That next Tuesday, Octavia didn’t show up. Xavi didn’t think anything of it; she rarely came on Tuesdays. Instead, he put the finishing touches on his article for Armando and read a hundred pages or so of “La Difunta Correa.” Then he turned off his light, masturbated, and fell asleep early.

When Octavia didn’t show on Wednesday, Xavi was slightly concerned, but mostly he was perturbed. She knew about his meeting with the police inspector, and he was anxious to tell her about it. He tried to call her twice, but she didn’t answer. He sent her a text, asking where she was. He fell asleep in bed, waiting for an answer, too annoyed to read, write, or jack off.

When she didn’t visit on Saturday or Sunday, Xavi’s annoyance turned to dread. He called her frantically, but by then her phone had died or been shut off. All his calls went directly to voice mail. He left her a few voice mails, each of increasing desperation. He sent her six text messages, hopelessly. He thought about calling the police. Women in San Rafael still disappeared on a regular basis, even if the trickle of bodies had slowed. He reasoned and rationed with himself: Octavia was too smart, too savvy, to find herself in the wrong kind of company; but sometimes evil was implacable, and there was nothing to be done to stop it. Octavia had just disappeared, as she warned him she often did; but they’d grown close enough, and she clearly cared about him enough, that she wouldn’t have disappeared without at least tipping him off. He finally fell asleep close to dawn, his mind having exhausted itself with its incessant whirring.

He woke up a few hours later and took a bus to Felipe Munoz’s apartment in Colonia Cortes. Lipe shared a top floor apartment with his mother, younger brother, and two younger sisters. The building was one of the first mass tenements hurriedly built to accommodate the influx of workers in the 1980’s. Already, it was beginning to crumble. Only half of the elevators worked, and the stairways that cantilevered along the outside of the building had been covered by a chain-link netting.

Xavi knocked and Munoz’s mother let him in. The apartment itself was small and messy. It had a small bedroom, a filthy kitchen, and a living area that was barely big enough for one tattered couch and a dining room table. Munoz was down the hall, showering, his mother said. She was going around the apartment, swooping up scattered articles of clothing and depositing them into a laundry basket. After she’d filled the basket to brimming, she handed it to Xavi.

“Here, make yourself useful,” she said, while she ran a bucket of water. She was a thin, sinewy woman with a faded tattoo on her left forearm. She wore a bandana, and had tiny facial features, tiny wrists, a pert tiny chest that was visible beneath a stained grey t-shirt. “Go on up to the roof,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute. Lipe likes to take long showers. The pervert jacks off in there for hours. You’ve got nothing but time. Esperanza is up there. She’ll help you.”

Xavi emerged on the roof, where Munoz’s sixteen year old sister Esperanza was sitting in jean shorts and a bikini top, smoking. She was more buxom than her mother, although still lissome and hipless. She was laying on top of a towel that she’d spread across the tar rooftop. The netting from the stairwells extended about five meters above the roof, surrounding the building’s exterior.

“Who are you?” Esperanza asked.

“A friend of Lipe’s.”

The girl nodded.

“What’s with the webbing?” Xavi asked.

Esperanza looked around her as if she were noticing the netting for the first time. She shrugged. “I dunno. It’s always been here. I think they had a problem with people jumping. That was probably before we moved here.” Clothes lines had been hooked through the netting and criss-crossed the roof like spindles of silk. Munoz’s mother arrived, lugging a bucket of water and a washboard. She pulled a piece of basalt from the pocket of her jeans and started to scrub away at the clothes. When she finished an article, she would hand it to Xavi, who then hung it from one of the lines. Esperanza had the bucket of clothes pins, which she eventually dumped salaciously onto her well oiled stomach, forcing Xavi to pick them delicately, as if they were guarded by adders.

“Lipe told me you work in the factories,” Xavi finally said to Munoz’s mother.

“Oh, yes. Me and Esperanza both do.”

“Where?”

“Lear, on Calle Lindbergh. We were working for Foxconn, but we’d spent a long time trying to organize a union. Things turned nasty. They were treating Esperanza badly because of me. So we left. We got out of there six weeks before the explosion last summer. I’m sure you heard about it.”

Xavi had heard rumors, but nothing concrete; it must have happened while he and Tomas were on one of their trips.

“Six people died. Including two women I was very close with, rest their souls. That’s why we’d been trying to organize a union. The safety conditions were awful. We knew something terrible was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. We told them, but no one listened. Now they’re paying for it, although not much. The government doesn’t care about safety. They just care that the companies don’t leave. So they give them tax breaks, and don’t show up for safety inspections, and offer to run safety trainings so that the companies don’t have to waste time on them.” She sighed.

