3. THE PART ABOUT FATE

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts.

Quincy Williams was thirty when his mother died. A neighbor called him at work.

"Honey," she said, "Edna's dead."

He asked when she'd died. He heard the woman sobbing at the other end of the line, and other voices, probably other women. He asked how. No one said anything and he hung up. He dialed his mother's number.

"Who is this?" he heard a woman say angrily.

He thought: my mother is in hell. He hung up again. He called again. It was a young woman.

"This is Quincy, Edna Miller's son," he said.

There was an exclamation he couldn't make out, and a moment later another woman came to the phone. He asked to speak to the neighbor. She's in bed, the woman said, she just had a heart attack, Quincy, we're waiting for an ambulance to come and take her to the hospital. He didn't dare ask about his mother. He heard a man's voice cursing. The man must be in the hallway and his mother's door must be open. He put his hand to his forehead and waited, without hanging up, for someone to explain what was going on. Two women's voices scolded the man who had sworn. They spoke a man's name, but he couldn't hear it clearly.

The woman who was typing at the next desk asked whether something was wrong. He raised his hand as if he was listening to something important and shook his head. The woman went back to typing. Quincy waited awhile and hung up, put on the jacket that was hanging on the back of his chair, and said he had to leave.

When he got to his mother's apartment, the only person there was a fifteen-year-old girl who was sitting on the couch watching TV. She got up when she saw him come in. She must have been six feet tall and she was very thin. She was wearing jeans and over them a black dress with yellow flowers, very loose, like a robe.

"Where is she?" he asked.

"In the bedroom," said the girl.

His mother was on the bed with her eyes closed, dressed as if to go out. They'd even put lipstick on her. All she was missing was her shoes. Quincy stood for a time in the doorway, looking at her feet: there were corns on her two big toes and calluses on the soles of her feet, big calluses that must have hurt her. But he remembered that his mother went to a podiatrist on Lewis Street, a Dr. Johnson, always the same person, so they must not have bothered her too much after all. Then he looked at her face: it seemed to have been carved out of wax.

"I'm leaving," said the girl from the living room.

Quincy came out of the bedroom and tried to give her a twenty, but the girl said she didn't want money. He insisted. Finally the girl took the bill and put it in the pocket of her jeans. To do that she had to hitch her dress up to her hip. She looks like a nun, thought Quincy, or like she belongs to a dangerous cult. The girl gave him a piece of paper where someone had written the phone number of a neighborhood funeral home.

"They'll take care of everything," she said gravely.

"All right," he said.

He asked about the neighbor woman.

"She's in the hospital," said the girl. "I think they're putting in a pacemaker."

"A pacemaker?"

"Yes," said the girl, "in her heart."

When the girl left, Quincy thought that the people in the building and the neighborhood had loved his mother, but they had loved his mother's neighbor, whose face he couldn't remember clearly, even more.

He called the funeral home and talked to someone by the name of Tremayne. He said he was Edna Miller's son. Tremayne consulted his notes and expressed his condolences several times, until he found the paper he was looking for. Then he put him on hold and transferred him to someone called Lawrence. Lawrence asked him what kind of ceremony he wanted.

"Something simple and intimate," said Quincy. "Very simple, very intimate."

In the end they agreed that his mother would be cremated, and the ceremony, barring unforeseen circumstances, would take place the next evening, at the funeral home, at seven. By seven forty-five it would all be over. He asked whether it was possible to do it sooner. It wasn't. Then Mr. Lawrence delicately approached the matter of payment. There was no problem. Quincy wanted to know whether he should call the police or the hospital. No, said Mr. Lawrence, Miss Holly already took care of that. Quincy asked himself who Miss Holly was and drew a blank.

"Miss Holly is your late mother's neighbor," said Mr. Lawrence.

"That's right," said Quincy.

For a moment they were both silent, as if they were trying to remember or piece together the faces of Edna Miller and her neighbor. Mr. Lawrence cleared his throat. He asked whether Quincy knew what church his mother belonged to. He asked whether he himself had any religious preferences. Quincy said his mother belonged to the Christian Church of Fallen Angels. Or no, maybe it had another name. He couldn't remember. You're right, said Mr. Lawrence, it does have a different name, it's the Christian Church of Angels Redeemed. That's the one, said Quincy. And he also said he had no religious leanings. So long as it was a Christian ceremony, that would be enough.

That night he slept on the couch in his mother's house. He went into her room just once and had a glance at the body. The next day, first thing in the morning, the people from the funeral home came and took her away. He got up to let them in, gave them a check, and watched how they carried the pine coffin down the stairs. Then he went back to sleep on the couch.

When he woke up he thought he'd dreamed about a movie he'd seen the other day. But everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn't necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he'd seen was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as he washed his face in the apartment where his mother's body no longer was.

He also thought about what she would have said to him. Be a man and bear your cross.

At work everybody called him Oscar Fate. When he came back no one said anything to him. There was no reason for anyone to say anything. He spent some time looking over his notes on Barry Seaman. The girl at the next desk wasn't there. Then he locked his notes in a drawer and went out to eat. In the elevator he ran into the editor of the magazine, who was with a fat young woman who wrote about teen killers. They nodded to each other and went their separate ways.

He had French onion soup and an omelet at a good, cheap restaurant two blocks away. He hadn't eaten anything since the day before and the food made him feel better. When he'd paid and was about to leave, a man who worked for the sports section called him over and offered to buy him a beer. As they were sitting waiting at the bar, the man told him that the chief boxing correspondent had died that morning outside Chicago. Chief was really an honorary term, since the dead man was the only boxing correspondent they had.

"How did he die?" asked Fate.

"Some black guys from Chicago stabbed him to death," said the other man.

The waiter set a hamburger on the bar. Fate finished his beer, clapped the man on the shoulder, and said he had to go. When he got to the glass door he turned around and contemplated the crowded restaurant and the back of the man from the sports section and the people in pairs, gazing into each other's eyes as they ate or talked, and the three waiters who were never still. Then he opened the door and went out. He looked back into the restaurant, but with the glass in between everything was different. He walked away.

"When are you heading out, Oscar?" asked his editor.

"Tomorrow."

"You got everything you need, are you set?"

"All set," said Fate. "Everything's ready to go."

"That's what I like to hear, son," said the boss. "Did you hear that Jimmy Lowell got whacked?"

"I heard something."

"It was in Paradise City, near Chicago," said the boss. "They say Jimmy had a girl there. Some bitch twenty years younger and married."

"How old was Jimmy?" asked Fate without the least interest.

"He must've been fifty-five or sixty," said the boss. "The police arrested the girl's husband, but our man in Chicago says she was probably mixed up in it too."

"Was Jimmy a big guy? Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds?" asked Fate.

"No, Jimmy wasn't big, and he didn't weigh two hundred and fifty neither. He was five ten, maybe, maybe one seventy-five," said the boss.

"I must be mixing him up with someone else," said Fate, "a big guy who had lunch with Remy Burton sometimes. I used to see him in the elevator."

"No," said the boss, "Jimmy almost never came into the office. He stayed on the road. He showed up here once a year tops. I think he lived in Tampa, he may not even have had a place, spent his life in hotels and airports."

He showered and didn't shave. He listened to the messages on the answering machine. He left the Barry Seaman file that he'd brought from the office on the table. He put on clean clothes and went out. Since he still had time, he went to his mother's apartment first. He noticed that something there smelled bad. He went into the kitchen and when he didn't find anything rotten he tied up the garbage bag and opened the window. Then he sat on the couch and turned on the TV. On a shelf near the TV there were some videotapes. For a few seconds he thought about checking them out, but he gave up the idea almost as soon as it came to him. They had probably just been used to record shows that his mother watched later, at night. He tried to think about something pleasant. He tried to mentally run through all the things he had to do. He couldn't. After sitting absolutely still for a while, he turned off the TV, picked up the keys and the garbage bag, and left the apartment. Before he went down the stairs he knocked at the neighbor's door. No one answered. Outside he tossed the garbage bag into an overflowing Dumpster.

The ceremony was simple and businesslike. He signed a few papers. He wrote another check. He accepted the condolences first of Mr. Tremayne, then of Mr. Lawrence, who appeared at the end as Quincy was leaving with the urn that held his mother's ashes. Was the service satisfactory? asked Mr. Lawrence. During the ceremony, sitting at one end of the room, he saw the tall girl again. She was dressed just as she had been before, in jeans and the black dress with yellow flowers. He looked at her and tried to give her a friendly wave, but she wasn't looking his way. The rest of the people there were strangers, although they were mostly women, so he supposed they must be friends of his mother's. At the end, two of them came up to him and spoke words he didn't understand, words of consolation or rebuke. He went walking back to his mother's apartment. He set the urn next to the videotapes and turned the TV back on. The apartment had stopped smelling bad. The whole building was silent, as if no one was there, as if everyone had gone out on urgent business. From the window he saw teenagers playing and talking (or plotting) but doing the one thing on its own. In other words, they would play for a minute, stop, gather, talk for a minute, and go back to playing, and after that they'd stop and do the same thing over and over again.

He asked himself what kind of game it was and whether the pauses to talk were part of the game or a clear sign that they didn't know the rules. He made up his mind to take a walk. After a while he felt hungry and went into a little Middle Eastern restaurant (Egyptian or Jordanian, he didn't know which), where they served him a sandwich of ground lamb. When he came out he felt sick. In a dark alley he threw up the lamb and was left with a taste of bile and spices in his mouth. He saw a man pushing a hot dog cart. He caught up to him and asked for a beer. The man looked at him as if Fate was high and told him he wasn't allowed to sell alcoholic beverages.

"Give me whatever you have," Fate said.

The man handed him a Coke. He paid and drank the whole thing as the man with the cart went off down the dimly lit street. After a while he saw a movie theater marquee. He remembered that as a teenager he used to spend many evenings there. He decided to go in, even though the movie had already started some time ago, as the ticket seller informed him.

He sat through only one scene. A white man is arrested by three black cops. Instead of taking him to the police station, the cops take him to an airfield. There, the man who's been arrested sees the chief of police, who's also black. The man is no fool and he figures out they're working for the DEA. Through unspoken assurances and eloquent silences, they reach a kind of deal. As they talk, the man looks out a window. He sees the landing strip and a Cessna taxiing toward one end of it. They unload a shipment of cocaine. The cop opening the crates and unpacking the bricks is black. Next to him, another black cop is tossing the bricks into a fire barrel, like the kind the homeless use to keep warm on winter nights. But these cops aren't bums. They're DEA agents, neatly dressed, government employees. The man turns away from the window and points out to the chief that all his men are black. They're more motivated, says the chief. And then he says: you can go now. When the man leaves, the chief smiles, but his smile quickly turns into a scowl. At that moment Fate rose and went to the men's room, where he vomited up the rest of the lamb in his stomach. Then he left and went back to his mother's.

Before he went in, he knocked at the neighbor's door. A woman more or less his own age opened the door. She was wearing glasses and her hair was up in a green African turban. He explained who he was and inquired after the neighbor. The woman looked him in the eye and asked him in. The living room looked like his mother's. Even the furniture was similar. In the room he saw six women and three men. Some were standing or leaning in the kitchen doorway, but most were sitting down.

"I'm Rosalind," said the woman in the turban. "Your mother and mine were very close friends."

Fate nodded. Sobs came from the back of the apartment. One of the women got up and went into the bedroom. When she opened the door the sobs got louder, but when the door closed the sound vanished.

"It's my sister," Rosalind said wearily. "Would you like some coffee?"

Fate said yes. When the woman went into the kitchen, one of the men who was standing came over and asked whether he wanted to see Miss Holly. He nodded. The man led him to the bedroom but remained outside, on the other side of the door. The neighbor lady's body was laid out on the bed, and beside it he saw a woman on her knees, praying. Sitting in a rocking chair next to the window was the girl in jeans and the black dress with yellow flowers. Her eyes were red and she looked at him as if she'd never seen him before.

When he came out he sat on the edge of a couch occupied by women speaking in monosyllables. When Rosalind put a cup of coffee in his hands he asked when her mother had died. This afternoon, said Rosalind in a calm voice. What did she die of? She was old, said Rosalind with a smile. When he got home, Fate realized he was still holding the coffee cup. For an instant he thought about going back to the neighbor's apartment and returning it, but then he thought it would be better to leave it for the next day. He couldn't drink the coffee. He set it next to the videotapes and the urn containing his mother's ashes, then he turned on the TV and turned off the lights and stretched out on the couch. He muted the sound.

The next morning, when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a cartoon. Rats were streaming through a city, silently squealing.

He grabbed the remote control and changed channels. When he found the news, he turned on the sound, though not very loud, and got up. He washed his face and neck and when he dried himself he realized that the towel, hanging on the towel rack, was almost certainly the last towel his mother had used. He smelled it but didn't detect any familiar scent. In the bathroom cabinet there were various bottles of pills and some jars of moisturizing or anti-inflammatory cream. He called in to work and asked to speak to his editor. The only person there was the girl at the next desk and he talked to her. He told her he wasn't coming into the magazine because he planned to leave in a few hours for Detroit. She said she already knew and she wished him good luck.

"I'll be back in three days, maybe four," he said.

Then he hung up, smoothed his shirt, put on his jacket, looked at himself in the mirror by the door, and tried and failed to pull himself together. It was time to get back to work. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, wondering whether he should take the urn with the ashes home with him. I'll do it when I get back, he thought, and he opened the door.

He was home just long enough to put the Barry Seaman file, a few shirts, a few pairs of socks, and some underwear in a bag. He sat in a chair and realized he was a nervous wreck. He tried to relax. When he went outside, it was raining. When had it started to rain? All the taxis that went by had fares. He slung the bag over his shoulder and began to walk along the curb. At last a taxi stopped. When he was about to close the door he heard something like a shot. He asked the taxi driver whether he'd heard it. The taxi driver was Hispanic and spoke very bad English.

