Lunchtime and we head to the plaza for beans and bread. The beans are distributed in multiliter soda bottles with the tops sawed off. Everyone gets something like a liter of beans, the makeshift bowls filled up just past halfway, bread balanced on top. Some dip. Some scoop. Some slurp from the bottle and wipe their faces with the bread. In late afternoon the sun relents a bit, clouds drift in, and many of the residents disperse from the edges of the old plaza. But just as quickly Josué rounds them up, lines them up.
Time for the needles, everyone.
* * *
The metal door to the multipurpose room slams. The residents sit in plastic Office Star folding chairs, circled up, totally solemn or making silly faces. A guy wearing a hat with the logo of a billion-dollar energy-drink corporation makes farting noises. An old man in a bathrobe stands and sits and stands and sits. Gaspar is at attention. Yogi is the king of silly faces and takes down all challengers with a puff of his cheeks, a tug of both ears. Elisabeth holds her purse, crosses her legs, and flaunts her platform shoes. Smiles.
At the back of the room are three showers. A dusty plastic Christmas tree. And a pulpit in the corner, surrounded by homemade TV lights, fluorescent bulbs and lots of aluminum foil. El Pastor is sometimes a TV evangelist. And sometimes a painter. The multiple purposes of this room are meeting hall, treatment center, shower, storage, TV studio, art studio, and gallery. Many of El Pastor’s paintings hang on the walls of the asylum, including the one over Elisabeth’s right shoulder: a skeleton scratching his chin at Jesus, who sits on a heavenly throne, and at the left edge of the painting, Satan overlooks the scene, his face covered in American Stars and Stripes. The only picture on the wall that isn’t amateur art done by El Pastor or a resident is the painting above Elisabeth’s left shoulder: a Roman centurion with his sword raised for battle.
The circle is composed of thirteen men and seven women. Favela has been wheeled in over by the pulpit, out of the circle. I think we are waiting for El Pastor to administer the treatments, but he will not come. Josué and another of the healthier residents, Jesús, will do the needling. El Pastor is out directing the construction of his columns.
Josué tears open the needle packets with his teeth and his good hand. The other hand is missing three fingers from gangrene that ate at his body as he lay in the gutters of Juárez in the months before arriving at the asylum. He holds the needles in the good hand and starts with Elisabeth, tilts her head, his mangled hand on her buzzed scalp as she breathes. He breathes. He’s stocky but right now all his bulk is channeled into an unlikely delicacy as he slips the needles into the cartilage of her ear. Then the next ear. The next resident. Ear after ear. Pew pew, pew pew. I think of the Sicarii and their little daggers. I think of an alternate universe where the word sicario has its roots in the little daggers of acupuncture rather than the little daggers of assassins and the possibility that in that parallel universe there are no cartel hit men in Mexico, no twelve thousand dead, no Josué or Elisabeth at the asylum, no need for the asylum at all.
Nearly every time Josué gets the needles into another ear he looks back at me and grins. He looks to Bemis for approval, and when Josué gets the nod of assent, he flexes his biceps. He and Jesús have only been learning the needles for a month, still under the watchful eye of their teacher, Bemis. He’s training them in a protocol called NADA, just five insertion points in the outer ear, a technique used by the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association as “a no-nonsense, non-verbal, no-drug pharmaceutical free, and barrier-free approach to behavioral health.” All the negative constructions in their slogan play on the idea that nada is Spanish for “nothing.” Just ten needles in the ears. De nada. The soul will fall into place.
Jesús doesn’t quite have his needle legs under him yet. He’s clearly guessing a bit about the location of any single insertion. There is much poking and jabbing. When Jesús first arrived at the asylum, he could not stop shaking; he’d done nothing but booze for decades. The shakes have mostly passed but there’s nothing elegant in his work with the needles and he knows it. He avoids looking at Bemis and soldiers through the wincing of the face between whatever ears he’s stabbing.
