All the colors of Mexico converge at a single point. All the flash, the hype, the glass beads, the flora, the glaring daylight, the darkness, the blood, the steel, the concrete. At La Feria, the ceiling is strung out in seven-pointed star piñatas, like a gaudy Christmas hangover. The story is that each piñata point represents one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

I'm at the bar with a paper and pen spread out in front of me in case of random synaptical insights. Given none, I try to remember the Deadly Sins. List them, one by one. Lust slips out effortlessly. But from there I start shooting blanks. Well, hang on...there's envy. Greed. Gluttony's one, I think. And sloth, whatever that means...isn't sloth a kind of bear? Avarice. But on second thought, aren't avarice and greed the same thing? What about anger? ...anger makes six, but after that, I'm really stuck. Does wearing white shoes after Labor Day count? I look at my scratch pad. Clipped to the corner is a photo of Mrs. Champion.

Lust slipped out effortlessly. But it's not just me. Sex simmers under the lid of this hyper-Catholic city; inside a beautiful nut-brown woman I just passed on the corner of Ninoes Heroes and 16 De Septiembre, lashy modest downcast eyes above el costume del dia, slacks so tight that I could count the seams on her underwear. I see a lot of that here; lots of modesty, little eye contact, legs like ripe chorizo sausages stuffed into lycra casings...plenty of underwear seams...some days I seem to do nothing but count panty seams, erotic or grotesque, depending on the posterior. Sex here is like the six-inch sprout you find struggling underneath a tarp in the backyard, looking for a wholesome outlet. Lacking that, any hole will do. The whole city of Guadalajara is smothering underneath a great Papal tarp.

Outside, in the street, is a huge cardboard sign across a Tsuru dashboard that reads NEED HELP. CALL POLICE. I'm staring at the sign from La Feria's window. Nobody is doing anything about it. Fifty people pass by each minute without so much as glancing down. Of course, the car looks perfectly normal, empty, but maybe the guy's inside bleeding to death, maybe you can't see him because of his huge sign. Stupider things have happened. Maybe he's slumped down over the seat. I'm tempted to go check it out, but in the end, I don't do anything either. Well, not quite nothing. I pour more Cazadores into my glass of Squirt. Signal the waiter for ice. I can't remember the word in Spanish, so I ask in English. "More ice."

Far from being a sacrilege down here, tequila and Squirt is almost rote. Even at the distilleries, Squirt goes on the table before the liquor bottle. Well, maybe they drink Remy and Squirt in Cognac, Dom and Squirt in Rheims. Who knows? The waiter is looking at me, puzzled. He's one of these excellent specimens of bronze Tapatino, six feet tall, hair the color of rich honey, eyes pale, nearly green. A superb face, though momentarily nonplussed. He has zero English in his vocabulary...despite the fact that the town is quite cosmopolitan. To get my ice I have to make a cube shape with my hands and point to the tumbler. Then he understands. Meanwhile, it clicks with me also. The HELP sign in the Nissan. It's a sunscreen for the dashboard. It's all in English, and probably neither the car owner nor anybody passing by knows what it means.

Squatting beyond the car, on the other side of the street, is the great squarish cathedral. People going past it cross themselves dutifully even though they're hundreds of feet from the altar. The façade is vast and daunting, no doubt hand-chiseled by some underpaid Mexican scrub. Lichen are cuddling inside the dark places while below, on the sidewalk, sprouts are seeking the light. Carved in the stone is the Catholic answer to the dashboard sign, to all such demands for relief: Yo Soy La Puerta. 'I'm The Door'. Under it, I see a brown little dirty kid dragging a long, long strip of black plastic, for reasons that are completely beyond me. To the wisest of men, street people are inscrutable. Whatever this kid thinks that strip of plastic's going to do, it probably won't. He's like the ants you see carrying idiotically disproportionate blades of straw back to the colony. They're busy little bugs, those ants, serious, obsessed, determined, and you know in advance that the straw will never fit into any anthill. They'll have to leave it outside.

It's crude to think of human beings as ants, but there you are... Haves and Have Nots are one thing, but these miniature cinders, these foul, filthy gamines, are plumbing new depths. They're Are Nots. Otherwise, what do you do with the old Huichol woman on the corner, completely draped in a woolen shawl, one hand poked out with the eternal appeal, something for nothing. Hour after hour she sits there in her patch of shade, expressionless...what thoughts could possibly be firing inside that neocortex? None, none... She's less than an ant, that mummified parasite; she's more like a piece of dirt, a clay clod.

I passed her on the way to La Feria, along with a dozen, two dozen, two hundred million others like her. A minute later, I passed a sidewalk magazine stand filled with dirty books. Remarkable. Porno is really rare at these kind of stands, but here, on bold display, were sets of cartoon chapbooks. One showed a naked girl sitting on the lap of some perverse-looking slob. She was solid airbrush, sitting so that her legs were up, but closed...you could nearly see the goods, but not quite. For some reason, her eyeballs had been whited-out with odd precision; the retoucher had done a remarkable job; he hadn't disturbed so much as an eyelash. The girl looked unaccountable; dead or diabolical. But why? It was more eerie than arousing. I wanted to look at the chapbook, find out what demographics it was targeting...but actually, I was embarrassed to pick it up. This swarming, nattering, busy colony of Catholic ants... what would they have thought of me?

