The next day Xavi called Armando, who picked up on the second ring. His voice was higher than Xavi expected.

“Xavi, wow, hey, good to meet you, officially. Or, semi-officially.”

Xavi didn’t recognize his accent, either.

“You, too.”

“Well, hey, I wanted you to call because I’ve got something I want you to check out. Or, someone I want you to talk to. You said you wanted to write bigger, or that you were trying to write bigger.”

“Sure.”

“I’d like you to meet up with a police investigator I know. He’s a good guy, which is saying something in Mexico. He keeps the external sources of income to an absolute minimum, so you don’t have to worry about getting mixed up in anything fucked.”

“Are you sure about this? We’ve never met. I‘m just some shitty poet.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Look, you’re a good writer. And it ain’t easy to find good writers willing to work hard for inconsistent pay. Which is actually what I’m dealing with right now, the issue of pay… I’m out of town for a little while, but when I come back, I assure you, I’ll have enough money for the next year, accounting for interest on the pay you’ve lost, too.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’ve got to run. The investigator’s name is Miguel Angel Espinoza. Meet him tomorrow at noon at Café Veracruz.” Then, before Xavi could ask any questions, Armando hung up.

~

Xavi arrived at Café Veracruz at 11:30 and ordered a coffee. It was a simple restaurant: square tables with red tablecloths and a coffee bar. The place was already crowded. Many of the diners were municipal police, who talked lewdly amongst small groups, telling raunchy jokes, eating huge plates of juevos rancheros or enchiladas or chili relleno. Xavi felt out of place sitting by himself; he’d brought a notebook. He felt like everyone else was a regular, and being an imposter (and a lonely one at that) drew attention his way. Of course, maybe that was just self absorption and paranoia. Maybe Café Veracruz was the kind of place, ubiquitous in San Rafael, where one could go and eat without being asked any questions. He ordered another coffee.

Three minutes before noon, Miguel Angel Espinoza arrived. Xavi could tell it was him immediately; apparently the recognition was mutual, because the inspector made a beeline directly for Xavi’s table. Espinoza was short and sturdy, very clean cut. He wore straight jeans and simple boots and a black t-shirt. He was basically the kind of guy Xavi would figure to be a cop, the kind of guy who was probably a decent bantamweight in his youth, with quick hands but slow feet. Faint scars latticed his face, like a stone in the desert that had been scoured for thousands of years.

“Xavier?” he said after already sitting down.

“Inspector Espinoza.”

“Just call me Angel.”

“Ok. Angel.”

They shook hands and Angel immediately hailed the waitress, snapping for her, and ordering himself a water and an orange, peeled. Xavi offered him a cigarette, but Angel declined.

“No cigarettes or coffee,” he said. “There’s too many temptations. They’re easy, and lazy. Just water and fruit for me. Put your notebook away.”

Xavi put it into his bag.

“Are you eating anything?”

“No. I was waiting for you.”

“Are you hungry?”

Xavi shrugged.

“Ok, good.”

The waitress arrived with Angel’s orange and water. He ate deliberately, using a fork and knife. Xavi’d never seen anyone eat an orange with a fork and knife before.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Angel asked between bites.

“No.”

Angel nodded, a terse nod, wasting no motion.

“I have too many women. That’s the one indulgence I’ll give myself. Cunt. I’m addicted to it. What’s the only point of life? Fucking, to fuck. To get fucked. What motivates us? Fucking. It’s the only reason we want money, or power. Because with money or power it becomes easier to fuck who we want to fuck.” He smiled as if stumbling across a revelation. “The killing, the drugs, the guns. All of it just to fuck. All so some poor sad street urchin can put his cock into the finest chingada possible. And there’s always somebody with a finer chingada. There’s always finer pussy to be had than the pussy you’re fucking. That’s what they think,” Angel said, pointing his fork at Xavi and crossing his legs. “Not me. Whatever pussy I’m fucking is the finest pussy in the history of the world.”

“I agree.”

Angel smiled, showing small, imperfect but very white teeth. He drank his entire glass of water in one long, measured draught.

“You’ve never fired a gun before,” Angel said.

“No.”

“Let’s go then.”

