He walks through a somnolent city night. The tacquerias are bulging with laughter, with music, and the young couples going to the clubs are pliant as sex dolls in each others arms. The street lights that still work quiver in lissome puddles. The prostitutes strut and serenade like proud wounded birds; somewhere an old man is dancing with a slightly younger woman but there is no music, and the maquiladoras are spewing their mucous into the sultry desert and blotting out the stars. The adipose slums reverberate with theft and death and sex and all things sacred made cheap, the malandros stalk like bacteria in their feral packs, their hair shimmering like seashells, their guns bulging like toy dicks in their pants. The tourists are waddling onto their belching buses, the artisans are packing up their wares and saying a prayer for the forsaken aboriginal souls of their ancestors.

Diesel fuel peppers the air, but there is also a splendid marriage of chili and garlic. They are a man and a woman, young, vaguely erotic, walking in the dense residual heat of dusk. They could be in New York, Beirut, or Paris, maybe even Singapore. They walk at the end of summer, in San Rafael, their tortuous orbits entwined, incandescent. The city around them trembles at the threshold of a savage fury

“Have I told you at all about the dream I’ve been having lately?” she says to him. When she talks, her arms swing wildly like levers, or like naked branches caught in a ferocious wind. Her hands flit like hummingbirds. “I haven’t, have I? Love, it’s a doozy. It stays with me and haunts me halfway into the afternoon. It takes two cups of coffee just to rouse me from the stupor this thing drops me into.”

He takes a swill of rapidly warming beer. The night is dense and sultry as stew.

“The basic framework is that I’m in a pyramid, ok? And I’m climbing the outside of this pyramid, but I’m also, simultaneously, walking right through the heart of the thing, in that wonderful duality of dreams. And each level is populated by a different set of workers. What I mean is, there are people on each level, and they represent a caste, or class, as far as I can tell.”

Her face is fuchsia beneath a thin, perspirant patina. It coats her like a protective lacquer.

“Except the first level isn’t populated. The first level, which is actually subterranean, is wholly mechanical. It’s laundry machines and cars and oil refineries, all humming this somatic, wordless tune, this haunting mechanical whir. And above that, I can’t remember the exact order of the levels. They bleed together in that filmic way of dreams. There was a level of politicians, a level of poets. There was a level of glass blowers, I remember, and a level for potters. They were separate levels, the glass blowers and potters. That I remember very vividly, thinking why were the two separated?”

He wants to lick the sweat clean off.

“There was a level for priests, and one for hunters. I wish I could remember the order, but there were too many, and some of them I would just observe, as through a window. But others would trap me, would hold me hostage, and the terror was just totally constricting. I would have rather died. I wanted to die. I could understand suicide, the seductiveness of total nullity. It made so much sense, love. It was like a revelation I wanted to share: I could understand death then. But just when I thought the terror would overwhelm me, I’d materialize on another level, in that wonderful, transition-less way we move in our dreams. I remember emerging from a particular bout of terror on a level of silver miners, and another time on a level of revolutionaries. The amazing thing, as far as I can remember, is that the levels have remained consistent each time I’ve had this dream. There’s never any deviation.”

He smokes a cigarette and watches her hands, their trailing semblances.

“What made last night so haunting is that, while I’m climbing this pyramid, this immense monolithos of stone, the lower levels start to disintegrate. They start dropping away so that I’m suspended on a giant rock in the middle of the sky, a rock that has no apparent end, and I’m frantically climbing but also, at the same time, walking through a silver mine amongst these bruised, tattered men in their hard hats. Even though the place, admittedly, didn’t resemble a mine at all. It was outside and the sky was this vast, brittle blue, the kind of sky we never get here. But somehow I knew it was a silver mine.”

When she talks, there is a vast quieting of his soul. The audible world slowly dies, consumed within the vortex of her hands and her voice. Gone are the street vendors hawking their sloppy empanadas. The musicians on the corner dissolve into distant stars, glittering specters. The car horns screeching like night owls, the steady threnody of traffic, the commuters barking at one another like feral pigs: all of it drowned by the sea of her body. They are walking alone through a moonscape; the gentle and vestigial pulse of reflected light.

“So I’m ascending and climbing, but I don’t know if I’m getting anywhere. The levels start dropping away faster, and faster. We’re so completely suspended, me and this pyramid. And I always wake up with the fucking shakes, so utterly terrified, because I have no idea what the hell this dream is and why it keeps coming back for me.”

Her face is monastic and, yet, everyone is madly in love with it. Her cheeks are sturdy, and inquisitive as a priest’s. They are offset by anonymous obsidian eyes, the kind that burn like two orbs in a dark alleyway. Her mouth is not sensual or pragmatic. It’s somehow mundane and universal, comforting in the way of a well decorated and lived-in bedroom.

She purports to be of mystical and indigenous descent. Her grandmother was a seer of some kind, an itinerant woman of the central hills renowned for her ability to predict the future and to heal incurable maladies. It is the only biographical information she’s shared with anyone. She is not the kind of person who takes personal history for granted. Her mother, her father: mysteries. Her childhood: a cavern sealed by stone.

“Do you know what I’ve decided to do?” she says, gaily bouncing a few feet in front of him, one hand extended back towards him. Narrowly, forever, out of reach. “I’ve decided I’ll write a poem about it. A great and epic poem about Mexico and its history, about death and the ferocity of love, about failure and the survival of grace. A poem that redeems us all.”

~

Dollops of amber fall from her ears. She closes her eyes and smiles, as if there is voice singing in the night that only she can hear.

