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By Root 1404 0

that waits, the holes being dug each morning in the brown dirt of the Campo Santo, the graves a guess and a promise gaping up like hungry mouths for the kills of the morning and afternoon and evening, and four people sit outside their house at night and the cars come by, the bullets bark, two die soon after the barrage and the other two are scooped up by family who drive them from hospital to hospital through the dark houses because no healers will take them in, because the killers have a way of following their prey into the emergency rooms in order to finish the work.

His arms are on the solid wooden table as Juárez wafts across our faces and we do not speak of this fact, we simply inhale life and death and smell the fear of betrayal rising on the wind.

I cannot explain the draw of the city that gives death but makes everyone feel life. Nor can he. So we do not speak but simply note this fact with our silence. We are both trying to return to some person we imagine that we once were, the person before the killings, before the tortures, before the fear. He wants to live without the power of life and death and wonders if he can endure being without the money. I want to obliterate memory, to be in a world where I do not know of sicarios, where I do not think of fresh corpses decorating the calles. We have followed the different paths and wound up in the same plaza, and now we sit and talk and wonder how we will ever get home.

I crossed the river about twenty years ago—I can’t be exact about the date, because I am still not sure what crossing really means, except that you never come back. I just know I crossed and now I scratch like a caged animal trying to claw my way out and reach the distant shore. It is like killing. There are some things that if learned change a person forever. You cannot know of the slaughter running along the border and remain the same person. You cannot know of the hopeless poverty of Mexicans who are fully employed in U.S. factories and remain the same person. And you cannot listen to a sicario—who functioned for years as a state policeman—tell of kidnappings, tortures, and murders and remain the same person.

I ask him, “Tell me about your first killing,” and he says he can’t remember. I know he is not telling the truth, and I know he is not lying. We all remember the first killing, the first love, the first betrayal, and the first moment we knew we would die. But sometimes you cannot reach it, you open that drawer, and your hand is paralyzed. It is right in front of you, your nostrils fill with the smell, the gun is warm in your hand, the little quiver coming out of the throat as your hand tightens, but still you cannot reach it and so you say you don’t remember.

We sit there in the quiet room tasting the void that is now Ciudad Juárez.

He is the product of a religion called the global economy, the child of a poor family that had to flee the interior and become factory hands in the American mills of Juárez. The bright man who cannot afford the university. The eager pupil of the FBI.

He is law and order with his training and police uniforms.

He is a sicario, and it is trade like other trades. All those bodies found in the dawn, hands and feet bound with duct tape, sometimes the head severed, or the tongue cut out, often signs of torture on the torso—this requires work. The people vanished as if beamed up into the sky by an alien life form, yet more work. These things are seen as mysteries. Now he offers to explain the simple mechanics of the job.

He cannot explain Juárez, because he is too busy being Juárez. In his eyes, the current torrent of murders results from all of his work. The new killers are his children, and now they mimic what he did and operate as independent death machines. All the official explanations—a cartel war, a war between the army and the cartels, a war between the cartels and the government—remain a blur to him. He is one small cog in a big machine, and during his entire career, he never once got to see the whole machine. Nor did he ever know who, if anyone, controlled