perverse liturgies.

“Vete y chinga a tu padra, vete y chinga a tu hermana, vete y chinga a tu hermano, vete y chinga a tu madre! Ve-te y chinga a tu madre, tu madre, tu madre, chinga a tu ma-dre!”

When a Tijuana player writhes on the ground after the match’s first tackle, he is serenaded with catcalls of “Chocha, chooooo-cha!”

“Que maricon de mierda! Eres una marica!”

“Get up you fucking faggot!”

Tijuana controls the early play. Their center midfielders are stronger and win most of the contested balls. They run rough shod through the defense’s center like a virus, collapsing the flanks. This allows their lithe outside mids to pepper San Rafael’s goalbox with a bombardment of crossing passes.

The keeper is a stalwart, though. He punches away any aerial assault that is imprecise and flirts with his space. He corrals two feeble headers. A stocky forward rifles a speculative shot from thirty yards, it bends and wobbles like a wounded bird, and the keeper tips it derisively over the crossbar.

The crowd sags as the momentum stays with their opponent. It is a dangerous cycle; they lag in energy, and Tijuana is emboldened.

San Rafael counters. A defender strips his man and launches a long, howitzer missile of a pass across the field. A forward touches the ball sweetly into his stride, evading a defender, sieving through the disorganized, distended defense. The crowd ascends in expectation, tempered murmurs growing exponentially to a throttling imploration.

“Go you motherfucker, go!”

Football, like fate, is devilishly fickle. One minute misstep is magnified, puts in motion an ineluctable sequential progression. The forward streaking like a comet falters - perhaps stumbling on a divot, or his own piston-legs - and the ball squirts from his next step, eluding his desperate, overextended foot. The defense, given a half second more, closes like a noose.

The ball is pried lose, the attacker left denuded and in shambles on the pitch. The tide ebbs back, and this time, it is San Rafael that is out of sorts, scrambling. Tijuana floods the defense’s last levee, overwhelming them. A first shot is deflected by the sprawling, noble keeper. But the backline is outnumbered. One of the stolid midfielders slots the ball easily, unglamorously, into the goal. He saunters towards the jeering stands, takes a mordant bow.

It was not a beautiful goal. It was blunt, penetrating.

The first half expires, the remaining action sloughed down in midfield. The stands empty, everyone breaking for more beer.

“You should get out more,” Luis says, offhandedly. “It’s not healthy to be so alone. It gets to you, the way cold works its way into stone. Eventually, it fractures and dissembles you.”

She was not always so isolated. Most of her friends have dispersed on the winds of violence, fled to America or to Mexico City. But she is not reclusive. She is friendly with her neighbors: Eduardo and Lucia, the young couple she can hear through the thin walls, fighting one night, screaming and throwing objects - bottles, bodies - and fucking the next night; Margherita, the frazzled single mother; Jose, the middle aged philosophy professor who leaves his bike in the hallway and intermittently comes over with a bottle of wine, who drunkenly, slavishly, compliments her legs.

Occasionally she will attend one of their parties, but the nights always end with her as a sideshow - an unofficial expert on the violence, arbiter of the dead. They pry for gruesome details, and if she drinks enough, she provides them. Or, if she controls herself, they grow tired of her equivocations. They circle away from her, like moths abandoning a dying light, and eventually she is segregated and silent; a voyeur. They are non-caloric affairs, and she returns from them enervated, deflated.

“I’m out now, aren’t I?” she says, and he smiles rabidly. The game is about to resume.

The second half begins as an obverse of the first. San Rafael, undersized but quicker, better conditioned, dominates the possession. Their midfielders flit like insects around the Tijuana defenders, whose legs suddenly seem ensconced in molasses. With each forward thrust, the fans grow emboldened. They are rejuvenated, and they sing their dulcet, profane hymns.

He revels in this, the crowd exalting the men on the pitch. They become symbiotic organisms: the crowd and the team. A numinous energy is between them. He believes in this completely, that the verve and cacophony can deliver them both transcendence. Their chants reverberate, and the action on the field powers towards the opposition’s goal. One wave of attackers thrust ahead, then another. Their passes are fluid and precise, like steps to a samba. The crowd rejoices, seeking an even higher plane. Their decibel level, improbably, climbs. They are raucous and rabid. The opposing players seem to shrink into the maw of this noise. There is an inevitable momentum here: they will equalize, fans and team.

The keeper makes one sprawling save, and another. But the roar only builds, not yet crescendoed. The entire stadium shakes like a man on the verge of climax. Shakes, and quivers. Two minutes later, the dam breaks: a pass out wide; a gorgeous rainbow of a cross; a howitzer volleyed towards the near post, caroming emphatically in off the piping. Poetry ceding to puissance.

The crowd collapses into a frenetic ecstasy. Strangers embrace strangers, kiss them on the cheek or the forehead. The solid mass of humanity quavers in liquid waves and pools. Luis is picked up by the man beside him, spun in circles like a boy being carried by his father. He spreads his arms in delight, a wind mill in a gale, slapping hands with random men as he whirls.