Ants make me think of Mrs. Champion (what doesn't?) whom I haven't seen in nearly two weeks. I get queasy thinking about her. I experience a sudden memory dump: One time, she looked across a restaurant and pointed out something that the waiter was carrying. "Those are ant eggs," she said to me as a conversational byte, and I looked at her. Looked at her! My expression must have been noteworthy because she totally forgot the deal for a moment and repeated 'ant' in Spanish, "Hormiga...?" as if it was the English words that had somehow escaped me. I teased her about that, told her that she'd been here in Mexico too long, and she laughed and laughed. Her laugh is distinctive; a fresh, warm, unexpected release that reminds me of something sexual, something she tries to control, or suppress, but can't entirely do it...sometimes, it has to come out anyway, find a glory hole in the tarp, like in a wet dream.

I write that down on a fresh page in my notepad. Her laughter is dreamlike.

Dreamlike. She's only halfway pretty, Mrs. Champion; she's been through a world of hurt, and she looks like it; she's ethereal and sleepy and sort of burned around the edges...maybe she's in her early thirties, but no more than that, for sure... still, her face is starting to let go. Bullshit does that to a face, quicker than sun or genetics or alcohol. Her eyes are laced with fine patterns, the skin is shattering, but it's doing it delicately, almost respectfully, like the latticework that begins to form on the glass of old Brady daguerreotypes.

Obviously, I am impressed with her. Inalterably touched. I've looked for clues that she feels the same about me. Clearly, she doesn't despise me, but I want more than that. Like a sappy school kid, I cling to nuances in her voice when we're out; I try to feed her an extra cocktail or two (guaranteed that she's on to that coy game), hoping that maybe she'll betray something she's been hiding from me. I want everything, you understand. The whole package. I've known Mrs. Champion for four weeks, and I'm in love with her... so fucking in love with her that my stomach hurts

. I finger the photograph, the last one I have left; the others are long gone. It has a slight motion blur. In it, Mrs. Champion is posing with some children outside a small school here in town. The kids are grinning, contorting, mugging; she's radiant, erect, absolutely inside her element. She's wearing that absurd red jumpsuit of hers; I shot this photo on the day we met.

Another quick mental discharge: The day we met. I was a little drunk that afternoon, and a whole lot lost. I'd been wandering side streets, peering into corners, taking pictures of window boxes and bouquets. I'm a freelance photographer on assignment, or at least I was ...The Color Palette of the City of Roses... It's been weeks since I started ignoring pages from my employer, Floral Lifestyles, whose expectations had begun to exceed reason.

It was a strange, propitious encounter, that meeting with Mrs. Champion. I think so, even today.

*

As I said, I'd wandered off the beaten track, down one of these sinuous alleyways which seem to ramble into ever seedier channels and then into trash and desert. In any case, I've never been able to find it again. Around me, the air was thick and urban, filled with peculiar smell cosms; vendor food, diesel fumes, wood-smoke, unexpected breezes with fresh perfume...living foliage. From an open storefront, a brassy jukebox was blaring. There was a bank, in front of which two lanky policemen stood around with M16's, bored and dangerous looking. A meat shop was festooned with dismembered pieces of pig. There was a juice market on the block, I think. And there was a small art gallery.

Me, the consummate pro; I was drawn to the gallery, of course. In the window were a series of antique photographs...tintypes, albumens, platinums...a couple were familiar to me; a print of Beethoven's life mask; a stereograph of some faceless porcelain figurines; a Cartier-Bresson picture of a blind boy feeling his way along a wall, a nineteenth century carte-de-viste where all the subjects, four demure women in Victorian gowns, were shielding their faces with placards; a portrait of Victor Hugo in which he'd blinked at the moment of exposure... The collection's historical worth blew my mind by itself; then, the theme of the exhibition (if that's what it was) hit me; none of the subjects was making any direct eye contact with the camera lens... hence, none with the viewer. It was a hypnotic, compelling series. Somehow, difficult to look at. It refused to look back. A man came from the inside, out of some hidden cubby, into the street. He'd seen me standing there with my equipment. He was neatly-dressed, wearing super-fine, almost invisible spectacles, with ripples of hair spreading backward over his skull in oiled, overly-combed waves. He was grim and scholarly looking; a proprietor, I assumed. I noticed that one of his ears was deformed...not much more than a bulb of flesh that appeared part way down his cheek, like it had slid there. He began to converse in Spanish, and when he saw that I didn't copy, he said, indicating the photographs, "Retratos Sin Ojos. Portraits Without Eyes. Interesting oeuvre, you think?"

I agreed; they were haunting images. He continued, twisting his face into a clinical pout, like a doctor delivering a bad prognosis: "You see, that's because the cells of skin, the ones on the surface? They are all dead. With the exception of the eyes. Looking at a person without seeing the eyes is looking at something dead. But, you make photographs for a living I think. You would probably know that."