~

Octavia Luna, poetess of the Sonora. Known in every coffee bar from San Rafael to Hermosillo for her feverish, hallucinogenic readings, and for her disappearances and reappearances, her maddening erotic detachment that has sundered most of Northern Mexico’s most promising male poets, damning them to careers of impotent, stricken poems about her implacable beauty.

(And a handful of the most promising female poets, too.)

Everyone has kissed her, drunkenly, one night, on the arm of a chair in one of the crumbling modernist mansions in the mountains outside town, or in a coffee stained booth eating salsa and eggs sometime before dawn, or standing in the dingy stairwell of a slab apartment complex. But word of her body, naked, is like a whisper of God. And stories of sex are rumors of ancient legends, passed orally from one generation to the next, like Incan creation myths.

No one has fucked her. No one has even touched her tits. This has begun to consume the poets of Northern Mexico like a slowly developing mental illness. Is there something wrong with them? Is she waiting for one of them to write a truly great poem? Is she some supernatural angel/critic sent from God to judge the bankruptcy of their work? Is she horribly malformed, vaginally speaking? Is she secretly a religious nut? Who is she?

When they are in public together, he tries to ignore the whispers. He does not read the poems other men - some of them his friends - give her. He laughs when near strangers approach him on the street and ask if he’s seen her naked, if she’s a hermaphrodite, if she’s said anything about their letters and poems, if she’s given up the goods yet.

Despite his best efforts, the profusion of questions makes him feel like the most envied and talked about man in San Rafael. He knows this is absurd, and patently untrue, but he can’t help feeling it, perpetually inflating his own ego. It’s the same as when he sits in bed at night and writes imaginary news articles about imaginary books of poems he has written a thousand times in his head but hasn’t actually put down on paper.

Why ruin the perfection? she says, teasing.

Yes, he thinks, why?

~

Where are they walking? He forgets sometimes. They are walking to a reading by Luis Suarez. He knows nothing about Suarez except that he is from Argentina and has written a book about the drug cartels in San Rafael. What can an outsider know about the cartels? What can anyone know about them? The cartels are everywhere and nowhere. They are so enmeshed in the fabric of the city that one only notices them if they look closely. They are accepted like the maquilladoras are accepted and like the slums are accepted and like casual violence is accepted. Changing these things would take an effort that no one seems to know the location of: where does it hide? It is like something searched for in a dream, something magical but unnamed, and thus never found.

Calderon has begun his war. And how is it going? It’s difficult to know. There are pieces of commonly accepted knowledge, but even commonly accepted knowledge is liable to be false in this fucking country. Most people accept that there are three cartels dominating northern Mexico:

The Chihuahua cartel controls the Chihuahua state and most of central Mexico. Their stronghold is in Chihuahua.

The Baja cartel controls most of the peninsula and is based in Tijuana.

La Familia controls most of Sonora, including San Rafael.

The state media is paid well by the federal government to only report positive news. But the opposition controlled newspapers in San Rafael and Tijuana have an interest in fomenting dissent. The state news says that the Chihuahua cartel has been decimated and its leaders brought to justice; that the minor violence in Chihuahua is the result of a dead body spasming after decapitation.

The rumor is that the Bajains paid off the state media to report the Chihuahuans untimely demise. This news would benefit both the federalis and the Bajains: the federalis because it would mark their first major victory in Calderon’s War on the Cartels; the Bajains because it weakens their primary rival. The papers in Tijuana report that the Baja cartel is offering asylum and work to anyone displaced or suddenly unemployed in the skirmishes between the Chihuahuans and the federalis.

The newspapers in San Rafael also report that Chihuahua is a war zone, that the leaders of the cartel have holed up in bunkers and have declared total war. They’ve paid off the local police forces. Meanwhile, the papers report, the Baja cartel has paid off the federal forces. They’ve long wanted easier access to Mexico City, and from there, to the critical Central American pipeline. Thus, the police are waging war on the federalis.

The local media is sympathetic to La Familia. La Familia is relatively stable, as drug cartels go: mostly content with their territories, not overly aggressive, extremely active in the community. La Familia is headed, supposedly, by a man nicknamed ‘The Boar.‘ No one knows if he exists or not. He is purported, in some myths, to be a former priest, a fire-and-brimstone kind of cleric sickened by the immorality of his countrymen, who took to drug smuggling in the name of dogmatism. Rumors abound that La Familia is governed by a strict religious code - no drinking, no swearing, no fornicating - and anyone in violation is punished, publicly, with death.

It goes without saying that a war between the Baja and Chihuahua cartels would be extremely beneficent to La Familia and the Boar.

Others believe that the Boar is a shaman born of pure Aztec blood on a mission to punish the country for functioning as a subsidiary of the American capitalist system. Still others believe the Boar is a former general under the PRI. And if one ventures far enough from San Rafael, a lot of the Indians actually worship the Boar - La Familia routinely goes into villages the federals have long forgotten, to pave roads, build medical clinics or schools - believing that he’s the Second Coming. In fact, most residents of Sonora profess some form of personalized beliefs about the Boar, his origins, and the likelihood of his actual existence.

There was a front page story in the New York Times. Journalists who’ve gone looking for the man have disappeared like explorers seeking the famed Amazonian city of gold. His death has been reported at least a dozen times by newspapers from Tijuana to Mexico City. Funerals have been held, and no one really knows if they were real, if they were staged by the Chihuahuans or the Bajains, or if they were staged by the Boar himself.

The news in this country is a vortex of shit.

