Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

The Skinny Girl BY LUCIUS SHEPARD

Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and lives in Portland, Oregon. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His latest books are a short novel, The Taborin Scale, and a short fiction collection, Viator Plus. Forthcoming are another short fiction collection, Five Autobiographies; two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It; and a short novel, The House of Everything and Nothing.

During the twenty-six years in which he had supplied images of the dead to the city’s daily newspapers, Hugo Lis had photographed over thirty thousand corpses, the victims of strangulation and shooting, knifings, car crashes, decapitations, accidental electrocutions, and other more idiosyncratic instances of mayhem. A considerable number of those pictures, despite the anonymity of the victims, had been run on the front page above the fold, often in conjunction with the photograph of a half-naked starlet or singer. When asked to explain this apparent opposition, Hugo would suggest that in a place where life has little or no meaning, death tends to acquire a certain glamour. Mexico City had seventy-five thousand streets and death was a celebrity on every one. Hugo had visited homes in which his photograph of a family member’s bloody remains, snipped from a newspaper, now served as the centerpiece of a shrine. It was as if the violated flesh and its public exploitation were deemed truer emblems of a loved one’s memory than the sunny smile of a confirmation photo or the purposeful, forward-looking pose of a graduation shot. Or it may have been that the implicit passion and drama of a violent death lent the departed a Christ-like pathos, thereby engaging the Catholic sensibilities of the populace. Hugo’s attitudes toward the subject, albeit no less formalized, were not in the least circumscribed by faith or emotion. Death, to Hugo Lis, was simply a way of life.

As dean of the photographers whose pictures illustrated the notas rojas (“red news”), Hugo was occasionally approached by foreign journalists interested in doing a story on his life and profession. His hair and mustache colored to hide the gray, dressed in a black suit tailored to disguise his paunch; wearing lifts that added two inches to his diminutive stature, he would pose for pictures. After negotiating a fee (necessary, he claimed, to guarantee their safety from the gangs), he would guide them to one or another of the innumerable shrines devoted to Santa Muerte (“Saint Death”) in Barrio Tepito where, behind glass or within a confine of plastic panels, a human skeleton (often a real one) dressed in robes or a lace gown stood holding a scythe and a globe representing the earth, surrounded by offerings of flowers and fruit and cigars left by thugs, kidnappers, drug dealers, murderers, and the disenfranchised, whose patron saint she was.

“Death has become so prominent a character in our lives, we’ve transformed her into a movie star,” he would typically say, leading his interviewer among the stalls that transformed many of Tepito’s streets into crowded pedestrian aisles, pointing out the various representations of Santa Muerte available among fraudulent Swiss watches and knockoffs of designer clothing—statuettes and paintings of robed skeletal figures juxtaposed with T-shirts that depicted her as an emaciated yet beautiful young girl. “You find her image everywhere,” he would go on. “Soon there will be films celebrating her starring Mayrin Villanueva or Ninel Conde. People en Español will proclaim her to be the Sexiest Woman of the Year.”

As befitted his profession, Hugo was a widower; his wife, Fabiola, a thin, sallow girl, died in her teens as the result of sudden illness, which had originally seemed merely a summer cold. He could no longer call her face to mind and had come to view the marriage as an adolescent mistake; yet he had been dismasted by grief upon her death or, better said, he had embraced grief with the same childlike fervor that he had love, wearing it as an actor would wear a costume, using it to simulate authenticity. But no matter how deep his investment in the emotion, grief had rendered him glib and cynical and purged him of his juvenile ambitions: He no longer cared about creating art and thought of photography strictly as a means to an end. Ironically, his work since had been praised for its “raw purity” and “bizarre sensuality” and now formed part of the permanent collections of several important museums. When asked how he managed to make the dead so attractive, so vital even though charred or covered in blood, he replied, “I seek to do nothing. I shoot pictures for the newspapers. I don’t try to frame shots, I don’t enhance negatives. What you see is what I see, nothing more.”

He had never remarried, and lived in a one-bedroom condo close to Avenida Vincente Suarez in the colonia of La Condesa, a trendy section of the city that echoed the intellectual pretensions of Greenwich Village and the architecture of South Beach, yet lacked the cultural traditions of the one and the garish splendor of the other. Though he welcomed the attentions of women (mainly intellectual types, attracted by the numena they claimed to perceive in his photographs), he refused to adapt his routines to their needs, and they would leave after a few weeks or months, accusing him of being aloof and passionless except as related to his job. This accusation surprised him, for he considered himself a passionate sort. As for his job … well, he would admit to being a bit obsessive—that was his nature—but it was scarcely a passion. These women, he reasoned, must have been pampered in their previous relationships and thus demanded too much of him.