From under the energy-drink hat, the farting noises start up again. But then Josué gets to the farter and sticks him with the NADA protocol. The last resident needled is Gaspar, soldier of a nation unknown. Gaspar is also the name of one of the three wise men in the novel Ben-Hur and I wonder if El Pastor is choosing residents’ names. In the novel, each wise man tells his own origin story. Gaspar is the Greek bringing frankincense to baby Jesus. The reason Gaspar gives for blindly following a twinkling star out into the Judaean Desert seems to pretty well summarize why El Pastor is out here in the Chihuahuan Desert, why I’m out here, maybe why anyone at all ends up in the asylum.
It happens that two of our philosophers, the very greatest of the many, teach, one the doctrine of a Soul in every man, and its Immortality; the other the doctrine of One God, infinitely just. From the multitude of subjects about which the schools were disputing, I separated them, as alone worth the labor of solution; for I thought there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown. On this theme the mind can reason to a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains is to stand and cry aloud for help. So I did; but no voice came to me over the wall. In despair, I tore myself from the cities.
With Gaspar the circle is complete. Forty ears. Two hundred needles. Nearly everyone is silent. Calm. Some with their eyes closed and others with the kind of distant stare that suggests contentment rather than absence. They will sit like this, quietly in a circle, all heads needled, for a half hour or more. Out in the plaza the residents are always a cacophonous organism on the brink of going totally to shit, the pacing and the shouting and hand-wringing and lounging and occasional slap or bite or corpse carried away or dragged in piecemeal by mutts, all of it feeding the whole living, breathing whirlwind of enfeebled humanity in the plaza, and if anyone stops pacing too soon or howls too soft or repeats repeats repeats himself one too many times, then the delicate balance of madness and routine shatters and the organism implodes and even the cinder-block walls all fall down. But here, for now, it is quiet. In the multipurpose room—with El Pastor’s army of insane all now brandishing their little daggers in this strange way, five needles shooting an inch out of each ear like a mad science experiment or some Hellraiser congregation or so many antennas in search of a connection—there is silence.
In the corner by the pulpit Bemis bends over Favela in her wheelchair. She gets more of the full-body treatment, needles in the ears and head and legs and feet. Bemis is a pro, effortlessly twisting the needles so deftly it’s almost like his fingers create a kind of propulsion that launches the steel into the flesh. Ah, you see, here is a different kind of steel piercing the flesh. The cartels have stocked up on AR-15s and AK-47s, some bought from the American ATF or manufactured in clandestine cartel workshops in Jalisco or Guadalajara. Steel-jacketed ammo will ruin a gun barrel, but with high-volume shooting it’s cheaper to replace barrels than it is to spend more on brass ammo—$500 cheaper per five thousand rounds—so the cartels have been saving many thousands of dollars a month littering Juárez with steel casings, firing steel-jacketed bullets that will fragment just centimeters into the flesh, the bullet often passing all the way through a body but the steel jacket fragmenting, stopping, staying in the flesh, one or two grams of steel resting inside the skin. So many of the bodies in this desert with one or two grams of steel resting in the skin. I bet that’s about the exact weight of those steel needles sticking out of Elisabeth’s ears—one or two grams of steel resting in her skin. Her leg is really shaking now. She’s tense, gripping her empty purse and her platform shoe hitting the ground, that click of rubber on tile the only sound as we sit waiting for this new steel stuck in the side of her head to fix the terror of all that other steel. And Elisabeth’s buzzed head just slightly rocking, all those needles in her ears pointing up to the
Roman centurion on the one side or tilting and pointing toward Satan in Stars and Stripes on the other side.