Meanwhile, the guillotine has dropped on the American economy. He imagines this gigantic body that is now in the vicious throes of death. He imagines San Rafael as its liver. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workers are being expelled from the maquilladoras every day. It is like inoperable internal hemorrhaging; all that can be done is prayer, mysticism.

Those turned away from the factories are now stranded in a city whose institutions are like muscles stretched within a millimeter of snapping. Half of the city’s roads were never paved. Those that were mostly resemble fractured floes of ice; that a bridge has not collapsed is a miracle. The police force has shed a third of its officers. Those that remain are young, inexperienced, cheap; the kind of naïve, poor boys that are ripe for corruption. There is no centralized fire company; volunteer companies exist, but they’re woefully under equipped. Fires in the slums routinely burn for days on end. The city’s bus system is comprised of third or fourth hand Mercedes Benzes from the 1960’s, vehicles whose parts haven’t been manufactured for a generation.

Any sort of federal aid has been cut off. The Sonoran state is the still the country’s most reliable PRI bastion; the federalis are spiting their face by cutting out one of their eyes. This, of course, is what the PRI wants: a lack of federal aid and high unemployment guarantees that la Familia fortifies their stranglehold on the region’s economy. They, in turn, give heavily to PRI candidates (candidates who, through belligerence and bellicosity, successfully alienate Sonora from Mexico City). La Familia threatens the opposition, rigs elections, buys off officials. The PRI, though nationally marginalized, maintains its influence and, more importantly, its steady stream of cash.

Of course, La Familia isn’t the only cartel in San Rafael, just the primary one. The Chihuahuans have a stranglehold of the city’s southern slums, those that spill like toxic waste from the maquilladoras into the desert. The Bajains may or may not control the federal office downtown.

Store owners, their businesses flagging at the prospect of a pronounced recession, are unable to pay off their bank lenders. Facing default, they go, hat in hand, to one of the cartels. Does it matter which one? The money is the same. The cartels, benevolently, agree to assume responsibility for the loan. There are conditions, of course. Now, the store owner is indebted to the cartel. Now, his payments are made with a gun pressed invisibly into the back of his head. Now, his business is crowded with the kind of folks he’s spent his entire life trying to keep out. And what can he do about it?

Most of the city’s permanent residents are resigned to their isolation. San Rafael has long existed in the perpetual limbo between two civilizations: one modern and global, one parochial and hermetic. It suffers the vagaries of a port city: the industrial mayhem, the outside meddling, the all-encompassing haze of manufacturing. The young men from nowhere and headed anywhere. Men who are proficient only at waiting, their oneiric days punctuated by cigarettes and the girls who walk the streets in their masks of blush and mascara. The girls with their pubescent tits pushed together like unripe oranges. The somber girls with impenetrable eyes that can look through walls and across oceans, girls who can feel neither pleasure or sorrow, girls whose entire lives are negation.

Odalisques, pure corporeality.

Nearly a quarter of the city’s residents are undocumented and in transit. San Rafael is a city for dreamers and vagabonds, for those looking to disappear, for those with nothing to lose, for those trapped by miserable circumstance. It is the great terminal of Mesoamerica. A city looming in the shadow of the insatiable empire to the north but tethered to the tribes of the south.

~

“Do you think that there is any courage left in this country? All of you write your lovely poems, and for what. No one reads them, and if they do, they forget them. A million better poets before you, a million better poets after you. Each poem like a stone on a long, infinite beach. How do you ever find the right stone, the one with the right weight to fit just perfectly in your hand? You don’t know if such a stone exists. All of you shitting out your stones, your gneiss and your marble and your limestone and your sandstone.”

He’d like to hang his hat on her shoulders, leave his shoes in the foyer of her breasts, wrap himself in her intestines for warmth.

“When what you should be doing is wading into the surf and letting it drag you out beyond the shallow shoals, which is the furthest any of you will wade anyway, out beyond the shallow shoals to the bottomless depths, where there are great and terrifying fish, prehistoric worlds that are as mysterious as death. And what one of you would do, if you had any courage, was disappear into these depths. You might not return, love, of course, you might be lost forever. But what a show you would see! And if you came back? The clarity of your visions, from that very precipice of humanity, well they might be enough to save us. It might be enough to rouse us from the eternal slumber that is our sad, decrepit history.”

“Are you any better than those corrupt bastards taking their maquiladora money, sitting in their palaces eating caviar and drinking Italian wine while all around them the cauldron of ‘their’ country boils? Are you any different than them, seeking out your easy comfort in secure places? Avoiding the real, hard work of actual truth instead of just artifice?”

She takes his hand, clasps it desperately to her chest, kisses his knuckles not with her lips but with her teeth. Draws blood.

The chuck of a heavy blade shatters through bone. Tires cling to the ruddy, neon asphalt in a high falsetto. The sibilant conversations of coffee glasses and beer bottles. And distantly, sirens moan like an old woman remembering the weight of all the love she has lost. The city plunges to life from nothingness, and his mother is dancing in the traffic with a man like the memory of his father. They move to the rhythm of the street. They substantiate as curriers of the dusk, the last protracted gleams of day. Mom looks good, she’s not ravaged by the efficient mechanisms of long nights, her face not yet slagged away from the cigarettes and the God-only-knows-where-she-found-them men she brings home when she thinks her only son is asleep. The dancers are a half step off beat, always. He leads and her head is cradled into the leathery nave of his neck.

“You’re all too belletristic. God, I love your words sometimes, they move me to the very core. But what of it? What of gorgeous sentiment, I ask you. Your evasions are legendary, you know that, right? Your ability to be pretty without saying a thing.”