When not at home, his life was spent driving from point to point in the Distrito Federal, obeying the prompts of a police scanner, on the move for days at a time, eating and napping in his car. Traveling from crime scene to crime scene through snarls of clamorous traffic; from black nights fruited with neon to days that, whether rainy or bright, gave evidence of a polluted haze; from the Zona Rosa, where child prostitutes flocked the streets, to the sprawl of Cuautepec, the epicenter of poverty, to the Zocalo, the great central square hemmed in by gray fortresslike government buildings and the equally forbidding cathedral, the site of demonstrations and concerts and, in winter, improbably, an outdoor ice skating rink. Experienced this way, the city, for all its chaos and violence, had a calming, almost a narcotizing effect upon him, as though it generated a violent beatitude … or else, like a fish born in a cataract, he had grown inured to the crash and tumble of its rhythms.

One night at the end of such a sojourn he stopped to buy cigarettes at a tiny store, a niche no wider than a doorway on a nearly deserted stretch of Calle Doctor Vertis. When he emerged from the store, two men seized him by the elbows, pressed a pistol into his side, and forced him into a van, where he was made to lie on the floor with his face pushed into a moldy carpet. Terrified, Hugo assumed this to be an express kidnapping and that the men would bring him to a cash machine and have him make a withdrawal. They did not wear masks and were so nonchalant in their demeanor, chatting about a woman of their acquaintance, he thought they must be unconcerned about revealing their identities because they planned to kill him. Yet if that were so, would they not head toward a spot where they could complete their business undisturbed? He could tell by the buildings, whose upper floors were visible through the windows (stone facades with balconies and crumbling colonial ornaments), and by the increased noise (cumbia and rock playing in the hotly lit stores, somebody shouting over a bullhorn, shrieks and laughter, horns braying, engines being gunned) that they were passing along Calle Morelos very near the Zocalo. Screwing up his courage, expecting a blow in return, he asked where he was being taken.

The man in back with Hugo, heavily muscled, his neck so thickly covered in tattoos that in the shadowy interior of the van he appeared to be wearing a turtleneck, glanced at him incuriously and said, “The Skinny Girl wants to meet you.”

A certain amount of ambiguity was attached to this statement—La Flacita (“the Skinny Girl”) was a diminutive for Santa Muerte, an affectionate name used by her devotees. The man might be threatening him with death … or he might be referring to someone who had adopted the name. Hugo sought clarification, but the driver snapped at him, telling him to keep quiet. The men began talking about the woman again, not in the way such men usually talk about women, neither lustfully nor derisively, but reverently and with the sort of respect they would normally reserve for a man. Hugo suspected this woman to be a criminal type who relied on a quasi-mystical pose to keep the troops in line. He told himself that he was going to be all right—he’d inform her of his police connections and she would come to her senses and release him.

That the official and the criminal are inextricably aligned should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of their government, but nowhere is this juxtaposition so literal and apparent as in Mexico City. Located fifteen minutes’ walk from the Zocalo, the seat of the government and home to the immense, grim cathedral that is its spiritual analogue, lies the seat of outlawry, Barrio Tepito. Within its borders, fully two-thirds of the world’s child pornography is produced; assault rifles and missile launchers are sold via illustrated catalogs; and there are dozens of warehouses filled with drugs and stolen goods. You can find anything in Tepito, it’s said: pirated software, endangered species, a Rolex, a Guarneri cello, a slave, a cruel master … anything. The majority of Tepito’s business is done on the streets, but much of it is accomplished in vecindades, old colonial mansions scattered throughout the barrio, decayed to the point of collapse, each room serving as a boutique given over to a separate extralegal enterprise—it was to such a ruinous structure that his captors brought Hugo. The earth beneath the house had been excavated, creating two brightly lit subterranean levels, the uppermost walled in concrete block and plaster, ranged by mahogany doors elaborately carved with an imagery of bounteous nature—bunches of grapes and orchids and hummingbirds and reeds. The men led Hugo down to this level and stationed themselves at the foot of the stairs and told him to proceed along the corridor, that he would find the Skinny Girl in one of the rooms. When he hesitated, anxious about what might lie ahead, they drove him forward with kicks and curses.

