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The black boots came with Miss Sinaloa. She arrived that December afternoon with shiny black boots reaching almost to her knees, the heels thick, the surface acrylic as it threw light back up toward the heavens. The rest of her was skin, skin with bite marks all over her breasts, skin with handprints all over her ass. There were marks of beatings, also.

That was some weeks ago, when she had hair flowing down to her ass but had lost all of her wardrobe, save those boots. And lost her mind.

I sit here looking at a photograph taken in the yard of the crazy place. She has now been in her cage for some weeks, and her hair has been shorn. She is calming down and can be let out into the yard at times, a safe-conduct moment in which she struggles to rejoin the human race.

So she stands in the bright sunlight, boots gleaming, and she wears a satiny green dress and a black leather jacket. She holds a microphone in her right hand, and she is singing love songs. Behind her is the black amplifier and behind the equipment are her neighbors in the crazy place, and they look here and there and pay no attention to Miss Sinaloa singing of the heartaches that women must endure as they seek love in the world of men.

Her face is round and perfectly made up. Her cheeks shine, lips underscored with liner, eyebrows narrow and finely stated. Her body is solid and, to foreign eyes, might even look fat, but here in her native country, she looks good, a woman with some flesh, a woman a man can get a hold of as the night passes on sweat-soaked sheets. She is battered, she is still healing, she is half crazy, but it is clear to even my ignorant eyes that Miss Sinaloa is back, and men are simply creatures God created to worship her.

One member of her audience sits with head bowed and hands clasped between his knees. Another man wears a huge peaked hat such as the kind favored by Merlin in the ancient tales. A short man in a beige sport coat looks out with an idiot grin.

She sings because to fall silent is to die.

Even here, the world is about love or the world is about nothing at all.

I have learned many things from her, and because of this, I love her and her songs.

I think at times I need her music even more than she does.

Those red lips mean so much in a world of dust and blood.

They must pretend to have a monopoly on violence. So in the autumn of the killing season, six hundred military police and two hundred state and local cops converge on the prison that sits on the southern edge of Juárez. They come for their prey at 6 A.M. The prison is controlled by three local gangs: the Aztecas, the Mexicles, and the Artistas Asesinos—the Murder Artists. Some leaders are shipped away to another facility. There is a show of force until the veil drops again and the prison falls back into itself.

The entire raid is like a laboratory experiment that mirrors the city itself. The state parades as the real power. Inmates briefly cower and then return to violence and gangs and a world without a center. The newspapers note the assertion of order, then fall silent again as killing walks every pathway in the city.

It is a careless time.

Nothing you do can make you safe, and nothing you do can put you in danger. So, relax. You are in play, and all the neighborhoods are the wrong neighborhood, and all the bars are the wrong bar, and every minute of the day and night offers slaughter. This is not some breakdown of the social order. This is the new order. And we will adjust to it and it will be fine.

We are in a forever war, only it is not a war. It is not a crime wave. It just is. And we are. And this is it.

A kind of poetry falls out of the mouths of people as this new reality sinks in. The head of a local citizen’s group says,

We are living the consequences

of the war that has come to the city

and unfortunately

we are also realizing

that the presence of the

police

and the military

has not managed to lessen the number of

homicides at all.

The head of the local bar association says,

To what the people already know,

the