He saw her read for the first time at a house in the mountains. It was a theme party, something involving top hats and fedoras, opulent cigarette holders. He and his friends playing at the idea of wealth. A band was playing jazz in the basement. He stumbled into an amphitheater that had been retrofitted as a basketball court. A few couples littered the distended, warped floor, sitting cross legged. And she stood at their center, wearing only a white tank top and black panties. Reading from memory, as she always did, improvising each performance, making it a little new each time. Eyes closed, the assembled crowd swaying in hallucinatory parabolas. It was a poem about coyotes and about, perhaps, a boy she’d loved, or about her brother, or her father. There was a man of unknown origin and occupation and age. He was being devoured from inside out by these coyotes whose howls seemed to be constructing a lucid and elaborate melody. Christ almighty, he’d muttered, but he’d been unable to leave.

“You should try to write non-fiction. Otherwise you will waste half your life in fantasies and inventions and elaborate labyrinths in which you forget what is tangible and what is a creation of your loneliness. I’m trying to save you...”

Or the first time he saw her read was in the Ticker Tape Tacqueria on a misty May morning. The sun was fighting valiantly through the oppressive post-dawn haze. The coffee was staler than usual; that’s about all the exposition he remembers: stale coffee and bamboo shoots of sunlight. She stood statue still, framed by the heavily condensed front window. She was usually so full of movement, but when she read, it was like every cell in her body concentrated on the words and nothing else. She obliterated time with her poetry the way most women did with their bodies. Her voice spread like a slow smoldering fire, extinguishing every other mundane conversation in the shitty dining room - its cheese-whiz orange upholstery and its torture-chamber florescent lights. Her silhouette was stark and strangely charred against the milky, opaque window. His companion gripped his wrist. He can’t remember the boy’s name, or even his face; he was a very casual acquaintance, they’d gone for coffee on a delirious whim. And his companion whispered something he will not forget: I’d fuck that crazy bitch harder than she’s ever been fucked. Doesn’t she look like she needs a good, hard fucking? A good dick will whip into her shape real quick.

“…so you don’t fall into the same awful voids that I’ve fallen into. Voids from which the only ladder is a clear and true sentence. Except I don’t even know what such a thing looks like! So where do I find it? Externally. I visit the old masters, the men I loathe because I cannot be one of them. But only the weak find salvation in the external, and almost all of us are weak. So soon I fall back into the void, and I am in constant need of new, purer provender. I‘m trying to save you from the same fate, Xavier.”

He would like to spend an entire conversation listening to her repeat his name, over and over, varying only her inflections and timbres.

~

He grapples with the improbability of personal history. Or, with the impossibility of two personal histories running concurrently and then colliding.

His father was born on the side of a canyon. He was born to a mother who died in childbirth and a stern, retributive father who never forgave his only son for the death of his wife. Xavier’s grandfather was a missionary from Spain and a man of few words. As his son grew into the adumbration of his dead wife, he was consumed by disdain. He sensed that every similarity between the boy at his side and the woman of whom he dreamt was God mocking him, punishing him for loving a mestizo. God, he learned, was cruel and vindictive. He saw it in the boy’s charcoal irises, his epicene and attenuated jaw line, the way his gaze was drawn perpetually to the earth and not the sky. The two spoke less and less. Xavier’s grandfather never spoke of his wife; Xavier‘s father‘s first stories circumnavigated the myth of his own parents. He began by telling creation stories.

When Xavier’s father was eleven, he was abandoned at an orphanage somewhere deep in the desert between Huitzilopochtli and Cuauhtemoc.

(Surely the thought of abandonment had crossed his grandfather’s mind before. Yet he chose that orphanage, in that village, on that day. Just as he had fallen in love with his wife under equally specific circumstances, just as he had come to Mexico under equally specific circumstances. There are a million million probabilities for each and every life, and it is miraculous that any one of them come to pass. Every act of every life deserves reverence as a kind of miracle, he thinks.)

When Xavier’s father was thirteen he ran from the orphanage and into desert with no food and no water. When a band of nomadic shepherds found him in a gully, unconscious and dying of dehydration, his intractable faith in the almighty was born. Xavier’s mind hurts trying to calculate the possible computations that led those shepherds to that very gully on that very day - their own fathers and mothers, their fathers’ fathers and their mothers’ mothers, the notoriously unreliable migratory patterns of Mexican sheep, the stochastic route his father must have taken through the indecipherable and terrifying desert, his decision to leave at the very hour he did, to collapse in the very spot he fell (did he resemble a stone from afar, the body of a coyote, was he just a shadow amidst the immense arid plateau; at what point did he materialize as a boy to one of the shepherds?), the thousands of years of meteorological patterns that deigned that very afternoon was sunny and clear - and what all those computations could have meant, r.e. the status of his own existence.

Then there are his father’s years with the nomads: the fevers and the scorpions and the snakes, the flash floods; random death lurking beneath every step. There are the women he espied, the stories to which he listened, the languages he slowly learned. He learned the desert the way most people learn cities. His hands learned the most efficient and merciful way to kill a goat. His soul learned to love the earth and worship the sky. He learned when to speak and when to listen. He learned how to seduce girls. He learned how to preach without proselytizing, how to debate without condescending. He learned to make fire. His body learned to go days without water and weeks without a bed. He never learned to read. He didn’t need to.

And all of it led to him eventually riding out of the desert into the foreign labyrinth of San Rafael. Why? And why then?

These are mysteries to which there are no answers. There are only extrapolations and inventions.

