I didn’t go to the police what I had uncovered was, in the first place, beyond comprehension, and the second place, of such a nature as to implicate me, especially since no rational explanation could begin to account for this horror. To make matters worse, my discovery involved missing children, a subject so fraught with powerful emotions that the possibility, or I should say probability, of hysteria and mob violence would have focused on me. I had no wish to be a lightning rod for the frustration, however understandable, of the grieving parents and, less understandable, of the bloodthirsty media. Politicians would have seen their opportunity to satisfy the cries for justice, which would in reality have been expressions of fear.

          I also had no wish to disappear into the state’s maze of secret prisons and mental asylums. Thus, I await our common fate, or doom, as a free man, burdened though I am by a special knowledge, like that which passed between Job and Yahweh when Job saw God’s mask slip.

          I have never had children, perhaps because I didn’t want to bring innocents into this ever more terrifying world, or perhaps more simply and honestly, because I can’t tolerate the tremendous, incessant noise they generate. I know it is normal for children to screech and cry and yell, but I cannot stand it. In any event, I prefer unclehood, visiting and playing in small doses with my three sisters’ many children. Part of the ritual of Tio Roberto’s visits was a toy, something unusual and original, for each nephew and niece. In retrospect, that the life-changing secret I uncovered should have begun with a visit to a toy store is the blackest of black humor.

          As soon as I saw the toy I had to have it: a kind of “hologram projector”, with a child’s face painted in the bright colors of a Russian babushka doll. It came with no further explanation or instructions; it was on sale and labeled “as is”. But it was considerably bigger than the outermost babushka of a Russian doll, round and very solid. I thought it might withstand my nephews’ and nieces’ best efforts, possibly a day or two, to destroy it. But what attracted me were the eyes, brown, curious and sad, sad as only can be the eyes of child soldiers or denizens of sprawling barrios and favelas. They bore into me, reading my thoughts and emotions. It was as if I were being taken on a tour of my unconscious, with all its archaic drives and supreme self-centeredness, my animal nature that moved through forests and across mountain slopes with creeping glaciers, a hungry predator, yet myself hunted. This was one of those toys, as happened from time to time, that I would keep for myself.

          I don’t know how long I stared into those eyes, but the spell was only broken when the public address system blared some annoying and overloud announcement about a special on bicycles. I saw other shoppers, parents and aunts and grandparents, occasionally take one of the “hologram projectors” from the shelf, smile and toss it into their shopping carts. No one saw what I saw, and what I saw was not fit for any child. I bought it, not daring to look at the row of the others staring into space from the shelf. I heard the bar code reader beep, and heard further beeps of approval as I waved my credit card over yet another reader. I was relieved when the cashier placed it in an opaque plastic bag and I could no longer see the eyes. Crossing the inferno of the parking lot to my car, I felt there was a sleeping animal in the bag.

Having appropriated this disturbing toy for myself, I drove straight to my office at La Prensa, the largest newspaper and magazine publisher in the city. I call myself a journalist, but since many topics here in Ciudad Juárez are off-limits, I chose to specialize in evaluating consumer products, everything from kitchen gadgets to dishwashers, spot-removers to miracle tonics, and even toys. Many of my colleagues have fled to the United States or have vanished, sometimes their mutilated bodies with hands and feet bound with duct tape found dumped in some industrial wasteland or in a drainage ditch along a highway. Their crime was to pry into, or sometimes just to stray into, the scene of the countless murders that form the throbbing background noise of our city, the outpost of a growing reality that will dominate our new century. These journalists, still believing in justice, included some details or speculation beyond the unwritten but well-understood guidelines: report only about the name, age and occupation, if known, of the victim, the location of the body, and a detailed, if useless, inventory of the shell casings, their number and calibers, and the statement that there were no witnesses. So far, no reporter writing about consumer products has been shot or disappeared.

          My office is well equipped with tools of all sorts  bought at my own expense  with which I test and take apart, but rarely reassemble, appliances. I took a heavy framing hammer to the toy, but the blows bounced off as I had been hitting a trampoline. Next I fitted a power drill with a bit used to bore through steel. The bit merely skated over the surface, failing to take hold anywhere. Neither toll made the slightest crack or scratch. I could find no seam, even with a magnifying glass or a strong light, that marked how the casing had been constructed. Perhaps it was molded in a liquid that hardened.

          Why was it so heavy  nearly four kilos according to my digital scale? I tried an electric saw, the type used to cut chains and metal beams. The saw blade found no purchase; in fact, the blade lost teeth. Again, no evidence the casing had ever been touched.