"Every day you hear more fantastic things in New York," the driver said.

"What do you mean, fantastic?" he asked.

"Exactly what I say, fantastic," said the taxi driver.

After a while Fate fell asleep. Every now and then he opened his eyes and watched buildings go by where no one seemed to live, or gray streets slicked with rain. Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. He woke up when the taxi driver asked him what terminal he wanted.

"I'm going to Detroit," he said, and he went back to sleep.

The two people sitting in front of him were discussing ghosts. Fate couldn't see their faces, but he imagined them as older, maybe sixty or seventy. He asked for an orange juice. The stewardess was blond, about forty, and she had a mark on her neck covered with a white scarf that had slipped as she bustled up and down assisting passengers. The man in the seat next to him was black and was drinking from a bottle of water. Fate opened his bag and took out the Seaman file. Instead of ghosts, now the passengers in front of him were talking about a person they called Bobby. This Bobby lived in Jackson Tree, Michigan, and had a cabin on Lake Huron. One time this Bobby had gone out in a boat and capsized. He managed to cling to a log that was floating nearby and waited for morning. But as night went on, the water kept getting colder and Bobby was freezing and started to lose his strength. He felt weaker and weaker, and even though he did his best to tie himself to the log with his belt, he couldn't no matter how hard he tried. It may sound easy, but in real life it's hard to tie your own body to a floating log. So he gave up hope, turned his thoughts to his loved ones (here they mentioned someone called Jig, which might have been the name of a friend or a dog or a pet frog he had), and clung to the branch as tightly as he could. Then he saw a light in the sky. He thought it was a helicopter coming to find him, which was foolish, and he started to shout. But then it occurred to him that helicopters clatter and the light he saw wasn't clattering. A few seconds later he realized it was an airplane. A great big plane about to crash right where he was floating, clinging to that log. Suddenly all his tiredness vanished. He saw the plane pass just overhead. It was in flames. Maybe a thousand feet from where he was, the plane plunged into the lake. He heard two explosions, possibly more. He felt the urge to get closer to the site of the disaster and that's what he did, very slowly, because it was hard to steer the log. The plane had split in half and only one part was still floating. Before Bobby got there he watched it sinking slowly down into the waters of the lake, which had gone dark again. A little while later the rescue helicopters arrived. The only person they found was Bobby and they felt cheated when he told them he hadn't been on the plane, that he'd capsized his boat when he was fishing. Still, he was famous for a while, said the person telling the story.

"And does he still live in Jackson Tree?" asked the other man.

"No, I think he lives in Colorado now," was the response.

Then they started to talk about sports. The man next to Fate finished his water and belched discreetly, covering his mouth with his hand.

"Lies," he said softly.

"What?" asked Fate.

"Lies, lies," said the man.

Right, said Fate, and he turned away and stared out the window at the clouds that looked like cathedrals or maybe just little toy churches abandoned in a labyrinthine marble quarry one hundred times bigger than the Grand Canyon.

In Detroit, Fate rented a car, and after he checked a map from the car rental agency, he headed to the neighborhood where Barry Seaman lived.

Seaman wasn't home, but a boy told him he was almost always at Pete's Bar, not far from there. The neighborhood looked like a neighborhood of Ford and General Motors retirees. As he walked he looked at the buildings, five and six stories high, and all he saw were old people sitting on the stoops or leaning out the windows smoking. Every so often he passed a group of boys hanging out on the corner or girls jumping rope. The parked cars weren't nice cars or new cars, but they looked cared for.

The bar was next to a vacant lot full of weeds and wildflowers growing over the ruins of the building that had once stood there. On the side of a neighboring building he saw a mural that struck him as odd. It was circular, like a clock, and where the numbers should have been there were scenes of people working in the factories of Detroit. Twelve scenes representing twelve stages in the production chain. In each scene, there was one recurring character: a black teenager, or a long-limbed, scrawny black man-child, or a man clinging to childhood, dressed in clothes that changed from scene to scene but that were invariably too small for him. He had apparently been assigned the role of clown, intended to make people laugh, although a closer look made it clear that he wasn't there only to make people laugh. The mural looked like the work of a lunatic. The last painting of a lunatic. In the middle of the clock, where all the scenes converged, there was a word painted in letters that looked like they were made of gelatin: fear.

Fate went into the bar. He took a stool and asked the man behind the bar who had painted the mural outside. The bartender, a heavy black man in his sixties with a scar, said he didn't know.

"Probably some kid from the neighborhood," he muttered.

Fate ordered a beer and cast a glance around the bar. He didn't see anyone who might have been Seaman. Beer in hand, he asked loudly whether anyone knew Barry Seaman.

"Who wants to know?" asked a short guy in a Pistons T-shirt and a sky-blue tweed jacket.

"Oscar Fate," said Fate, "of the magazine Black Dawn, from New York."

The bartender came over and asked whether he was really a reporter. I'm a reporter. For Black Dawn.

"Man," said the short guy without getting up from his table, "that's a fucked-up name for a magazine." His two fellow cardplayers laughed. "Personally I'm sick of all these dawns," said the short guy. "Why don't the brothers in New York do something with the sunset for once, that's the best time of day, at least in this goddamn neighborhood."

"When I get back I'll tell them. I just write stories," he said.

"Barry Seaman didn't come in today," said an old man who was sitting at the bar, like Fate.

"I think he's sick," said another.

"That's right, I did hear something like that," said the old man at the bar.

"I'll wait for him awhile," said Fate, and he finished his beer.

The bartender settled across from him and told him that in his day he'd been a fighter.

"My last fight was in Athens, in South Carolina. I fought a white boy. Who do you think won?" he asked.

Fate looked him in the eye, frowned noncommittally, and ordered another beer.

"It was four months since I saw my manager. I just went around with my trainer, this old man called Johnny Bird, we went from one town to another in South Carolina, North Carolina, sleeping in these shitty-ass motels. He was wobbly and so was I, you know what I'm saying, me because I'd got hit so much and old Bird because by then he was eighty at least. That's right, eighty, maybe he was eighty-three. We used to argue about that before we went to sleep, with the lights out. Bird said he'd just hit eighty. I said he was eighty-three. They fixed the fight. The promoter told me to go down in the fifth. And to let myself get knocked around some in the fourth. For that, they'd give me double what they'd promised, which wasn't much. I told Bird about it that night, eating supper. It don't matter none to me, he said. I don't give a damn. The problem is, most times these people don't pay their bills. So it's up to you. That's what he said."

On the way back to Seaman's house Fate felt a little dizzy. An enormous moon was rising over the roofs. Near the entrance to a building a man came up to him and said something that either he didn't understand or that struck him as unacceptable. I'm Barry Seaman's friend, motherfucker, said Fate as he tried to grab the man by the lapels of his leather jacket.

"Relax," said the man. "Easy, brother."

Inside the doorway he saw four pairs of yellow eyes shining in the dark, and in the dangling hand of the man he was gripping he saw the fleeting reflection of the moon.

"Get out of here or I'll kill you," he said.

"Relax, brother, let me go first," said the man.

Fate let go of him and looked for the moon over the roofs ahead. He followed it. As he walked he heard noises on the side streets, steps, running, as if part of the neighborhood had just woken up. Next to Seaman's building he made out his rental car. He examined it. Nothing had happened to it. Then he rang the buzzer and an irritated voice asked what he wanted. Fate identified himself and said he'd been sent from Black Dawn. Over the intercom he heard a little laugh of satisfaction. Come in, said the voice. Fate crawled up the stairs. At some point he understood he wasn't well. Seaman was waiting for him on the landing.

"I need to use the bathroom," said Fate.

"Jesus," said Seaman.

The living room was small and modest and he saw books strewn everywhere and also posters taped to the walls and little photographs scattered along the shelves and the table and on top of the TV.

"The second door," said Seaman.

Fate went in and began to vomit.

When he woke up he saw Seaman writing with a pen. Next to him were four thick books and several folders full of papers. Seaman wore glasses when he wrote. Fate noticed that three of the four books were dictionaries and the fourth was a huge tome called The Abridged French Encyclopedia, which he'd never heard of, in college or ever. The sun was coming in the window. He threw off the blanket and sat up on the couch. He asked Seaman what had happened. The old man looked at him over his glasses and offered him a cup of coffee. Seaman was six feet tall, at least, but he stood slightly stooped, which made him seem smaller. He made a living giving lectures, which tended to be badly paid, since he was hired most often by educational organizations operating in the ghetto and sometimes by small progressive colleges with tiny budgets. Years ago he had published a book called Eating Ribs with Barry Seaman, in which he collected all the recipes he knew for ribs, mostly grilled or barbecued, adding strange or notable facts about the places where he'd learned each recipe, who had taught it to him, and under what circumstances. The best part of the book had to do with the ribs and mashed potatoes or applesauce he'd made in prison: how he'd got hold of the ingredients and how he'd cooked them in a place where cooking, like so many other things, was forbidden. The book wasn't a bestseller, but it put Seaman back in circulation and he appeared on a few morning shows, cooking some of his famous recipes live. Now he had fallen into obscurity again, but he kept giving lectures and traveling the country, sometimes in exchange for a return ticket and three hundred dollars.

Next to the table where he wrote and where the two of them sat to have coffee, there was a black-and-white poster of two young men in black jackets and black berets and dark glasses. Fate shivered, not because of the poster but because he felt so sick, and after the first swallow of coffee he asked whether one of the boys was Seaman. That's right, said Seaman. Fate asked which one. Seaman smiled. He didn't have a single tooth.

"Hard to tell, isn't it?"

"I don't know, I don't feel very well, if I felt better I'm sure I could figure it out," said Fate.

"The one on the right, the shorter one," said Seaman.

"Who's the other one?" asked Fate.

"Are you sure you don't know?"

Fate looked at the poster again for a while. "It's Marius Newell," he said. "That's right," said Seaman.

Seaman put on a jacket. Then he went into the bedroom and when he came out he was wearing a narrow-brimmed dark green hat. He picked his dentures out of a glass in the dark bathroom and fit them in carefully. Fate watched him from the living room. He rinsed his mouth with a red liquid, spat in the sink, rinsed again, and said he was ready.

They left in the rental car for Rebecca Holmes Park, some twenty blocks away. Since they had time to kill, they stopped the car on the edge of the park and spent a while talking as they stretched their legs. Rebecca Holmes Park was big and in the middle, surrounded by a half-collapsed fence, was a playground called Temple A. Hoffman Memorial Playground, where they didn't see any children playing. In fact, the playground was completely empty, except for a couple of rats that took off when they saw Seaman and Fate. Next to a cluster of oaks stood a vaguely Oriental-looking gazebo, like a miniature Russian Orthodox church. Hip-hop sounded from the other side of the gazebo.

"I hate this shit," said Seaman, "make sure you get that in your article."

"Why?" asked Fate.

They headed toward the gazebo and next to it they saw the dried-up bed of a pond. A pair of Nike sneakers had left frozen tracks in the dry mud. Fate thought about dinosaurs and felt sick again. They walked around the gazebo. On the other side, on the ground next to some shrubs, they saw a boom box, the source of the music. There was no one nearby. Seaman said he didn't like rap because the only out it offered was suicide. But not even meaningful suicide. I know, I know, he said. It's hard to imagine meaningful suicide. It isn't a common thing. Although I've seen or been near two meaningful suicides. At least I think I have. I could be wrong, he said.

"How does rap lead to suicide?" asked Fate.

Seaman didn't answer and led him on a shortcut through the trees, which brought them out into an open space. On the pavement three girls were jumping rope. The song they were singing seemed highly unusual. There was something about a woman whose legs and arms and tongue had been amputated. There was something about the Chicago sewers and the sanitation boss or a city worker called Sebastian D'Onofrio, and then came a refrain, repeating Chi-Chi-Chi-Chicago. There was something about the pull of the moon. Then the woman grew wooden legs and wire arms and a tongue made of braided grasses and plants. Completely disoriented, Fate asked where his car was, and the old man said it was on the other side of the park. They crossed the street, talking about sports. They walked one hundred yards and went into a church.

There, from the pulpit, Seaman spoke about his life. The Reverend Ronald K. Foster introduced him, in a way that made it clear Seaman had been there before. I'm going to address five subjects, said Seaman, no more and no less. The first subject is DANGER. The second, MONEY. The third, FOOD. The fourth, STARS. The fifth and last, USEFULNESS. People smiled and some nodded their heads in approval, as if to say all right, as if to inform the speaker they had nothing better to do than listen to him. In a corner Fate saw five boys in black jackets and black berets and dark glasses, none of them older than twenty. They were watching Seaman with impassive faces, ready to applaud him or jeer. On the stage the old man paced back and forth, his back hunched, as if he had suddenly forgotten his speech. Unexpectedly, at a sign from the preacher, the choir sang a gospel hymn. The hymn was about Moses and the captivity of the people of Israel in Egypt. The preacher himself accompanied them on the piano. Then Seaman returned to center stage and raised a hand (he had his eyes closed), and in a few seconds the choir's singing ceased and the church was silent.

