They emerge on the throbbing southern shore of Avenida Bolano. Its 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.

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 loud 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.

On the opposite side of the river are the gas stations and the fast food joints, the cheap motels with faded chintzy signs.

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 Sausatino 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.