“It’s better at Lear?”

“A little, sure. Nowhere is that much better. But I don’t feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to explode, if that’s what you mean.”

Xavi went to fetch another clothes pin. Munoz’s mother finally looked over at her daughter, the pile of clothes pins sprawled on her stomach.

“Ay, chica, what are you doing?”

Esperanza looked at her mother over her sunglasses, casting her a soldering glare. Munoz finally appeared on the roof, his hair wet and shaggy.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

“Whose going to help me finish the laundry?” his mother asked.

“Have her do it,” Munoz said, motioning to his reposed sister.

“I work for a living,” Esperanza objected.

Munoz threw his hands in consternation before leaving the women by themselves. He and Xavi went down to the street, which was a wide and hauntingly empty boulevard lined by melancholy desert willows that stood alone at regular intervals, like forlorn travelers waiting for a bus that would never arrive, or like abandoned lovers.

“Octavia’s gone,” Xavi said.

“She does that.”

“I was thinking of calling the police.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Why?”

“What’s the point?”

“What if something happened?”

“If something happened she’s already dead. It’s not like the police would do anything anyway. All it would do is make you look crazy if, and when, she comes back. This is what she does. She’s told you herself.”

Xavi pulled out a cigarette and offered Munoz one. They were moving southwest, towards a cluster of maquiladoras. A dilapidated school bus with a mattress strapped to the roof trundled past, kicking up a spume of dust and rock. Across the street two couples were sitting together on a ruined bench, smoking cigarettes and laughing. They were probably fourteen or fifteen. The boys wore wife beaters, and had scrawny, tattoo-less arms. The girls were slightly overweight, wearing jeans that were too tight and earrings that were too large for their still pudgy, unhardened faces. They were probably sisters. Xavi watched them while he and Munoz walked. The boys showed off. One of them had a skateboard. He tried doing tricks, but mostly fell on his ass, to the delight of the others. The other boy, who wore a big crucifix, had his arm around the shorter and pudgier of the two girls. Her stomach toppled over the top of her jeans in a strangely endearing way. Without warning she nestled her head into the crux of the boy’s neck, and, almost reflexively, he bent over and kissed her on the forehead. Xavi thought, then, about how impossible love was, and how desperate we were for it. How desperate everyone was to communicate honestly, even with near strangers. But what could really be said that mattered? He thought about Octavia. He didn’t know anything about her, save for what he intuited (and what, really, was intuition: sexual desire? the belief, based on some numinous current, that another person might understand you?), and that she loved poetry. They’d talked about death, sure, and about writing, but what could anyone say honestly about those things? What could be known about them? We create shapes and figures out of words, shapes and figures for things that are entirely beyond us.

“Can we sit down, Lipe?” Xavi asked.

“Sure. You ok?”

They found a bench and sat, smoking. Xavi watched the kids across the broad avenue, an avenue that reminded him of communism and tanks and imposing governmental buildings where stone faced men and women trudged about their duties, unquestioning, because that was what was asked of them. Instead there were the lonely trees, the distant maquiladoras, the two young couples flirting. He wondered if any of them would remember this afternoon. If the boy would remember that dip of the girl’s head; if the girl would remember how effortlessly the boy kissed her forehead. Maybe the boys would grow up to be malandros or rapists or something worse. Maybe the girls would just become insecure whores, or go to work in the maquis. How could anyone know, just by looking at them? He wanted more for them; what that more was, he couldn‘t say.

“Do you believe in evil, Lipe?”

“Evil? What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. Whatever we consider evil to be. All those women who disappeared. Or the men who run the cartels. Or the men who run these factories. You know, evil. Do you believe in it?”

Munoz dragged his cigarette.

“Hadn’t much thought about it.”

“No?”

“Not really. Have you?”

“Not really, no, I suppose. At least not deeply. I guess as a kid I believed that evil existed and you’d recognize it when you saw it. As if it were something malignant that you could see, in the eyes, or maybe something you could smell. Now I look people and I don’t know. If it even exists, or if I could recognize it if it did.”

“The way I see it, most people you’re talking about are just trying to make money. The cartels and the factories. Does that make them evil? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t have a choice in it. Not that they’re born evil but that they’re born into a system that doesn’t give them a choice but to make money.”

“So it’s the system.”

“Sure.”

“But it’s people that uphold that system. How else would it survive?”

Munoz crushed his cigarette. He nodded to the kids. “I remember being that age. Taking out the chubby girls because they were the first ones to have real tits. Getting hand jobs in abandoned houses. Sucking on their soft, fat tits. The best erections of my life, I swear.”

Xavi smiled.