The first door admitted Hugo to a large, poorly lit room smelling of marijuana, in which people visible as half shadows sat about on sofas and easy chairs (those he could see were swaybacked and patched with tape), their conversations barely audible over a music of whiny reeds and clattering drums that had a Middle Eastern flair. It reminded him of his university days: smiling young men passing hand-rolled cigarettes to giggling girls; long-haired guys engaged in impassioned arguments. He asked a busty, fresh-faced girl who stood along the wall where he could find the Skinny Girl. “No hablo,” she said in an American accent. Her companion, a sullen kid with a complicated emo hairstyle, said, “Pase por alla,” and pointed to the far end of the room, where there was a door and, nearby, a number of people gathered about a radiant object on the floor, blocking it from view. A sudden flash of white light cast them in silhouette—some gasped, while others cried out and applauded. The glow faded, albeit slowly, and Hugo shouldered in among them, hoping to discover what they had been watching. Embedded in the floor was a flat panel of black glass—a television screen—but whatever image it had shown was no longer in evidence.

Hugo exited the room and, at the urging of the men standing by the stairs, continued along the corridor. From behind a second door came a racket that reminded him of an old-fashioned printing press. He turned the knob but found it locked. Putting his ear to the next door, he heard noises reminiscent of a dog worrying a chew toy and decided not to enter. The fourth door opened into a considerable space with bright ceiling lights and a banquet table at which some two dozen prosperous-looking men and women were seated, all clad as mourners, most with their heads bent, murmuring as in prayer. Three mestizo boys in white coats were serving them, two holding a steaming tureen and one ladling a thick black soup. The dominant feature of the room was a mural occupying the whitewashed wall at the diners’ backs, depicting a pale, asthenic girl clad in black jeans, a wide belt with a gold buckle, and a sleeveless black top. Of the countless representations of the Skinny Girl that Hugo had seen, this was the first to strike him as having the specificity of an image rendered from life. She stood inhaling a cigarette, an act that accentuated the hollowness of her cheeks, and gazed into an unguessable distance, her physical attitude projecting a palpable disaffection. An immense ghostly skull looming behind her formed the backdrop of the mural, along with some sketchy vegetation and small indefinite figures that might have been cacti or soldiers with spears. She wore on her left arm a simple silver bracelet, and on a chain about her neck was an oddly shaped gold amulet holding a flat magenta stone. Her hair was jet black, and her long, narrow face, with its high cheekbones, full carmine lips, and prominent nose, had a severe, almost mannish cast; yet despite this, despite the coldness of her expression and the fact that she had virtually no hips or breasts, she seemed to incarnate every principle of feminine beauty, albeit in their most forbidding and reductive form.

At the end of the banquet table nearest Hugo sat a matronly woman with a kindly face who had not yet been served. She wore widow’s garb, but her crepe dress and lace mantilla were of much finer quality than those of the black-clad women Hugo saw each day on the streets of the city, grimly clutching their little bundles. He approached her and inquired as to whether she knew the woman who had posed for the mural.

“Why that’s Aida, of course,” she said with a faltering tone, as if bewildered by the question. “Don’t you recognize her? It’s an excellent likeness.”

The old man on her left made a pleased noise as the server filled his bowl.

“I haven’t yet met the lady,” Hugo said. “Could you tell me where I might find her?”

“Oh!” The woman put a hand to her cheek. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave. You’re not permitted to partake of communion until you’ve…”

The serving boys moved behind her, and the tallest, a beetle-browed twelve-year-old with a yellowish-brown complexion, ladled soup into her bowl—it smelled of nutmeg, yet there was an unpleasant undertone, a scent that Hugo could not identify. The woman closed her eyes and inhaled the steam rapturously. She took up her spoon and stirred the soup, which had the consistency of partially set custard.

“Until what?” Hugo asked.

“Until you’ve met her.” The woman bowed her head and began to pray. “Glorious Death, I beseech you,” she said in a fervent tone—the rest of her words were lost in a muttering consensus. Only the serving boys abstained from prayer. They glared at Hugo, their black eyes agleam like chitin under the lights, their faces glum. If he had seen them on the streets of Tepito, he wouldn’t have given them a second thought, but the context lent them a sinister aspect and he retreated from the room.