          I placed the toy in a large vice and began tightening the screw. Here I must admit I became quite squeamish, as if I were squeezing a living thing. I could not tighten the vice any further with my bare hands, so I fitted a pipe over the handle, but even with this increased leverage I could see the vice would strip its threads before causing any deformation to the toy. I thought of those crystal skulls found in an Aztec site that, according to some sources, have so far resisted hydraulic presses, drills and furnaces. They were described in a book of unsolved mysteries written by Arthur C. Clarke, father of the communications satellite and science fiction writer, with a strong interest in the unexplained.

          I moved the toy from the workbench to the center of my desk, stared back at its penetrating eyes, then, perplexed and fatigued, turned my gaze out the window to the desert and the sierra in the distance. I heard a click and turned just in time to see the clear casing split apart. A hologram showed me, in living color, pounding, drilling, sawing and compressing the toy. Then the projection ceased. The hologram just materialized, without any obvious lens or projector lamp. I wondered if this information had been broadcast somewhere. But to whom, and for what purpose?

          The casing showed no signs of snapping shut, but as a precaution I placed a thick paperback dictionary between the open hemispheres.

          Now that the casing was open I saw that those penetrating, sad eyes were part of a boy’s face. The rest of the head was still covered in a hard material, with only the face exposed. I touched the surface of the face. It felt like living tissue, but not warm. I could not scream  my breathing ceased, my vocal cords froze. I jerked my hand back. The eyes followed my every move.

          Near the top of the forehead I felt the bristles of thick black hair, such as Indian children have. The bright markings of the doll’s face were on the casing. The boy’s skin was not painted.

          I was horrified at the pain I must have inflicted on this boy, but no expression whatever crossed his face. I was sure it was a boy because of a certain leanness to his face.

          I reached for my digital camera, took a close-up photo  again the eyes did not blink  and connected the camera to my computer. I uploaded the photo a website the federal government had set up for missing children. I guessed his age was not more than five, and the computer compared this photo with those of male children that had disappeared in the last two years.

          Within thirty seconds there was a match: Arturo Sandoval, age five, born in the state of Sonora on August 28^th, 2005, to a single mother who moved to Juárez in 2008 to work in a maquiladora. Both mother and son disappeared on Sunday, just six months ago. They had entered a small pine forest in a park and never reappeared. She had taken the boy into the trees to relieve himself. No next of kin. The mother was only 19. Father unknown.

          This could not be happening, I thought. On this day that started like any other, better than others in fact, for I was anticipating the joy my nieces and nephews would have when they saw the packages from the toy store. And in the most innocent of settings, a toy store with its brightness and silly sounds, its wide-eyed children and harried parents, I discover a child’s severed, yet living, head. The child’s brain was somehow kept alive so that its senses could be exploited.

          But there was the boy’s head, little Arturo who would have been better never to have been born, an undeniable artifact resting on the center of my desk. My mind over and over fled into denial, but when my gaze returned to that boy’s face I knew there could be no avoiding a new reality that would change my life forever. Were there others who had discovered this horror, and if so how could I contact them, and whom could I trust?

          I shivered at the thought of the heads lining the shelves at the toy store. Were they all human heads, or just this one?

          The image of the skull racks in Mexico City came to mind: skulls of human sacrificial victims like beads on horizontal poles, row upon row. Would Mexico ever escape its Aztec past?

          I draped a cloth over Arturo’s head. He deserved a decent burial. If he were still sentient I would be burying him alive. To give him a burial I would have to kill him. Perhaps his fate was like that of a normal mind living inside a body paralyzed from the neck down.

          Everywhere my thoughts turned another horror revealed itself.

          Anything is possible in this lawless city. Money can buy anything. I found myself planning to acquire an electroencephalograph. That would be the only sure way of determining whether Arturo was, by some medical definition, still alive.

          I phoned an amiable doctor who made a good living providing medical treatment for Americans at a fraction of the cost north of the border. Not only would he lend me the machine, but he would interpret the results. He asked no questions.

          It was a grisly business. The head showed no signs of decomposition, so I locked it, covered with the cloth, in the large bottom drawer of my desk while I went away to fetch the machine.

