Xavi sits in a small, windowless room. The walls are a shade of dirty white. In the middle of the room is a metal table with two chairs. Xavi sits in the one facing the door. Occasionally, outside, he hears a muffled voice, or the click-clack of a gurney. The light above him gives off a broad, thin light. It buzzes and whirs. Rooms like this always remind him of mortality: the bureaucratic responsibilities of dying. We lose our loved ones, or ourselves, in such anodyne spaces.

There are two paintings on the wall, or reproductions of paintings. One is Monet’s ‘A bend in the river Epte.’ It’s behind Xavi, and he spends a long time looking at it, studying the movement of the trees, the light that turns them white. It’s too beautiful for the room. The other reproduction is a van Gogh, his famous sunflowers. Somehow this seems more appropriate to the space: the torment of the lines, the cataclysm of the yellow. He wonders who chose them, why they’re here.

A woman comes in, walking with the stern, rigid authority of someone who takes comfort in procedures and structures. She’s probably nearing forty, very pretty. She wears a white lab coat and its starkness brings out the angles of her face, which are well formed. Her eyes are very light brown, which doesn’t fit with her dark skin and deep features. Her hair is in a pony tail, going grey in a careless way. She’s clearly not vain about it. It makes sense: someone so accustomed to death wouldn’t waste much effort fighting her own senescence.

“Mr. Luna?” she says, sitting down across from him.

“Yes.”

“I’m Maria Rosa Ramirez,” she extends a small, muscular hand and gives him a firm, terse handshake. “I’m the head coroner for the city.”

“It’s a pleasure.”

She has a Styrofoam cup of coffee and notices his lack of one.

“Did they not offer you any coffee?” she asks.

“No, they didn’t.”

She shakes her head and smiles, momentarily perturbed by this lack of procedure. They sit for a few seconds in silence, looking at one another. It’s a surprisingly easy, familiar silence - the kind usually reserved for old friends or family. Her jaw is very nice, Xavi thinks; she’s sitting partially in profile, angled towards the van Gogh.

“Whose idea were these paintings?” Xavi asks then.

“Those? Oh, they were mine. I like Monet especially.”

“What is this room normally used for?”

“It’s normally for families who are hysterical. They come in here, and someone comes to talk to them. I don’t think they pay much attention to the art.”

“Probably not.”

“The Monet is a terrible reproduction, unfortunately. It’s too blanched. But I found it in a store, and remembered loving it, so I bought it.”

“Where did you see it?”

“Paris.”

“You’ve been to Paris?”

She smiles, reorienting herself slightly towards him, and in the same motion picks up her coffee. She nods while drinking it.

“Why, if I can ask?”

“Why not?” she says, laughing. “A boyfriend took me once, many years ago.”

“A friend of mine went to Paris. I’ve never been out of Mexico.”

She laughs. “A common complaint.”

She looks at him then, and smiles, fine deltas of wrinkles emerging at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“Have you seen Monet’s water lilies?” she asks.

“Only on a computer.”

“Well, of course. You’ve never been out of Mexico…” she doesn’t say it patronizingly, just as a means of correcting herself.

“Of course.”

“There’s a museum in Paris that’s dedicated almost entirely to his water lilies. There are two circular rooms, and you can go and sit in the middle of them and be completely surrounded. It’s overwhelming, of course. The size and grandeur of so much paint. You can practically feel his spirit.” She smiles, remembering. It’s the kind of introverted smile that causes him to remember Octavia, and this causes him to smile in the same way.

“I’m sorry, you’re not here to listen to my memories,” she says.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Would you like a tour?”

“Absolutely.”

She motions towards the door, gets up, and he follows. They step out into a hallway, equally off-white, equally sterile and scrubbed. At one end of it is the lobby. Xavi can see women keening softly, praying, children running around, beautifully oblivious, televisions flashing silently. She turns him the other direction.

“The facility here opened in 2003. It was funded, ultimately, because of all the women being murdered. A couple police officers, and the coroner at the time, spent about five years arguing with the state government for more money and resources to help solve those crimes. Are you old enough to remember them, Mr. Luna?” she says, glancing back at him over her shoulder with a strangely playful lilt.

“Yes, I’m not that young.”

She stops and turns to him. He’s taller than her by his head. They’re very close together; his back is against the wall.

“How young are you, Mr. Luna?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

She smiles, her arms akimbo, cocks her head. “And you’re a journalist?”

“Yes, I am. At a small paper.”

“But the small papers are the only ones actually covering the news.”

“Yes, that’s what we like to think, depending on your definition of news.”

She resumes walking.

“The whole facility cost the equivalent of about ten million dollars. It was the most state of the art facility in Mexico at the time.”

She leads him into a big room. He’s stopped in his track by the corpses. There are five bodies, all young men, on operating tables. There are four more corpses in body bags on the floor, thrown into corners, out of the way.

“I should have asked if you’re squeamish,” she apologizes.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Well, come on.”

He follows her to one of the operating tables. On the bed is a short, skinny man with crucifix tattoos on both pectoral muscles. His skin is pallid, his limbs rigid. His eyes are closed and his lips are pursed, betraying neither pain or transcendence. There are three dime sized punctures in his abdomen. On a tray beside the operating table are three plastic bags. Maria Rosa hands him one.

“That’s the bullet from his liver. A .223 caliber rifle. That’s the important part of the autopsy. We send these over to the federals, of course, and they see if they can find where it came from.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Almost never. All the guns, or almost all of them, are from the States. They come down, unregistered. Some get caught, plenty don’t. But still. We have to go through the process. Every murder requires a full autopsy to determine the cause of death. And every cartel murder requires that the forensics be sent to the federal authorities.”