Actually, I didn't. But I was intrigued, not only by the vintage prints, but by the entire graphic; the strange, brooding shopkeeper with his fucked-up ear and his shiny suit and the tiny gallery on some podunk backstreet in Guadalajara. I asked for permission to photograph him in front of his store, and he agreed. I promptly discovered that the batteries in the high-drain Mamiya were history. No problem, he said, and directed me to a farmacia several block away. "I will wait here for you," he said, checking his watch, smoothing his greasy head. "Perhaps a picture where my eyes are closed... for the collection!"

He may be there still, checking his watch, posing and preening, that bullish dandy with the ear knob. I never returned. Ten minutes later, inside the farmacia, I met Mrs. Champion. She was an anomaly among the sausage-thighed, mocha madonnas with her red jumpsuit, her blondish hair, her softly eroding face. Obviously green-gah; an American, I figured, however fluent she seemed in local dialects. Good thing for me that she was. I needed alkaline AAs rather than the useless zincs on display and was having a devil of a time making myself understood. She stepped in and helped me make the purchase.

To this day, I'm not exactly sure why I was so moved by her gesture of passing kindness within that particular instant, within that Guadalajaran vivisection...or why, in fact, it became, suddenly important for me to learn further details of who she was. I have theories, of course; but for then, I masked my curiosity in aimless-sounding pleasantries, and afterward, at my nearly inappropriate insistence, she allowed me to thank her over a cup of thick black coffee at an adjacent café. And for a long, long while, I forgot about the earless fop and his eyeless portraits.

During that first encounter, I was able to draw out a minimum of information. It was unusual, she told me, for her to be in that part of town to begin with; she was on a job-break, hunting for unusual wind-chimes, which she collected with a kind of passion. She was a school-mistress at a small bi-lingual elementary school in town. She introduced herself as Mrs.Champion...though, she explained without apology, she'd never married her daughter's father...the 'Mrs.' was simply a formality that she expected from her students. She's genteel in that way, almost nineteenth-century. When I told her I was a photographer (hence my near-prurient interest in battery chemistry) she seemed quietly impressed. She hesitated, then asked me if I'd consider making a trip to her classroom and talking to her students, the fourth-grade children of missionaries, who'd get a kick out of something to break up their day. I agreed instantly, and that moment being as alive as any, returned with her to the school and spent the rest of the afternoon displaying camera bodies and zoom lenses to bright-eyed ten-year-olds.

To their great delight, I was able to share a number of genuine, quasi-typical adventures I'd had throughout my career... a tiger in Brunei, sharks in Melbourne, some G-rated, but crazy exploits in Kashmir Srinagar... while nimbly skirting the horror stories...Dili, Yola, Kabul, Freetown...and avoiding my simplest truth. Which is that, for me, art is dead, and that for the past year all I've done is fill holes in pages.

That day, Mrs. Champion wore a ring on her right hand. It was green and sort of costume-jewelry pretty. To my eye, against her livid outfit and pearly skin...skin I've elsewhere associated with acute dysentery... it was an oddly unpleasant chromatic clash.

*

What if I die today? Forty years is time enough to put some of this shit into perspective. Since my days as an unpaid BlackStar intern, armed with a Columbia College masters and a Nikon F2, I've intruded egregiously, brazenly, desperately into the lives and deaths of a number of human beings. If one situation was significantly worse than the others, it was probably my witnessing the systematic murders of nine of my colleagues, fellow journalists, from the third-floor window of a guesthouse in Sierra Leone. At the time, the average age of RUF rebels was fifteen. It was their policy to retaliate against the media for reporting the news; I was peeping through gauzy curtains as thirty hooded herd-humping teenagers tied up the nine men, laid them in the middle of Rawdon Street, pumped mosquito spray into their mouths, then took turns slitting their throats with brisk, practiced, delighted slashes... Neil Jung was the nom de guerre of the rebel commander in Freetown, I recognized him by his rolling swagger. Never sure if there was a sense of humor underneath that mask, or what. I survived this, the most sensitive of assignments, not because I was a brave, or even necessarily a clever fellow...I'm neither. It was because these reporters were local, and low profile... I was white, and my death would have caused a stir. I escaped that particular shithole with my head wrapped up in a bedsheet to make me look like a RUF supporter, with ECOMOG jets streaking overhead and the streets littered with corpses. Even the back routes smelled like cordite and human blood. I threaded the maze of claustrophobic alleys, repeating over and over, "What if I die today, what if I die today?" until I had my answer: There were dogs in the Ascension Town cemetery, fighting over bodies they'd pulled from shallow graves. It was the end of me. For me, I should say. I was beaten not by the fear of reprisals, not by the indifference of authorities, not by the unaccountability of the criminals, not by the totality of the censorship, but by own inurement. My resignation to the fact that I'm Alpo... and so, that's what if.

*

The students in the fourth-grade class called me vaca, vaca, which I didn't get, until Mrs. Champion pointed out that my sports coat was black and my shirt was white, and to the kids, that combination made me look like a cow.

After the impromptu demonstrations, there were various crushes swelled up in the hearts of the little sweet-breathed girls, who fought for access to me, clambering over me with covert sexuality, nuzzling and laughing and calling me their handsome cow, fighting to be the lucky one to hold my hand as we made a circle and read from Biblical flash-cards that said: ...Then again called they the man that was blind and said unto him, We know this man is a sinner. He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not. One thing I know: Whereas I was blind, now I see...

