Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [84]
Because then I forget what I see and smell and feel. I forget that it is cold in the night now, and the woman is twenty-two and she has four small children and one is six months old and another one died last year at birth and, ah, tell me if the lovers are losers in the shacks and rough lanes, go ask the twenty-two-year-old who was raped as a child and now has doomed children to fill her hours and she lives in a city where the rapist is free, more free than she will ever be, since he was never charged and he has never carried a child and feeds no young and hungry mouths, and the woman has no man and all of this loving family goes hungry and the floor is dirt, there is no heat, and I must listen to my rhapsody, the one called blue, maybe code blue, and enjoy the wine and refuse all explanations of the violence as the city storms into my mind with the hunger that will never be filled by anything but screams.
I see the fourteen-year-old who is pregnant, the forty-year-old woman with six children, a shack, a baby in her arms, no food, no doctors, nothing but the cold in the night, and the men who come and go and leave the litter of young lives in their wake. And I must say it is their fault, they breed too often, they have careless ways, they should read more and improve their minds.
I have found the place where theories die, where explanations are stabbed with sharp knives and flutter down the calles like litter created by the world that will not come here and will not listen to ignorant cries of people busy dying and calling it fate or God’s will or the way things are and have long been and the only way they know.
The cars with tinted windows prowl the streets, the guns go off, the authorities hide, and death without end, amen.
The counting, I will get to later.
Yes, I will.
The man found incinerated in a car, that burned corpse with a sign saying he was a thief, well, I will get to him in a while and return to tabulating things. But in passing we should note that the remnants of a dragon tattoo still glow from his charred chest. Just as I will acknowledge that three or four hundred local cops had to be let go because they failed various tests, and it turns out they were actually criminals and drug addicts. But they have been replaced by yet more cops, and so life will continue in the approved fashion.
But now, right now, I need this red wine, I need her dark form leaning over the piano in the moonlight, I need the music flowing through my heart.
I imagine a city as a living organism with electricity, gasoline, and propane firing through its arteries along with heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and meth. The humans, the creatures such as myself, think we are the city, but we are merely servants of the organism, and we can be dispatched without any warning by bullets, and yet the city will continue because it functions for our pleasure and our safety. Where the energy we have unleashed plays out like a tidal wave and levels everything in its path, levels the army, levels the police, levels the cartels, levels the gangs, levels the woman walking home from work, levels the man careening out of the midnight saloon. The general and the thief face the same giant wave. One thinks power safeguards him from the wave, and one thinks the delirious visions of the drug shelters him from all storms, and all learn that something they never imagined has come to pass.
Once, their worst nightmare was that they were not in control.
Now, their real nightmare is that no one is in control.
There is an afternoon and six men are put against a wall and executed in broad daylight. There is a morning and three prison guards at the bus stop are machine-gunned on their way to work. There is the man burning in the car.
There is a midday when two men fall dead in a hail of bullets.
The moon streams in, the fingers fly, I become “Rhapsody in Blue,” and ignore the killing ground until the notes