DANGER. Despite what the congregation (or most of it) expected, Seaman began by talking about his childhood in California. He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles. He raised a finger, felt for something in the pocket of his jacket, and brought out an inhaler. Everyone waited in silence. The two spurts of the inhaler could be heard all the way to the farthest corner of the church. Pardon me, he said. Then he said he had learned to drive at thirteen. I don't drive anymore, he said, but I learned at thirteen and it's not something I am proud of. At that point he stared out into the room, at a vague spot in the middle of the sanctuary, and said he had been one of the founders of the Black Panthers. Marius Newell and I, he said, to be precise. After that, the speech subtly drifted from its course. It was as if the doors of the church had opened, wrote Fate in his notebook, and the ghost of Newell had come in. But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell's mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people's self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I've seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I'll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice. He excused himself again and turned toward the altar, then he turned back to face the audience. As you all know, he said, Marius Newell was killed. A black man like you and like me killed him one night in Santa Cruz, California. I told him, Marius, don't go back to California, there are too many cops there, cops out to get us. But he didn't listen. He liked California. He liked to go to the rocky beaches on a Sunday and breathe the smell of the Pacific. When we were both in prison, I got postcards from him in which he told me he'd dreamed he was breathing that air. Which is strange, because I haven't met many black folks who took to the sea the way he did. Maybe none, definitely none in California. But I know what he was talking about, I know what he meant. As it happens, I have a theory about this, about why we don't like the sea. We do like it. Just not as much as other folks. But that's for another occasion. Marius told me things had changed in California. There were many more black police now, for example. It was true. It had changed in that way. But in other ways it was still the same. And yet there was no denying that some things had changed. And Marius recognized that and he knew we deserved part of the credit. The Panthers had helped bring the change. With our grain of sand or our dump truck. We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep. So he decided he'd go back to California and live the rest of his life there, in peace, out of harm's way, and maybe he'd start a family. He always said he would call his first son Frank, after a friend who lost his life in Soledad Prison. Truth is, he would've had to have at least thirty children to pay tribute to all the friends who'd been taken from him. Or ten, and give each of them three names. Or five, and give them each six. But as it happened he didn't have any children because one night, as he was walking down the street in Santa Cruz, a black man killed him. They say it was for money. They say Marius owed him money and that was why he was killed, but I find that hard to believe. I think someone hired that man to kill him. At the time, Marius was fighting the drug trade in town and someone didn't like that. Maybe. I was still in prison so I don't really know. I have my theories, too many of them. All I know is that Marius died in Santa Cruz, where he had gone to spend a few days. He didn't live there and it's hard to imagine the killer lived there. The killer followed Marius, is what I'm saying. And the only reason I can think of why Marius was in Santa Cruz is the ocean. Marius went to see the Pacific Ocean, went to smell it. And the killer tracked him down to Santa Cruz. And you all know what happened next. Oftentimes I think about Marius. More than I want to, to tell you the truth. I see him on the beach in California. A beach in Big Sur, maybe, or in Monterey north of Fisherman's Wharf, up Highway 1. He's standing at a lookout point, looking away. It's winter, off-season. The Panthers are young, none of us even twenty-five. We're all armed, but we've left our weapons in the car, and you can see the deep dissatisfaction on our faces. The sea roars. Then I go up to Marius and I say let's get out of here now. And at that moment Marius turns and he looks at me. He's smiling. He's beyond it all. And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he's incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I'm afraid, even though it's my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea.

MONEY. In a word, Seaman believed that money was necessary, but not as necessary as some people claimed. He talked about what he called "economic relativism." At Folsom Prison, he said, a cigarette was worth one-twentieth of a little jar of strawberry jam. Meanwhile, at Soledad, a cigarette was worth one-thirtieth of a jar. And at Walla-Walla, a cigarette was worth the same as a jar of jam, for one thing because the prisoners at Walla-Walla-who knows why, maybe because of some brainwashing against food, maybe because they were hooked on that nicotine-would have nothing to do with anything that was sweet, and all they wanted was to breathe that smoke into their lungs. Money, said Seaman, was ultimately a mystery, and as an uneducated man, he was hardly the right person to try to explain it. Still, he had two things to say. The first was that he didn't approve of the way poor people spent their money, especially poor African Americans. It makes my blood boil, he said, when I see a pimp cruising around the neighborhood in a limousine or a Lincoln Continental. I can't stand it. When poor people make money, they should behave with greater dignity, he said. When poor people make money, they should help their neighbors. When poor people make money, they should send their children to college and adopt an orphan, or more than one. When poor people make money, they should admit publicly to having made only half as much. They shouldn't even tell their children how much they really have, because then their children will want the whole inheritance and won't be willing to share it with their adopted siblings. When poor people make money, they should establish secret funds, not just to help the black people rotting in this country's prisons, but to start small businesses like laundries, bars, video stores, the profits to be fully reinvested in the community. Scholarships. Never mind if the scholarship students come to a bad end. Never mind if the scholarship students end up killing themselves because they listened to too much rap, or killing their white teacher and five classmates in a rage. The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new-found riches. We have to give it our all. We have to squeeze water from the rocks, and from the desert too. But we can never forget that money remains a problem to be solved, Seaman said.

FOOD. As you all know, said Seaman, pork chops saved my life. First I was a Panther and I faced down the police in California and then I traveled all over the world and then I lived for years on the tab of the U.S. government. When they let me out I was nobody. The Panthers no longer existed. In the minds of some, we were old terrorists. In the minds of others, we were a vague memory of sixties blackness, we were picturesque. Marius Newell had died in Santa Cruz. Some comrades had died in prison and others had made public apologies and started new lives. Now there weren't just black cops. There were black people in public office, black mayors, black businessmen, famous black lawyers, black TV and movie stars, and the Panthers were a hindrance. So when they let me out there was nothing left, or next to nothing, the smoldering remains of a nightmare we had plunged into as youths and that as grown men we were leaving behind now, practically old men, you could say, with no future ahead of us, because during the long years in prison we'd forgotten what we knew and we'd learned nothing, nothing but cruelty from the guards and sadism from our fellow inmates. That was my situation. So those first months out on parole were sad and gray. Sometimes I would sit at the window for hours watching the lights blink on a nameless street, just smoking. I won't lie to you, terrible thoughts crossed my mind more than once. Only one person helped me selflessly: my older sister, God rest her soul. She invited me to stay at her house in Detroit, which was small, but for me it was as if a princess in Europe had offered me her castle for a resting place. My days were all alike, but they had something that today, in hindsight, I don't hesitate to call happiness. Back then I saw only two people regularly: my sister, who was the world's most good-hearted human being, and my parole officer, a fat man who used to pour me a shot of whiskey in his office and he'd say: tell me, Barry, how could you be so bad? Sometimes I thought he said it to get me going. Sometimes I thought: this man is on the payroll of the California police and he wants to get me going and then he'll shoot me in the gut. Tell me about your b--, Barry, he would say, referring to my manly attributes, or: tell me about the guys you killed. Talk, Barry. Talk. And he would open his desk drawer, where I knew he kept his gun, and wait. And what could I do? Well, I would say, I didn't meet Chairman Mao, but I did meet Lin Piao, and later on he wanted to kill Chairman Mao and he was killed in a plane crash when he was trying to get away to Russia. A little man, wise as a serpent. Do you remember Lin Piao? And Lou would say he had never heard of Lin Piao in his life. Well, Lou, I would say, he was something like a Chinese cabinet member or like the Chinese secretary of state. And in those days we didn't have a whole lot of Americans in China, I can tell you. You could say we paved the way for Kissinger and Nixon. And Lou and I could go on like that for three hours, him asking me to tell him about the guys I'd shot in the back, and me talking about the politicians I'd met and the countries I'd seen. Until I was finally able to get rid of him, with a little Christian patience, and I've never seen him since. Lou probably died of cirrhosis. And my life went on, with the same uncertainties and the same feeling of impermanence. Then, one day I realized there was one thing I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgotten how to cook. I hadn't forgotten my pork chops. With the help of my sister, who was one of God's angels and who loved to talk about food, I started writing down all the recipes I remembered, my mother's recipes, the ones I'd made in prison, the ones I'd made on Saturdays at home on the roof for my sister, though she didn't care for meat. And when I'd finished the book I went to New York and took it to some publishers and one of them was interested and you all know the rest. The book put me back in the public eye. I learned to combine cooking with history. I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion I felt at the kindness of so many people, from my late sister to countless others. And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe. In other words, the sense of wonderment at a marvelous thing, like the lilies that bloom and die in a single day, or azaleas, or forget-me-nots. But I also realized this wasn't enough. I couldn't live forever on my recipes for ribs, my famous recipes. Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for. So those of you who are interested can take out pencil and paper now, because I'm going to read you a new recipe. It's for duck a l'orange. This is not something you want to eat every day, because it isn't cheap and it will take you an hour and a half, maybe more, to make, but every two months or when a birthday comes around, it isn't bad. These are the ingredients, for four: a four-pound duck, two tablespoons of butter, four cloves of garlic, two cups of broth, a few sprigs of herbs, a tablespoon of tomato paste, four oranges, four tablespoons of sugar, three tablespoons of brandy, black pepper, oil, and salt. Then Seaman explained the preparation, step by step, and when he had finished explaining he said that duck made a fine meal, and that was all.

STARS. He said that people knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you're driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it's the oil or the radiator, maybe it's a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you're done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That's a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave. Having reached this point, Seaman warned that stars were one thing, meteors another. Meteors have nothing to do with stars, he said. Meteors, especially if they're on a direct collision course with the earth, have nothing to do with stars or dreams, though they might have something to do with the notion of breaking away, a kind of breaking away in reverse. Then he talked about starfish, he said he didn't know how, but each time Marius Newell walked along a beach in California he came upon a starfish. But he also said that the starfish you find on the beach are usually dead, corpses tossed up by the waves, with exceptions, of course. Newell, he said, could always tell the dead starfish from the ones that were still alive. I don't know how he did it, but he told them apart. And he left the dead on the beach and returned the living to the sea, tossing them near the rocks to give them a chance. Except once, when he brought a starfish home and put it in a tank, with some of that Pacific brine. This was in the early days of the Panthers, when we spent our time directing traffic in the community so cars wouldn't speed through and kill the children. A couple of stoplights would have come in handy, but the city wouldn't help us. So that was one of the first of the Panthers' roles, as traffic cops. And meanwhile Marius Newell saw to his starfish. Naturally, before too long he realized that he needed a pump for his tank. One night he went out with Seaman and little Nelson Sanchez to steal one. None of them was armed. They went to a store that specialized in the sale of rare fish in Colchester Sun, a white neighborhood, and they went in through the back door. When Marius had the pump in his hands, there came a man with a shotgun. I thought that was the end of us, said Seaman, but then Marius said: don't shoot, don't shoot, it's for my starfish. The man with the gun didn't move. We stepped back. He stepped forward. We stopped. He stopped. We took another step back. He came after us. At last we got to the car that little Nelson was driving and the man stopped less than ten feet away. When Nelson started the car the man lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and he took aim. Step on it, I said. No, said Marius. Go slow. The car rolled out toward the main street and the man came walking after us, his gun raised. Now you can hit it, said Marius, and when little Nelson stepped on the gas the man stood still, shrinking until I saw him disappear in the rearview mirror. Of course, the pump didn't do Marius any good, and a week or two later, for all the care he'd lavished on that starfish, it died and ended up in the trash. Really, when you talk about stars you're speaking figuratively. That's metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You've used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he's seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. But really, there's just one star and that star isn't semblance, it isn't metaphor, it doesn't come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It's the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star. When I was young I saw a science fiction movie. A rocket ship drifts off course and heads toward the sun. First, the astronauts start to get headaches. Then they're all dripping sweat and they take off their spacesuits and even so they can't stop sweating and before long they're dehydrated. The sun's gravity keeps pulling them ceaselessly in. The sun begins to melt the hull of the ship. Sitting in his seat, the viewer can't help feeling hot, too hot to bear. Now I've forgotten how it ends. At the last minute they get saved, I seem to recall, and they correct the course of that rocket ship and turn it around toward the earth, and the huge sun is left behind, a frenzied star in the reaches of space.