Then there is his mother. She was born in a ruined village in the shadow of a dormant volcano. The first daughter after four sons. She was a pure blooded indigena, traceable to the prophets of the sun and their bloody sacrifices. The great mathematical architects of the greatest civilization the world had ever seen. Only to be undone by equines and microorganisms. Her father was a teacher and her mother kept house. Her father taught her to read and her mother taught her to wash clothes until her hands bled, to retrieve water from the well nearly a mile away, to walk through the desert in bare feet and not cry, how to be beaten without wailing, how to forgive through silence and grace. Her brothers taught her how to play football better than most of the boys in town. When she was seven she attended her first fiesta of the grito and watched her father sing until he went horse, watched her brothers get so drunk they pissed themselves, watched her mother get fucked by the constable of police and then watched her father beat the constable within a few breaths of his life. When she was eleven she lost her virginity at the grito to a cousin visiting from Mazatlan. When she was thirteen the same cousin brought with him a record player and records like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. She would suck him off and he would play his records and smoke cigarettes and tell her that he was going to move to Los Angeles and become a musician. She heard her father complaining to her mother that he disliked the boy, that he was ostentatious and careless, that his brother had failed as a father because his sons were indulgent and weak and knew nothing of suffering. She grew to hate her father because she didn’t think he felt anything but anger at the world, because she suspected he wanted everyone to be as miserable and as emotionally interred as he. She grew to hate her mother because she did not want more for her life or for her daughter than the shitty home she kept, because she did not speak back to her husband when he beat her. She grew to hate her home because there was no music there, because the people were reserved and quiet and disliked music except for at the fiestas, because they did not even recognize the smallness of their lives. Why did not they aspire to something grander? She hated the volcano for blocking the afternoon sun, which her cousin from Mazatlan said was the best and fullest light of the day. She hated the desert in the valley below town for being so empty and hopeless, for being like a moat that kept the outside world at bay. She hated the town’s fiestas because they were a relic of the old stoicism, because they reinforced her father’s view of the world by absolving structure for five days a year and then rigidly imposing it the other three hundred and sixty. She hated her country because it was not healthy to live such restrained lives, to bottle up one’s honest self and then to only indulge one’s desires at the fiestas. She started to sing songs about sexuality and about money. She started to cry in the house. She started neglecting her responsibilities because she didn’t feel like fulfilling them.

When she was sixteen she hitched her way to San Rafael. Would she have made it if she had left a day earlier or a day later? There are the cars she avoided, the murderers and the rapists. These lonely and possessed men exist in Mexico with alarming abundance. They troll the highways and byways scanning the horizon for an outstretched arm. It is easy to think of them as monsters; more difficult to think of them as very subtle variations of the ordinary, to think of them as men pushed to the brink by genetic mutations, by freak accidents, by the oppressive nature of bad luck. Some of them don’t even premeditate their crimes. Some of them take to the road for no reason at all, pick up a woman on a whim, find themselves turning down an abandoned path against their own logic and reason. Why? Because they can. Because she is at their mercy. Because they’ve never felt such power and they want to test its limits. Because they want to see what they are capable of. Because if they are capable of such monstrosities, surely they must also be capable of profound grace.

This minor deviancy is the root of real terror.

How many of them did she narrowly miss? Again, it’s almost too much to comprehend: each of their stories, each of their trajectories. He imagines asteroids careening towards earth.

She would never discuss her first years in the city. He can imagine, now, what they must have been. There is the childhood, the indoctrination. There is the rebellion and the journey. Then, there is a blankness; like a hundred pages torn out of a novel. The blankness that he can only decipher now. Those years of sweat and jizz. Those years of roaches and knives, of glottal moans. Those calloused years that eventually came to seem, to her, like one interminable sea, its landmarks indefinable. The men were no more distinguishable than gulls or kelp, a vast feral horde. She was stronger than them because they came to her desperate, because she sated them.

Because when they left, she was still empty.

Then, there is a man on horse back in need of a bath and a meal. And there is her offering both. Why? A whim, a lark, she said. Divine intervention or divine chance. She thought it would make a good story to tell her friends. She liked his posture. She was drawn to the stoicism of his eyes, the stoicism that she found absent in San Rafael and that she had come to miss about her hometown. He was as mysterious and as detached as a star. Her reasoning for stopping him never stayed consistent. She probably never even knew the precise motivations that led her to grab hold of his horse’s reins.

And she had to be on that exact block at that exact hour of that exact day. And he had to take that exact route through a city that would have been as disorienting as Atlantis. If Xavi ever seriously considered the possibilities, the permutations, the probabilities of all these things occurring…well, he’d never make it out of bed in the morning. He’d certainly never finish a poem.

Thoughts like these annihilate the foundations of his atheism. In a world of infinite permutations, by what metrics is a life measured?

All of this solipsism does not even begin to account for Octavia’s own trajectory: her parents, her parents’ parents. Their creation stories and those before them. Eden re-created and breached again, and again. She is in San Rafael and so is he. Either one of them could have been elsewhere. He could have been born in the States, in a clapboard house in the New York suburbs to a banker father and a schoolteacher mother. He could have played tennis and attended private school on Long Island. She could have been born to carpet merchants in Tunisia, shared a house that reeked of tea with wizened men whose teeth had rotted away to candied nubs, their hands stained indigo and scarlet as if they were Shamans. He could have been born in Mumbai and abandoned on the steps of an orphanage, learned to steal and panhandle and play dice in the lurid shadows of opium dens and brothels, lost his virginity to a girl whose eyes had been burned out by cattle prods. She could have been born to architects in Paris, fallen in love with a nude model on a brittle, piercing December night pacing the Seine, could have grown blasé about the Champs Elyse and the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. He could be a fiction writer in Iowa writing stark, spare stories about drunks and haunted railroad crossings and wives who’ve lapsed into asexual middle age. She could be a debutante in Seoul watching her brother jump from the thirty-third floor of a hotel balcony, hearing the gasp of the wind and the catechistical blinking of the infinite city. A seasonal farm hand in fallow Ontario, a beggar maid in Budapest, a preacher in a sun-drenched Melbourne parish, a solider in the Lord’s Resistance Army torturing and raping and murdering his way through the Sudan, a naked boy waiting to leap from the back of a rusted ship in an oasis somewhere in the vast central Asian deserts.