Xavi followed Angel to his car across the street, a dusty grey Buick with tinted windows. They drove west out of the city on the Border Highway. Across the river the orderly streets of Texas shone like scrubbed slate beneath the hot, late spring sun. They headed for the mountains, turning off the highway and following a packed dirt road through a pass in the hills. Xavi wanted a cigarette, but he wasn’t going to ask Angel to roll the windows down. Instead he thought about Octavia. He remembered dancing with her at the concert. The way her forearms fell behind his neck. The pressure of her hips against his thumbs. He thought about all the ways he should tell her he loved her. He thought about taking her out for a nice dinner. Or he thought about writing her a poem. Or he thought about just turning to her sometime, when they were in his hallway, and saying,

“You know, Octavia, I love you.”

He didn’t tell her though, even though he was certain she knew, and even though he was certain that, in her own way, she loved him, too. Why else would she come over so often? Why else would she share her poetry with him? Why else would she have danced with him like that? He’d taken to scrutinizing her every move, looking for hints as to whether she seemed more affectionate or less than the last time he’d seen her. Did she hug him for longer? Did she smile more? Was she leaning away from him at dinner? It was foolish stuff, asinine and destructive. Obsessive, even. But he couldn’t help it. If he just told her that he loved her, it might put an end to all that silliness. Yet something stopped him.

They were descending the opposite side of the mountains. A thousand miles of desert lay ahead, barren, inhospitable land that, somehow, Xavi’s forebearers had lived on for centuries. He thought about his father. Ildefonso. Born on the side of a canyon to an Indian mother who died during childbirth and a stern, retributive Spanish father who never forgave his only son for the death of his wife. Xavier’s grandfather, Valentino, had been a missionary. As his son grew into the ghost of his dead wife, disdain for the boy consumed him. He sensed that every similarity between the son and the woman of whom he dreamt was God mocking him, punishing him for loving a mestizo. God, Valentino learned, was cruel and vindictive. He saw it in the boy’s charcoal irises, his epicene and attenuated jaw line.

When Ildefonso was eleven, Valentino abandoned him at a Jesuit orphanage somewhere deep in the desert between Huitzilopochtli and Cuauhtemoc; when Ildefonso 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.

Looking out at the Sonora’s numbing expanse, Xavi’s mind hurt 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 his small body resemble a stone from afar? the body of a coyote? or 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 that very afternoon was sunny and clear - and what all those computations could have meant, r.e. the status of his own, that is Xavi’s, existence.

After that were 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 were the women he espied, the stories to which he listened, the languages he slowly learned. He learned the desert the way most people learned 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 were mysteries to which there were no answers. There were only extrapolations and inventions.

It occurred to Xavi that they’d been driving for nearly two hours. The afternoon light was fattening, the sun burning itself toward the distant, invisible sea. It also occurred to him that he had no idea who this Angel was, and really, no idea who Armando was, or why he’d conscripted Xavi to meet with a stoic, vaguely malicious man who would drive him two hours into the empty desert where there just-so-happened to be no other cars around, and where absolutely no one back in San Rafael would know to look for them. Suddenly he started to sweat. His throat dried. He tried to control his pulse, with little success. He thought about the bodies of women found in the Sonora, decomposed and naked, strangled and raped. He wondered, now, what they must have felt in the car on the drive out. If they had any idea they were going to their death. If there was a moment of clarity, where it struck them with finality, that the man beside them was the invisible man no one could find; that the journey they were on was not to get a drink, or a bite to eat, or to go fuck back at his place. Did they watch the mountains recede in the rearview mirror, the residual glow of their city? Did they watch the anonymous desert unfold like a Godless blip in the universe, an invisible land of silence, where anything was permitted and nothing sacred? Did they pray or cry or beg for mercy, or did they try to convince themselves that, no, they were letting their imaginations get the better of them, that obviously this couldn’t be the last hour of their life, because there was no way that they could actually find themselves suddenly caught in the omniscient path of such unrepentant violence?

“Would you mind rolling the window down?” Xavi asked, forcing his voice to remain steady. “I could really use a cigarette.”

Angel looked at him ambivalently, shrugged, and rolled the windows down. Hot, dry air flushed through the car.