USEFULNESS. But the sun has its uses, as any fool knows, said Seaman. From up close it's hell, but from far away you'd have to be a vampire not to see how useful it is, how beautiful. Then he began to talk about things that were useful back in the day, things once generally appreciated but now distrusted instead, like smiles. In the fifties, for example, he said, a smile opened doors for you. I don't know if it could get you places, but it could definitely open doors. Now nobody trusts a smile. Before, if you were a salesman and you went in somewhere, you'd better have a big smile on your face. It was the same thing no matter whether you were a waiter or a businessman, a secretary, a doctor, a scriptwriter, a gardener. The only folks who never smiled were cops and prison guards. That hasn't changed. But everybody else, they all did their best to smile. It was a golden age for dentists in America. Black folks, of course, were always smiling. White folks smiled. Asian folks. Hispanic folks. Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a smile. Or to put it another way, we don't trust anybody, least of all people who smile, since we know they want something from us. Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they're good people, that they'd never hurt a fly? No again. The truth is they don't want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they ask for in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that's all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshipped. When I was little, said Seaman, I don't remember children wearing braces. Today I've hardly met a child who doesn't wear them. Useless things are forced upon us, and it isn't because they improve our quality of life but because they're the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and high-class people require admiration and worship. Naturally, fashions don't last, one year, four at most, and then they pass through every stage of decay. But markers of class rot only when the corpse that was tagged with them rots. Then he began to talk about useful things the body needs. First, a balanced diet. I see lots of fat people in this church, he said. I suspect few of you eat green vegetables. Maybe now is the time for a recipe. The name of the recipe is: Brussels Sprouts with Lemon. Take note, please. Four servings calls for: two pounds of brussels sprouts, juice and zest of one lemon, one onion, one sprig of parsley, three tablespoons of butter, black pepper, and salt. You make it like so. One: Clean sprouts well and remove outer leaves. Finely chop onion and parsley. Two: In a pot of salted boiling water, cook sprouts for twenty minutes, or until tender. Then drain well and set aside. Three: Melt butter in frying pan and lightly saute onion, add zest and juice of lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Four: Add brussels sprouts, toss with sauce, reheat for a few minutes, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with lemon wedges on the side. So good you'll be licking your fingers, said Seaman. No cholesterol, good for the liver, good for the blood pressure, very healthy. Then he dictated recipes for Endive and Shrimp Salad and Broccoli Salad and then he said that man couldn't live on healthy food alone. You have to read books, he said. Not watch so much TV. The experts say TV doesn't hurt the eyes. I'm not so sure. It won't do your eyes any good, and cell phones are still a mystery. Maybe they cause cancer, as some scientists say. I'm not saying they do or they don't, but there you have it. What I'm saying is, you have to read books. The preacher knows I'm telling you the truth. Read books by black writers. But don't stop there. This is my real contribution tonight. Reading is never a waste of time. I read in jail. That's where I started to read. I read a lot. I went through books like they were barbecue. In prison they turn the lights out early. You get in bed and hear sounds. Footsteps. People yelling. As if instead of being in California, the prison was inside the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. You feel cold and hot at the same time and that's a clear sign you're lonely or sick. You try to think about other things, sure, nice things, but sometimes you just can't do it. Sometimes a guard at the nearest desk turns on a lamp and light from that lamp shines through the bars of your cell. This happened to me any number of times. The light from a lamp set in the wrong place, or from the fluorescent bulbs in the corridor above or the next corridor over. Then I would pick up my book and hold it in the light and get to reading. It wasn't easy, because the letters and the paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in that unpredictable, underground world. But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body, not just my brain. And I could read like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers, most of whom couldn't care less whether I rotted or not. I knew I was doing something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of shift with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. And you, who are so kind, now you must be asking: what did you read, Barry? I read everything. But I especially remember a certain book I read at one of the most desperate moments of my life and it brought me peace again. What book do I mean? What book do I mean? Well, it was a book called An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, and I promise you that is one useful book, or at least it was of great use to me.

That night, after he dropped Seaman off at home, Fate slept at the hotel where the magazine had booked him a room from New York. The receptionist told him that he'd been expected the day before and handed him a message from his editor asking how everything had gone. He called the magazine from his room, knowing no one would be there, and left a message vaguely explaining his meeting with the old man.

He showered and got in bed. He turned on the TV, looking for porn. He found a movie in which a German woman was making love with two black men. The German woman was speaking German and so were the black men. Were there black people in Germany, too? he wondered. Then he got bored and switched to a free channel. He saw part of a trashy show on which a hugely fat woman in her early forties had to sit and listen to her husband, a hugely fat man in his midthirties, and her husband's new girlfriend, a slightly less fat woman in her early thirties, insult her. The man, he thought, was clearly a faggot. The show was shot in Florida. Everyone was in short sleeves, except for the host, who was wearing a white blazer, khaki pants, a gray-green shirt, and an ivory tie. At moments, the host looked uncomfortable. The fat man gestured and bobbed like a rapper, egged on by his slightly less fat girlfriend. The fat man's wife, meanwhile, was quiet, gazing at the audience until, without a word, she started to cry.

This must be the end, thought Fate. But the show or this segment of the show didn't end there. At the sight of his wife in tears, the fat man stepped up his verbal attack. Among the things he called her Fate thought he heard the word fat. He also told her that he wasn't going to let her keep ruining his life. I don't belong to you, he said. His slightly less fat girlfriend said: he doesn't belong to you, why don't you get that through your head? After a while, the seated woman reacted. She got up and said she'd heard enough. She didn't say it to her husband or to her husband's girlfriend but directly to the host. He told her to pull herself together and take her turn saying what she needed to say. I was tricked into coming on this show, said the woman, still in tears. No one's tricked into coming here, said the host. Don't be a coward, listen to what he has to say to you, said the fat man's girlfriend. Listen to what I have to say to you, said the fat man, circling her. The woman raised her hand to fend him off and left the set. The girlfriend took a seat. After a while, the fat man sat down, too. The host, who was sitting in the audience, asked the fat man what he did for a living. I'm unemployed now, but I used to be a security guard, he said. Fate changed the channel. He took a little bottle of Tennessee Bull bourbon from the minibar. After the first swallow he felt like throwing up. He put the cap back on the bottle and returned it to the minibar. After a while he fell asleep with the TV on.

While Fate was sleeping, there was a report on an American who had disappeared in Santa Teresa, in the state of Sonora in the north of Mexico. The reporter, Dick Medina, was a Chicano, and he talked about the long list of women killed in Santa Teresa, many of whom ended up in the common grave at the cemetery because no one claimed their bodies. Medina was talking in the desert. Behind him was a highway and off in the distance was a rise that Medina gestured toward at some point in the broadcast, saying it was Arizona. The wind ruffled the reporter's smooth black hair. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Then came a shot of some assembly plants and Medina 's voice-over saying that unemployment was almost nonexistent along that stretch of the border. People standing in line on a narrow sidewalk. Pickup trucks covered in a fine dust the brown color of baby shit. Hollows in the ground, like World War I bomb craters, that gradually gave way to dumping sites. The smiling face of some kid who couldn't have been more than twenty, thin and dark-skinned, with prominent cheekbones, whom Medina identified in a voice-over as a pollero or coyote or person who leads illegal immigrants over the border. Medina said a name. The name of a girl. Then there was a shot of the streets of an Arizona town where the girl was from. Houses with scorched yards and dirty silver-colored chicken-wire fences. The sad face of the mother. Exhausted with crying. The face of the father, a tall man with broad shoulders who stared into the camera saying nothing. Behind the two of them were the shadowy figures of three teenage girls. Our other three daughters, said the mother in accented English. The three girls, the oldest no more than fifteen, went running into the dark of the house.

As this report was showing on TV, Fate dreamed of a man he'd written a story about, the first story he'd had published in Black Dawn, after three other pieces were rejected. He was an old black man, much older than Seaman, who lived in Brooklyn and was a member of the Communist Party. When Fate met him there wasn't a single Communist left in Brooklyn, but the man was keeping his cell operative. What was his name? Antonio Ulises Jones, although the kids in the neighborhood called him Scottsboro Boy. They also called him Old Freak or Bones or Skin, but they usually called him Scottsboro Boy, among other reasons because Antonio Jones often talked about what had happened in Scottsboro, about the Scottsboro trials, about the blacks who were almost lynched in Scottsboro, people no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood remembered.

When Fate met him, purely by chance, Antonio Jones must have been eighty years old and he lived in a two-room apartment in one of the poorest parts of Brooklyn. In the living room there were a table and more than fifteen chairs, those old folding wooden bar stools with long legs and low backs. On the wall there was a photograph of a huge man, well over six feet tall, dressed like a worker of the period, receiving a diploma from a boy who looked straight into the camera and smiled, showing perfect, gleaming white teeth. The face of the giant worker, in its way, also resembled a child's face.

"That's me," Antonio Jones told Fate the first time Fate visited him, "and the big man is Robert Martillo Smith, a Brooklyn city maintenance worker, a specialist at going down into the sewers and wrestling with thirty-foot alligators."

In the three conversations they had, Fate asked Jones many questions, some intended to prick the old man's conscience. He asked about Stalin, and Antonio Jones answered that Stalin was a son of a bitch. He asked about Lenin, and Antonio Jones answered that Lenin was a son of a bitch. He asked about Marx, and Antonio Jones said now he was talking, that was where he should have started: Marx was a wonderful man. After that, Antonio Jones began to speak of Marx in glowing terms. There was only one thing he didn't like about Marx: his temper. This he blamed on poverty, because according to Jones, poverty didn't cause only illness and resentment, it caused bad temper. Fate's next question was what he thought about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resulting collapse of the real-world Socialist regimes. It was foreseeable, I predicted it ten years before it happened, was Antonio Jones's response. Then, out of the blue, he began to sing the "Internationale." He opened the window and in a deep voice that took Fate by surprise, he intoned the first few lines: Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! When he had finished singing he asked Fate whether it didn't strike him as an anthem made especially for black people. I don't know, said Fate, I never thought of it that way. Later, Jones gave him an off-the-cuff accounting of the Communists of Brooklyn. During World War II, there were more than a thousand. After the war, the number rose to thirteen hundred. At the start of McCarthyism, there were only about seven hundred, and when it ended there were scarcely two hundred Communists in Brooklyn. In the sixties there were just half as many and by the seventies there were no more than thirty Communists scattered in five hardy cells. At the end of the seventies, there were ten left. By the beginning of the eighties, there were only four. During the eighties, two of the four who were left died of cancer and one vanished without saying anything to anyone. Maybe he just went on a trip and died on the way there or the way back, mused Antonio Jones. Whatever it was, he never showed up again, not at headquarters or at his apartment or at the bars where he was a regular. Maybe he went to live with his daughter in Florida. He was Jewish and he had a daughter there. The fact of the matter is that by 1987 there was only one left. And here I still am, he said. Why? asked Fate. Antonio Jones hesitated for a few seconds, considering his answer. Then he looked Fate in the eye and said:

"Because someone has to keep the cell operative."

Jones's eyes were small and black as coal, and his eyelids were heavy with folds. He had hardly any eyelashes. His eyebrows were sparse, and sometimes, when he and Fate went out to take walks around the neighborhood, he put on big sunglasses and picked up a cane, which he left by the door when they got back. He could go whole days without eating. Once you get to be a certain age, he said, food is no good. He wasn't in contact with any other Communists in the United States or abroad, except for a retired UCLA professor, Dr. Minski, with whom he corresponded occasionally. Until fifteen years ago I belonged to the Third International, and Minski convinced me to join the Fourth, he said. Then he said:

"Son, I'm going to give you a book that will be of great use to you."

Fate thought it would be The Communist Manifesto, maybe because in the living room, piled in corners and under chairs, he had seen several copies published by Antonio Jones himself-who knew where he'd gotten the money or how he'd fast-talked the printers-but when the old man put the book in his hands he saw with surprise that it wasn't the Manifesto but a fat volume titled The Slave Trade by someone called Hugh Thomas, whose name he had never heard before. At first he refused to take it.

"It's an expensive book and this must be your only copy," he said.

Jones's answer was that he shouldn't worry, that it had cost him only cunning, not money, by which Fate deduced that Jones had stolen the book, though this also struck him as unlikely, since the old man wasn't in any shape for such things, though he might conceivably have an accomplice at the bookstore where he pocketed his finds, a young black man who turned a blind eye when Jones slipped a book under his jacket.

Flipping through the book in his apartment hours later, he realized that the author was white. A white Englishman who had also been a professor at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, which for Fate made him more or less the equivalent of a drill sergeant, an English mother-fucking sergeant in short pants, so he put the book aside and didn't read it. People responded to the interview with Antonio Ulises Jones. To most of his colleagues, Fate noted, the story was little more than a venture into the African-American picturesque. A loony preacher, a loony ex-jazz musician, the loony last member of the Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International). Sociological curiosities. But they liked it and soon afterward he became a staff writer. He never saw Antonio Jones again, just as in all likelihood he would never see Barry Seaman again.

When he woke up it was still dark.

Before he left Detroit he went to the only decent bookstore in the city and bought The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas, the former professor at Sandhurst. Then he headed down Woodward Avenue and checked out the downtown. He had a cup of coffee and toast for breakfast at a Greektown diner. When he said he didn't want anything else, the waitress, a blond woman in her forties, asked him if he was sick. He said he had an upset stomach. Then the waitress took away the cup of coffee she'd poured him and told him she had something better for him. A little while later she came back with a tea brewed from anise and an herb called boldo that Fate had never tasted and at first he was reluctant to try it.

"This is what you need, not coffee," said the waitress.

She was a tall, thin woman, with very large breasts and nice hips. She was wearing a black skirt and a white blouse and flat-heeled shoes. For a while neither of them said anything, both waiting expectantly, until Fate shrugged and took a sip of the tea. Then the waitress smiled and went to wait on other customers.

At the hotel, as he was about to pay his bill, he discovered he had a phone message from New York. A voice he didn't recognize asked him to get in touch with his editor or the editor of the sports section as soon as possible. He made the call from the lobby. He talked to the girl at the next desk and she told him to hold on while she tried to find the editor. After a while an unfamiliar voice came on. The speaker introduced himself as Jeff Roberts, editor of the sports section, and he began to talk to Fate about a boxing match. Count Pickett is fighting, he said, and we don't have anybody to cover the event. The editor called him Oscar as if they had known each other for years, and he talked on and on about Count Pickett, a promising Harlem light heavyweight.

"So what does this have to do with me?" asked Fate.

"Well, Oscar," said the sports editor, "you know Jimmy Lowell died and we still haven't found anyone to replace him."

Fate thought the fight must be in Detroit or Chicago and it didn't strike him as a bad idea to spend a few days away from New York.

"You want me to write up the fight?"

"That's right, kid," said Roberts, "say five pages, a short profile of Pickett, the match, and some local color."

"Where is the fight?"

"In Mexico," said the sports editor, "and keep in mind that we give a bigger travel allowance than they do in your section."

With his suitcase packed, Fate headed to Seaman's apartment for the last time. He found the old man reading and taking notes. From the kitchen came the smell of spices and frying onion and garlic.

"I'm leaving," he said. "I just stopped to say goodbye."

Seaman asked if he could give him something to eat first.

"No, I don't have time," said Fate.

They embraced and Fate headed down the stairs, taking them in threes as if he were dashing for the street, like a boy heading out for a free afternoon with his friends. As he drove toward the Detroit-Wayne County airport, he thought about Seaman's strange books, The Abridged French Encyclopedia and the one he hadn't seen but that Seaman had claimed to have read in prison, The Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, which made him laugh out loud.