July 16, in the Year of Our Lord 2014
GOD IS ON YOUR SIDE says the billboard as we drive I-10 along the border toward Juárez. Today I’m headed with Bemis not to the asylum but deep into the city, to a church in south Juárez called Santa Margarita, where pastoral workers are learning the NADA acupuncture protocol along with another form of traditional Chinese medicine called moxibustion. Bemis rummages through boxes of needles in a duffel bag and pulls out some moxa, dense bricks of black, dried mugwort that’ll get burned on the flesh of a patient with particularly chronic issues. He has me sniff the moxa to get a sense of it, how it looks like pot and smells a bit like pot when it burns but it is not pot. Then he stuffs the bricks in the bag along with all the other boxes of needles. You’ve got to be careful taking this stuff across the border, Bemis yells, but the bag stays in plain view behind us. He’s yelling because we’re on the freeway and his window won’t roll up. He’s thinking about using duct tape to keep it closed, but the AC doesn’t always run good and this is a roasting summer. So the window is stuck down and he’s yelling about duct tape and he’s yelling a story heard from a friend of a friend about a student of moxibustion in Guatemala or Uganda who found a woman in labor on a jungle road and burned moxa on her belly to get the baby turned around the right way and delivered safely. These kinds of stories always crop up around the talk of traditional Chinese medicine. You’ve probably heard about patients in Shanghai undergoing open-heart surgery without anesthesia, no drugs and only acupuncture to manage the pain. They’re stories that sound too good to be true, like miracles, and you can either spend your life trying to dissect the specifics of the unbelievable account or simply accept the human need for stories that break the terrible cycle of tragedy. There’s no way to sift through the specifics of the moxa birth by yelling at Bemis over the noise of speeding along the border in his Ford clunker, so I choose to believe it. Also, I hope my little bit of faith will grow and envelop us and glue the vehicle together as we clunk, windows wide-open, through the terrible unpaved roads of some neighborhoods that only show up in the news when another corpse is found.
We cross into Juárez and I catch the yawn of a guy on the corner just as some federales speed up alongside us, the officer riding shotgun leaning out his window and getting pretty damn close to leaning right into Bemis’s window, checking out the bag he’s no doubt been alerted to by the inspector at the border crossing. Extortion is easier once you’re a few blocks into the city. Bemis has been pulled from his clunker in alleys by local police with assault rifles and gotten the shakedown for as little as the twenty bucks he keeps in his sock. He’s in his thirties, grungy with a hint of hipster, looks neither dangerous nor rich, but that doesn’t stop the shakedowns. The federales swerve in front to stop us, then grill Bemis about the bag. He responds by saying zapatos a whole bunch. I don’t know how in the world this satisfies them but it eventually does and they drive off without opening the bag, which is good because even though no money or drugs or guns were in it, there were no zapatos either and that would have been enough to ruin our day.
There is a moment I fear we might be smuggling drugs, both now and every time I’ll cross over or back with Bemis. There’s the similarity of moxa to mota. There’s the general paranoia lingering from my stonier days that I’ve left a joint in my backpack or pocket. There’s the fact that I don’t yet know Bemis all that well, met him for the first time when we went to El Pastor’s asylum. And then the big issue is that in this place—la Frontera—drugs make a whole lot more sense than traditional Chinese medicine, like it would be incredibly mundane if we were smuggling drugs, but all the little needles and mugwort, that’s absurd and totally outside all reason. This is how the authorities see it. So, coming or going, with the Mexicans or the Americans, no border official will ever let us pass without incident. A couple of long-haired hippies in a clunker must be up to no good, particularly when they concoct some bullshit story about one of them sticking people with needles at a chapel while the other one watches and takes notes. When we get pulled out of the clunker on our way back from this trip and separated for questioning while U.S. ICE agents tear the car apart, I’ll try to explain my theory about the congruity of steel in bullets and needles while Bemis just lifts up his shirt and shows what looks to be a knife sheath on his belt and the agents will hold their hands on their guns while he slowly pulls from the leather case, bead by bead, a rosary. This always seems to agitate them because maybe they wanted it to be a knife and sort of lusted after the kind of confrontation that makes sense to them in these violent times and now they feel a bit guilty with Bemis just dangling the crucifix in their faces, and maybe they are even having a flashback to a moment of faith in their lives or a moment when their own good intentions were misconstrued, and the combination of all those complex emotions in the sort of people we’ve got manning our border is usually enough to short-circuit their single-minded investigations and finally get us on the road again. This is the power of the rosary, of any object with no utility but for faith.