The corridor veered to the right and, after inspecting a room used to store stacks of high-end electronics gear still in their cartons, he leaned against the wall, seeking to order his thoughts. Nothing that had occurred since the kidnapping made sense, and the more forcefully he sought to impose logic on events, the less comprehensible they became. It was evident that he had not been kidnapped for ransom alone, that whoever was behind his abduction was playing games with him; but he could think of no reason for such treatment.

Several people passed him by as he pondered, and he asked each of them if they knew Aida’s whereabouts. They were uniformly civil, suggesting that if he kept going, sooner or later he would run across her; but each time he raised a question that required a more detailed response, they excused themselves and hurried off. Unable to resolve any of his questions, he took their advice and continued along the corridor.

At length he reached a door that stood partially open. The room beyond was furnished with a sofa and easy chairs upholstered in earth tones, end tables, and a gray rug with a blue diamond pattern typical of Zapotec work. It had a faintly shabby air redolent of an old hotel that was being kept up but had seen better days. Pottery occupied niches in the tiled walls (ocher with geometric designs of red and green), and on the wall opposite, next to a doorway hung with a beaded curtain, directly above the light switch, was a crucifix—the exposed wiring of the switch ran up behind the cross, giving the impression that the electricity powering the jaundiced glow from the ceiling lamp was at least partly responsible for Christ’s tormented posture. Hugo slipped inside, closing the door after him, and tiptoed to the doorway across the room, pushing aside the beaded curtain.

On his left, a staircase led downward; to his right, a bedroom … a woman’s bedroom, judging by the underwear strewn across the floor.

A noise from without drew his attention and he peered through the beaded curtain. A woman stood in the corridor, only her hand visible resting on the doorknob, a silver bracelet about her wrist. “All right. I’ll talk to you later,” she said to someone, and entered the room. She was identical to the woman in the mural in every respect. The same jewelry and clothing, even the same severe makeup. This reinforced his idea that she was a charlatan who affected the guise of Santa Muerte for some devious purpose—such an act would play well in Tepito. He was certain she had seen him through the curtain and in reflex he took a backward step. Without acknowledging him, she lit a cigarette and tipped back her head to exhale a plume of smoke. After a silence she said reflectively, “Hugo Lis.” Her voice had a husky sonority that made it seem a larger presence was speaking through her; yet when she spoke again, her words had a normal timbre. “My name is Aida Chavez. You are welcome in my house.”

“Since you know me…” he said, pushing aside the curtain and stepping forward as though unafraid. “You must also know that I have influential friends.”

“Truly? Perhaps your friends know my friends.” She had another hit of her cigarette. “Don’t worry. No harm will come to you here.”

“I don’t believe you understand. My niece’s godfather is…”

“Mauricio Ebrard. I know. I know a great deal about you. Your friends, where you like to drink … I know you took your last vacation in Biarritz. You spent quite a sum of money on a woman named Cinnamon.” A smile nicked her wide, straight mouth. “No doubt a relative.”

She sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs. “Still, there are things I don’t understand about you. Why, for instance, do you continue to photograph the dead? It can’t be an issue of money—your celebrity has brought you a nice income. Nor is it because you have a dearth of other options.”

Irritated, Hugo said, “Perhaps I just like driving around and taking pictures. I’m no psychologist. Why does anyone do anything? Why do you pretend to be Santa Muerte?”

“Is that what I do?” She kicked out her right leg and considered the tip of a stylish boot. “Are you afraid, Hugo? I should think anyone in your situation would be.”

“Of course I am. I’m afraid you won’t use good judgment.”

“If you’re really afraid, if you fear for your life, you may leave.”

He searched her face for a hint of deception, reminding himself that she was a poseur, an actress—he would be unlikely to detect anything that she had not put there by design.

She swung her legs onto the sofa and leaned back against the armrest. “Yet you’ve spent so many years at the entrance to my house, it would be a pity if you left without exploring it a little.”

He was aware that she had spoken metaphorically, referring both to his photographs of the dead and her affectation as the embodiment of Santa Muerte, but he chose to respond as though the comment had been literal. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “I’ve never been here before.”

Her face settled into a haughty, disinterested expression that reminded him of his niece, a student at the university, the look she adopted when she asked him for money and he would question the reason for which she needed it.