At the airport he bought a ticket to Tucson. While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing. Maybe it happened that way for my mother, thought Fate, but deep down he knew otherwise. When the airplane took off from Detroit a storm had begun to break over the city.

Fate opened the book by the white man who had been a professor at Sandhurst and started to read it on page 361. It said: Beyond the delta of the Niger, the coast of Africa at last begins to turn south again and there, in the Cameroons, in the late eighteenth century, Liverpool merchants from England pioneered a new branch of the slave trade. Further on, and well to the south, the River Gabon, just north of Cape Lopez, was also coming into full activity as a slave region in the 1780s. This area seemed to the Reverend John Newton to possess "the most humane and moral people I ever met with in Africa," perhaps "because they were the people who had least intercourse with Europe at that time." But off the coast the Dutch had for a long time used the island of Corisco (the word in Portuguese means "flash of lightning") as a trading center, though not specifically for slaves. Then he saw an illustration-there were quite a few in the book-showing a Portuguese fort on the Gold Coast, called Elmina, captured by the Danes in 1637. For three hundred and fifty years Elmina was a center of the slave trade. Over the fort, and over a small nearby fort built at the top of a hill, flew a flag that Fate couldn't identify. What kingdom did it belong to? he wondered before his eyes closed and he fell asleep with the book on his lap.

At the Tucson airport he rented a car, bought a road map, and drove south out of the city. He planned to stop at the first roadside diner he came to, because his appetite seemed to have sharpened in the dry desert air. Two Camaros of the same model and the same color passed him, honking. He thought they must be in a race. The cars probably had souped-up engines, and their bodies shone in the Arizona sun. He passed a little ranch that sold oranges, but he didn't stop. The ranch was about three hundred feet from the highway, and the orange stand, an old cart with an awning and big wooden wheels, stood by the side of the road, tended by two Mexican kids. A few miles down the road he saw a place called Cochise's Corner and he parked in a big lot, next to a gas station. The two Camaros were parked next to a flag with a red stripe on top and a black stripe on the bottom. In the middle was a white circle emblazoned with the words Chiricahua Auto Club. For an instant he thought the Camaro drivers must be two Indians, but then the idea struck him as absurd. He sat in a corner of the restaurant next to a window, where he could keep an eye on his car. There were two men at the next table. One was tall and young and looked like a teacher of computer science. He had an easy smile and sometimes he clapped his hands to his face in what might have been astonishment or horror, or anything at all. Fate couldn't see the other man's face, but he was clearly quite a bit older than his companion. His neck was thick, his hair was white, and he wore glasses. Whether he was talking or listening he remained impassive, without gesturing or moving.

The girl who came to wait on him was Mexican. He ordered coffee and scanned the menu for a few minutes. He asked whether they had club sandwiches. The waitress shook her head. A steak, said Fate. With salsa? asked the waitress. What's in the salsa? asked Fate. Chile, tomato, onion, and cilantro. And we put some spices in, too. All right, he said, I'll try it. When the waitress left he looked around the restaurant. At one table he saw two Indians, one an adult and the other a teenager, maybe father and son. At another he saw two white men with a Mexican woman. The men were exactly alike, identical twins of about fifty. The Mexican woman must have been forty-five or so, and it was clear the twins were crazy about her. They're the Camaro owners, thought Fate. He also realized that no one in the whole restaurant was black except for him.

The young man at the next table said something about inspiration. All Fate heard was: you've been an inspiration to us. The white-haired man said it was really nothing. The young man raised his hands to his face and said something about willpower, about the power to hold a gaze. Then he removed his hands from his face and with shining eyes he said: I don't mean a natural gaze, a gaze from the natural realm, I mean a gaze in the abstract. The white-haired man said: of course. When you caught Jurevich, said the young man, and then his voice was drowned out by the deafening roar of a diesel engine. A semi was parking in the lot. The waitress brought Fate's coffee and the steak with salsa. The young man was still talking about the person called Jurevich who'd been caught by the white-haired man.

"It wasn't hard," said the white-haired man.

"A killer who's sloppy," said the young man, and he raised his hand to his mouth as if he were about to sneeze.

"No," said the white-haired man, "a careful killer."

"Oh, I thought he was sloppy," said the young man.

"No, no, he was careful," said the white-haired man.

"Which is worse?" asked the young man.

Fate cut a piece of meat. It was thick and tender and it tasted good. The salsa was tasty, especially once you got used to the heat.

"The sloppy ones are worse," said the white-haired man. "It's harder to establish a pattern of behavior."

"But can it it be established?" asked the young man.

"Given the means and the time, you can do anything," said the white-haired man.

Fate beckoned for the waitress. The Mexican woman rested her head on the shoulder of one of the twins and the other twin smiled as if this were a common occurrence. Fate imagined that she was married to the twin who had his arm around her, but that their marriage hadn't extinguished the other brother's love or dashed his hopes. The Indian father asked for the check. Meanwhile, the young Indian had pulled out a comic book from somewhere and was reading it. Out in the lot Fate saw the truck driver who had just parked his truck. He was on his way back from the gas station bathroom and he was combing his blond hair with a tiny comb. The waitress asked him what he wanted. Another coffee and a big glass of water.

"We've gotten used to death," he heard the young man say.

"It's always been that way," said the white-haired man, "always."

In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn't want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he's afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he's about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren't invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it's because polite society was so small back then. I'm talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn't just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren't part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren't part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn't tell you.

The young man covered his face with his hands.

"This isn't your first trip to Mexico," he said, uncovering his face and smiling a catlike smile.

"No," said the white-haired man. "I was there for a while a few years ago and I tried to help, but the situation was impossible."

"And why did you come back this time?"

"To have a look, I guess," said the white-haired man. "I was staying at a friend's house, a friend I made last time. The Mexicans are a hospitable people."

"It wasn't an official trip?"

"Oh, no," said the white-haired man.

"And what's your unofficial opinion about what's going on there?"

"I have several opinions, Edward, and I'd prefer that none of them be published without my consent."

The young man covered his face with his hands and said:

"Professor Kessler, my lips are sealed."

"All right, then," said the white-haired man. "I'll tell you three things I'm sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus; (b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border."

When the sun began to set in a blaze of red, and the twins, the Indians, and the men at the next table had been gone for a long time, Fate decided to ask for the check. A chubby, dark-skinned girl who wasn't the waitress he'd had before brought it and asked whether everything had been to his liking.

"Everything," said Fate, as he felt in his pocket for money.

Then he went back to watching the sunset. He thought about his mother, about his mother's neighbor, about the magazine, about the streets of New York, all with an unspeakable sadness and weariness. He opened the book by the former Sandhurst professor and read a paragraph at random. Many captains of slave ships looked on their task as, as a rule, complete, when they had delivered their slaves to the West Indies. But it was often impossible to realize the proceeds of the sale of slaves fast enough to provide the ship concerned with a return cargo of sugar. Merchants and captains could not he certain of the prices which they would receive at home for goods taken on their own account. Planters might take several years to pay for the slaves. Sometimes the European merchant preferred to have remittances from the West Indies in bills of exchange than to have sugar, indigo, cotton, or ginger in exchange for the slaves, because the prices of these goods in London were unpredictable or low. What pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted indigo, washing herself in the shower.

When he got up, the chubby waitress came over and asked him where he was headed. To Mexico, said Fate.

"I guessed that," said the waitress, "but where in Mexico?"

Leaning on the counter, a cook smoked a cigarette and watched them, waiting for his answer.

"To Santa Teresa," said Fate.

"It isn't a very nice place," said the waitress, "but it's big and there are lots of clubs and places to have fun."

Fate looked at the ground, smiling, and realized that the desert sunset had tinted the tiles a soft red.

"I'm a reporter," he said.

"You're going to write about the crimes," said the cook.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I'm going to cover the boxing match this Saturday," said Fate.

"Who's fighting?" asked the cook.

"Count Pickett, the New York light heavyweight."

"I used to follow the fights," said the cook. "I'd bet and check out the boxing digests, but one day I made up my mind to give it up. Now I don't know the names. Do you want a drink? It's on the house."

Fate sat at the counter and asked for a glass of water. The cook smiled and said he knew for a fact all reporters drank.

"I do, too," said Fate, "but I think there's something wrong with my stomach."

After bringing him a glass of water the cook wanted to know who was up against Count Pickett.

"I don't remember the name," said Fate. "I have it written down somewhere, a Mexican, I think."

"Strange," said the cook. "There're never any good Mexican light heavyweights. Once every twenty years you get a heavyweight, who usually winds up crazy or shot dead, but never a light heavyweight."

"I could be wrong, maybe it's not a Mexican," admitted Fate.

"Maybe he's Cuban or Colombian," said the cook, "although the Colombians don't have a tradition of light heavyweights either."

Fate drank the water and got up and stretched. It's time for me to go, he said, though in fact he was happy at the restaurant.

"How far is it to Santa Teresa?" he asked.

"That depends," said the cook. "Sometimes there are lots of trucks at the border and you can spend half an hour waiting. Say three hours from here to Santa Teresa and then half an hour or forty-five minutes at the border, four hours all together."

"From here to Santa Teresa it's only an hour and a half," said the waitress.

The cook looked at her and said that depended on the car and how well the driver knew the terrain.

"Have you ever driven in the desert?"

"No," said Fate.

"Well, it isn't easy. It looks easy. It looks like the simplest thing in the world, but there's nothing simple about it," said the cook.

"You're right about that," said the waitress, "especially at night, driving at night in the desert scares me."

"Make a mistake, take a wrong turn, and you're liable to go thirty miles in the wrong direction," said the cook.

"Maybe I should go now while it's still light out," said Fate.

"It won't do you much good," said the cook, "it'll be dark in five minutes. Sunsets in the desert seem like they'll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, they're done. It's like someone just turned out the lights," said the cook.

Fate asked for another glass of water and went to drink it by the window. Don't you want something else to eat before you go? he heard the cook say. He didn't answer. The desert began to disappear.

He drove for two hours along dark roads, with the radio on, listening to a Phoenix jazz station. He passed places where there were houses and restaurants and yards with white flowers and crookedly parked cars, but there were no lights on in the houses, as if the inhabitants had died that very night and a breath of blood still lingered in the air. He made out the shapes of hills silhouetted against the moon and the shapes of low clouds sitting motionless or speeding west at a given moment as if driven by a sudden, fitful wind that lifted dust clouds, clouds adorned in fabulous human garb by the car's headlights or the shadows created by the headlights, as if the dust clouds were tramps or ghosts looming up alongside the road.

He got lost twice. Once he was tempted to turn back, toward the restaurant or Tucson. The other time he came to a town called Patagonia where a boy at the gas station told him the easiest way to get to Santa Teresa. On his way out of Patagonia he saw a horse. When the headlights swept over it the horse lifted its head and looked at him. Fate stopped the car and waited. The horse was black and after a moment it moved and vanished into the dark. He passed a mesa, or what he took to be a mesa. It was huge, completely flat on top, and from one end of the base to the other it must have been at least three miles long. There was a gully next to the road. He got out of the car, leaving the lights on, and urinated at length, breathing the cool night air. Then the road sloped down into a kind of valley that at first glimpse struck him as gigantic. In the farthest corner of the valley he thought he saw a glow. But it could have been anything. A convoy of trucks moving very slowly, the first lights of a town. Or maybe just his desire to escape the darkness, which in some way reminded him of his childhood and adolescence. At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike. He was in a bus with his mother and one of his mother's sisters and they were taking a short trip, from New York to a town near New York. He was next to the window and the view never changed, just buildings and highways, until suddenly they were in the country. At that exact moment, or maybe earlier, the sun had begun to set and he watched the trees, a small wood, though in his eyes it looked bigger. And then he thought he saw a man walking along the edge of the little wood. In great strides, as if he didn't want night to overtake him. He wondered who the man was. The only way he could tell it was a man and not a shadow was because he wore a shirt and swung his arms as he walked. The man's loneliness was so great, Fate remembered, that he wanted to look away and cling to his mother, but instead he kept his eyes open until the bus was out of the woods, and buildings, factories, and warehouses once again lined the sides of the road.

The valley he was crossing was lonelier now, and darker. He saw himself striding along the roadside. He shivered. Then he remembered the urn holding his mother's ashes and the neighbor's cup that he hadn't returned, the coffee infinitely cold now, and his mother's videotapes that no one would ever watch again. He thought about stopping the car and waiting until the sun came up. He knew without being told that for a black man to sleep in a rental car parked on the shoulder wasn't the best idea in Arizona. He changed stations. A voice in Spanish began to tell the story of a singer from Gomez Palacio who had returned to his city in the state of Durango just to commit suicide. Then he heard a woman's voice singing rancheras. For a while, as he drove through the valley, he listened. Then he tried to go back to the jazz station in Phoenix and couldn't find it.

On the American side of the border stood a town called Adobe. It had once been an adobe factory, but now it was a collection of houses and appliance stores, almost all strung along a long main street. At the end of the street you came out into a brightly lit empty lot and immediately after that was the American border post.

The customs officer asked for his passport and Fate handed it to him. With the passport was his press ID. The customs officer asked if he was coming to write about the killings.

"No," said Fate, "I'm going to cover the fight on Saturday."

"What fight?" asked the customs officer.

"Count Pickett, the light heavyweight from New York."

"Never heard of him," said the officer.

"He's going to be world champ," said Fate.

"I hope you're right," said the officer.

