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They came for me on January twenty-first, ten of them wearing ski masks and toting machine guns. It was over a week before anyone found me. Some nines were scattered around my body. My name is Fernando Javier Macias Rivera, twenty-three.

They found my body next to his. Luis Carlos Contreras, twenty-one.

José Luis Piedra, thirty. They kidnapped me and then gave me six from a .380 in my neck and head.

I was just driving. They pulled me out of my car at an intersection. Seven in the chest. Juan Garcia Vazquez, thirty-two. That’s about it.

I guess I’m the change of pace. Javier Leal Saucedo, thirty-three. Beat me to death.

Me too. Bernardo Rafael Hernandez Vasquez, thirty-nine. Beaten to death.

Look, I don’t even know if I should talk. I was out driving with my wife in my white pickup. Then they took me. No reports about me since then, so I think I’ll leave it at that.

Well, I’m different. Raymundo Daniel Ruvalcaba, twenty-nine. They put a plastic bag over my head and duct-taped my hands and feet. Then they wrapped me in a blanket. The people who found me saw pools of blood around my body.

I open my eyes, and it looks as though there are still hundreds waiting their turn to speak. I notice the brevity of the people speaking. Name, age, wounds. They don’t really say much. Maybe they think no one cares. Or maybe they think everyone already knows. You will die. You will not really see it coming, no matter what warnings or signals you have received. You will ignore the warnings because you will think bad things happen to other people and not to you.

Jesus Duran Uranga, thirty-one. Put me in the trunk of a ninety-five Ford Escort. Finally, the neighbors complained of the smell, and that’s how I got found.

I’m thirty. Francisco Macias Gonzalez. Shot in the head in my Dodge Ram with a Hemi. Hands tied behind my back with those plastic handcuffs the cops use.

Look, I work for the state prosecutor’s office. I drive a Durango. That’s where they shot me.

So you will die and be surprised, and yet you will die and expect to die. The explanations other people crave hardly matter to you because the cause of your death is just a detail. You fucked up, or someone wanted your business, or maybe, just maybe, you looked too long and too hard at the wrong woman. That would actually be kind of nice—to die for love. But in the end, you will die because killing is part of life here, and all the things called motives and reasons don’t tell you much in the end, because you can imagine a different kind of place where you behaved in the same way, and you would not be murdered in this other place.

I drift off. I listen and don’t listen, in the same way a person sits in a bar and takes in the band and yet is hardly aware of the music.

Of course, nothing Miss Sinaloa knows matters to most people. Just as the dead of Juárez will vanish from memory.

As I watch the new Our Town in the abandoned rehab center, I see one little image in my head, a fragment that whispers of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. The barrio is poor and is a place that eats the cast-off entrails of a richer world. A man sells cocaine on the street, and he is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out, and he falls on the street near his mother’s house. That is not the image in my mind. What I see is his mother. It is night now, the body has been taken away, and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open, and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street, and she is there all alone and her son is not coming home, and her face is as inscrutable as a block of stone. Her arms are crossed, and she is a portrait of grief Juárez-style, silent, enduring, and doomed.

I am eight years old. They poured two hundred and fifty rounds into my dad’s truck and killed him. They shot my arm off. And then I died.

I