His entire life is swaddled in sand, is endless horizon in all directions.

Somehow, from inexplicable nothingness, they are here, this city is here, they are walking through it, and yet another summer is lapsing into yet another autumn.

It all seems impossibly urgent.

~

“I think you could write very good non-fiction. You have a heart for universal sentiment and an eye that locates very small details most poets can’t be bothered with. You like specifics, not metaphor. You like strong images instead of devices. That is important, because what, love, what remains after we read something? We do not remember character or style or structure. What we remember are images, and nothing more. That is the key to endurance: to create images that survive and metastasize, that will haunt the reader long after he’s left your artificial world behind.”

She will visit him in his bedroom and sit looking out the small, octagonal window at the pigeons who weave and prattle on his rooftop. Somehow, word reaches her old suitors that Octavia is at his place for coffee. They show up, one by one, sometimes bumping into each other in the stuttering elevator or the ammonia-rich hallway. They pretend they’ve come to see him, and then they sit on his bed just feet from Octavia and they stare out the same window and give her chapbooks they’ve assembled, sketches they’ve compiled. Sometimes they’ll empty a cigarette and roll a spliff on his desk.

They ask what he is writing and ignore him.

They help themselves to day old coffee, get stoned and recline on his bed like it’s their own. Arms behind their heads, to alleviate the tightness in their chests from the lovesickness and the weed. Sometimes, after the weed does its methodical work, they’ll begin to cry, not quite silently.

She looks out the silmy window and denies any intimations of empathy.

“That’s why I’m bringing you to this reading tonight. Suarez was a poet when he was younger, a middling poet, not half as good as you. He had no reputation and he was wandering Europe alone, fucking his way through Europe, in his own words. A drift less expat. And do you know what he did? He turned, first, to fiction, and eventually, to non-fiction, and he’s made a reputation for himself because of that shift.”

He could have been a member of the Peruvian civil guard and stationed in a defunct, Andean mining village.

“You haven’t read his first novel, have you? Oh, love, you must read it, it’s an absolute marvel. It’s about a driver under a ferocious South American dictator. The dictator’s forces are trying to eradicate a fierce, indigenous uprising somewhere in the country‘s western mountains. And this man drives the dead bodies of the slaughtered indigenous to the already dug mass graves. He starts to hear voices, or so he thinks. Whispers in the night. They grow louder.”

There are walking through a moonscape again. They traverse the sea of tranquility, disappear into the soft shadows of a crater.

“Soon, these voices are so loud he cannot ignore them any longer. It’s the indigenous, talking amongst themselves and to him, arguing about old family disputes, telling local tall tales, lamenting lost loves or bragging about women they’d fucked. Of course, they talk politics, too, especially to the driver. They talk and argue about politics, and this driver, he starts to feel an affection for these dead, for the people he’s supposed to be killing, and every night, when he finally dumps the bodies, he’s overcome by enormous sadness, the kind of sadness one feels at the funeral of a dear friend. He starts to look forward to these nights, far more than he enjoys the daytime amongst the soldiers in his camp.”

He breaks her into segments and pieces. She is mostly deconstructed. Here are the priestly cheeks, there are the hanging breasts he has seen whole only in fantasies, and seen in reality only in even smaller fragments: a rounded, sumptuous edge as she turns to see who is at the door, her hands holding her onyx hair up and exposing the taut tendons of her neck; the bottomless cove between them as she leans forward to trim her toenails, how this space is shaped like an inverted swan (if the swan is seen from straight on, not in profile); their heft (considerable) as she reaches over him to grab a middling novel by Vargas Llosa. Here are her broad and inelegant feet, there are her adamantine eyes. Here is the sharp prow of her left shin bone, there is the taper of her ass that reminds him of a scythe.

“Obviously, this starts to torment the driver, too. He’s soon wracked with guilt. Oh, I’m sorry to go on like this, love, I won’t ruin anymore for you. The whole thing, he’s suggested, is about his own guilt in fleeing Argentina just when Peron came to power. He was living with a woman at the time, a poet, and she begged him to stay, for her, for their love, but he was afraid, too afraid, and he fled. The poet eventually disappeared. So many of his friends and peers were among the disappeared. Suarez says he never got over the guilt of leaving them, and he vowed never to return to Argentina. He dedicated the novel to them, each of them, by name. The dedications page is actually two and a half pages long. It’s a treasure of a book, and you wouldn’t have the faintest idea that he’d had it in him if you’d ever read his poetry.”

What he should do is give up writing and ride into the Sonora in search of his father. After all, what becomes of even a very good, arguably great, writer? They are abandoned, in short time. It is better to be a minister, or a laborer. Then, at least, people will tell stories about you; you survive a generation or more by word of mouth. A great writer secludes himself, writing stories in lieu of living them. He strives towards an impossible transcendence, but he never reaches such an apogee. He fails perilously close; maybe he even achieves his desired grace for a sentence, or paragraph, or even a whole page (but immortality is not granted for brilliant sentences or pages), and as such, he is forgotten more quickly than anyone. Better to be a local legend or a muse or even a drunk than a writer.