Then Fate advanced three hundred feet to the Mexican border and he had to get out of the car and open his suitcase, then show his car papers, his passport, and his press ID. He was asked to fill out some forms. The faces of the Mexican policemen were numb with exhaustion. From the window of the customshouse he saw the long, high fence that divided the two countries. Four birds were perched on the farthest stretch of the fence, their heads buried in their feathers. It's cold, said Fate. Very cold, said the Mexican official, who was studying the form Fate had just filled out.

"The birds. They're cold."

The official looked in the direction Fate was pointing.

"They're turkey buzzards, they're always cold at this time of night," he said.

Fate got a room at a motel called Las Brisas, in the northern part of Santa Teresa. Every so often, trucks passed along the highway, headed to Arizona. Sometimes they stopped on the other side of the highway, next to the gas pumps, and then they set off again or their drivers got out and had something to eat at the service station, which was painted sky blue. In the morning there were hardly any big trucks, just cars and pickups. Fate was so tired that he didn't even notice what time it was when he fell asleep.

When he woke up he went out to talk to the motel clerk and asked him for a map of the city. The clerk was a guy in his midtwenties and he told Fate that they'd never had maps at Las Brisas, at least not since he'd been working there. He asked where Fate wanted to go. Fate said he was a reporter and he was there to cover the Count Pickett fight. Count Pickett versus El Merolino Fernandez, said the clerk.

"Lino Fernandez," said Fate.

"Here we call him El Merolino," said the clerk with a smile. "So who do you think will win?"

"Pickett," said Fate.

"We'll see, but I bet you're wrong."

Then the clerk ripped out a piece of paper and drew him a map with precise directions to the Arena del Norte boxing stadium, where the fight would be held. The map was much better than Fate expected. The Arena del Norte looked like an old theater from 1900, with a boxing ring set in the middle of it. At one of the offices there, Fate picked up his credentials and asked where Pickett was staying. They told him the American fighter hadn't come to town yet. Among the reporters he met were a couple of men who spoke English and who planned to interview Fernandez. Fate asked whether he could go along with them and the reporters shrugged their shoulders and said it was fine with them.

When they got to the hotel where Fernandez was giving the press conference, the fighter was talking to a group of Mexican reporters. The Americans asked him in English whether he thought he could beat Pickett. Fernandez understood the question and said yes. The Americans asked him whether he had ever seen Pickett fight. Fernandez didn't understand the question and one of the Mexican reporters translated.

"The important thing is to trust your own strength," said Fernandez, and the American reporters wrote his answer in their notebooks.

"Do you know Pickett's record?" they asked him.

Fernandez waited for the question to be translated, then he said that kind of thing didn't interest him. The American reporters snickered, then asked him for his own record. Thirty fights, said Fernandez. Twenty-five wins. Eighteen of them knockouts. Three losses. Two draws. Not bad, said one of the reporters, and he went on asking questions.

Most of the reporters were staying at the Hotel Sonora Resort, in the center of Santa Teresa. When Fate told them he was staying at a motel on the edge of town, they said he should check out and try to get a room at the Sonora Resort. Fate stopped by the hotel, where he got the sense that he'd stepped into a convention of Mexican sportswriters. Most of the Mexican reporters spoke English and they were much friendlier than the American reporters he'd met, or so it seemed at first. At the bar, some were placing bets on the fight and as a group they seemed generally cheerful and laid-back, but in the end Fate decided to stay at his motel.

From a phone at the Sonora Resort, he made a collect call to the magazine and asked to speak to the sports editor. The woman he talked to said no one was there.

"The offices are empty," she said.

She had a hoarse, nasal voice and she didn't talk like a New York secretary but like a country person who has just come from the cemetery. This woman has firsthand knowledge of the planet of the dead, thought Fate, and she doesn't know what she's saying anymore.

"I'll call back later," he said before he hung up.

Fate's car was following the car of the Mexican reporters who wanted to interview Merolino Fernandez. The Mexican fighter had set up camp at a ranch on the edge of Santa Teresa, and without the help of the reporters Fate could never have found it. They drove through a neighborhood on the edge of town along a web of unpaved, unlit streets. At moments, after passing fields and vacant lots where the garbage of the poor piled up, it seemed as if they were about to come out into the open countryside, but then another neighborhood would appear, this time older, with adobe houses surrounded by shacks built of cardboard, of corrugated tin, of old packing crates, shacks that provided shelter from the sun and the occasional showers, that seemed petrified by the passage of time. Here not only the weeds were different but even the flies seemed to belong to a different species. Then a dirt track came into sight, camouflaged by the darkening horizon. It ran parallel to a ditch and was bordered by dusty trees. The first fences appeared. The road grew narrower. This used to be a cart track, thought Fate. In fact, he could see the wheel ruts, but maybe they were just the tracks of old cattle trucks.

The ranch where Merolino Fernandez was staying was a cluster of three low, long buildings around a courtyard of earth as dry and hard as cement, where someone had set up a flimsy-looking ring. When they got to the ring it was empty and the only person in the courtyard was a man sleeping on a wicker chaise who woke at the sound of the engines. The man was big and heavy and his face was covered in scars. The Mexican reporters knew him and they began to talk to him. His name was Victor Garcia and he had a tattoo on his right shoulder that Fate thought was interesting. A naked man, seen from behind, was kneeling in the vestibule of a church. Around him at least ten angels in female form came flying out of the darkness, like butterflies summoned by his prayers. Everything else was darkness and vague shapes. The tattoo, although it was technically accomplished, looked as if it had been done in prison by a tattoo artist who for all his skill lacked tools and inks, but the scene it depicted was unsettling. When Fate asked the reporters who the man was, they answered that he was one of Merolino's sparring partners. Then, as if someone had been observing them from the window, a woman came out into the courtyard with a tray of soft drinks and cold beers.

After a while, the trainer of the Mexican fighter showed up in a white shirt and white sweater and asked whether they'd rather interview Merolino before or after the training session. Whatever you want, Lopez, said one of the reporters. Have they brought you anything to eat? asked the trainer as he sat down within reach of the soft drinks and beer. The reporters shook their heads, and the trainer, without getting up from his seat, sent Garcia to the kitchen to bring some snacks. Before Garcia returned they saw Merolino appear along one of the paths that vanished into the desert, followed by a black guy dressed in sweatpants who tried to speak Spanish but could only curse. They didn't greet anyone as they walked into the courtyard, and they headed to a cement watering trough where they used a bucket to wash their faces and torsos. Only then did they come to say hello, not bothering to dry themselves or put on the tops of their sweat suits.

The black guy was from Oceanside, California, or at least he had been born there and had later grown up in Los Angeles, and his name was Omar Abdul. He worked as Merolino's sparring partner and he told Fate he was thinking of staying in Mexico to live for a while.

"What'll you do after the fight?" asked Fate.

"Get along as best I can," said Omar, "like we do, right?"

"Where will you get the money?"

"Anywhere," said Omar, "this country is cheap."

Every few minutes, for no reason, Omar would smile. He had a nice smile, set off with a goatee and a fancy little mustache. But every few minutes he would scowl, too, and then the goatee and the little mustache took on a menacing look, a look of supreme and ominous indifference. When Fate asked whether he was a professional or had been in any matches, he answered that he'd "fought," without deigning to explain further. When Fate asked him about Merolino Fernandez's chances of winning, he said you never knew until the bell.

As the fighters dressed, Fate took a stroll around the courtyard and surveyed his surroundings.

"What you looking at?" Omar Abdul said to him.

"The landscape," he said, "it's one sad landscape."

Next to him, the fighter scanned the horizon and then he said:

"That's just how it is here. It's always sad at this time of day. It's a goddamn landscape for women."

"It's getting dark," said Fate.

"There's still light enough to spar," said Omar Abdul.

"What do you do at night, when you're done training?"

"All of us?" asked Omar Abdul.

"Yeah, the whole team or whatever you call it."

"We eat, we watch TV, then Mr. Lopez, goes to bed and Merolino goes to bed and the rest of us can go to bed too or watch more TV or head over into town, if you know what I'm saying," he said with a smile that might have meant anything.

"How old are you?" Fate asked suddenly.

"Twenty-two," said Omar Abdul.

When Merolino climbed into the ring the sun was sinking in the west and the trainer turned on the lights, which were fed by an independent generator that supplied the house with electricity. In a corner, Garcia stood motionless with his head bowed. He had changed and put on knee-length black boxing shorts. He seemed to be asleep. Only when the lights came on did he raise his head and look at Lopez for a few seconds, as if waiting for a signal. One of the reporters, who never stopped smiling, rang a bell, and Garcia assumed a defensive stance and moved into the center of the ring. Merolino was wearing a safety helmet and he circled Garcia, who threw a couple of left jabs, no more, trying to land a hit or two. Fate asked one of the reporters whether sparring partners usually wore safety helmets.

"Usually," said the reporter.

"So why isn't he wearing one?" asked Fate.

"Because no matter how much anybody hits him they won't do any damage," said the reporter. "Do you see what I mean? He doesn't feel anything, he's out of it."

In the third round Garcia left the ring and Omar Abdul stepped up. The kid was bare chested but he hadn't taken off his warm-up pants. His movements were much quicker than those of the Mexican fighter, and he dodged away easily when Merolino tried to corner him, although it was clear that the fighter and his sparring partner had no intention of hurting each other. Every so often they would talk, while still moving, and laugh.

"You off in Costa Rica?" Omar Abdul asked him. "Come on, baby, open your eyes."

Fate asked the reporter what the fighter was saying.

"Nothing," said the reporter, "all the son of a bitch knows are curse words."

After three rounds the trainer stopped the fight and disappeared into the house, followed by Merolino.

"The masseur is waiting for them," said the reporter.

"Who is the masseur?" asked Fate.

"We haven't seen him, I think he never comes out into the yard, he's a blind guy, you know, he was born blind, and he spends all day in the kitchen eating, or in the bathroom shitting, or lying on the floor in his room reading books for blind people, in that blind people's language, what's it called?"

"Braille," said the other reporter.

Fate imagined the masseur reading in a dark room and a shudder passed through him. It must be something like happiness, he thought. At the watering trough, Garcia dumped a bucket of cold water on Omar Abdul's back. The fighter from California winked at Fate.

"What did you think?" he asked.

"Not bad," said Fate, to be nice, "but I get the feeling Pickett's in better condition."

"Pickett's a punk," said Omar Abdul.

"Do you know him?"

"I've seen him fight on TV a couple times. Motherfucker doesn't know how to move."

"Well, I guess I've never actually seen him," said Fate.

Omar Abdul stared at him in astonishment.

"You've never seen Pickett fight?" he asked.

"No, the truth is the boxing guy at my magazine died last week and since we didn't have anyone else, they sent me."

"Put your money on Merolino," said Omar Abdul after a moment of silence.

"Good luck," said Fate before he left.

The ride back seemed shorter. For a while he followed the rear lights of the reporters' car, until he saw them park outside a bar when they were back on the paved streets of Santa Teresa. He pulled up next to them and asked what the plan was. We're getting something to eat, said one of the reporters. Although he wasn't hungry, Fate agreed to come for a beer. One of the reporters, Chucho Flores, worked for a local paper and radio station. The other one, Angel Martinez Mesa, who had rung the bell when they were at the ranch, worked for a Mexico City sports paper. Martinez Mesa was short and must have been around fifty. Chucho Flores was only a little shorter than Fate. He was thirty-five and he was always smiling. The relationship between Flores and Martinez Mesa, Fate sensed, was that of grateful disciple and largely indifferent master. And yet Martinez Mesa's indifference seemed less a matter of arrogance or any sense of superiority than of exhaustion, an exhaustion that showed even in his disheveled clothing, a stained suit and scuffed shoes, while his disciple wore a designer suit and designer tie and gold cuff links and possibly saw himself as a man of style. As the Mexicans ate grilled meat with fried potatoes, Fate thought about Garcia's tattoo. Then he compared the loneliness of the ranch to the loneliness of his mother's apartment. He thought about her ashes, which were still there. He thought about the dead neighbor. He thought about Barry Seaman's neighborhood. And everywhere his memory alighted as the Mexicans ate seemed bleak.

After they dropped Martinez Mesa off at the Sonora Resort, Chucho Flores insisted on going out for a last drink. There were several reporters at the bar, among them a few Americans Fate would've liked to talk to, but Chucho Flores had other plans. They went to a bar on a narrow street in the center of Santa Teresa, a bar with walls painted fluorescent colors and a zigzagging bar. They ordered whiskey and orange juice. The bartender knew Chucho Flores. The man looked more like the owner than a bartender, thought Fate. His movements were brusque and commanding, even when he began to dry glasses with the apron tied around his waist. And yet he wasn't very old, twenty-five at most, and Chucho Flores, who was busy talking to Fate about New York and reporting in New York, didn't pay him much attention.

"I'd like to go live there," confessed Chucho Flores, "and work for some Hispanic radio station."

"There are lots of them," said Fate.

"I know, I know," said Chucho Flores, as if he'd already done plenty of research, and then he mentioned names of two stations that broadcast in Spanish, stations Fate had never heard of before.

"So what's the name of your magazine?" asked Chucho Flores.

Fate told him, and after thinking awhile, Chucho Flores shook his head.

"I don't know it," he said, "is it big?"

"No, it isn't big," said Fate, "it's a Harlem magazine, if that means anything to you."

"No," said Chucho Flores, "it doesn't."

"It's a magazine where the owners are African American and the editor is African American and almost all the reporters are African American," said Fate.

"Really?" asked Chucho Flores. "Can you do objective reporting that way?"

It was then that Fate realized Chucho Flores was a little drunk. He thought about what he'd just said. In fact, he didn't really have any basis to claim that almost all the reporters were black. He had seen only African Americans at the office, although of course he didn't know the correspondents. Maybe there was some Chicano in California, he thought. Or maybe in Texas. But it also seemed likely that there was no one in Texas, because otherwise why send him from Detroit and not give the job to the person in Texas or California?

