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  It wasn’t so easy to know what to do with Paco’s request. I could tell he was a criminal, given the look of the guards and his threat to kill me. I could tell—since he was trying to change his appearance, completely—he was trying to run away from the law. I could tell that if he was a narco, which was the most likely explanation for his behavior, he’d probably killed dozens of people climbing to his position as a boss. I had no idea he was the Lord of the Heavens. I would find that out only later. But he had a presence, a way of commanding, that let me know he was a big shot who would fully be willing to kill me, and others.

  By the Hippocratic oath, if I helped him change his appearance to run away from the law, then wasn’t I becoming complicit in his crimes and in his harm to others? Performing the surgery would break the rule and put the blood of his hands indirectly on mine.

  And if I didn’t stand up to him, wouldn’t I just be placing my life above others? Wouldn’t I be saying, in effect, that my life was worth more than the many lives of the people he’d undoubtedly killed, and would kill in the future?

  At the same time, it was hard to see how performing surgery on him was really any different from doing so on any other patient coming into my clinic and asking for a change of appearance. What he chose to do with his life—whether to kill, or not—wasn’t an act I, myself, was committing. And, while it could be wrong to aid a criminal, the law of self-preservation is valid, too: sometimes it’s necessary to do harm for the greater good. My life was my life. It wasn’t worth nothing. And the more I lived, the more I might help others. It may seem impossible, but as I went through preparation for the surgery on Paco, I went through all these ideas as I scrubbed my hands and put on my surgical gloves, as I put on my clean medical scrubs, and as the assistants prepped the surgery room. Nothing was cast in stone. At any moment, I could pull out of the situation and say no.

  Paco lay on the surgery table with the LED lights focused on his face, where I would begin. I told one of my two assistants, Jaime, to administer the sedative Dormicum intravenously to begin the process of anesthesia. I told him to be careful not to give too much of the sedative. The risk was too great, otherwise, that something could happen to Paco, that his heart could stop during surgery, and the consequences of the death of a narco were obvious.

  Paco overheard the conversation, and he said to Jaime, “Give me double whatever the doctor said. I’m not going to let you torture me.”

  “The Dormicum is powerful,” I said to Paco. My other assistant, Marina, cleaned surgical instruments and placed them by my side. “If too much is administered, you could die.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Paco said. “If I die, nobody killed me. The only person who can kill the great Paco is Paco,” he said, using his real name.

  I signaled to Jaime not to listen to him, but I can’t be sure Jaime understood my signal, or whether he refused to disobey Paco, or whether he followed my instructions. Paco went under, and I began the surgery.

  We worked for eight hours. The two guards with the AK-47s came in, and they stood in corners of the room, one by the door, the other by the respirator. They’d dismissed the secretary, Veronica, and told her if she contacted anyone in the police, or told anyone, at all, what was happening, they’d go to her house and kill her.

  The shape of Paco’s nose was wide, like a fistful of lead. I narrowed his nose and shortened it, raising the tip. I opened his eyes wider and lifted his eyebrows. I reduced the widow’s peak at his hairline and pulled his skin tight around his ears, so he looked ten years younger.

  The respirator hummed, pumping into his body, but after four hours of surgery the sound paused, and I could tell the machine was somehow cut off.

  “What’s going on with the ventilator?” I asked Jaime, calmly, but extremely firmly.

  “I’m not sure,” Jaime said, and he checked the machine. An electrical outlet was near one of the guards, and Jaime found the machine unplugged. It was extremely strange that the machine could have become unplugged. I couldn’t help but think one of the guards had removed the plug, or had kicked it with his feet. It was bad enough I was operating on a killer, but I could no longer be certain the two guards present weren’t trying to kill Paco. What if they’d received orders to make him die during the surgery? What if they’d been bought off, by some rival narcos, to kill Paco and make it look like an accident?

  I told one of the guards to put the plug of the respirator in, and he didn’t respond. I couldn’t tell if this was because he didn’t want to hear me, or if he’d simply begun to doze off during the surgery.

