“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

The fights came quickly. It took a full day after sparring to feel tip-top again—my headache would fade—but Alice never let me rest much. If she sensed I was feeling good, she’d take me out to the pond, or she’d tie bags of sand to my ankles and wrists and she’d bike with me as I ran. I was hammering the local competition, never allowing anyone past the third round, but there was still a waiting list to get into my ring. Red Heingartner was the only one to hit me hard—he had a quick hook that snapped me back—but even with Red, all I had to do was decide the fight was over, and it was over. A flurry of punches and the man went down.

That night, in the janitor’s closet of my apartment complex, beside the mop buckets and toolboxes, I kissed her, and when she kissed me back, she bit my tongue, then sucked on it, clamping down around it with her lips and yanking it with the strength of her lungs. I took her coat off, and she unzipped my pants, so I removed her sweater and unbuttoned the outermost of the three shirts she was wearing. I tried to respond to each move she made with an action I hoped she’d find interesting, original, unclichéd. When she kissed me on the eyelid, where my scar was, I put my pinkie in her navel, but she squirmed, telling me it made her feel sick.

In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.

My father’s dying was not news.

There were ten of us and we shared a single name: compañero. Except me. They called me Pintor. Together we formed an uncertain circle around a dead dog, under the dim lights off the plaza. Everything was cloaked in fog. Out first revolutionary act, announcing ourselves to the nation. We strung up dogs from all the street lamps, covered them with terse and angry slogans, Die Capitalist Dogs and such; leaving the beasts there for the people to see how fanatical we could be. It is clear now that we didn’t scare anyone so much as we disturbed them and convinced them of our peculiar mania, our worship of frivolous violence. Fear would come later.

Every year of Mayra’s birthday, since she turned one, I have asked Sonia to marry me. This year our little girl turned five. Each rejection has its own story, but until recently, before the two of them left, I preferred to think of these moments as one long, unfinished conversation. Mayra’s fifth fell on a hot, bright day. I had twenty-five soles in my pocket, the ring, and a little makeup kit I’d bought for my daughter. I was at the Plaza Manco Capac, waiting for a spot at the lunch counter of a cheap criollo place before heading over to see the women of my life.

Gruel, crumbs on a table

of ice, a labyrinth of snow:

and infinite distances

in the small box of the kitchen.

Mother chopped pieces

of her heart into the skillet.

Brother and I heard oil sizzle

until we huddled in shame.

She salted the meat with tears.

She cried if we ate

and cried if we refused to eat,

warning You’ll go hungry.

Admit it. You hate the body

because it can be broken,

stabbed, shot full of holes.

And so you become a butcher.

Say the spirit cannot be broken.

Say you see better than anyone

how fiercely an ox, a hog, a cock

fights to stay alive, until the end.

You wonder how nothing seems

to stop this rat: sucking, gnawing

through cement walls to snatch

scraps of gristle – not knowing

what you need to kill, or why.

Beat it with a shovel: skin-slither,

pestle of skull and will. Admit

it shamed you to cover with dung.

I don’t mean to make you cry.

I mean nothing, but this has not kept you

From peeling away my body, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills

With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of the pursuit.

Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Hunt all you want. Beneath each layer of mine

Lies another skin: I am pure onion – pure onion

Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

…one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude’s and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus.

The moth flew from my hand, a gust fanned the flames, there was a flash, and the girl ignited, lighting up like a paper lantern. She was cloaked in fire. The heat moved in waves across my face, and I had to squint against the brightness. The ballerina spread her arms and levitated, sur les pointes, leaving the patio as her legs, ass, and back emerged phoenix-like out of the paper chrysalis, rising up until finally the gown sloughed from her shoulders and sailed away, a tattered black ghost ascending in a column of smoke and ash, and she lowered back down, naked and white, standing there, pretty much unfazed, in first position.

They walked into the building and rode the freight elevator upstairs. “First thing you do,” Greenfield said, “is board up all the windows. This is a nonunion job.”

“A union for porn?” Ramage said.

“Erotica,” Greenfield corrected him. “There’s a street tax we’re not paying.”

“What’s the plot of this one?” Ramage asked.

Greenfield lowered his glasses and looked at him over the rims as if he were stupid.

“Boy meets girl,” he said.

Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.

She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.

He bent down, speaking closer now to my ear.

“What made you think she ever belonged to you, or more importantly, that you ever belonged with her? America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say or think it is. Things get stirred, yes, but like oil and vinegar they eventually separate and settle and the like things always go back to each other. They have made new friends, perhaps even fucked them, but in their heart they will always wander back to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.

The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.

The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch, Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.