She moves him to the next body. Another young man, probably in his early twenties, with long skinny features, a delicate face. His body is tattoo-less. “Now, a full autopsy is a lot of work. Most of it unnecessary work. With most of these murders, its pretty clear what the cause of death is, and it makes all the procedural stuff not only unnecessary but cumbersome. We just don’t have the coroners or the staff or the space to handle what’s going on.” She motions to the body bags on the floor. It reminds Xavi of a party where there weren’t enough beds for everyone. “A full autopsy requires opening the skull,” here she detaches the boy’s skull as if it were the top of a flour jar, “to check the brain. It requires examining the heart and all other internal organs. It’s time consuming. One thing we don’t have right now is time.”

“So did you do a full autopsy with this one?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because by all accounts he was a civilian, caught in the cross fire. We try to find people responsible for civilian deaths. My stance is, the cartels will police themselves. We’re wasting time and energy trying to find them.”

She looks very exhausted suddenly, a pallor in her eyes. It’s only a second or two, this brief melancholic interlude, and then she smiles professionally again. She leads him out of the exam room and back into the hallway.

“How many coroners are there?” Xavi asks.

“We have four. There were three of us, but they added a fourth last year. Do you know many people were murdered last year?”

“Something like 4500.”

“Four thousand six hundred and seventeen. 4,617.”

“And there’s four of you?”

She stops outside a door and smiles curtly. She pulls open the door with a deep whomp of decompression. They step into the freezer. It’s like a library, with shelves on both sides running the length of a long, high ceilinged room. Instead of books the shelves are filled with bodies. They’re stacked and crammed carelessly on top of one another, like a poorly packed truck. Again, the floor space is utilized.

“Before all this, the rule was we kept a body for thirty days before we sent it to Santa Teresa to be buried anonymously. We eventually changed that rule to two weeks. And now we can only keep a body for one week. Which is difficult, and probably unfair. We get a lot of people showing up after the week has passed, looking for a son, or brother. And all we can do is tell them, roughly, where they might be buried. It’s awful, of course, to do that. But what choice do we have? We don’t have room. We can’t keep them any longer. We just can‘t.”

They stand there in silence, the motors that cool the room humming and throbbing like mechanical hearts. He looks around at the sprawl of bodies, like some grotesque scene from a medieval painting. He can see his breath, her breath. Thrum and hum. He breathes, she breathes, the condensations merge. A hand hangs off the shelf, like a lover’s hand fallen from bed. He can feel her presence a half step behind him. He has the strange premonition that she’s going to wrap her arms around his waist, to rest her head on his back. He wants that. He wants to turn to her and put his hands on the strict lines of her jaw. He’s waiting for something, for her arms, maybe. Or maybe he’s just standing here, struck dumb for no reason at all. There has to be some purpose for him to be here, for these bodies to be here, these sons and lovers and brothers. They will rot in anonymous heaps, piled like this in the earth, their bones entwined. Maybe someday some civilization will come to the planet and discover these graves, these impossible gouges of earth piled with bones. What did these men die for? they might ask, if they‘re a civilization that asks these things. What great cause created these killing fields?

“Are you ready, Mr. Luna?” she says. Her hand is resting tentatively on his shoulder. He turns to face her, but she’s already headed out the door.

She leads him back down the hallway.

“Where are we going now?”

“I need a cigarette,” she says.

They step out a service entrance into the day. It’s hot, nearly midday. The sun is a white shadow behind a curtain of clouds and haze. They’re behind the facility, which overlooks a wide pit about the size of a football field. Maria Rose lights up a cigarette, and offers one to Xavi, who accepts.

“What’s this?” Xavi asks, motioning to the pit. The bottom if glazed in turbid, oily water. Trash floats absently, reminding Xavi of dead fish.

“The expansion of the facility,” she smiles sharply at him, exhales.

“What happened?”

“Something with the money. It dried up or disappeared. I don’t know.”

“Are there any plans to finish it?”

“No,” she says. “None.”

They smoke in silence, watching the trash aimlessly. On the other side of the pit are the maquiladoras of Colonia Juarez, their windowless backs lined up in imposing rows. They look vacant, hollow, sheet metal facades dimly reflecting the blunted sun. Xavi remembers hearing somewhere that the average lifespan of a maquiladora is twenty-two years. They’re only built to be serviceable for twenty-five. And then they’re left to slowly deconstruct.

“Do you think there’s a point to any of this? This conflict, I mean, all the killing.”

She looks at him. Her cigarette is almost finished. She has high nostrils, and he can make out the fine black hairs, the latticed capillaries, that form the sensitive interior of her nose. It fills him, unexpectedly, with a sense of complete hopelessness.

“No,” she says. “No, I don’t.”

They finish their cigarettes and she leads him back inside, back to the room with the Monet and the van Gogh. She gives him her hand. He holds it for longer than necessary.

“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Luna. Good luck with your article. If you have any questions, you can call me on my cell.” She takes out a pen and scrawls her number on the back of a receipt; it’s for a cup of coffee and a donut, and it’s eight days old.

“Thank you,” he says, and then she smiles once more, lifts her hand in an uncertain half wave, and walks out the door.

~

Traffic on the Border Highway is stalled. Everyone’s attention focuses on a bridge just shy of Maria Rosa’s exit. Cars crawl past. A body is crucified from the bridge, like mistletoe or a wood carving of Christ or a sex doll, its arms nail-gunned into the cement. Its midsection has been gutted and flaps openly in the wind. A large bed sheet hangs beside the body. Written in red ink: This is what happens to those cowards who whisper behind the backs of el Hermandad. You will be split open like the swine you are.