“Where are we going?” Xavi asked after lighting the cigarette and taking three deep drags that scorched his throat.

Angel leaned forward, almost against the windshield, and he pointed towards the northwest horizon. There, cobbled together on the flat rocky plain, was a small colony of buildings that shone in the late daylight like limpid stones beneath a shallow stream. “San Theodosius,” Angel said.

A little later they pulled into the town, as it was, or what happened to remain of the town. It was only four streets, all of them built around the dilapidated central square of what had once been a Coenobitic monastery. The monastery, built of adobe, had long been abandoned to vagabonds and birds. Its bell tower flaked, gradually coming apart. Its once hard-edges had become rounded like glass smoothed by the flow of water. The streets were left to mongrel children and men so old that they seemed too tired to even look at Angel’s car moving slowly down their streets.

At the northern terminus of town the border fence ran unimpeded in both directions, hideous and malignant and covered in profane graffiti, pictures of genitals, hopeless protestations. It seemed the only artists to venture this far were angry ones, or cynical ones, or maybe they’d been hopeful and the sight of the fence was too much for any decent spirit to endure. Angel drove about a mile along the fence until he came to a lot that was a scrap yard or a dump, or possibly even a graveyard. It was filled with garbage and rusting metal, abandoned machinery, some of it quite old. Near the lot’s center was a cinder block structure, maybe eight feet high, and roofless. It was the size of a bedroom. A tarp, that was connected to the building by two frayed ropes, lay on the ground, rumpled and worn. Rancid water had pooled between its folds. Angel kicked his way through the junk. Paths had been picked through the garbage, seemingly at random, and they ran in all directions, as if someone blind had carved them. Angel moved a piece of warped plywood from an opening in the building. Xavi stood at a distance.

“Well, come on,” Angel said, motioning into the building.

Inside were the ashy remains of small fires. The walls were charred black. The interior, despite being open to the sun, smelled dankly of piss and shit. Garbage piled like driftwood in the corners. At the base of the northern wall was another piece of plywood. Xavi looked up, briefly. The sky was impenetrable as a mausoleum. Angel knelt down.

“Help me with this,” he said.

Xavi knelt down on the other side and they lifted the plywood aside. Beneath it was an opening, barely large enough for a body to fit through. Steps had been built from the earth and led underground.

“Wow,” Xavi said.

Angel smiled, showing his small, imperfect teeth.

“What’s down there?”

Angel shrugged. “Corpses.”

Xavi felt the color fall from his face.

Angel laughed, coolly. “No. It’s just a tunnel. There’s a generator somewhere around here, and that runs power down there. There’s lights on the wall. It leads into the middle of the desert on the other side.”

“For drugs?”

“Guns, actually. And girls, too.”

After a minute of staring into the blackness of the tunnel they finally put the plywood back. They walked back to Angel’s car. He opened the trunk. He pulled out a gun, a rifle. He loaded it.

“This is an AR-15. Also known as the M-16. The major firearm of the United States military. This, however, is the semi-automatic version.” He unloaded it, and tossed one of the bullets to Xavi. “That’s a Remington .223. Identical, in all but name, to the 5.56 by 45 milimeter NATO, which, again, is standard issue in the US military. Now, you‘d think that that means it's designed to inflict maximum damage. And in a sense, it is. It impacts at high velocity, yaws, and fragments, effectively exploding inside you. But because so much of the damage is tertiary, it basically means you‘re either just seriously disabled, or you die a long, slow death. Toss it here,” he said. Xavi threw him the bullet. “Now, it used to be that there were limits on the size of the clip you could own. The amount of bullets, basically. And there still are, in some places. But not in Texas. As long as your gun’s a center fire rifle - as this one is - there are no restrictions on the size of the magazine.” Angel loaded the gun again and set it on his trunk. He jogged across the lot, and picked something up. It was the emaciated corpse of a dog. He set it on a cinder block, picked up the rifle, and took twenty-five paces. He unleashed three shots, in rapid succession. The tat-tat-tat of the shots ricocheted and reverberated off the tin of the border fence so that, for a moment, it sounded as if they were being fired upon from all sides. They were deafening. The first shot missed, slightly low, but the other two ripped into the corpse. Angel strode over to the body, motioned for Xavi.