Even she is caught up in the pandemonium. Strange men high five her, wrap her up in euphoric embraces. Luis gives her a forceful kiss.

The rapture slowly subsides in the stands, ceding to a brutish confidence. Now deadlocked, the teams flail at each other like two punch-drunk heavyweights. Technique and precision are abandoned. Defending is of the desperate, last ditch kind. Many incursions are derailed at the last moment by a tackle that flirts dangerously with a foul. When San Rafael is the victim of such a tackle, the crowd howls its disapproval; when Tijuana is on the receiving end, they erupt in shouts of delight.

She senses his heart undergoing a sort of whiplash: elation with each prospective drive, terror when the ball begins its tilt the other way. The action is sloppy, unruly and riveting. After a corner kick, A Tijuana striker finds himself unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing scrum, the ball dropped fortuitously on his right foot mere yards from the goalmouth. But in his celerity, his touch is too brazen; the ball sails wide over the crossbar, eliciting an exhale of relief from the bated crowd.

Minutes later, San Rafael has a chance. A turnover in midfield gives their legs new life. They pass out wide, and a break seems to be on. Four attackers swarm just three defenders. But the toll of nearly ninety minutes rears its head: a centering pass is struck a second late, and the forward who is sprung free on goal is whistled offside. The fans cackle sardonically; a few beer bottles rain down in the direction of the stoic official.

Everyone is exhausted. The players lag, as if their shadows are now controlling the ball. The crowd exhorts them as best they can, but even their energy is failing. Their songs are disjointed, lacking in spirit. The match seems destined for a hard fought draw.

Then, in extra time, one of San Rafael’s undersized forwards slinks a sinewy trail through the lagging defense, breaking free down the pitch’s right side. He careens madly towards the goal. The crowd finds a final wind, rising like a congregation in unison. It will be a race, a last test of conditioning: the striker moves fleet as lightning down the right side, and a defender closes like desperate thunder from the left, hoping to intercept. The keeper is caught off guard and hesitant. He first ventures out from his box, then retreats. He is off-balances, primed to be beaten.

At the last moment, the defender collides with the streaking forward. The ball skitters away harmlessly. The referee’s whistle cannot be heard over the crowd, but his arm raises, and points towards the center of the goal box.

Regular time has run its course; they are stealing minutes.

Tijuana’s bench nearly charges the field. The guilty party pleads with the referee, his posture submissive and plaintive, his hands mad with motion. The ref brushes him away. He is statue stoic, looking at some point he has chosen in the distance. A beer advertisement, perhaps, or a pretty woman, maybe a vision of his own mortal insignificance in the noxious sea of drunkards and fanatics.

It is a soccer match in a crumbling, undersized stadium between two middling Mexican squads. The tension of it all, drawing at everyone’s heart, is nearly unbearable.

The referee ignores the bedlam, serene and still. The striker saunters outside the box, collected. The keeper bounces on his line. The crowd cannot decide whether it is prematurely euphoric or rendered silent by the drama. Luis is screaming in delight and terror. Maria Rosa’s throat has gone dry, her body completely usurped by the moment.

The keeper bounces on his line. He claps his hands once, twice, nods at his bench. The striker peels his long, sweaty hair from his face, slips it behind his ears. The referee confers somatically with both men, a terse nod of his head. The stands begin to wobble. Fans are holding their breath, clutching their hearts. Everything is in the balance. The referee places the ball. The keeper jumps once more, then crouches like a predator, swimming along his line. The striker looks skyward, kisses his hand and blows it to the heavens. For his mother, his father, all the dead.

The stadium gasps, an aural event horizon, and goes vacuum silent.