~

There is a murmur that he can sometimes hear, a susurrus rising from the city like mist from a swamp. Mostly, there are only the dissociated instruments: the timpani of bullets, the choral lament of grief stricken mothers, the exasperated sighs of veteran police officers as they sip stale coffee and watch the sun crawl to life, the anonymous prayers of the fossilized women in their church pews, the blather of politicians while cash whispers in their pockets.

But sometimes, if one listens very intently, these disparate melodies converge and form a terrible requiem, a new language in which the listener, in the deepest marrow of existence, intuits his own severance from the earth, and from his organic nature. He hears the sound of his own death. How far off? he wonders. It is the mechanized hum of a world incapable of mourning the implosion of his universe. It is the cruel abnegation of his importance.

He quivers with anger, and realizes we’ve built a world of systems so efficiently permanent that a man no longer has the dignity of necessity. When he is extinguished, nothing will change.

Octavia’s eyes are sometimes a lapidary labyrinth of bronze and copper and jade and faint glimmers of ivory. In the café shadows of evening, they blister like ingots.

~

They emerge on the throbbing southern shore of Avenida Bolano in San Rafael‘s Casco Antiquo. The avenue’s two lanes run unimpeded to the border. It’s the kind of street that’s survived the old west, the kind of street once lined with saloons and gambling parlors, brothels rubbing elbows with family restaurants.

Those days survive in photographs and dreams.

Garbage and refuse litter the avenue in a manner that, in the floral light of dawn or dusk, appears festive. Malandros and homeless and gypsy marauders claim space on the sidewalks, selling their flowers and trinkets, their quick hits of ecstasy. There is the pale ammonia stink of piss, and the fetid nausea of the unclean and the desperate:

The official stench of San Rafael.

There was a time when this was the grand avenue of San Rafael. Xavi came here as a boy with his mother. The street was a phalanx of light, an immense promenade of bright flesh.

Noticing the change in a place is like noticing your own aging. When did the vibrancy go out of the avenue? When did a pall fall over its shops? Or is the vibrancy just a product of nostalgia? Is the pall just Xavier maturing and growing less romantic about the city around him?

A boy lurking outside a bodega calls to Octavia. He’s young, part of a loose amalgamation of scared boys and boys feigning toughness. Impassive and ambivalent boys in their gaudy American clothes, their designer sunglasses and their coruscant jewelry. Some of them brandish hand guns like toys, wave them as wistful shibboleths of adulthood. It’s an awkward tableaux: boys occupying the demeanor of men:

The official photograph of San Rafael.

The boy in question calls out something about her tits, about her beautiful tits. He wants to swim between them.

She waves and turns like a skinny stalk of grass caught in a surprising wind. “I’m sure you would dive like a master,” she yells to him, and the boy’s already pallid color races from his face. His surrounding friends hoot and holler, pretending to punch and smother him with the bombast of children whose bodies are still foreign and mysterious. The boy turns away in hot shame. His lugubrious mask fractures and beneath it is the ululating face of a woman, her countenance ancient and painted with fine lines.

Octavia swims backwards, and facing him. The hot neon lome of tacqueria after bodega after tacqueria floods her, forging dells and caverns of shade on the left side of her face, and somehow these depressions seem infinitely clearer than the portions of her face that are briefly illuminated. It is like the shadows of clouds race swiftly over her skin.

He could be a sheep rancher in Patagonia with twelve children, three of them bastards, his hands could be precise with shears and unafraid of blood.

Some of the shops are two stories and built from adobe or brick. Many of them are like an Archimboldo painting: cobbled together from similar but disparate elements. Cinder blocks, chicken wire and corrugated tin. Broken concrete, corroded iron piping and plywood. Many of the shops are adorned with ostenations, rosaries and crucifixes and blinking strands of lights.

Syncopated moans, smothered groans, the aural offal of suffering. Generators hum and wheeze, spilling their noxious breath. Elaborate mazes of electrical wire lie coiled like adders. Older men sit at folding plastic tables and play cards, dominoes. The malandros, their hair slicked back and their shirts unbuttoned to reveal gold crucifixes or gold serpents, give them a wide berth. Their faces are indistinguishable from one another, frozen with apathy and honeyed capitalist dreams.

A bus squawks as it waddles past, heads hanging out the windows, a mattress strapped to the roof and threatening to fall off.

“Were you ever a boy like that? Did you ever call to strange women on the street? Or were you timid, like most artists? Were you a delicate boy?”

They come to a wide, fallow field. Trash has collected in its corners, and scatters like leaves across its expanse. The ground has been hopelessly worn to dust. Antiquated, precarious towers of light unevenly illume the barren lot, the same way parents unevenly cast their love amongst their children. The middle of the field burns orange; the near end is a sickly yellow. The farthest reaches flicker a dull pearl.

Lissome, scrawny children roam the pitch, calling vulgarly to one another. They kick a ball abraded to its core. They flux and abort and swerve like gulls driven by a distant storm. Their field is depressed beneath street level; from above, the boys resemble small birds learning to soar.

The sour tang of sewage saunters in on an easterly breeze.