“Do as you wish,” she said, giving a languid gesture. “Leave … or stay. It’s of no consequence.”

She stared at the ceiling, smoke curling between her lips, holding her cigarette aloft as if using it to gauge perspective. He had the idea that he had disappointed her and felt an irrational dismay at having come up short of her expectations. He picked through his thoughts, examining this one and that one, thinking that she might be a witch and had placed them in his head—he did not actually believe in witchcraft, but his upbringing in San Luis Potosi, where peyote was sold by brujas in the market, compelled him to accept that magic was part of the world’s potential. While taking this mental inventory, he became aware that he was no longer quite so afraid. Although he remained unsettled by her diffident manner and general inexpressiveness (smiles and frowns scarcely registered on her face), she had demanded no ransom and he began to believe that she meant him no harm. Whatever her intentions, he told himself, they must have something to do with the cult of Santa Muerte, with her position in it, and perhaps there was a story here that could be exploited. The bulk of his equipment was in his car, but he had a digital camera in his jacket pocket.

“May I take your picture?” he asked.

Partway through Hugo’s photographic session with her, Aida Chavez started to remove her clothes. She did this of her own volition and with the nonchalance of a wife preparing for bed while chatting with her husband. Hugo was initially taken aback, but the hollows of her buttocks, the articulation of her ribs, collarbone, and pelvis, and the thrust of her hip bones contrived an eerily erotic terrain that aroused him in no small measure, and he snapped picture after picture. Desire grew furious and sharp in him, like the flame from a gas jet turned high. He wanted to touch her and might have done so, using the pretense of helping her to achieve a pose, but an insistent knocking at the door broke the mood.

Aida slipped on her panties and top, and poked her head out into the corridor, and carried on a brief, half-whispered exchange, after which she shut the door and struggled into her jeans.

Irritated, Hugo waved at the door and said, “Who are all these people? What are they doing here?”

Aida lit another cigarette and exhaled with a despondent sigh. “I hoped you would recognize me, but since you do not—”

“How could I recognize you? I’ve never laid eyes on you before!”

“No? How odd!” She reclined on the sofa once again. “I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I hoped you could ‘identify’ me. But since you cannot, I’ll tell you a little about myself. Perhaps that will assist your judgment.”

He sat in one of the easy chairs, and once he was comfortable she said, “I was a foundling left on the steps of the Nueva Vida Orphanage when I was barely a few hours old. I was grossly underweight and the doctors doubted that I would live; yet somehow I managed to survive my infancy. As I grew older the nuns tried to fatten me up, thinking that if I were closer to normal weight, I stood a better chance of being adopted. Though they forced me to stuff myself, often using the threat of physical punishment, I remained abnormally thin. The other children were cruel to me. I wasn’t strong enough to fight them off, so I developed a kind of passive resistance. No matter how painful the beatings, I refused to cry. I would glare at them until at last they stopped. Eventually they left me more or less alone and satisfied their need to demean me with the occasional prank. They took to calling me the Skinny Girl. Sometimes I wonder if their cruelty wasn’t a form of recognition, a denial of their fear.

“My stoic manner made me even less appealing to potential adoptive parents. They wanted bubbly, bouncy children and not a gaunt, solemn girl who sat without speaking. After nine years in the orphanage it seemed clear that I would never be adopted, and so it was decided I would enter the convent when I reached the proper age. I raised no objection to this plan. A nun’s life seemed as good as any and better than most in that it offered a guarantee of food and shelter. Then just prior to my tenth birthday, DeMario Chavez came to the orphanage. He had heard about the Skinny Girl dwelling there and asked to see me.”

“The founder of the Zetas?” Hugo asked. “That DeMario Chavez?”

Aida nodded. “During our interview I gave minimal responses to his questions and did not expect to see him again. But several days later he came to collect me. I assume a sum of money changed hands—that would explain why a drug dealer, a murderer, was allowed to adopt me. Then, too, the nuns were likely glad to wash their hands of me. They were a superstitious bunch, and I suspect they half believed me to be the Skinny Girl. DeMario took me to his house, this house, and installed me in an apartment and let it be known that the incarnation of Santa Muerte was dwelling under his roof, living as his ward. Occasionally he would bring other men to see me—men like him, gang leaders with dozens of tattoos. They offered me gifts—perfume, food, tequila. They prayed before me, they asked my blessing, and all the while DeMario smirked at me over their bowed heads.”