  A patient can last no more than three or four minutes without the respirator before permanent brain damage sets in. I told Jaime, sharply, to plug in the respirator. He bent beneath the AK-47 of one of the guards and reached to plug it in.

  “What are you doing?” the guard said. “Are you trying to kill the jefe?” The guard seemed to snap out of his stupor. He pulled the plug out of Jaime’s hand and plugged it in himself.

  Beyond Paco asking for extra anesthetic, this was the second strange thing that had happened since the beginning of the surgery, but I decided to focus on the task at hand. I shifted the shape of the skin around Paco’s abdomen and thighs. In the eighth hour, as we neared the end of surgery, I could hear the vital sign of his heart slowing. I asked Marina to check if the intravenous tube with the Dormicum was dripping at the appropriate flow rate. She said the drip chamber was open a little wide, and I told her to cut off administration of the fluid. The heartbeat slowed further. It flatlined. With his face in bandages, Paco closed his mouth and eyes, pushing against the clamps that held them open in their proper place. He looked like a phantom, up at me. I ordered Jaime to administer Flumazenil as an antagonist drug to counteract the effect of the Dormicum. I considered defibrillation to revitalize normal heart functioning.

  “What’s happening?” the guard near the door said.

  “His heart has stopped, temporarily,” I said. “We’ll get it going again soon.” I shouted this last bit between teeth as an order to Jaime to prepare the defibrillator.

  “No one kills the jefe,” the guard by the door said. “Only the jefe can kill himself.” His heart wouldn’t revive, and the guard by the door took a nearby pillow and placed it over the face of Paco and pressed the pillow into his face. The guard seemed to act to kill Paco, to suffocate him, though the patient was already dead.

  “The jefe told me that if he was suffering I had to put the pillow on him to keep the pain out,” the guard said.

  I’ve been a surgeon for thirteen years, and I couldn’t make any sense of all these strange actions. Had Paco been trying to kill himself when he asked for the extra Dormicum, and when he ordered the guards to put a pillow on his face? Was he constructing an elaborate suicide, to end his life but without disgrace? Had the guards tried to kill Paco in the pay of another, rival group of narcos? Had I failed, completely, to oversee the operation correctly? And was I responsible for his death? The only thing I knew was that Paco was definitely dead, and what it meant for me, I wasn’t sure.

  —

  The disposal of the body was fast. I didn’t have any say in the matter. The two guards took out a camera and took photos of Paco lying on the surgery table, his body already losing whatever pallor he’d had. It seemed an odd trophy shot, almost like the photos of Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein minutes after they were killed. There’s something about the final photo of major tyrants—grainy, fuzzy, and stark—which reminds people, when it comes out in the tabloids, that they committed horrible crimes when they were alive. The guards’ photography might imply they were truly on the payroll of other narcos, but there was no smiling, no cheering, as they took these shots. Nor was there any crying, nor wrenching of hair, which would show deep loyalty to the Lord of the Heavens. They stayed as neutral as the mirrors on their sunglasses, as professional as hired hit men, pulling out a body bag that they wrapped Paco up in, after they documented he was dead.

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sp; As quickly as they’d come, more than ten hours ago, they disappeared.

  In some crazy way, the ease with which his body was disposed of, the fact all traces of him were gone—minus pieces of tiny flesh and blood that stuck to the scalpels and other surgical instruments—relieved me. It was like a nightmare that was over, and now I could awake.

  But just like a nightmare, which never quite leaves the sleeper alone as they stay up, walking around in the middle of the night, Paco’s sudden appearance and disappearance wasn’t so easily sewn up.

  I decided there was no way I could sleep in my apartment the night of the surgery. I debated whether I should call the police, but for the same reason I’d performed the surgery to begin with—a desire to live—I decided this avenue was impossible. I decided to keep everything hushed up, to say nothing, and I made Jaime and Marina swear they, too, would say nothing.