Some girls came up to say hello to Chucho Flores. They were dressed for a night out, in high heels and club clothes. One of them had bleached blond hair and the other one was very dark, quieter and shy. The blonde said hello to the bartender and he nodded back, as if he knew her well and didn't trust her. Chucho Flores introduced Fate as a famous sportswriter from New York. Fate chose that moment to tell the Mexican that he wasn't really a sports reporter, he covered political and social issues, which Chucho Flores found very interesting. After a while another man showed up and was introduced by Chucho Flores as the biggest film buff south of the Arizona border. His name was Charly Cruz, and with a big smile he told Fate not to believe a word Chucho Flores had said. He owned a video store and in his line of work he had to watch lots of movies, but that was all, I'm no expert, he said.

"How many stores do you have?" Chucho Flores asked him. "Go on, tell my friend Fate."

"Three," said Charly Cruz.

"The dude is loaded," said Chucho Flores.

The girl with bleached blond hair was Rosa Mendez, and according to Chucho Flores, she had been his girlfriend. She had also been Charly Cruz's girlfriend and now she was dating the owner of a dance hall.

"That's Rosita," said Charly Cruz, "that's just the way she is."

"What way is that?" Fate asked.

In not very good English the girl answered that she liked to have fun. Life is short, she said, and then she was quiet, looking back and forth between Fate and Chucho Flores, as if reflecting on what she'd just said.

"Rosita is a little bit of a philosopher, too," said Charly Cruz.

Fate nodded his head. Two other girls came up to them. They were even younger and they knew only Chucho Flores and the bartender. Fate calculated that neither of them could be over eighteen. Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes, said Fate, although he didn't really.

"He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz.

"Maybe," said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it."

"And what about Woody Allen?"

"I like him," said Fate.

"He seems Mexican too, but Mexican from Mexico City or Cuernavaca," said Charly Cruz.

"Mexican from Cancun," said Chucho Flores.

Fate laughed, although he had no idea what they were talking about. He guessed they were making fun of him.

"What about Robert Rodriguez?"

"I like him," said Fate.

"That shithead is one of ours," said Chucho Flores.

"I have a movie on video by Robert Rodriguez," said Charly Cruz, "a movie hardly anyone has ever seen."

"El Mariachi?" asked Fate.

"No, everybody's seen that one. An earlier one, from when Robert Rodriguez was a nobody. When he was just a piss-poor Chicano motherfucker. A fuckup who took any gig he could get," said Charly Cruz.

"Let's sit down and you can tell us the story," said Chucho Flores.

"Good idea," said Charly Cruz. "I was getting tired of standing."

The story was simple and implausible. Two years before he shot El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez took a trip to Mexico. He spent a few days wandering along the Texas-Chihuahua border and then he went south, to Mexico City, where he spent his time drinking and getting high. He sank so low, said Charly Cruz, that he would go into a pulqueria before noon and leave only when it was closing and they kicked him out. In the end, he was living in a bordello or a brothel or a whorehouse, where he got to be friends with a whore and her pimp, a guy who went by the name El Perno, which for a pimp was like being called the Penis or the Cock. This Perno guy hit it off with Robert Rodriguez and was a good friend to him. Sometimes he had to drag him up to the room where he slept. Other times he and the whore had to undress him and put him in the shower, because Robert Rodriguez was always passing out. One morning, one of those rare mornings when the future movie director was half sober, the pimp told him he had some friends who wanted to make a movie and asked whether he could shoot it. Robert Rodriguez, as you might imagine, said sure thing, and El Perno took care of the practical details.

The shooting lasted three days, it seems, and Robert Rodriguez was always drunk and high when he got behind the camera. Naturally, his name doesn't appear in the credits. The director is listed as Johnny Swiggerson, which is obviously a joke, but if you know Robert Rodriguez's movies, the way he frames a scene, his takes and overhead shots, his sense of speed, there's no doubt it's his work. The only thing missing is his personal editing style, which makes it clear the film was edited by someone else. But he's the director, that much I'm sure of.

Fate wasn't interested in Robert Rodriguez or the story of his first film, first or last, he couldn't care less, and also he was starting to feel like eating some dinner or having a sandwich and then going to bed at the motel and getting some sleep, but still he had to hear scraps of the plot, a story of whores who gave wise advice or maybe they were just whores with hearts of gold, especially a whore called Justina, who, for reasons that escaped him but weren't too hard to figure out, was acquainted with some vampires in Mexico City who roamed at night disguised as policemen. He ignored the rest of the story. As he and the dark-haired girl who had come with Rosita Mendez were kissing, he heard something about pyramids, Aztec vampires, a book written in blood, the inspiration for From Dusk Till Dawn, the recurring nightmare of Robert Rodriguez. The girl with dark hair didn't know how to kiss. Before he left he gave Chucho Flores the phone number of the motel where he was staying and then he stumbled out to where he had parked the car.

As he was opening the car door he heard someone ask if he felt all right. He took a deep breath and turned around. Chucho Flores was ten feet away with the knot of his tie loosened and his arm around Rosa Mendez. Rosa was looking at Fate as if he were some kind of exotic specimen, what kind? he didn't know, but he didn't like the look in her eye.

"I'm fine," he said, "there's no problem."

"Do you want me to drive you to your motel?" asked Chucho Flores.

Rosa Mendez smiled more broadly. It occurred to him that Chucho Flores might be gay.

"No need," he said, "I can handle it."

Chucho Flores let go of Rosa Mendez and took a step in his direction. Fate got into the car and started the engine, looking away from them. Goodbye, amigo, he heard the Mexican say, his voice somehow muted. Rosa Mendez had her hands on her hips in what struck him as a completely artificial pose, and she wasn't looking at him or his car as he drove away but at her companion, who stood motionless, as if the night air had frozen him.

There was a new kid at the front desk of the motel, and Fate asked him whether he could get something to eat. The boy said they didn't have a kitchen but he could buy cookies or a candy bar from the machine out front. Outside, trucks passed by now and then heading north and south, and across the road were the lights of the service station. Fate headed that way. When he was crossing the road, a car almost hit him. For a moment he thought it was because he was drunk, but then he told himself that before he crossed, drunk or not, he had looked both ways and he hadn't seen any lights on the road. So where had the car come from? The service station was brightly lit and almost empty. Behind the counter, a fifteen-year-old girl was reading a magazine. It looked to Fate as if she had a very small head. Next to the register was a woman, maybe twenty years old, who watched him as he went over to a machine that sold hot dogs.

"You have to pay first," said the woman in Spanish.

"I don't understand," said Fate, "I'm American."

The woman repeated what she had said in English.

"Two hot dogs and a beer," said Fate.

The woman took a pen out of the pocket of her uniform and wrote down the amount of money Fate had to give her.

"Dollars or pesos?" asked Fate.

"Pesos," said the woman.

Fate left some money next to the cash register and went to get a beer out of the refrigerator case and then he held up two fingers to show the small-headed teenager how many hot dogs he wanted. The girl brought him the hot dogs and Fate asked her how the condiments machine worked.

"Push the button for the one you want," said the teenager in English.

Fate put ketchup, mustard, and something that looked like guacamole on one of the hot dogs and ate it right there.

"Nice," he said.

"Good," said the girl.

Then he repeated the operation with the other hot dog and went to the register to get his change. He took some coins and went back over to where the teenager was and tipped her.

"Gracias, senorita," he said in Spanish.

Then he went out with his beer and hot dog. As he waited by the highway for three trucks to go by on their way from Santa Teresa to Arizona, he remembered what he'd said to the cashier. I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

When he got up he called the editor of the sports section at the magazine and told him Pickett wasn't in Santa Teresa.

"That's no surprise," said the editor of the sports section, "he's probably at some ranch outside Vegas."

"So how the hell am I supposed to interview him?" asked Fate. "You want me to go to Vegas?"

"Interview? You don't need any fucking interview, all we need is somebody to cover the fight, you know, the atmosphere, the mood in the ring, the shape Pickett's in, the impression he makes on the Mexicans.

"The mise-en-scene," said Fate.

"Mise-what?" asked the editor of the sports section.

"Shit, man, the atmosphere," said Fate.

"In plain English," said the editor of the sports section, "like you're telling a story at a bar and all your friends are there and people are gathered around to listen to what you have to say."

"I hear you," said Fate, "I'll get it to you the day after tomorrow."

"If there's anything you don't understand, don't worry about it, we'll edit it here so it sounds like you spent your whole life ringside." "All right, I hear you," said Fate.

When he stepped onto the landing outside his room he saw three blond kids, almost albinos, playing with a white ball, a red bucket, and some red plastic shovels. The oldest must have been five and the youngest three. It wasn't a safe place for children to play. If they weren't careful they might try to cross the road and be run over by a truck. He looked around: sitting on a wooden bench in the shade, a very blond woman in sunglasses was watching them. He waved to her. She glanced at him for a second and jerked her chin as if she couldn't take her eyes off the kids. Fate went down the stairs and got in his car. The heat inside was unbearable and he opened both windows. Without knowing why, he thought about his mother again, the way she had watched him when he was a boy. When he started the car one of the albino children got up and stared at him. Fate smiled at him and waved. The boy dropped his ball and stood to attention like a soldier. As the car turned out of the motel parking lot, the boy lifted his right hand to his visor and stood that way until Fate's car disappeared to the south.

As he was driving he thought about his mother again. He saw her walking, saw her from behind, saw the back of her head as she watched a TV show, heard her laugh, saw her washing dishes in the sink. Her face, however, was always in shadows, as if in some way she were already dead or as if she were telling him, in actions instead of words, that faces weren't important in this life or the next. There weren't any reporters at the Sonora Resort, and he had to ask the clerk how to get to the Arena del Norte. When he got to the stadium he noticed some kind of commotion. He asked a shoeshine man who had set up shop in one of the corridors what was going on and the shoeshine man said that the American fighter had arrived.

He found Count Pickett in the ring, dressed in a suit and tie and flashing a broad, confident smile. The photographers were shooting pictures and the reporters around the ring called to him by his first name and barked questions. When'll you be up for the championship? Is it true Jesse Brentwood is scared of you? What did you get to come to Santa Teresa? Is it true you eloped in Las Vegas? Pickett's manager was standing next to him. He was a short, fat little man and he was the one who answered most of the questions. The Mexican reporters addressed him in Spanish and called him by name, Sol, Mr. Sol, and Mr. Sol answered them in Spanish and sometimes he called the Mexican reporters by name too. An American reporter, a big guy with a square face, asked whether bringing Pickett to fight in Santa Teresa was politically correct.

"What do you mean politically correct?" asked the manager.

The reporter was about to answer, but the manager cut him off.

"Boxing," he said, "is a sport, and sports, like art, are beyond politics. Let's not mix sports and politics, Ralph."

"So what you're saying is," said the reporter called Ralph, "you aren't worried about bringing Count Pickett to Santa Teresa."

"Count Pickett isn't afraid of anybody," said the manager.

"There's no man alive who can beat me," said Count Pickett.

"Well, Count's a man, that's for sure. So I guess the question ought to be: has he brought any women with him?" asked Ralph.

A Mexican reporter at the other end of the ring got up and told him to go fuck himself. Somebody not far from Fate shouted that he'd better not talk shit about Mexicans if he didn't want to get his ass kicked.

"Shut your mouth, man, or I'll shut it for you."

Ralph seemed not to hear what they were saying and he stood there calmly, waiting for the manager's answer. Some American reporters who were in a corner of the ring, near the photographers, gave the manager a questioning look. The manager cleared his throat and then he said:

"We don't have any women with us, Ralph, you know we never travel with women."

"Not even Mrs. Alversohn?"

The manager laughed and so did some of the reporters.

"You know very well my wife doesn't like boxing, Ralph," said the manager.

"What the hell were they talking about?" Fate asked Chucho Flores as they were eating breakfast at a bar near the Arena del Norte.

"About the women who've been killed," said Chucho Flores glumly. "The numbers are up," he said. "Every so often the numbers go up and it's news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work."

"They go back to work?" asked Fate.

"The fucking killings are like a strike, amigo, a brutal fucking strike." The comparison of the killings to a strike was odd. But Fate nodded his head and didn't say anything.

"This is a big city, a real city," said Chucho Flores. "We have everything. Factories, maquiladoras, one of the lowest unemployment rates in Mexico, a cocaine cartel, a constant flow of workers from other cities, Central American immigrants, an urban infrastructure that can't support the level of demographic growth. We have plenty of money and poverty, we have imagination and bureaucracy, we have violence and the desire to work in peace. There's just one thing we haven't got," said Chucho Flores.

Oil, thought Fate, but he didn't say it. "What don't you have?" he asked.

"Time," said Chucho Flores. "We haven't got any fucking time." Time for what? thought Fate. Time for this shithole, equal parts lost cemetery and garbage dump, to turn into a kind of Detroit? For a while they didn't talk. Chucho Flores took out a pencil and notebook and started to draw women's faces. He did it very quickly, completely absorbed in the effort, and also, it seemed to Fate, with some talent, as if before he'd become a sportswriter Chucho Flores had studied drawing and spent many hours sketching from life. None of his women were smiling. Some had their eyes closed. Others were old and had their heads turned as if they were waiting for something or someone to call their names. None of them was pretty.

"You're good," said Fate as Chucho Flores started on his seventh portrait.

"It's nothing," said Chucho Flores.

Then, more than anything because it embarrassed him to keep talking about how well the Mexican could draw, Fate asked about the dead women.

"Most of them are workers at the maquiladoras. Young girls with long hair. But that isn't necessarily the mark of the killer. In Santa Teresa almost all the girls have long hair," said Chucho Flores.