“So,” said Hugo. “Your function was to impress other criminals by posing as Santa Muerte?”

“That was the idea. DeMario rarely confided in me, but once he patted me on the head and said that before we were done, he would have every criminal in Mexico worshipping at my church.”

“It doesn’t seem credible that you could frighten men to that extent.”

“Oh, I have my moments,” she said. “I don’t know whether I frightened them as much as I convinced them, but this is an unusual house. In one room there is an animal that feeds on itself, tearing at its own flesh, and yet the next day is whole again. In another there is a TV screen set in the floor that works only intermittently and shows images of an apocalyptic event that soon will be visited upon us. There are other strange things besides. Some will tell you they are nothing but tricks. High-tech illusions, animatronics, and so forth. Others claim they are magical devices. I believe both sides are right, that given certain conditions, illusions can become real.”

Hugo made a dubious noise, but Aida ignored it.

“Whatever their nature,” she said, “I think after seeing them the men were disposed to believe in me.” She lit another cigarette and exhaled through her nostrils. “DeMario’s behavior toward me underwent a change over the course of the three years that I knew him. Increasingly, he began to display anxiety in my presence. During the last year I scarcely saw him at all, until one night he broke into my apartment and raped me. I reverted to the passive resistance of my orphanage days and glared at him the entire time and gave no outcry. After he had finished he appeared terrified. He wept and babbled and called me his beautiful death. He had been using a lot of drugs those last months. Cocaine, heroin, pills. I imagined that his substance abuse provoked the incident. The next morning he was dead. Some problem with his heart. His woman told me that he had become convinced that I was Santa Muerte incarnate, and that what had started out as a game had evolved into something much darker. The rape, she said, was an attempt to restore his control over me. She, too, believed I was Santa Muerte and that I had struck DeMario down for his assault on me. She begged my forgiveness and asked me to show her mercy.

“I thought I would have to move out of the house, but the story of DeMario’s death and my part in it spread through the barrio and no one ever tried to evict me. Instead, people thronged the house, asking for my blessing. They would have transformed my home into a shrine to Santa Muerte, a big one like the old woman’s house on Alfareria Street; but I told them I wanted neither their gifts nor their adoration. I said that I had been made flesh in order to explore the nature of my humanity and to fulfill a destiny as yet unrevealed. I meant to choose those with whom I surrounded myself. The people you asked about, the ones who visit me here, they are my suitors. They come in hopes that I will grant them surcease. Whenever I feel so inclined, I give them a kiss and send them away. Not one of them has returned.”

“Some of your suitors are very young.”

“Are you so naïve that you think only the old seek death?”

“You believe they are dead, the ones you kissed?”

“I’ve come to think so. Yes.”

“Then you must believe that you are the Skinny Girl.”

“At first I did not believe it. I found the concept ridiculous. But lately…”

She failed to complete the sentence, and Hugo asked what she had intended to say.

“People assume an incarnation is a special soul given physical form,” she said. “Something apart from creation, something that has a different quality. But God is in all things, so how can His incarnation be separate … or different? I think an incarnation is a part of God that is gradually shaped by His design to satisfy some need. It took Jesus years before he understood His destiny.” She got to her feet and paced off a few steps toward the door. “Lately I have gained a new sense of myself. It’s difficult to describe, and there are moments—like now—when I doubt what I know in my heart. Words make it sound utterly preposterous.” She slapped her thigh in frustration. “Let’s just say I’ve begun to accept that my actions have some wider resonance in the world.”

“Well,” said Hugo, choosing his words with care, not wanting to upset her further, “it should be easy enough to prove. Have the people whom you kiss followed when they leave. Invite technicians into the house to examine the television and whatever else requires validation.”

“That would prove nothing. Scrutiny changes the observable. No, my idea of proof was to bring you here. Your life has been surrounded by death. It’s your passion.”

Hugo started to object, but she talked through him.

“I’ve read your interviews,” she said. “You make a point of denying me, yet you seek me out in my most terrible forms and perceive in each a vivid grace. When you photographed me, I felt you were fucking me with the camera. I stripped off my clothes because you recognized me. You responded to my beauty … you’ve always responded to me. Your desire was palpable. You wanted to touch me. Why didn’t you?”

Embarrassed, Hugo gave no answer.