          The sun illuminated every molecule of the atmosphere. The particles of dust suspended in the air spun, giving off flashes of light like the mirrored balls in a disco. Boys sold newspapers wherever there was a traffic light, occasionally slipping an envelope or plastic tube into the folded paper, and receiving a tightly wadded pack of bills in return. Waitresses greeted customers behind the hand-painted restaurant windows, and the comforting smell of frying onions and chilies hung in clouds about the open doors of the kitchens. School children in blue jackets and white shirts or blue dresses and white blouses swung their book bags and ran circles around each other, shouting all the while. The desert, as it always did, held an emptiness that threatened to swallow our souls, and beyond, at the edge of the known world, the sierra hid its Indian pueblos and gazed from its peak upon a vast sea invisible to us. Contrails silently flowed from planes immensely remote, the only sign that hundreds of people were bypassing our homeland, heading God knows where, the very image of human loneliness, just as our planet must appear as its weeps across space. In all this ordinariness and seeming permanence I drove toward a mystery whose implications had changed my life as I could never have imagined. How relieved I would have been to awaken from this nightmare.

          Money changed hands, no curiosity was evinced, and I parked by the loading dock of the newspaper, and wheeled the EEG toward the back door of my office.

          The head was undisturbed and covered in the locked drawer. I attached electrodes to the forehead, the only part of the head that was exposed. I turned on the machine.

          At first the graph showed only a flat line, but as soon as I lifted the cloth, jagged lines started racing across the paper. I held a stopwatch in front of the eyes and the eyes tracked the second hand, and the watch itself as I moved it across Arturo’s field of vision. I played a CD recording of a Bach suite for cello, and again new patterns of squiggles appeared on the moving paper. At no time did the expression change or did the mouth move to form words. When I touched Arturo’s skin the lines went flat.

          Thirty seconds later a hologram appeared, faithfully representing in three dimensions the experiments that I had just been conducting. The excited lines on the paper the ceased, and I covered the head.

          I tore off the paper, rolled it up neatly, and wheeled the machine back to my car.

          I told the doctor that these data came from only two electrodes attached to the forehead.

          He unrolled the paper across his desk and took out a clear plastic ruler marked in centimeters. He took notes, made noises of surprise now and then, and ended by putting down his pen and ruler and shaking his head. He took out a cigarette, lit it and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

          “You’ve told me an MRI is not feasible in this case. The two senses of sight and sound are intact, but there is no way of knowing if any processing of this input is going on. It looks like a medically induced coma, but with these two senses deliberately left functioning.”

          He blew a smoke ring and held his cigarette off to the side, he smiled and said, “But why would anyone do that?”

          I knew what he meant. Both of us were aware of cases in which people had been kept alive for days  with a physician’s help  while being tortured with fire and mutilation. Anything was possible in Juárez, or more exactly, any human cruelty had a precedent here.

          “In any event,” he said, looking at the expanding smoke ring, “this person is medically brain dead.”

          I thanked him and left with the roll of paper.

          The head faithfully projected a holographic record of whatever it had seen and heard. But why this gruesome method? After all, cameras, microphones and transmitters were getting better, smaller and cheaper every day. Whoever did this took precautions not to be discovered. If the casing hadn’t split open my nieces and nephews would be merrily playing with a human head.

          The technology involved was impressive: the nearly impenetrable casing, the ability to preserve the head from decay and to confine brain functioning within precise limits, and then there was the hologram. Was I missing something? I had been assuming this exercise had a purpose. But maybe it was pure madness, the experiments of Dr. Moreau on his remote island, or like the insane torture-experiments of the Nazi doctors in the death camps.

          The actual world looked inviolable in its ordinariness, yet subtly different, forever changed, as when an adult revisits after an absence of decades the neighborhoods of his childhood, where many houses, buildings and streets are the same, but businesses have changed hands or their merchandise is different, everyone is greyer and others have vanished. The church bell still tolls the hours, but the church itself is mostly empty, even at Sunday mass. I kept wanting to return, so to speak, to an unspoiled neighbourhood of my youth, and each time the reality of Arturo’s head brought me back to a menacing present.

          At the toy store I identified myself as the writer of our paper’s consumer section, and on the strength of this asked for the name of the supplier of that hideous object. I was given the name of a trucking firm that handled this particular shipment. No one showed the slightest hesitancy or curiosity in passing on this information.

          At the trucking company, which amounted to a large garage for their fleet of white, unmarked vans and small delivery trucks, plus a few gas pumps, I was given the manufacturer’s address.

          “In fact,” a driver told me, “we’re picking up a consignment tonight.”

          “Mind if I tag along?”

          He was about to object, but the bills I put in his hand removed all obstacles.

          “Bueno. Meet me here around eight. In a way I’m glad you’re coming with me  that place gives me the creeps.”

          “OK, but I’ll follow you in my car till we get near the plant and I’ll drive in with you.”

          He cocked an eyebrow at this, but whatever his thoughts were he kept them to himself.