Mrs. Champion succumbed less easily than her ten-year-olds, and I had to ask her routinely for the next two days before she'd agree to meet me for dinner.

*

There was no exchange of phone numbers, and she wouldn't tell me where she lived or even allow me to commandeer her a taxi. All she'd surrender was a time and a place to meet: a small fish house on Rio Pinto called Jaime's. She claimed that it was her favorite place in Guadalajara, though as far as I could judge, it wasn't anybody's favorite place anywhere: it was a flyblown dump in need of a powerwash and a new theme. I arrived half an hour early, and situated myself against the wall, so that when she showed up, she'd have to face inward; I was hoping to do a little monopolizing. Settling in, I sucked down a lukewarm rum and coke and watched an adjacent cafe chair where a giant, delirious cockroach was staggering around in circles, like he was lost inside a bowl. He had a head full of something; poison or fever. My initial impulse was to whack him one. My second was to sympathize. Mrs. Champion appeared within a few moments of our appointed time, wearing a modest, ineffably ugly plaid dress, underneath which (I surmised) there was a rocking little physique... though apparently, she had not come prepared for seduction. I plied her anyway; coffee with Grand Marnier, but despite my worst intentions, the meal progressed civilly and non-romantically. We had a rambling, surprisingly philosophical, and completely charming conversation that for me was probably more overdue than sloppy sex. I held up my end, blaming politesse, not a need to share anything.

At any rate, for me, there wasn't much to give away. I'd traded a foul marriage and daily violence for silly petal pictures, theatrical sunsets, and slept-off hangovers. That made her smile, but the smile looked spent, like it was being driven by the last few engine turns. Something skulked beneath her surface, that was obvious. I solicited what I could, but there was a clear limit to what she'd give up without a struggle. She'd been born in Houston, she'd lived with her sister in New Orleans for a number of years, and she'd come to Guadalajara around the time of the Mexican economic collapse of '96. She'd been teaching at the seedy little Jesus school for about four years, where they paid her two thousand pesos per month... something less than two hundred dollars... which is barely a living wage, even here in Mexico. With it, she supported her six-year-old daughter Carla. Carla was one genuine luster in her life, the one subject she could discuss without appearing short of breath. For her, Carla was immediate. With distance, her personal details became a little confused; but I gathered that Carla's father, some greaseball named Luis, was totally out of the picture. Far fucking out, I figured, having already begun to deliberate beyond my station. Still, when we spoke of love in the abstract she said, "That's a luxury I can't afford."

But, being in love's not a luxury. Living without it is. Right? I was about a rum away from pressuring the issue, but midnight approached, and that was all the time she'd spare me; she had to work in the morning, and she didn't own her twenty-peso-per-shift babysitter past twelve. She rose, proffered a courteous and gentle abrazo, a quick peck on each of my cheeks, and merged into the evening. I sat there, dully perplexed, looking for my feverish cockroach, and twenty minutes later, I slumped into a cab and headed toward a chilly hotel room and a major purgatorial jerk-off. Imagine that. Surrounded by a million sultry Latinas, and I took my handful of solace from some skinny Texan with crows feet and a dependent.

I won't say I hounded her. But I persisted. Over the next few days, I caught up with her a couple of times, generally appearing near her break-times at the school, shooting the breeze with administration staff until she showed up to check her messages. Actually, I expended a good amount of journalistic energy nosing around the open-air office, trying to pump information from her co-workers. But they remained obscenely loyal to the cause; that is to say, tight-lipped.

That Thursday evening, she consented to meet me again for dinner, giving me the distinct impression that she knew my time in town was limited, and that in the long run, consenting might be less a hassle than continuing to blow me off.

Whatever. We did Jamie's again, though her affection for that ghastly little dive continued to elude me. At least it was cheap. I couldn't have spent twenty dollars at Jaime's if I bought dinner for the staff. At my prompting, we sat outside, where the mealy smell of cooking grease gave way to carbon monoxide. But overhead, the air was clean and bright, and a fat moon sat over the Pacific. That marvelous night, we drank a lot of Spanish wine and gradually got heavy again; ripe territory, since we were at essential theological odds... she filtered her attitudes through generic Texas evangelism while I took religion as a basic, profound misinterpretation.

There's little enough of which I'm absolutely certain, but at least I understand that you can't explain behavior without biology. More to the point, other than the obvious problems with doctrine over logic, and fundamentalism's near-hysterical appeals to vanity, I'd seen the damage that religions will do. I'd seen it in ditches and alleys and fields. But I was falling in love, and I was fully capable of viewing Mrs. Champion's born-again rhetoric as a precious, generally good-natured personality quirk. And anyway, I was hardly qualified to lecture... Wasn't I in process of shedding my skin? Wasn't I reinventing things, weaning myself from political convulsions and paramilitary squads and AP images of wispy hair and silvery skin on the heads of decapitated children?