“You’ve been my absent lover for a long while,” said Aida. “Soon we will be together.”

“Don’t be silly,” Hugo said. “I took those pictures to run with your story.”

“Even the ones the newspapers would refuse to print? Who are those intended for? You can’t deny your desire for me much longer. We will have our time, and on that day I promise you much more than a kiss. But our meeting today may have been premature. I need to purge myself of doubt. My faith must be pure in order to awaken yours fully.” She beckoned. “There’s something I want you to see. Afterward you may leave, if that’s your pleasure.”

He followed her through the beaded curtain and down a short stairway and along a whitewashed tunnel lit by naked ceiling bulbs—like a passage leading to a gallows or a gas chamber.

“A few weeks ago, I had a vision of you,” she said as she went. “I watched you photographing the dead.”

He felt a pang of anxiety. “Dozens of people watch me at work. Cops, medics. Bystanders.”

“But no one saw you working at the New Divine, did they?”

Hugo quit walking.

“You were alone inside the club,” said Aida. “You must have bribed someone to let you in before the emergency teams arrived. There were bodies everywhere. The room was still very smoky, so you tied a cloth about your face. The first picture you shot was of a teenage girl who had been trampled trying to reach the door. She had on a green dress.”

“You must have seen footage from a security camera,” he said.

“Aren’t security tapes shot in black-and-white? Yet I’m telling you her dress was green.” She sniffed. “Don’t bother responding. You can always construct an alternative explanation. Reality is full of loopholes.”

At the end of the tunnel was a door with a padlock. Aida put a key in the lock and said, “What I’m going to show you occurred during the earthquake in ninety-nine, a few days after my arrival in this house. DeMario thought it might have caused the earthquake. I didn’t learn of it until after his death.”

She threw open the door, warm air and a smell of decay rushed out, and Hugo clapped a hand over his mouth and nose. Emerging from the wall directly ahead of them, wedged in place, resting among chunks of rock and white plaster that appeared to have been shattered by its violent incursion, were the head and torso of an androgynous giant with chalky skin and long, silky white hair and an impassive Sphinx-like face. It lay on its side, the right shoulder and arm crushed beneath its body, its left arm protruding from the shattered wall some thirty feet above, as though it had been reaching out for someone or something at the instant its momentum ceased. The position of the left hand, wrist bent and fingers dangling, reminded Hugo of the hand of Jehovah depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Half-clotted black blood welled from a gash on its wrist, spilling into a pool that had accumulated in a depression in the rock. Wisps of steam rose from the surface, and Hugo recalled the soup served in the banquet room. At the base of the throat, under the collarbone, on the shoulder blade and elsewhere, were patches of dark webbed veins that showed through the skin like evil snowflakes.

“It came for me,” said Aida. “Or so I’ve concluded.”

Despite the sluggish flow of blood, Hugo presumed the giant to be dead; but then he checked himself and decided it must be a fraud, a torso with metal bones and skin fabricated from latex, set in place and jammed into a hole. The giant twisted its neck and, with a laborious effort, lifted its head. Its eyelids opened to reveal cavernous empty sockets crusted with blood, and a chthonic groan issued from its throat. Hugo felt the bellows of its rotting breath and fell back, nearly bumping into Aida. He moved away from her, sweat dripping into his eyes.

“DeMario thought it was an angel,” she said. “It doesn’t have wings, though. I’m not sure what the damned thing is, but it refuses to die. It’s like a fucking cockroach.”

The enormous hand overhead clenched into a fist and the giant’s face contorted.

“It wanted to control me, to take me to its house and imprison me, just like DeMario,” said Aida. “Despite the fact that it bungled the job, I think it might be God.”

The giant groaned again, louder this time, and the accompanying stench grew more fecal, as if the noise had been dredged up from its bowels; it looked to be trying to push itself forward into the room.

“Every year it manages to move a few inches,” said Aida. “At that rate it might break free in a century or two. It’s not very bright, but you can’t kill it. At least I can’t. I’ve tried everything … even kissing it.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big, stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal. Of course…” She flicked her eyes toward Hugo. “You probably think it’s a fake. And you may be right. But even if you’re right, you’re wrong, you know.”

Hugo wet his lips.

“Watch this,” she said. “It’s terrified of me.”

