Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [80]
No one can keep track of things here, not even of vacant land.
June is running out, and I can’t tell if the murders this month are at 120 or 130. Nor can I bear at the moment to go back over my tally. I’ll wait for the month to end, and then, as is the custom, the Juárez papers will briefly announce the slaughter, and then, as is the custom, it will vanish from memory.
The woman in the burrito café was forty-seven when the man entered and killed her. Six months ago, I might have wondered about her story. Did she know him? Was he a husband or lover? What did she look like? And was she frightened as she entered the café shortly before midnight? I would have had questions and feelings and sought answers. Now I do not. There are too many, that is part of the problem. But also, the answers seem a way to erase what is happening, a way to explain a death so that in a real sense, it does not matter because, given the explanation, it is inevitable, unique, and irrelevant to my life or your life.
And so, I do not ask. The deaths blur, the names go by too fast. I sit here blinded by the storm and ignorant of the lives that led to the deaths.
The air, feel the air, the sun, rising and warming the skin, the broken sidewalk underfoot, the sewage wafting down the lane, the sounds of cars and buses, there, take it all in, absolute, finite, actual. Swallow the sensation of the city whole, and this will stop the blurring, steady the mind, and make it possible to believe in order and calm. Each murder is explicable. There is a body, and there are killers, there is a time of day or night, the gunman has a reason, or the gunmen were sent by someone with a reason, and even the innocent bystander mowed down by accident, this corpse, too, has an explanation and can be made sense of by tracing the trajectory of the rounds, the entry point of the bullet into the flesh.
But then it breaks down. Over five hundred murders in six months, and still, no one seems to make sense of the murders, and no one seems able to say the names of the killers or to explain who they are, who they represent, and what they want. No matter how many facts and details are assessed, the killings overwhelm simple explanations. There are too many authors writing too many short stories on bodies, there are too many styles of handwriting, and forensic specialists get baffled by all the murderous forms of cursive writing. No matter how clever the examiner, still, there is a door behind whatever explanation is offered. The gangs are sent to kill, but who sends them? The cartels are killing, but who in the cartels gives the orders and why? The army slaughters, but who is behind the army? And what if a person finds the door and opens it and finally gets in the room where the orders are issued, the deaths decreed, yes, walks into that room. And finds nothing but dust, cobwebs, and a cold cup of coffee?
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe that room has skeletons, bones centuries old, and these gleaming white forms run everything and are beyond party or deals or moments, and are—like the sounds and smells of the city—simply part of the very fabric of the thing called life. They are death, these skeletons, and they are life, and so we avoid going into that room because we want an explanation that does not involve our lives and our souls and the very ground we stand on. We want peace and quiet—that tranquility the mayor says is lacking in the city—we want blue skies and the breath of summer as we sit in the shade of a tree and the rose blooms by the doorway. But mainly we want to not know what we know, to forget that this thing within us has always been there, a virus lurking in our being that has now slipped out into the flow of life and ravages not the city, not the people.
But the imaginary life we have always led and now must realize was a lie.
A puddle of blood seeping