And could anyone be blamed if they got up from their seat and left? What, after all, does it matter? It is a game between two middling and irrelevant teams playing a sloppy, un-televised match in a city ravaged by violence. Men kicking a ball better than most, but not as well as they dreamed as children on the dirt streets, when they were Pele or Hugo Sanchez, riveting hundreds of thousands with their grace, with their visceral beauty. Just a half mile away, in the middle class neighborhood Colonia Cento, a fifteen year old girl is being raped in the basement of a her parent’s cantina by a neighbor. She is screaming in vain. Across town to the south, in Casas Negras, a woman returns from work early. She works at the AutoZone maquiladora and has been fired for arriving four minutes late. She walks into her house to find her husband fucking a strange woman in the kitchen. He has her pinned against the refrigerator, thrusting impotently and groaning. He does not hear his wife come in. She stands for a time in the doorway, watching her husband’s bare ass flexing, the hair at its nadir gleaming with sweat. Then she grabs a knife, kisses his left ear, and slits his throat. The unnamed woman screams and runs naked from the house, bathed in blood. In Colonia Media, Marta Lucia Ramirez is holding her signs. They have faded with unremitting sun. The edges are warped by rain. She stands guard and no one pays her any mind. In Santa Teresa Cemetery, a middle aged man drives a platform truck down a long, rutted, washed out dirt road. Bloated corpses bounce and jangle in the truck bed. They have gone unclaimed by their dead, absent, or indifferent families. Many of them have no names. They will be buried in a mass grave marked only by a single wooden cross. Their arms and legs dangle out the sides of the truck, reaching back towards the city, out into the expanse-less desert. The middle aged driver brings the truck to a stop and dumps the bodies. He stands for a time in the rancid heat and stares out to the horizon. The sere earth shimmers white beneath the sun; distantly, mountains rise like impotent, mourning sentinels. Hermosa, he whispers under his breath. Hermosa, and the dead slumber blindly. In Colonia Paz de el Sol, the Mayans and El Hermandad are engaged in a shootout. They have taken over two streets, crouching behind the burned husks of cars, hiding in the doorways of homes. Most residents who have not fled hide in closets or bathtubs. Some lie under their beds, arms wrapped desperately around their children. ‘Mom,‘ a young girl pleads, ‘you’re crushing me.‘ Other residents bombard the militants with Molotov cocktails. The young men of the street brandish automatic weapons smuggled from America. They fire off pizzicato strikes. Occasionally, a body slumps to the mottled pavement that is lacquered in blood; bodies lie littered in the same terrible but mesmerizing entropy of a Bruegel painting. A federali helicopter hovers above. A sharpshooter dangles out and takes aim.

If the fans inside the stadium quieted, they could hear the faint, sibilant noise of the chopper rotoring in concentric circles.

But they are on their feet, every last soul has arisen and is now screaming from the depths of their chafed throats. The keeper bounces his solo ballet. The referee checks his watch; time is set to expire. The two teams line the goal box like eager suitors. The men from Tijuana cackle and heckle, conjuring their most repulsive epithets.

Last night I watched a donkey fuck your little sister’s tight, virgin asshole; Your mother sucked my cock and I blinded her with my cum; I ate your wife’s pussy so good that she squirted all over my fat dick, I made her scream.

The striker strides stridently; his foot meets the ball. It is a rhythmic motion he has repeated millions upon millions of times in his life. His leg like a lead pendulum, his ankle cocked unnaturally.

He pushes the ball wide, to the right, and he crumples to his knees, throwing his hands over his face. The referee’s whistle sounds thrice. The striker cradles his own head, rocking back and forth like a sick infant. Luis loves this, too; the human frailty in the face of pressure. The crowd howls and jeers, yowling obscenities as if the game were life or death. Elsewhere, it might be. Here, maybe it is more so.

Bottles and trash rain venomously onto the pitch, like acid confetti. Tijuana struts from the field with the brazen defiance of conquerors. Some of them raise their arms, inciting the drunk mass. The exhausted keeper straggles behind the rest of the phalanx, his head raised to the sky, seeing only the soft cerulean. Teammates wait for him at the field’s edge and tousle his hair the way a mother tousles her child’s. A few sober fans in the front row are struck by how young the keeper is, how boyishly gaunt, how fine and fragile his body seems.

They are stunned into ponderous silence.

The striker sits alone in agony at the pitch’s center. He is bathed in an invective homily. Two of his teammates walk slowly to him. They lift him tenderly by his shoulders, wrapping their arms around his waist. The striker buries his head into the crux of a shoulder. His teammate whispers something into his ear. They carry him like this off the pitch, battered together by the hurled refuse.

The field is empty but for ghostly remnants. Beer bottles, plastic cups, wrappers, shirts. For anyone looking, it arouses the same dolorous hollowness as a house after a party, that sense of being too late. Arriving to find pleasure and revelry moved on.

The way out of the stadium is slow and hot and crowded. The fans are close bundled, sweaty, more intimate with these strangers than with their own family. Men vomit, and some piss directly onto the concourse. In the locker rooms below, both teams can hear the procession rumble like a low grade seismic tremor.

Finally, they are free of the gridlock. They pour into the unfettered concrete plaza. Some of them sing melancholy songs of defeat. Others sing defiant melodies. They move lugubriously - sun-battered, alcohol-weary - and disperse back into the sprawling city.

“Those few minutes before we scored,” he says, “you could feel it coming, right? It was inevitable. That’s what I love in the game. Those few moments of lucid, preternatural beauty. When the crowd moves as one body, right? That synchronization. And it so rarely happens. But when it does, you remember it, and so does everyone else. That communal memory.”

She takes his hand and rests her head on his shoulder. She can feel the rapid, electric pulse in his hand.

Across the open park, the soprano prattle of machine gun fire erupts. For what seems an endless coda, Maria Rosa and Luis are petrified. While the crowd around them avalanches into discordant, flurried motion, they are staunched like two ancient stones in a stream. Another flue of bullets sings out in curt, rapid syllables. Luis finally tackles Maria Rosa to the ground, pressing his body tightly onto her, curling her lissome form beneath his long, lanky silhouette.

She feels his heart chanting like a drum, ravenous with fear.