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His son goes to church and then down to the plaza to be with friends. Emilio stays at his friend’s house, and around eight o’clock, a woman calls and says, “Emilio, I have to see you right now. Where are you? I can’t talk over the phone.”

He is entering a place he will only recognize later: denial. He is trying to pretend none of this means anything and none of this has anything to do with him.

She comes over and tells him she is dating a soldier and the military people all talk about how they are going to kill him. She is crying. She says, “Emilio, you have to leave now. They are going to kill you.”

It is late June 2008, the solstice has passed, the heat is on, the city boils at over a hundred degrees. The churches of El Paso announce they are going to pray for an end to the violence in Juárez. Over the weekend, at least twelve die. Some guys are drinking, and one of them is machine-gunned. There is a fiesta to celebrate the baptism of a baby. Two are killed at the party. Some guys approach a college student, and they ask him to hold some stuff for them. He refuses. They beat him to death. Most are fairly routine butcheries—a hail of bullets from machine guns, the thud as a body hits the ground. Around 3 A.M., a man staggers across the bridge to El Paso. He is full of bullet holes and would like some medical attention.

On Monday, June 23, a corpse is found on the western edge of the city. Nearby is a black daypack. It holds the head. There is no identification on the corpse. He is about thirty-four years old, and he rests on the side of a Catholic church. Anapra is a place where people squat in shacks on land they do not own, steal electricity from high-power lines, buy water off a truck, and work in American factories. They seem to eat sand since the ground here is largely sand. The woman who lost her sister in 1998 to rape and murder and started the campaign to paint utility poles with pink paint and black crosses to memorialize the city’s penchant for killing women, well, she was raised here. The sprawling slum also hosts train robbers who regularly hold up the U.S. trains that pass just a few feet across the wire on its northern edge. One dirt track links it to Juárez. Anapra is home to tens of thousands of people who do not exist to those who govern the city.

It is also a touchstone for me, a place where all the pieties of free trade and hands across the border and growing the economy become grit in my mouth. It abuts the United States, and so its residents stare at a world they cannot touch.

But the body by the church, well, the head is really severed and in the daypack. So also the legs and arms, and they are scattered over an area of about ninety feet. The feet wear black socks. Someone has covered the torso with a blanket—green, brown and yellow. The clothing was in a white plastic bag. Children found the body. Adults in the area saw a car going by Sunday night with a man who appeared to be a captive. Someone really cared and put in the extra work.

The authorities say they are investigating.

There is delirium induced by the heat.

I am slowly ceasing to function.

The bodies all blur. The killings merge into one river of blood.

I have reached a serene state where things no longer make sense but simply exist. So much depends on a decapitated corpse with the head in a black daypack in the white heat of June.

The killers hardly matter. What would a solved case really tell me? It would be like having the men who raped Miss Sinaloa explain to me their motives. Because they could. Because they wanted to have her. Because the air is dusty, the city is hot, the houses are small, the smell of sewers is everywhere, the police are not useful, guns are available, killings are possible.

And besides executions, the city kills in other ways. Social services are a phrase, not reality. Blanca Edna Paez Orozco is twenty-two when she dies. Her brother Abel is twenty and he survives. They are both playing with