“What the fuck do you want me to say, Xavi? I don’t know shit about evil, strangely enough, despite living in this city. I’m sure Octavia’s fine. I don’t know where she is, or why she left. And I don’t know why you’re still hanging out with her if you aren’t even getting laid. I don’t know what you’re looking for, hombre.”

Munoz’s mom made them all dinner, some kind of pork soup with rice, and they ate sitting on the couch and watching the television. They watched melodramas and then they watched a football match. Xavi and Munoz watched television late into the night.

There was a show that aired after the news on the local cable channel. It was, unimaginatively, titled “Talk of the Town,” and it was hosted by a former melodrama star, Carlos Reyes, a middle aged man with a striking, angular face who’d begun to go flabby in the chest and stomach. Reyes interviewed low level local celebrities and eccentric personalities, discussing mostly superficial matters about life in San Rafael. This particular night, Reyes happened to be interviewing the literary critic and blogger for Luz de la Sonora, a newspaper out of Hermosilla. Her name was Rosalita Ramirez Medina. Reyes and Medina spent most of the hour discussing a new crime novel by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. The discussion inevitably devolved into whether a Mexican living in America - in Iowa, at that (Reyes practically spat out the word Iowa in disdain) - could still write about issues concerning Mexicans, or whether Crosthwaite - who’d gone so far as to write two novels in English - had been irrevocably Anglicized. It was a common argument in literary circles: how does one write about place? especially a place that one no longer lives? It was a sensitive topic for Latin American literary aficionados, and especially for the Mexican literati, since most of the best Mexican literature was being written by non-Mexicans, or by Mexicans who’d emigrated. At one point, Medina - who had short trimmed black hair (that was probably dyed), and thick horn rimmed glasses, and wore bright crimson lipstick (she looked, Xavi thought, like the female heroine of a Mexican crime novel) - mentioned the poet Juan Carlos Ortega. “Say what you will about Ortega’s contemporary poetry,” Medina said, “And I think that it’s mostly pedestrian. But at least he’s stayed in country.” “Yes,” Reyes said, “but he’s not exactly a vocal proponent of Mexican literature. He’s mostly holed up in his ivory tower, disengaged.” Medina nodded somberly, as if this were a great tragedy. “True. It’s a shame to see such a fine writer who refuses to use those gifts to engage in a dialogue, and has instead chosen the monologue.”

“I’m surprised Reyes knows anything about poetry,” Munoz said.

Near the end of the hour, Reyes smiled slyly at Medina. “Ms. Medina, before you go, I do want to ask you, briefly, about some rumors we’ve heard. Or some whispers.” Medina smiled expectantly, flirtatiously. “You already know what I’m talking about, Ms. Medina?” “I have an idea.” Reyes leaned forward. “Suarez,” he said, “the modern day Borges, they call him.” “Yes, if only Borges had written novels.” “Well, yes, of course.” Medina smiled for a long time, her face taut on the screen, almost like a corpse’s. “It seems true, from what I hear, that Suarez is going to be releasing a novel in the very near future about San Rafael,” she said, “and about the cartel culture in San Rafael. Yes, this is true, from what I’m told.” “Do you have any more information for us, Ms. Medina? Did Suarez spend time in our city? Did he infiltrate the cartels?” “It’s hard to separate fiction from fact when it comes to Suarez. He’s done a remarkable job at blurring the two. Some people even say that his first novel is somewhat autobiographical. That he was taken into the jungle by Peron’s men, that he was slated to disappear, and only through chance did he survive. Others say that he wasn’t anywhere near Argentina in the early 70’s. No one knows with any certainty; there are only the books. And so it will be with this one. Beyond it being about the cartel violence in San Rafael, I don’t know anything.” Reyes smiled again, the broad, winning smile of a man whose entire life had been built upon the charm and fake honesty of that smile. “Well, Ms. Rosalita Ramirez Medina, from Luz de la Sonora, thank you for joining us. Until next time, this is Carlos Reyes.”

By then, Munoz had fallen asleep on the couch. Xavi settled in on the floor, but he was awake all night listening to the baleful yowls of the freight trains that, like keening pilgrims from a distant land, crawled to and from the maquiladoras.

~

Two days later a letter appeared in the editorial section of Luz de la Sonora:

It is a well known fact that writers make their trade in lying,
just as corporations make their trade in exploitation. It would
be wise for the citizens of Sonora to remember that you cannot
believe everything you read. The publishing industry is just an arm
of the state. And You have seen what the state has done to You.
How they have sold you down the river to slavery. ‘Watch out that
no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming,
“I am the Christ,” and will deceive many. At that time many will
turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and
many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.’ There is
but one Father, and there is but one voice for His People.

El Hermandad.