We arrive at Templo Católico Santa Margarita Maria Alacoque in the colonia Constituyentes—a warehouse of a chapel that reminds me of the church I grew up in, except this one looks quite a bit more fortified. There are iron gates. We leave the SUV parked on the street along railroad tracks that run across the face of the chapel to an industrial park a few miles north. Right there on the south corner of Santa Margarita, last May, a woman was gunned down in a hit that mimicked one on nearly the same corner at the height of cartel wars in 2009. Though everyone I’ll talk to at mass today agrees the violence is over, they only mean The Violence is over, that it is no longer every day they wake up to another massacre, that murder is no longer the only thing on their minds. This parish includes the impoverished colonias Constituyentes and Independencia II, and here the blood still flows too much, just not enough to be abnormal. A scan of El Diario, the Juárez daily news, for terms such as la víctima or asesinato or arruinar in these colonias surrounding the chapel since cartel fighting in the city supposedly began to ebb in 2012, tells of a woman’s body in a Ford Explorer, bound hand and foot by duct tape, head wrapped in a plastic bag. And two convenience-store owners gunned down for refusing extortion. And a convicted murderer released early only to return home and immediately kill his neighbor. And a handful of carjacking murders. And a severed head found in the sewer. And a stabbing spree at a dance party. And the bullet-riddled corpse of a woman in the street. And a man walking with his family, executed by a truckful of armed men. And a jogger executed. And a mechanic executed. And an unidentifiable body, bound hand and foot with duct tape. As we walk into the chapel, duct tape holds a flyer of announcements to the big iron gates. There’s a cliché about duct tape, how it fixes everything, and it’s true that duct tape will hold a sign or keep a clunker’s window up or patch a space suit, but it has also been accomplice to so much murder. If a single sound could relate to alien civilizations how much ingenuity and barbarism we humans pack into our modern civilization, it would be the dull, hollow screech of duct tape coming off the roll.
And maybe it was duct tape just barely holding together the candy factory down the road at the industrial park when it exploded eight months ago—eight people dead and dozens more maimed and burned. They call it Blueberry, the factory that makes candy for the American company Sunrise Confections, and its explosion was not exactly murder but just indifference toward 250,000 impoverished Juarenses employed for about eight bucks a day to make American furniture and laptops and sweets. The Blueberry factory had appealed nearly twenty labor and safety infractions before it exploded, and as all that sugar and flesh burned, there was so little help because the city’s already woefully inadequate fleet of twenty-four ambulances was operating suboptimally—five were broken and fifteen had no gasoline.
Yes, at least The Violence is over, they say.
So
here we are in a hard pew for mass. The iron gates are rolled open like a whole wall of the warehouse chapel has evaporated and the city is spewing in, the street and its gory gutters just feet from our pew and the railroad running to the exploded candy factory. Stray dogs meander in and out of the chapel throughout the homily, runts all filthy and starved, in and out of the aisles. The youngest kids roam the aisles too, sucking on candy to keep them quiet, free sweets a perk for parents slaving away at Blueberry. The entire service is run by women and girls. Altar girls and girls reading the Scriptures and leading the hymns and a nun giving the homily. I think it’s progressive but I’ll learn it’s just what these parishes resort to when the men stop showing up because they’ve been otherwise occupied with The Violence. But slowly people are coming back. The chapel holds hundreds, though only thirty are here today. That’s clearly an increase because during Communion they run out of wafers. A nun crumbles the last wafer in the big chalice and the final dozen parishioners sip until they feel they’ve ingested a crumb of divine flesh and then everyone leaves or mills, waiting for the needles.
Today the treatments are administered by two parishioners Bemis has trained, Rudolpho and Rosario, and a nun, Sister Maria Rosario. Bemis trains them for free so long as they agree to treat people for free. Sometimes patients donate a few pesos to cover needle costs, a second tithing for the day. About ten people grab chairs or pull up some pew as the three needlers work their way around, wiping and poking ears. Bemis adds needles to the head of a boy with epilepsy. Rosario lays a woman down on a table and burns moxa on her back. I talk to two small children, Ricardo and Mariana, who say they are being treated for weighing little things. They say la pesadilla and I should understand it means “nightmare,” but like any novice language speaker I’m translating too literally. I’m thinking of quesadilla. I’m thinking, what is this illness of weighing little things? Eventually we get around to saying malos sueños at each other like an epiphany. But the disease of weighing little things sticks with me, how it is a nightmare to pay attention to the tiniest details.
Acid West Page 28