  I went to my girlfriend’s apartment. She’s forty, and I’m forty-two. She’s a Mexican banker, and she often works late hours. She has a reputation, in her office, for being a tough boss. She directs a group of twenty beneath her, in the bond department. My girlfriend is shapely, her breasts are large, she wears high heels, and she has a high voice, all stereotypically feminine, but these outwardly soft signs mask that she’s a perfectionist who needs things done her way. When I came into her apartment, she’d just returned from work, and it was ten at night.

  We often barely said hello to each other, when I came over to her place. If she came in from work first, she was likely to give me a peck on the cheek. If I came in first, I was likely to say a big hello, but then to disappear to take a shower before saying more. I couldn’t tell her right away, therefore, what had happened during my day. I thought if I told her she might get scared and insist I call the cops. Or, I thought, she might suddenly worry about her own safety. I wanted everything to be normal, for everything that had happened that day to disappear.

  We’d been going out for three years, sometimes breaking apart then getting back together. It was hard for either of us to know what we wanted. I’d take off for Seattle for a couple months, and she wouldn’t come with me, or she’d go off to Turkey and not even tell me she was on vacation. We revolved like two atoms in the depths of outer space, attached but with barely enough energy to stay together, without the necessary warmth from the sun.

  A week ago, I’d told her I wanted to have a baby. I admit the idea must have seemed like it came from out of nowhere. I told her this because my father had died a couple months before; my sister was in the process of divorcing; I felt everything in my life pulling apart, and I wanted something to come together. I wanted love—a love I seemed incapable of sparking in my girlfriend. She told me, immediately, she didn’t want a child. She told me she didn’t want to break up, but that she didn’t know what she wanted next.

  So I told her nothing about my day, as I came in. I slept in the bed beside her, feeling the space between us, wanting to come closer, but feeling her repelling me.

  —

  The next day, the police came to my clinic. They asked if Jaime and Marina worked for me. In an odd way, I was glad the police came, because neither of my assistants had come into work, and I was worried about what had happened to them.

  “Do you know these people?” a police officer said, showing a photo of Jaime and Marina, their heads sticking out of two steel drums filled with concrete. Their faces were puffy with lacerations on their cheeks, as if they’d been tortured. “We found their bodies in the main pond of Chapultepec Park,” the police officer said. “Do you have any idea why they might have been killed?”

  I decided I couldn’t screw around anymore, hiding what had happened the day before. I told the police exactly what had happened. They thanked me for my time and told me they might need to take me in for further questioning, but at the moment I wasn’t under suspicion for the murder of my two assistants. They told me a full investigation would be made of the surgery I’d performed on Paco, that any evidence of negligence during the operation would be looked into, and that I’d remain under surveillance. They told me I wasn’t permitted to leave the country.

  The DEA came an hour later and did further questioning, informing me who Paco was and that they’d been on his trail, coming in closer and closer, the last two weeks. “Don’t worry,” one of the agents said. “We know you don’t have any ties to Paco. We’ll do what we can to get the local police off your case. The embassy has been informed of your situation.”

  The embassy may have been informed of my situation, but the question was, what was my situation? Was there someone out there who would be trying to hunt me down, as they had so quickly hunted Jaime and Marina? I told the DEA I wanted immediate protection. I told them I needed someone to be with me all the time, protecting me. I told them I wanted out of the country, fast.

  “No can do about getting you out of the country fast,” one of the DEA officers said, “but we promise to put someone on duty to watch what happens to you. We’ll make sure nothing crazy happens. It has all the signs of an inside job—the guards wanted to get him. I don’t think they’ll have any interest in you.”

  “Then why’d they kill Jaime and Marina?” I said.

  “Perhaps because they tried to talk about what happened. You did the right thing keeping silent. As long as you stay quiet, you should be fine.”