In retrospect, I'd begun that journey as a frontier hero, enormously impressed with myself, my larger-than-life mission, half-expecting to find some overseas Hollywood sets. What I'd found was a vivid and perplexing night of half-dreams; and the night lasted eighteen years. By the time I'd chucked it in, I had assembled a collection of secret truths, and I was still carrying them around like a hernia. There's dope like that, drugs you can take that will unlock places in your brain that have no business being unlocked, and when you get straight, the relief you feel at being normal again, naïve and sane, is palpable. That was the sensation I was after. That's what I'd come to Mexico to find, under the most innocuous assignment a photographer could arrange for himself. Gardening photos for a trade magazine. Jesus fucking Christ. I'd rooted out the job and the location as a purposeful emasculation.

Mrs. Champion represented, I suppose, an aggregate of the process... she was a sweet, struggling schoolteacher willing to live on chicken scratch to offer a taste of grace to miniature, moldable humans. Change your kids, the theory goes, you change your world. Of course. The fact that it never seems to work is where the theory falls apart. Still, I could see that her gestures were tangible; that she had imperatives and principles behind her actions. Apparently, I'd arrived at a state where I needed nothing more than that to fall in love. I wanted to buy into that wholesomeness, tap it like it was maple sap. I wanted to steal from it and jam it inside myself. I understood that my advances were perplexing to her, awkwardly handled and mostly unwelcome. But somewhere, she'd given me impression that the ramparts were not insurmountable. I flattered myself to think that I must own something she valued... a bank account, perhaps; a world-view, a sense of humor, chest hair, a penis... I imagined myself as her husband; her recuperating but industrious breadwinner; and Carla...whom I had never met, but pictured as a squished up version of Mrs. Champion and the Frito Bandito...yes, I could quite see myself as Carla's father. A dreadfully benevolent, wise, and altruistic step-daddy, sharing anecdotes and truths, loving this illegitimate seed as if she were my own. And me, who had intruded egregiously, brazenly, desperately into the lives and deaths of a number of human beings, got busy doing it again.

*

Rafael taught creative writing at Mrs. Champion's missionary school, but he appeared to have an extremely lax schedule; at least, he was always hanging around near the administration office whenever I dropped in. He was a tall, fussy fellow with an air of contamination behind his gimpy grin. I got the vague impression that he was gay. He wore the same threadbare business suit every day, and kept a chunk of cud inside his mouth, gum or something, so that his lips were perpetually wet. He reminded me of a rumpled, homosexual salamander. In journalism, one develops a sixth sense about people like Rafael, fools with whom you can bargain, provided you're slick enough to figure out their angle. Despite a profession of disdain for things American, I sensed that this was a fragile enough front; that, if ever there was a cat with an agenda, it was Rafael. To me, he radiated sell-out.

His English was pretty good, though too meticulous to sound anything but self-conscious. A couple of times he'd waylaid me, asking if I'd glance over his curriculum. I filed the comment in the appropriate dumpster, since I had no idea what he was talking about, and he gave me the creeps anyhow. But somewhere along the road, I learned that curriculum meant 'resume' and realized that the juicy leech was hitting me up for a job. Evidentially, he wanted to freelance as a magazine writer, having heard from somebody that the pay was good. Which, compared to his salary, it probably was. Having gotten that much out of the closet, I plied a little commerce, using all the decorum of a street hustler: My blessings would go to several industry sources in exchange for Mrs. Champion's personnel file.

Who knew what went on in his conscience, but I was able to balm mine easily enough, since I was convinced that her reluctance to share her address was the result of social embarrassment. I could well imagine the lifestyle that two thousand pesos per month allowed somebody here in Guadalajara...subsistence, if that. I saw her inside one of the featureless tenement shanties that lined the side-roads; a stuffy room with blank walls, half-lit polyethylene windows, a hurricane lamp hanging from the rafters; yeah, her chimes twisting and tinkling on stray scrap-yard breezes, while out back, little Carla, my poor, tiny, bastard stepdaughter, played barefoot.

My imagination was infinite, my coolness was on overdrive; that's how primed I was to play savior. In my unflagging vanity, I assumed that Mrs. Champion needed no more than a testosterone nudge to recognize the talented, sensitive, street-wise photographer for the catch that he was.

So, it was a blow to realize that along the run, the hustler got hustled.

When the cabby pulled into her neighborhood, I called him out, berated him in pidgin Spanish; this was no ghetto, and there wasn't a hurricane lamp or a scrap-yard in sight. This was the land hubris...of putting greens, natural lakes, water fountains, majestic entranceways and twenty-foot-high ceilings. But the cabby was taciturn, manifestly unberatable. He whipped up the cobblestone boulevards, down small romantic plazas, and finally stopped and pointed out a Parisian-style mansion with hand-carved lintels. You could see it beyond the brick windscreen, through rows of tropical fruit trees, behind a sundeck, a palapa, and a tile-roofed verandah. In this slice of the world, it was anyone's guess, but in Chicago you couldn't have touched the place for under three million. The cabby slapped at the address from the profile printout that Rafael had given me. 62 Villa Insurgentes. "Aca, aca", he insisted.

And in fact, the numbers matched. And the street name... and the colony.