          “You’re that newspaper guy, aren’t you, the one who writes about consumer products? I often wondered how you managed to be so honest and yet hang on to your job.”

          It’s like everything in Mexico: it looks like a modern state, but just under the surface it’s something much different. Those in power don’t much care what you say  nothing will change.”

          He smiled and crushed his cigarette butt with his heavy work shoe, just a few meters from the gas pumps.

          “Beats me why people have children,” was his only comment.

          I had purposely bought a good quality black car with tinted windows, in the hope I would blend in with the others of its type that cruise Juárez day and night, like the old “black Mariahs” of the NKVD in Stalin’s Russia, trolling for victims. They are filled with heavily armed young men with short hair and wearing black clothes, almost a uniform, and carrying rolls of duct tape. Sometimes the vehicle is an expensive black SUV. People disappear into them, perhaps found years later in a so-called “death house”, where dozens of bodies are found buried in the backyard. Sometimes the men emerge from the cars and discharge machine guns and handguns, shooting dead a father in front of his children, or a restaurant owner crossing the street, or an old man on a bicycle.

          I followed the truck, flashed my lights to signal him to stop, and left my car in an unlit area next to a warehouse.

          “I don’t even feel like listening to music on the radio when I come here. It would be like playing pop music in a cemetery.”

          I saw what he meant. The factory was utterly nondescript: a white concrete block building of one storey, surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with razor wire. Powerful lights illuminated the land between the fence and the factory, as if it were a prison yard. The only door was at the loading dock. I thought of the doorless tower in which the witch imprisoned Rapunzel.

          A large number of high-tension transmission wires ran into a walled-off transformer. The only sound was the buzz emanating from this small compound. Not one scrap of paper, not one plastic bag, not one aluminium can or old beer bottle marred the pristine grounds.

          The driver stopped at the fence and unlocked the gate with a key.

          “Who gave you the key?”

          “It arrived one day by messenger.”

          I helped the driver unload the boxes onto the dock and move them into a storage room.         

          When we finished I told the driver to leave without me.

          “Just leave the gate unlocked. I’ll snap it shut when I leave.”

          “You got cojones, amigo.”

          He drove away, stopping only to close the gate. I watched his tail lights disappear into the desolate landscape of industrial buildings fringed with desert.

          As I stood in the storeroom wondering what to do next, doors clicked open and a robotic fork lift gathered up the stacks of boxes. I slipped past and found myself in a brilliantly lit assembly plant that was sealed off on all sides by walls of thick glass. The only color was a blue trim that ran along the bottom and top of the corridors.

          A robot was placing unconscious children on metal reclining chairs that resembled those in a dentist’s office. They were strapped in. the robot inserted intravenous lines into the sun-darkened arms. The arms were thin and frail. Fluids gurgled through the lines attached to a pump.

          All at once the chairs tilted back with the heads resting in a trough. The children stared, some of them blinking at the bright ceiling lights. An electric saw ran the length of the trough in a flash, decapitating the children. There was very little blood.

          I vomited and retched until I thought I would turn myself inside out. I wept. I pounded on the glass window. I knelt in the stench of my own vomit. I wished I were dead. My legs were shaking violently. I could barely find my feet.

          I stood trembling, trying to refasten the lock on the gate. I had no memory of how I had gotten that far. I ran weeping, my face awash in tears and snot, my ears hearing sounds like howls and whimpering that I slowly realized were coming from my throat. I was watching myself as I floating numbly above my staggering body.

          Only the desperation to flee overcame my shaking hands enough to allow me to insert the key into the ignition.

          As I sped away I repeated, “Slow down! Don’t wreck the car!”

          Never did my home seem so welcome. I stood under the shower until the hot water gave out. I wanted to burn the clothes I had worn. I dressed all in white.

          I drank water, for I was greatly dehydrated. My heart was hammering in my chest and I waited for it to burst.

          All the torture and slaughter in Juárez paled in comparison to what I had seen that night.

          While my body shivered uncontrollably, my mind, working in some isolated chamber, began asking questions.

          Who in God’s name handles all the paperwork required to keep this factory running: who pays the taxes, who holds the deed, who controls the bank accounts?

          I did not sleep so much as dozed intermittently as I awaited the dawn.

          No one broke down the door to kill me. I knew there must be video surveillance in such a high-tech establishment. Whoever was watching saw me clearly. I could be quickly identified and tracked down. This whole enterprise seemed to be conducted by remote control. How remote? from a place here on earth with a certain longitude and latitude? Or from Andromeda?