Aida approached the giant—its nostrils flared, and it yielded a keening noise and thrashed about, resulting in a heavy fall of plaster dust. She backed away and the giant’s struggles subsided.

“Now maybe it’s a robot, but no one else gets that reaction. Just me. Go on. You try.” She turned to Hugo. “Are you okay? You look feverish.”

She stretched out a hand as if to feel his brow, and he flinched to avoid her touch.

“I have a bad stomach,” he said, trying to cover his alarm. “Is there a bathroom I can use?”

“Not down here. Why don’t you use the one in my apartment?”

“Thanks.” He hesitated. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time,” she said. “I want you to be sure.”

“What do you mean?”

She adopted a concerned expression, but her voice had a sarcastic lilt. “Your stomach. I want you to be sure it’s all right.”

He walked away, forcing himself to keep a measured pace, and was almost at the door when she called out, “I’ll be waiting!”

Again he hesitated, uncertain what would happen when he stepped through the door. The giant made a ghastly noise, half a shriek, half a grunt, as if straining against some internal agony. Aida stood close by its face, threatening to touch it. Sweat blurred Hugo’s vision, and for a moment she looked like a thin black spike driven into the stone.

“Hurry!” she cried. “The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll come back to me.”

Of his escape Hugo recalls very little, only that the two men were no longer guarding the stairs and that the streets of Barrio Tepito, into which he fled, were packed and filled with demented noise and fractured light and the smells of frying meat, and that while making his way through the crowds, he was shoved against something hard and glanced up to discover it was a statue of Santa Muerte bolted to the sidewalk, her skull face shrouded in an indigo robe—he was trapped in a rough embrace between her scythe and her bony fingers clutching the earth’s blue globe. For months thereafter he tried to slip back into his old habits, but he was unable to deploy the nets of faith and logic that had sustained that life. When photographing the dead, he saw Aida Chavez in every crowd of onlookers, in every group of mourners, in the shadowy depths of police vans and the hotly lit interiors of EMT vehicles. He recognized her postures and attitudes in the vacant faces and akimbo limbs of his subjects. He lost his taste for taking pictures of mutilated corpses; he had seen death made into life and the bodies were merely life made into death, a poor substitute. She was remorseless and cruel, so fearsome that even God trembled before her, but he could no longer deny his attraction to her, an attraction that had always been visible to others (though not to him) in his work.

Nowadays he dreams of returning to the mansion in Tepito and he anticipates the rite of communion, sipping the giant’s hot blood, marveling at the apocalyptic images on the magical TV, and debating the character of Aida’s destiny with the other suitors in her anteroom, not because these things have significance, but because their flavors accent the consummation he yearns for, the time he will share with her. It’s not so much fear that keeps him from returning. What is there to fear, after all? He understands that he has failed at living (as do all men), his days have been empty, his promise unfulfilled, and only in her arms will he learn whether or not his existence has meaning. No, it’s rather that he has yet to reach the point where life tips over into death, where the need for what she offers (be it surcease or something more graspable) outweighs everything else. He tells himself that once she is free of her doubts, the last of his restraints will dissolve and he will come to her like a young man on his wedding night, eager to penetrate the secrets of the woman for whom he has waited his entire life, a woman who rouses in him a passion like none other. Each morning and evening he kneels before a statuette of Santa Muerte that he purchased in the Sonora witches’ market and has been drenched in ritual perfumes and spices. Above it is pinned a photograph of Aida naked on her sofa, gazing into the camera with an insensate look, as if she has been struck dead, with her eyes half lidded and lips parted, fingering the folds of flesh between her legs. Each tendon string, every ligament, is taut and articulated. Her erect nipples cast more of a shadow than do her breasts. And yet she is beautiful. He lights red candles and spits rum on the flames and smokes part of a Faros cigarette, the brand she favors, before leaving it burning at her feet, and he offers up a prayer.

“Beloved Death,” he will begin. “Be swift in your deliberations and open yourself to me, for I would be your consort and companion.”

He will likely falter, then—he has never been a religious man and he’s embarrassed to see himself this way—but he fights through the moment, pressing his forehead to the base of the statuette, allowing the coolness of the stone to pervade and calm him as though it were her potent calmness, her coolness that flowed into his skull, so that when he continues it’s with an infirm voice, the voice of a lover overwhelmed and exhausted by passion, saying, “I await your summons, yet not patiently, for with each passing hour my desire grows.”