No margin for error. The cabby was silent, but smug. And here's me, suddenly, typically, thoroughly clueless. I unrolled the window and inhaled landscape smells while the driver drummed his fingers on the dashboard. The evening air was damp with exotic exhalations; Surinam cherry and blossoming calabash trees lined the property. Had I been halfway serious about the bed I'd made, I would have rushed back to the hotel for the Mimaya and a tripod. Instead, I did a nip of tequila and ruminated. Shortly, a lugubrious, lime-green Suburban hobbled up the street, two miles per hour. The engine was nearly toast; it sounded like there was a bag of nickels under the valve cover. As it limped by, a young, chesty turk in a fuscia zip-shirt glanced inside the cab, doubtless wondering who I was, jammed up against the neighborhood's walled estates. Fuck him. There was a caustic pause as we ogled one another. I nearly leaned out and asked him how he'd been stupid enough to fry the engine on his hotshot SUV, the nosy little prick; it wasn't more than six months old. He moved on, squinting, and a little wind stepped up from somewhere beyond the golf course. In its wake, past the wall, behind the cherry trees, I could hear the soft tinkle of wind chimes.

It was possible, I was forced to reckon, that somehow, she actually lived here... maybe out back in one of the sheds; a Kato/OJ type of deal. Maybe she moonlit as the mansion's housekeeper or took care of the idiotic squirrel monkeys skittering through the fruit trees. Maybe Carla was a little scullery maid, sweeping up ashes and shucking tomatillos; in Mexico they're kind of informal with the labor laws. The only thing I could think to do, short of knuckling under, was to call the phone number on the personnel card and find out what was up. I'd avoided taking that logical step so far, understanding how much harder I'd be to brush off in person...a better tactic would be to show up suddenly on her stoop, where it would be a quicker pass to sweeping her off her feet... by which primitive metaphor, I suppose I meant, to flipping her onto her back. Calling ahead was so tenth grade. But, short of vaulting the massive wall and sniffing around the outbuildings, I didn't know what else to try. I was operating on a minimum of precedence, you understand: the last time I had a crush on a fourth grade teacher, I was in the fourth grade. The cabby waited patiently, figuring, I'm certain, that his gringo was somehow good for the burgeoning fare. I punched in the number on my mobile, got nine rings, and then, a soft, familiar voice answered in Spanish. Mrs. Champion.

She turned out to be acceptably pissed that I'd finagled her telephone number. Less so that I was currently sitting outside the gate in a cab, listening to her wind chimes rattling numinously in the breeze. Unnerved would be closer to the mark. Especially when I showed no indication to accept any rain checks, but professed a willingness to sit here as long as necessary till she saw me. A crude, but ultimately effective MO, as shortly she appeared, wrapped in a full-length Berber bathrobe, and unlocked the wrought iron gate...I wasn't admitted so much as hustled inside.

If her expression was any indication, she was not inclined to be swept away. But, I was prepared to explain myself if she was...my side, at least, I could wing. I was hurried across the enclave; not out back to a shed, but through the old-world doorway into a dramatic, vaulted-brick cappella...not bad for a schoolmarm.

"This was the house of... Carla's father," she said. It was a passing comment, made in a vague tone. Evidentially none of my business. "He... bought it for her." Who asked? A second later, she turned, and stepped in the long shadow cast by the chandelier, which exaggerated the contours of her collapsing skin. She spoke in weary notes, as though self-protection was taking on a certain distastefulness, whispering, "You can't stay. You really can't. What is it you want from me?"

I wasn't sure how personally to take it. I sensed that she was galaxies away, embroiled in struggles unrelated to me, but either way, I knew I was coming across an intruder, not a suitor. I shuffled around on Italian tiles, steaming with booze and uncertainty, silent. Uncharacteristically so. What did I want? What was I supposed to say? Intercourse and a tootsie roll? There were times I would have. This wasn't one of them. We stood within a foyer beneath twin eighteen-foot mirrors and a fountain which flowed from the second floor. I watched her rub drowsy eyes. I glanced at details, the sultry wood beams, the domed ceiling, the imperial old architecture; I watched her fingers rubbing, digging away at the damaged skin. I looked at her green ring, and I realized that if the large, lambent crystal happened to be an emerald, it had to go in at thirty carats, conservatively.

She'd told me once that Carla's father was a banker. That's fine. I knew different. I knew where this kind of consumption came from, and it didn't come from banks. Not even if you were robbing them.

In that moment, I noticed a series of photographs strung along a mahogany shelf that ran the length of the formal entrance hallway. They were common shots, with ordinary subjects, children at parties, old people in parks, wildflowers, skyscapes, but I could sense that they were taken by someone with an eye for image, for line and pattern. It was my eye for an eye, as it happened, that saved my ass. Mrs. Champion had taken those photographs herself, and was quite proud of them; quietly proud, privately proud, pride without guile. My in. Her one subject was the kid. Mine, for the instant, was the camera. "Carla?" I asked brightly, indicating a smiling little brown-eyed poppet, rather surprised at myself for having remembered the name for more than twenty seconds.

"She's sleeping..." Mrs. Champion allowed herself a small seduction: her lips were tapped with soft smiles, the profundity of which was clear; inside the ashy column of chandelier light, her eyes closed and opened with a glitter of tears. "Yes, that's Carla, that one when she was three. It's a porch swing at my sister's on St. Charles street in New Orleans. I like the way her hair falls there... Does that sound cheesy to you?"