          Breakfast was out of the question. At nine o’clock I was already filling out request forms for whatever public records that were available on the human slaughterhouse I had seen firsthand last night. The owner was a company with a bland title, Star Holdings. Revenues were reported and taxes duly paid.

          The only common thread was a lawyer, Tlaloc Ochoa, whose first name, following the recent trend for Aztec names, indicated he must be a young man. He had signed all the deeds and financial papers, and even arranged the insurance policies. He was also listed as the owner of this private company.

          I drove to the address printed below his signature. His office was on the second, and top, floor of a modest but new building for doctors, dentists and other professionals, in a colonia of expanding housing developments for successful young couples. The cars in the parking lot were expensive models. It was a different world here, a new beginning consciously dissociating itself from the chaos and mayhem of Juárez proper.

          A carpeted staircase led to the second floor. The office was at the end, at the back of the building away from the street noise.

          The door, which was of an expensive hardwood meant to instil confidence, was ajar. No voices came from inside. I knocked and asked for permission to enter. More silence. Someone in an adjoining office yawned.

          I pushed the door open, apologetically, but my apology died on my lips, and no doubt something else in me died.

          Sitting with a straight back in an ergonomic chair, in his dark suit and dark tie was Tlaloc Ochoa. Before him were neat piles of legal documents. He was signing them with an impressive gold fountain pen. But he had no head.

          “Inured” is too strong a word to use, but I was less terrified and considerably more intrigued than I had been last night. Where his head should have been was a stainless steel plate from which sprouted tubes and wires. Through a vent in the plate air was rushing in and out in regular bursts.

          My first thought was that I had interrupted someone, or something, in the act of removing a robotic head, and that this someone or something would be returning any moment.

          I listened to his heart beating. I watched the wrist of his writing hand move. His other hand put the legal forms in just the right place for his signature.

          I went back and closed the heavy door and sat down.

          Here was a human being kept alive, physiologically in terms of circulation and respiration, but somehow commanded to follow a program of activities, yet without a brain.

          I looked in the desk drawers and cabinets for the head. There were no traces in the room that any work had ever been carried out  no tools, no cut pieces of wire, no drops of blood.

          How long ago had his head been removed? Why would the door be left ajar? Was I being shown this for some reason? A threat that I would be next?

          The burden of this secret is crushing me. Juárez is a city in which a voice announces over the police radio the names of the policemen who are scheduled for execution. One by one the officers are killed or disappeared. Sometimes the list is attached to the monument to fallen officers. The police are afraid to leave their stations and go on patrol. The state police and the federal police contain many killers, rapists and torturers, but everyone is afraid of the army. Since they have arrived in Juárez the killings have increased dramatically. The army, in a quiet coup d’état, now dictates to the president and the congress. They are present in every state. Thus, there is no institution of government I can turn to. To be questioned is to be beaten and tortured, possibly killed. Perhaps if my discovery had taken place north of the border some genuine investigation would be undertaken. Scientists and forensic experts would examine the plant, the heads, the headless man. Maybe that is why Juárez was chosen for these gruesome experiments. But experiments preparatory to what?

          Today and tomorrow and into the foreseeable future children will disappear and no one will make more than perfunctory efforts to find them. I can do nothing to stop it.

          Just several kilometers from where I am writing this, the factory continues to carry out its atrocities. I thought of dynamiting the transformer, but it would only be repaired and the unspeakable manufacture would resume.

          I can run away to a remote region, to an island perhaps, to live out my life with this secret. No matter where I go they can find me. If they have the technology I have seen, they can eliminate me, or worse, anytime they wish.

          Yet I cannot stay here testing and reviewing consumer products. What I have witnessed intrudes into my every thought. I know I am not delusional or schizophrenic. I know that what I saw is horrible and inhumane. Its very pointlessness  at least as far as I can see  makes it even more terrifying. If the intelligence behind these atrocities is extraterrestrial, then their motives may be incomprehensible, possibly a minor part of some greater project. I don’t know what to expect because every norm of common sense and rationality has been shattered. What rules are they playing by?

          At least one small mystery was solved: how the bodies of the children were disposed of. In the lawyer’s office I found receipts for two industrial microwave ovens. In Japan in the 1980s and 1990s the Aum Shinrikyo cult became increasingly fanatical. Members who tried to escape or tell the outside world about conditions within the cult were murdered and their bodies incinerated in industrial microwave ovens. All that remained, the bones, were crushed and strewn on the road that connected the highway with the cult residences. Those who did not know the origin of this “gravel” drove or walked over it, suspecting nothing. Those who did know walked on it in terror.

Milan

June 22^nd, 2010

© Robert L. Fisher, 2010