A couple sits on a ledge overlooking the pitch. A tall, gangly boy has his arm slung casually around the waist of a plump, squat girl. Gunfire announces itself in the industrial distance. No one moves, no one looks. The game forges on to its own halting, stochastic melody. The boy’s arm is naked to the shoulder, and latticed in ink. The girl’s head settles affectionately into the small alcove created by the crux of his shoulder and neck. He turns halfway to the street. His face, weakly chinned and strongly nosed, resembles a boomerang. He lightly kisses the crown of her head. It is a deft, immeasurable delicacy of a kiss. Maybe he does not even kiss her, maybe he only touches air.

What a forgotten beauty it will become, this fragile transept.

Higher pitched gunfire responds insistently to the first, sluggish rounds, screaming an arpeggio in falsetto.

A police motorcycle whinnies and coughs its way past, plunging into the violent night.

He could be a journalist driving across Siberia, his car stalled on a small ridge and an immense azure sky drawn out away from him, his driver buried in the vehicle’s bowels. A wedding party could be marching past them, singing and drinking and offering him vodka; the bride, pretty in an avian way, kisses him messily on the cheek.

The chubby girl, whose white tank top is a size too small and reveals two deeply tanned flanks of lard, responds to her lover’s kiss by nuzzling her cheek even deeper into the nave of his neck.

Have you no place of your own? This is no place for you, my lovers.

A primeval woman is prostrate on the sidewalk, supplicant. Her hand-crafted wares - pottery and idols - are smashed into eggshells all around her, and she weeps. Her hair is the color of sooty snow, and does not seem to end: the nest of a mother bird who cannot stop creating, even though she can no longer lay eggs.

There is a wound on the side of her neck, but it is not fresh. It is festering and open, and if he looks into it, he can see the sad history of her life, he can almost understand the quiet dialect of her heart, the foreign and terrifying tongues that they spoke in the desert with his father, the dialect that has been usurped and conquered, first by the Spanish, then by the Americans, now by its own brothers. A soft music that is at once joyous and melancholy, that meets death under the stars and dances with it, fucks it, marries it.

There are a thousand more like her the city over, all with their own gaping, oozing wounds. Some bow, some wail. The younger ones flagellate their backs with horse hair whips. His mother had given him an enormous wall map of the world when he was a young boy; these women’s scars are raised like the mountain ranges of Central Asia on that map.

His mother would burrow her cheek, too. It’s a strictly feminine gesture that rouses in him some inveterate, protective nostalgia. The crux of his father’s neck reminded him of a tree meeting the earth.

“You were one of those delicate boys, I can tell. The ones who kept to themselves and didn’t play sports. The kind of boys I watched from across the schoolyard, the kind of boys I teased endlessly because I liked them but they were too dumb to know.”

Garbage is everywhere. Wrappers and bottles and cups and receipts and condoms, all of it in different stages of decomposition or wasting or fading.

There is a smaller scar on Octavia’s chin. She will not tell him its origin. Sometimes he teases her: did a horse kick you for wearing it out? did your father get tired of your nosiness and cut you? did you try to eat a snake?

Music pulsates from a boarded-up church, bass heavy. Christ droops from a crucifix. An angel of death splays her spindly, terrific arms. Come to me, my child, come home. A priest sits on the steps, smoking. The church rattles and thunders. It’s the kind of music you measure seismically. The jaundiced-eyed priest smokes and stares vacantly into the sweet swarm of night.

There is a strange, serendipitous order to the beggars and the flagellates, the strutting malandros and the tentative corner boys eyeing up any passerby for hints of danger. There’s predestination in their assemblage, meaning in their entropy. He believes in the magic of chance encounters to save or to destroy.

“How much do you think these boys get paid? Five dollars an hour? Ten? What’s that, ten times what’d they’d make in a maqui! And we wonder why they take to the streets, gun tucked into their shorts. We have sold our soul, now why shouldn’t they sell theirs‘? Oh, love, such exuberance in them, such fearlessness. It’s almost admirable, don’t you think?”

He does not know what images will haunt him. He prepares diligently.

Beyond the field and the ragged game are the river shanties. The road has been broken apart and scavenged. Women in obstreperous copper jewelry and sun ravaged gowns sell rotting, infested fruit. Most of the men are shirtless and drunk. There are the dissonant howls of pleasure and pain. A junked TV is a card table. A gaggle of naked children chase a dog down to the river. A naked man shambles behind them, his long dick flaccid and dribbling something rank. Foam seeps from the corners of his mouth; a similar substance gestates on the river’s edge. A stray chicken clucks in the street, admonishingly. More dogs, their bodies plundered to the bone, wander in a laconic daze. A canine corpse, half scavenged and being devoured by flies, has come to rest at the entrance of a shack

The place resembles an old mining town that’s lost its charm and its hope.

There are safer ways across the river. A Northern wind bores penitently down, lucid and cold, and the night’s disposition shifts. There are rumors from Michoacán of mass graves. There are whispers from Chihuahua of screams coming from the silver mines at night, ghastly howls of despair. A story has been circulating that a rancher found three men crucified on the edge of his property.

A gang of boys has set fire to the river again. Its rainbow surface gurgles flame. The boys stand on the far bank and throw rats high into the air, their fat silhouettes falling like meteors into the burning abyss. The rats shriek on the way down. They splash like stones. They crackle in the oil fire.

An audience has gathered on the bridge. Some of them throw rotten fruit at the boys; others pelt them with rocks.

One of the boys pulls out a gun and clumsily fires it into the heavens.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, boy? You know how to use that as well as you know how to use your little dick,” a shirtless drunk heckles. The boy points the gun at him. The drunk opens his arms and lifts his head to the sky. The boy pulls the trigger, and the shot races errantly into the silky night.

The drunk cackles.