Of course it did, but there was no need to bullshit; her photographs were very good. They were luminous. I examined them in detail, moving through indistinct shapes in the villa, down the aracded hall, through a natural breezeway between the dining and drawing rooms....in deeper, until I was beyond point of return. I knew that because I heard her throw a series of heavy door bolts behind me. I proceeded to make intelligent, professional commentaries about the photos, a steady stream of them, pointing out some admirable arrangements she'd captured in a nearby park, contrasting colors in downtown area, interesting angles on the school playground. I made earnest suggestions and she devoured them. She respected my license to judge this piece of her, if no other, but I quickly saw what a large piece of her it was. Scattered throughout the place, on each voluminous flank, amid the inlaid shell and coral rock and the painted marbleized surfaces, were her photographs. Dozens of them. We discussed them candidly. Poor thing, missing my point. Pride was her undoing. She assumed that she could afford the luxury of a compliment.

We settled in some oversized room somewhere in the villa's interior, surround by lush tropical plants and ancient Indian sculpture. We talked about Man Ray and Lewis Hine and about love of image and other subjects of comparable gravity. We did not discuss the ersatz husband/banker and the unholy endowment that surrounded us. We drank copiously. I can't remember what it was exactly, something strong and sybaritic, and gradually she unfolded; she came into my arms and wasn't uncomfortable about it. I know she wasn't, because I asked. I pressured nothing, and the Carla glitter became a brief, but incomprehensibly intense meltdown, body-racking sobs; she made animal sounds that welled from such a nucleus of despair that I was very nearly embarrassed for her. But not quite. Having had the opportunity to make eye contact with men as they died, even at the single transient instant when their totality became their nothing... an indescribable, but unmistakable instant, I can tell you that much; an epiphany without a trace of heavenly light... I couldn't not commiserate.

Personally, I think no human on earth is more than a short fuse away from demolition. Nor am I entirely an autopilot brute; and I suggest that without any pride...guileless or otherwise.

By midnight, she was asleep in my arms, on the sofa, and I went down very soon after that, bolt upright, but solidly under; under with abandon, under like a narcoleptic. Or a eunuch. A very short time later, there was a small, explosive sound on the limestone terrace, and before I could I reassemble myself enough to react, she was out from under my arms, awake and outside in a hard-core panic. At that point, I had no clue as to what it might have been, only what it was: a rat, which had fallen fifteen feet from the hacienda balcony and onto a plant pot. By the time I hauled myself into a condition where I could help, she had the situation in hand; in some feral combo of relief and frustration, Mrs. Champion had beaten the creature to death with a shovel.

Carla woke and began to whimper way off amid the baroque columns and balustrades, and it was time to go. Mrs. Champion embraced me; a minute or longer; a deep kiss of such subtle and penetrating passion that it seemed...elemental. I've re-played it inside my head a hundred times since, like that Zapruder film. A kiss of essence. That was as far as I could take it; Carla's tinny mewling grew louder. She asked me to be careful, first in English, then, by force of habit, in Spanish. It was the last word I heard her speak: "Cuidado" She hustled me out beyond the deadbolts, the carved mahogany, and, glancing up and down an empty street, the wrought iron gate.

I stood for a little while before the estate and mused. Oh, I was already far gone. Fool! Love as a luxury. I was way beyond my station. The yard was heavy, humid and still; nothing tickled the chimes and even the hyperkinetic monkeys had turned in. The cobblestones were damp and deserted. The sky was indomitable. The stars thrashed. I trotted out to the main road, but I was too charged with cravings, too possessed with raw spirit, to have sat still inside a taxi even if had I found one. That night, for the rest of the night, I wanted to do nothing but roam and muse suck tequila and savor the strange tug of hope, because it was a reflex which I thought I'd left somewhere way, way behind me. I walked all the way back; four, five hours or something like that, avenues, sideroads, scrap yards, tenement shanties; signicant hours, to be sure...it was coming on light by the time I got to the hotel. And I was still musing as the sky grew fierce and redolent with dawn; in fact I mused right up until the moment I recognized the green Suburban jammed up near the hotel's side doorway.

I considered ten scenarios in as many seconds, while delirium began to resonate in my skull. I knew it was the same vehicle; for one, a pile of dirty rags lay on the curb nearby, where the chesty prick must have tried to fix his engine problem. It could have been coincidence, but I was slick enough to doubt it. I moved carefully, around to the rear of the building, up a laundry elevator, and when I came to my room, holding my breath, I stroked the doorknob. It was smeared with grease. I straightened up quickly enough; the booze in my brain was replaced by brain steam: a little shock, a well of panic... What if I die today? I'd pissed somebody off, and it wouldn't be the first time.