"Is there a single killer?" asked Fate.

"That's what they say," said Chucho Flores, still drawing. "A few people have been arrested. Some cases have been solved. But according to the legend, there's just one killer and he'll never be caught."

"How many women have been killed?"

"I don't know," said Chucho Flores, "lots, more than two hundred."

Fate watched as the Mexican began to sketch his ninth portrait.

"That's a lot for one person," he said.

"That's right, amigo. Too many. Even for a Mexican killer."

"And how are they killed?" asked Fate.

"Nobody's sure. They disappear. They vanish into thin air, here one minute, gone the next. And after a while their bodies turn up in the desert."

As they were driving to the Sonora Resort, where he planned to check his e-mail, it occurred to Fate that it would be much more interesting to write a story about the women who were being killed than about the Pickett-Fernandez fight. That was what he wrote to his editor. He asked if he could stay in the city for another week and asked them to send a photographer. Then he went out to have a drink at the bar, joining some American reporters. They were talking about the fight and all of them agreed that Fernandez wouldn't last more than four rounds. One of them told the story of the Mexican fighter Hercules Carreno. Carreno was almost six and a half feet tall, unusually tall for Mexico, where people tend to be short. And he was strong, too. He worked unloading sacks at a market or butcher's, and someone convinced him to try boxing. He got a late start. He might have been twenty-five. But in Mexico heavyweights are few and far between, and he won all his fights. This is a country with good bantamweights, good flyweights, good featherweights, even the occasional welterweight, but no heavyweights or light heavyweights. It has to do with tradition and nutrition. Morphology. Now Mexico has a president who's taller than the president of the United States. This is the first time it's ever happened. Gradually, the presidents here are getting taller. It used to be unthinkable. A Mexican president would come up to the American president's shoulder, at most. Sometimes the Mexican president's head would be barely an inch or two above our presidents belly button. That's just how it was. But now the Mexican upper class is changing. They're getting richer and they go looking for wives north of the border. That's what you call improving the race. A short Mexican sends his short son to college in California. The kid has money and does whatever he wants and that impresses some girls. There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California. Bottom line: the kid gets himself a degree and a wife, who moves to Mexico with him. So then the short Mexican grandkids aren't so short anymore, they're medium, and meanwhile their skin's getting lighter too. These grandkids, when the time comes, set off on the same journey of initiation as their father. American college, American wife, taller and taller kids. What this means is that the Mexican upper class, of its own accord, is doing what the Spaniards did, but backward. The Spaniards, who were hot-blooded and didn't think too far ahead, mixed with the Indian women, raped them, forced them to practice their religion, and thought that meant they were turning the country white. Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping from the bottom up, when what would've made more sense would be raping from the top down. They might have gotten some results if they'd been capable of raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard greatgrandchildren. But who's going to go out raping people when you're seventy and you can hardly stand on your own two feet? You can see the results all around you. The semen of those Spaniards, who thought they were titans, just got lost in the amorphous mass of thousands of Indians. The first mongrels, the ones with fifty-fifty blood, took charge of the country, those were your ministers, your soldiers, your shopkeepers, your founders of new cities. And they kept on raping, but it didn't yield the same fruits, since the Indian women they were raping gave birth to mestizos with a smaller percentage of white blood. And so on. Until we come to this fighter, Hercules Carreno, who started out winning, either because his rivals were even worse than he was or because the matches were fixed, which got some Mexicans to boast about having a real heavyweight champion, and one fine day Hercules Carreno was taken to the United States, and they matched him with a drunken Irishman and then a black guy who'd been smoking pot and then a fat Russian, and he beat them all, and it filled the Mexicans with happiness and pride: now their champion had hit the big time. And then they set up a fight against Arthur Ashley, in Los Angeles. Any of you guys see that fight? I did. They called Arthur Ashley the Sadist. That's the fight where he got the name. Poor Hercules Carreno was wiped right off the map. From round one you could tell it was going to be a massacre. The Sadist took his time, he was in no hurry, picking the perfect spots to land his hooks, turning each round into a monograph, round three on the subject of the face, round four on the liver. In the end, it was all Hercules Carreno could do to hang in till round eight. After that you could still see him fighting in third-rate rings. He almost always went down in round two. Then he tried to get work as a bouncer, but he was in such a fog he couldn't hold down a job for more than a week. He never went back to Mexico. Maybe he'd forgotten he was Mexican. The Mexicans, of course, forgot him. They say he started to beg on the streets and that one day he died under a bridge. The pride of the Mexican heavyweights, said the reporter.

The others laughed and then they all assumed expressions of penitence. Twenty seconds of silence to remember the unfortunate Carreno. The faces, suddenly solemn, made Fate think of a masked ball. For a brief instant he couldn't breathe, he saw his mother's empty apartment, he had a premonition of two people making love in a miserable room, all at the same time, a moment defined by the word climacteric. What are you, flacking for the Klan? Fate asked the reporter who had told the story. Watch out, looks like we got ourselves another touchy jig, said the reporter. Fate tried to lunge at him and get a punch in (though a slap in the face would've been better), but he was blocked by the reporters surrounding the man. He's just fucking around, he heard someone say. We're all American here. There's nobody here from the Klan. At least I don't think so. Then he heard more laughter. When he calmed down and went to sit by himself in a corner of the bar, one of the reporters who'd been listening to the story of Hercules Carreno came up to him and held out his hand.

"Chuck Campbell, Sport Magazine, Chicago."

Fate shook the reporter's hand and told him his name and the name of the magazine he worked for.

"I heard your sports guy was killed," said Campbell.

"That's right," said Fate.

"Woman trouble, I bet," said Campbell.

"I don't know," said Fate.

"I knew Jimmy Lowell," said Campbell, "at least we saw each other forty times or so, which is more than some men see a mistress, or even a wife. He was a good person. He liked his beer and he liked his dinner. A hardworking man, he used to say, has to eat, and the food has to be good. Sometimes we flew together. I can't sleep on planes. Jimmy Lowell would sleep through the whole flight, only time he'd wake up was to eat or tell some story. The truth is, he didn't really give a shit about boxing, his sport was baseball, but for you guys he covered everything, even tennis. He never had a bad word for anybody. He respected people and people respected him. Wouldn't you say?"

"I never met Lowell in my life," said Fate.

"Don't let yourself get upset by what you just heard," said Campbell. "Sports is a boring beat and guys shoot off their mouths without thinking about it, they make up stories just to have something different to talk about. Sometimes we say stupid things without meaning to. The guy who told the story about that Mexican fighter, he isn't a bad guy. Compared to the others, he's pretty decent, has an open mind. It's just that every so often, to pass the time, we act like assholes. But we don't mean anything by it," said Campbell.

"It's not a problem," said Fate.

"How many rounds you think it'll take Count Pickett to win?"

"I don't know," said Fate, "I saw Merolino Fernandez training at his place yesterday and he didn't look like a loser to me."

"He'll go down before the third," said Campbell.

Another reporter asked where Fernandez was staying.

"Not far from the city," said Fate, "although I don't actually know, I didn't go alone, some Mexicans took me."

When Fate checked his e-mail again, he found a reply from his editor. There was no interest in the story he'd pitched, or no budget. His editor suggested that Fate limit himself to completing the assignment from the sports editor and then return immediately. Fate spoke to a clerk at the Sonora Resort and asked to place a call to New York.

While he waited he thought about other pitches the magazine had turned down. The most recent had been about a political group in Harlem, the Mohammedan Brotherhood. He'd met them during a pro-Palestine demonstration. The turnout was mixed, groups of Arabs, New York lefties, new antiglobalization activists. But the Mohammedan Brotherhood caught his attention because they were marching under a big poster of Osama bin Laden. They were all black and they were all wearing black leather jackets and black berets and sunglasses, which gave them a vague resemblance to the Panthers, except that the Panthers had been teenagers and the ones who weren't teenagers had a youthful look, an aura of youthfulness and tragedy, whereas the members of the Mohammedan Brotherhood were grown men, broad shouldered with huge biceps, people who spent hours and hours at the gym, lifting weights, people born to be bodyguards, but whose bodyguards? true human tanks whose very presence was intimidating, although there were no more than twenty at the demonstration, possibly fewer, but somehow the poster of bin Laden had a magnifying effect, first and foremost because it was less than six months since the attack on the World Trade Center and walking around with bin Laden, even just in effigy, was an extreme provocation. Of course, Fate wasn't the only one who took notice of the small, defiant presence of the Brotherhood: the television cameras followed them, their spokesman was interviewed, and the photographers from several papers documented the attendance of the group, which looked as if it was asking to be crushed.

Fate observed them from a distance. He watched them talk to the television crews and some local radio reporters, he watched them yell slogans, he watched them march through the crowd, and he followed them. Before the demonstration began to break up, the members of the Mohammedan Brotherhood exited in a planned maneuver. A couple of vans were waiting for them on a corner. Only then did Fate realize that there were no more than fifteen of them. They ran. He ran after them. He explained that he wanted to interview them for his magazine. They talked next to the vans, on a side street. The one who seemed to be the leader, a tall, fat guy with a shaved head, asked him what magazine he worked for. Fate told him and the man smirked.

"No one reads that shit today," he said.

"It's a magazine for brothers," said Fate.

"It's a motherfucking sellout," said the man, still smiling. "It's played."

"I don't think so," said Fate.

A Chinese kitchen worker came out to leave some garbage bags. An Arab watched them from the corner. Strange, remote faces, thought Fate, as the man who seemed to be the leader gave him a time, a date, a place in the Bronx where they would see each other in a few days.

Fate kept the appointment. Three members of the Brotherhood and a black van were waiting for him. They drove to a basement near Baychester. The fat guy with the shaved head was waiting for them there. He said to call him Khalil. The others didn't give their names. Khalil talked about the Holy War. Explain what the hell you mean by Holy War, said Fate. The Holy War speaks for us when our mouths are parched, said Khalil. The Holy War is the language of the mute, of those who've lost the power of speech, of those who never knew how to speak. Why do you march against Israel? asked Fate. The Jew is keeping us down, said Khalil. You won't see a Jew in the Klan, said Fate. That's what the Jews want us to think. In fact, the Klan is everywhere. In Tel Aviv, in London, in Washington. Many leaders of the Klan are Jews, said Khalil. It's always been that way. Hollywood is full of Klan leaders. Who? asked Fate. Khalil warned him that what he was about to say was off the record. "The Jew tycoons have good Jew lawyers," he said. Who? asked Fate. Khalil named three movie directors and two actors. Then Fate had an inspiration. He asked: is Woody Allen a member of the Klan? He is, said Khalil, look at his movies, have you ever seen a black man in them? Not many, said Fate. Not one, said Khalil. Why were you carrying a poster of bin Laden? asked Fate. Because Osama bin Laden was the first to understand the nature of the fight we face today. Then they talked about bin Laden's innocence and Pearl Harbor and about how convenient the attack on the Twin Towers had been for some people. Stockbrokers, said Khalil, people with incriminating papers hidden in their offices, people who sell arms and needed something like that to happen. According to you, said Fate, Mohamed Atta was an undercover agent for the CIA or the FBI. What happened to Mohamed Atta's body? Khalil asked. Who can be sure Mohamed Atta was on one of those planes? I'll tell you what I think. I think Atta is dead. He died under torture, or he was shot in the back of the head. Then I think they chopped him into little pieces and ground his bones down until they looked like chicken bones. After that they put the little bones and cutlets in a box, filled it with cement, and dropped it in some Florida swamp. And they did the same thing to the men he was with.

So who flew the planes? asked Fate. Klan lunatics, nameless inmates from mental hospitals in the Midwest, volunteers brainwashed to face suicide. Thousands of people disappear in this country every year and nobody tries to find them. Then they talked about the Romans and the Roman circus and the first Christians who were eaten by lions. But the lions will choke on our black flesh, he said.

The next day Fate met them at a Harlem club and there he was introduced to Ibrahim, a man of average height with a scarred face, who set about describing to him in great detail all the charitable work the Brotherhood did in the neighborhood. They ate together at a diner next door to the club. The diner was run by a woman. A boy helped her, and in the kitchen there was an old man who never stopped singing. In the afternoon Khalil joined them and Fate asked the two men where they'd met. In prison, they said. Prison is where black brothers meet. They talked about the other Muslim groups in Harlem. Ibrahim and Khalil didn't think very highly of them, but they tried to be fair and maintain a dialogue with them. Sooner or later the good Muslims would end up finding their way to the Mohammedan Brotherhood.

Before he left, Fate told them that they would probably never be forgiven for having marched under the effigy of Osama bin Laden. Ibrahim and Khalil laughed. He thought they looked like two black stones quaking with laughter.

"They'll probably never forget it," said Ibrahim.

"Now they know who they're dealing with," said Khalil.

His editor told him to forget writing a story about the Brotherhood.

"Those guys, how many of them are there?" he asked.

"Twenty, more or less," said Fate.

"Twenty niggers," said his editor. "At least five of them must be FBI."

"Maybe more," said Fate.

"What makes them interesting to us?" asked his editor.

"Stupidity," said Fate. "The endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves."

"Have you become a masochist, Oscar?" asked his editor.

"Could be," said Fate.

"You need to get more pussy," said the editor. "Get out more, listen to music, make friends, talk to them."

"I've thought about it," said Fate.

"Thought about what?"

"About getting more pussy," said Fate.

"That isn't the kind of thing you think about, it's the kind of thing you do," said the editor.

"First you have to think about it," said Fate. Then he added: "Can I do the story?"

The editor shook his head.

"Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine."

"All right," said Fate.

"Motherfuckers marched with a poster of bin Laden," said his editor.