  —

  Three days later, the news was in all the tabloids. I went with my girlfriend to the Parque Lincoln, near her apartment, to take her golden retriever for a walk. I’d canceled all my appointments. I’d closed the clinic. It was seven at night, late July, in the rainy season, and the sky was overcast. We walked through the park, and as I threw the ball, and as her dog, Maya, returned the ball faithfully, dropping it at my feet, I thought this was all I’d ever really wanted, the simple order of throwing a ball and having a dog bring it back, wagging its tail, showing the love and affection between a pet and its master. I’d never been able to have that kind of clarity in my personal life. I’d been married, briefly, to a woman in Seattle, and then divorced. I had few friends in Mexico City, but I’d been in the city ten years. Life was nothing like paddling hard from one end of a long bay, efficiently, to the other. It was nothing like throwing a ball and having a dog bring it back.

  After a while of me throwing the ball, my girlfriend went up to Maya and took the ball from her. She told Maya to bring it to her, instead of to me. “He’s not your daddy,” she said. “I’m your mother, bring the ball to me.” It seemed a cruel dig at my request, the other day, to have a child with her. She was saying I wasn’t a parent; that she was the only parent.

  I knew I was being sensitive, and potentially reading too much into everything, but I didn’t want to play with Maya anymore.

  Across the park, in front of a large birdcage a couple stories high, I was positive I could see a man who looked just like Jaime, even though he was dead. I told my girlfriend I’d be right back. I told her to please be patient but that I had to run across the park. I still hadn’t told her what had happened to me, the other day.

  I rushed across the park to where the man stood in front of the birdcage, wearing the same shirt as Jaime. I went up close and said, “Hey, Jaime!”

  The man turned around, completely different from Jaime. It was a father holding a bag of peanuts, and his son came running around the base of the cage, laughing and shouting at the birds inside.

  The boy’s screams attracted a peacock inside the cage, resplendent in all the turquoise and blue that nature can conjure up to impress. The bird came toward the boy, the father, and me and opened its wide feathers, forming a big fan, so wondrous it stunned us all into silence. The pattern on the tail of the peacock looked like a thousand eyes staring at me, judging me. The bird shook its tail, and the eyes waved back and forth, evaluating me.

  And it was then that I knew what I had to do. I ran back across the park toward my girlfriend. She was still holding the ball in her hand. She’d stopped throwin
g the ball at Maya. She seemed to watch me run back from the cage.

  “I know I’ve been cold and silent the last few days,” I said, when I got to her, panting a bit from the run, though feeling invigorated from the dash. “A few days ago, an unknown man came into my clinic, a narco, and he asked me to completely change his body. I did my best to do what he wanted. He died during surgery, and now I feel I’m being hunted. I don’t know if I’m safe.”

  “Really? What a horrible, crazy thing,” she said. “You should have told me,” she said, softly. “Come here. Let me give you a hug.” She came close and pressed her large breasts against my chest. It was the first warmth I’d felt in days, maybe even in months and years. I wasn’t sure if things would be better between us, for the long run. I wasn’t sure if everything would work out with the police. I could see a DEA agent in the distance, watching us, keeping us safe. I could feel her warm chest pressing into mine, feeling wider than the menacing tail of the peacock, and though Jaime and Marina were dead, filling me with confusion and mourning, for a second, wrapped in the arms of my girlfriend, I was the happiest I’d been in ages.

  THE SHARPSHOOTER

  I had been down in Mexico City for two years, working with the DEA and CIA on covert activities to break up drug production and smuggling, when my buddy Charlie was shot. Charlie looked as young as I did, twenty-four, hair buzzed short, much taller than me, and a crack sharpshooter, just like me. Growing up, you would not have expected me to be some kind of crack sharpshooting hero-to-be, because I had dyslexia. I struggled to read at a fast enough pace to pass basic tests. But, through willpower, I learned you can do just about anything you put your mind to—including graduating from college with ROTC.

  Before I came down to Mexico, I remember signing up for a class at Wichita State University. It was a class I really wanted to take, on contemporary American literature, but two weeks into the course I got orders from my superior officer that I was going to have weekly training at the same time as the class, and that I had to give it up. I was pissed off, for a second, that the commander on base hadn’t thought enough to give us the schedule for training before the classes at the U. began, but orders are orders. I wanted to do what I was told—I had grown up without much money—and I wanted to get a college education, to progress with my life. If they had told me to walk backward to training, I would have done it.