I stiffed the hotel, of course; let Floral Lifestyles worry about it. Besides, I left four thousand dollars worth of equipment to the cat who was, I was willing to gamble, waiting for me inside my room. I slipped down the fire stair, skirting shadows, sniffing, peering, dodging employees, out a service door, into the infernal alleys of downtown Guadalajara just as they were coming to life. Clear of the hotel, I tried Mrs. Champion's phone, and it rang and rang and rang and sounded inconsolable

. I skulked into a small, open bakery, avoiding glances from the proprietors, and as soon as it was appropriate, I called the school. I got an extremely jumpy receptionist, and then I got Rafael. Rafael's facetious attitude remained intact even as he shared the regrettable news; Mrs. Champion was not coming in that day. Or on any subsequent day. He had it on pretty good authority that her stint with the fourth-grade missionary kids was done. I pressured him for the specifics. His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, but his tone remained so irritating, so hangdog and contemptuous, that I'd have strangled him if he'd been within reach. He'd assumed I'd known her fundamentals, at least. No? He was obliged to reveal them, then. Mrs. Champion's Luis was, in fact, Luis Aranda Banuelos. I recalled the name from my past life, when such CNN drivel actually caught my attention. Banuelos was head of The Aranda Cartel, one of the more powerful polydrug trafficking groups in Mexico. Fucking beautiful, I thought; muse on that one, Romeo. If I recalled history correctly, Banuelos was currently a fugitive, wanted for his complicity in the killing of Federal Secretary Juan Jesus Galvez.

According to Rafael, the school had received a call that morning, indicating that Mrs. Champion was finished. Resignado. He didn't know who'd made the call, but...not Mrs. Champion.

Delicately, with his fawning, soggy intonation, he inquired where I was. My nervous system ratcheted up another notch. Better overly paranoid than overly dead...an old expression, another memory from beyond the pale. What if I die today? Here, my death would make no stir. I told him I was back at the hotel, sitting in the office, filling out reports with house detectives, and I hung up the phone

. I wasn't looking for another bedsheet-around-the-forehead situation, but when the shit was all taken away, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened; that I'd come close to winding up in a fifty gallon drum. An hour later, I caught a bus to Mexico City, spent a number of dollars in a couple of cantinas, then flew to New Orleans. Why not? Where else was I going to go? I found a hotel in a crummy neighborhood, and spent two days wandering up and down St. Charles, swallowing exhaust, looking for little girls on porch swings. There were plenty of them, but none I could identify, none with whom I could speak without risking injury or jail time. So I lost nerve, then interest, and I went to Houston, where I rifled through phone books, examined faces on sidewalks, tried desperately to make eye contact, hoping something would strike me as significant. Nothing did, of course, and a few days of that was all I could stomach. In the end, I concluded that the fundamental gaps in logic, worth, and sense, were all genuine and that the significance of my emotions were not.

I came back to Guadalajara, gaunt, bearded, drunk, starved, pissed into fatalistic disgust, but I continued to push it, push it, push it, like that moron Quixote who appears in effigy in every goddamn souvenir shop in town. I behaved like a puerile asshole, but that's all in retrospect. I tried, without success, to find the photo shop with the eyeless portraits again, and I stumbled through farmacias buying batteries, looking for crinkle-eyed blondes with bad taste in clothes and men.

No delusions, of course; I understand that Mrs. Champion is gone. That clarity has never been anything but absolute. In Mexico, miracles might happen to Nahua peasants, but not to me. That's not my point. She hardly existed for me anyway; no moral analysis is required. People go all the time. I've seen them do it, watched them fly away forever. I've settled into that.

So, I'm at the bar with a paper and pen spread out in front of me in case of random synaptical insights. Vaguely, I'm hoping that Carla, my unseen stepdaughter, has been spared, but who knows about these whacked-out Catholic capos; maybe they're capable of murdering their own daughters, finding justifications; making their little girls into angels before they have time to sin like their mamas. But it really isn't my issue. It's a grace of fate, no more. Life has never been your friend. Not from the outset.

Sorry, Carla, but that's the only truth worth knowing, and there's nothing redeeming or profound about it. And no way out, either...unto dog chow you will return. Perspective and patience probably make that transition a little easier and here's some solid parental advice in case you're alive, Carlita: Nail those two down early.

On the La Feria stage, a schmaltzy mariachi band tunes up. It doesn't interest me. In times of deliberation, an addiction to alcohol is more constructive than an addiction to entertainment. I look out the window. In the street, the eerie Tsuru sign, thong silhouettes, lashy madonnas who refuse to look up from the pavement, chapbooks with zombie sluts on the cover. Across the way, copal incense is burning amid gold and magenta flowers; the smoke drifts slowly out the cathedral door. Soy La Puerta. In the church square, elegant Mexicans are perched besides campesinos, getting the same boot shine for the same three pesos.

But, such glances are transitory. Mostly, I embrace my photograph, clutch it like it's a human. All the colors of Mexico converge within that abominable jumpsuit. Beside her, sparkling expressions gild clingy acolytes, pubescent smirks, skinny brown limbs, precocious figures, and Mrs. Champion is looking into the lens, directly into the lens, into my eyes, beaming with pride over her little missionary spawn. Silly with pride, goofy with it. That goes into my scratch pad, and I'm nearly done. Pride's been a sticking point. Pride's the Seventh Sin, a last spike for the piñata. But I'm not comfortable leaving deadly sins without account, not really; something, at least, is required. I flip the photo over and write expiation. I leave it for the waiter and split.

Inner law is no easier to alter than natural law. But suppose I don't die today? What can I do but carry on?