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Oh, and he is married to a woman from Iran, one he met in prison in Kentucky, and they had several children together. The marriage lasted two years. Here the doctors falter and find his stories from Kentucky hard to follow, something about a guy named Jim Buster and woman known as De Fannie.

He has worked. He has done gardening and manual labor and been out in those fields. He has also worked with growing tobacco.

There have been bumps on his road. In Kentucky, his girlfriend was difficult and so he was convicted of burning down a house. He tries to explain, but the doctors cannot follow the flow of words he spews—something about homosexuality, medical stuff, mental health stuff, small brains. He did a year in Mexico, he says, for selling marijuana. Six times he has been jailed for entering the United States of America. Also, he laughs as he answers the doctors’ questions and they find this inappropriate.

So they decide he is suffering from a psychosis.

But Pedro Martinez insists he is not mentally ill. He is six feet two inches tall and weighs 149 pounds and his body temperature is 96.3.

The doctors notice that he has poor eye contact and sometimes he is hard to hear because he lowers his voice. Also, during one interview he asks the doctor, “Do you hear the voices?” He would turn to a corner of the room and talk to a woman named Peggy, but the doctors noted that they could not see Peggy. Besides that, he has poor grooming.

When he was told he would face a hearing on his mental competency, he said, “The judge, I am the judge.”

When he saw the doctor’s chart on him, he said, “I am not taking this shit. Give me the chart. Take your name off the chart.”

So they douse him with pills, antipsychotic medication, and this calms him down. Now they realize he is paranoid schizophrenic. Case closed.

And then, to solve all the problems, he is booted across the bridge, and El Pastor finds him on the street and takes him out to that crazy place. His brief fling at history—those U.S. medical evaluation records—ends and he rejoins the invisible people from whom he came. He is part of that army that has brigades all over Mexico and all over Juárez, the shock troops of poverty and drugs and booze and despair. He can negotiate the United States, he just cannot convince American experts that he knows as much as they do.

This happens. The brain-damaged often fail to get serious notice from the authorities.

But time is on the side of Pedro Martinez. Each day, there are more and more like him. The world now is designed to raise up huge crops of people just like him.

Everyone here is always talking. But no one ever says a real word because that can get you dead. Some blame the language, the calculated indirection of Spanish. Some blame a lack of education. Some blame the dust that is always in the air, the endless dirt giving everyone a mild cough that they use to punctuate sentences and to accent their silence and comments. Some claim fear creates the silence. In the past few years, Mexican reporters who bother to report are sometimes murdered and so the reports are becoming rarer in this nation. A newspaper story on a killing will have an almost pornographic description of a car or a corpse—and silence on the killers. This is the sound of the growing terror, this silence.

Guns make up for the silence that coats everyone’s lips. The city police lieutenant and his son get in his huge, new four-door Nissan Titan truck. The boy is eight, his dad thirty-two. About 250 rounds dance through the machine. The wife races out, sees the carnage, and tries to drive them to the hospital. But the cop dies, the boy’s arm is destroyed, and he dies also. The neighbors come out and stare. Numbers help. For example, 237 rounds were fired from guns of 7.62 by 30 caliber, 16 rounds came from an AK-47, and 1 round came from a 7.62 by 39 caliber. The cop was on a list of names posted January 26 on the police memorial monument. He was characterized