“See, they leave a clean entry. But once you get inside, it’s a disaster.” Angel produced a knife and he opened the dog’s belly, sticking his hand into the putrefied insides. “Look,” he said, “it’s just mush.” He pulled out fragments of bullet, like little pieces of shrapnel. “That’s your liver, or that’s your intestines, or your lungs. That’s your spine.” He smiled sadistically. “Here,” he said, handing the gun to Xavi. “Your turn.”

“I don’t know how to shoot.”

“It’s easy. You pull the trigger. Any dickhead can do it. Just aim a little low, and prepare for the kickback.”

Xavi put the gun against his shoulder, took aim slightly beneath the dog’s corpse, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun throttled into his shoulder; the shots sprayed wildly into the air. Angel laughed quietly to himself.

“Wasn’t prepared for that,” Xavi said. His shoulder throbbed from the impact.

“It’s like fucking,” Angel said. “You don’t know what to expect the first time. Now you know.”

“Yeah, sure. Now I know.”

Xavi braced himself. He fired off two more shots: both wild, but slightly less so. The problem wasn’t the first shot: it was how rapidly the second shot went off; he was unable to steady himself for it. “Fuck,” he muttered. He felt the heat of the afternoon for the first time. Once more he took aim. Two more shots. The first one kicked up dust, but the second one bore its way into the dead dog.

“Hey!” Xavi shouted, unexpectedly gleeful.

Angel clapped and walked over to take the AR-15.

“Now, the one problem with the AR-15, at least with the most common models, is that the ammo is easily deflected or stopped by body armor. It’s not so good for killing cops, or military. Street urchins and malandro punks? Perfect. Shoots as fast as you can pull your finger, so you can mow them down. But cops? That’s a different story.” He un-holstered the gun on his belt. “FN 5.7. A Belgian gun. The cop killer.” He handed it to Xavi. From the trunk of his car he produced a bullet proof vest, which he draped across a sheet of tin. “Shoot.”

Xavi took aim, and fired. The kickback was extraordinary, again. The violence of shooting the gun mirrored the violence of its result. Who would enjoy such a thing? Sadists like Angel, he assumed, whom Xavi liked, anyway, despite the fact that he still had moments where he thought the cop was going to put a bullet in his head and throw him into the tunnel, for no reason other than the fact that he could. Xavi wondered what it felt like to possess that kind of violence, or the possibility of that violence. He wondered about its scope and its feel and its size, if it compared to anything else in the world. He wondered how a single man could carry something so total and ruinous. But they did, of course, and they moved amongst the world like hawks, beautiful and feral in their destructiveness. Why? Why did such people exist? How could they? And what was poetry in the face of their nihilism? What was journalism, or literature? They were pitiful gestures of faith. Angel looked back at him, smiling, giving a thumbs up.

“Good shooting,” he said. He removed the bullet proof vest. Behind it, the sheath of tin had been puncture in four places, shot clean through. Angel strode confidently towards him, and took back the gun. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They drove back across the desert and into the mountains. By then, the hills were glowing a faint violet, their crags and dells accentuated, the way a lover’s face might be heightened by a lamp. They rode mostly in silence, Xavi staring out the window at the endless scrublands, the creosote and mesquite, the lands navigable only by the cosmos, or by the long memory of the heart. At some point Angel put a football match on the radio. It was two teams neither man cared about.

“What do you do about the guns?” Xavi finally asked. "I mean, the police. What do you do about the guns?" They were driving through the mountains, passing the large gated estates that perched on the hillsides like lonely herons or storks. The city was not yet visible, though the eastern sky blushed with the miasma of light rising from San Rafael’s caldera.

Angel shrugged, turning off the football match. “Whatever I’m paid to do.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means someone says there’s guns coming through, here’s money to do something about it.”

“And what happens to the guns?”

Angel smiled, and shrugged.

“You sell them?”

“Or use them.”

“What do you do about the girls?”

“What we’re paid to do.”

“Which is what?”

Angel looked at Xavi, his face mostly obscured by falling night. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”