EL FARO, PLAYAS DE TIJUANA, MEXICO--Next to a bathroom co-operative on the beach, I eat from a bowl of chopped fruit and coconut and talk to a man who will later claim to know my father.

We are several yards from the border, and the man is drunk; he is from Nogales, like my father, and like my father, the man traffics in live iguanas. It is a strange coincidence, and as we talk, I watch a desperation for connection take hold between us, even if it means lying. In this, too, there is a familiar symmetry. Our veins are thick with the same inherited impulse toward shared narrative structure. The man swaggers and gestures grandly with drink; he tells stories of his travels around the United States, his many deportations, his recent time in prison. The old man and woman who watch over the bath co-op laugh at the drunkard, and joke with him in a warm, good-natured way. He calls them Don, and Doña.

Early morning. Sand in my hair from sleeping on the beach.

At first, we are all four nameless. But then, when I say my father's name, the drunkard's eyes light up, and he conjures forth the image of a bar in a small Nogales colonia, 1983, where he swears he met him. In his rapidly assembling ad hoc narrative, my father is dressed "de vaquero"--cowboy-style. A good guess; I do not have the heart to tell him my father was a city boy his whole life, like me. But he quickly registers the disappointment in my eyes anyway, and he shrugs, and grins at me, as if to say, Well, I tried my best.

Later, the man will pass me and a group of other young people. "Watch out," he will joke. "I'm gonna tell your father you're down here causing trouble."

"It's a kind of violence," I tell him. "This thing of wanting. We inflict our desires on the world, and our hearts pump out more and more blood, grow smaller and smaller with each successive contraction."

In the graffiti-scarred shadow of the bullfight arena, a cabdriver explains: "If the bull wins, he doesn't just get to live; he gets to breed."

Another zero-sum game--Winner-Fucks-All.

[on the other side of the wall, U.S. Border Patrol agents float by silently and then dissolve into the fabric of freshly manicured lawn.]

Recuerdo: I was in the house, you were on the porch with my bicycle.

Recuerdo: I was next to the television, you were on your back on the dining room floor.

Recuerdo: I was in your womb, you were in my veins.

Chaos reigns--

(...last night I was a lone utopian pirate on the shore of an island in the Mediterranean Freeway; I caught a reflection of myself in the asphalt, covered my ears to ward off the onslaught of sanity and silenced horns

(...last night I was the familiar uphill theme in a stranger's recurring nightmare

(...last night I was a perpetual moment of blind thwarted desperation

(...last night I was the imaginary playmate of a terminally lonely child

--in the end, it was a compassionate malice that passed between them. A muted form of highly articulated Conceptual Violence. The classically trained artists in the crowd congratulated their own ability to formulate solid analyses of events; the autodidacts, meanwhile, hunkered down and lurked with the proles in the shadows of pretension, daggers and bombs at the ready, as always.

Beneath it all was an undeniably anarchistic impulse, Carlo said.

Then the bullet pierced his head.

And in Vladicin Han, the rockabilly kids plotted revolution and threw television sets onto the Parliament floor. We would all do well to remember their fist-raised chants:

"It's a satiation with hunger!"

"It's an excitement for apathy!"

"It's a nostalgia for amnesia!"

"It's a lust for repression!"

The kids shake rattle and Roll. The kids get Experienced. The kids get Down. The kids get their MTV. The kids get--

Nevermind.

Secondhand steady flow. Chocolate and coal. Columbite tantalite. Diamonds. Crude oil.

And just listen: While you dream of miracle three-easy-payment infomercial food dehydrator systems, the liquid in your veins is privatized overnight, and suddenly you are paying user fees just to bleed.

The women menstruate at tollbooths; the men stand around with soiled imported bandages and faux gauze strips from Taiwan. Helpless. Pathetic.

Paleolithic helicopters circling overhead.

Meanwhile, according to late-breaking news reports on TVAZTECA, a Oaxacan family of four camps for eight days on the beach, waiting for a chance to breach the wall. In the morning, you watch them massage one another's tired, blistered feet.

The ocean is rust; the sky is gray and broken in half.

Gnostic hemophiliacs go into hiding, roam the countryside under cover of night.

By late afternoon, a crowd of two hundred thousand has gathered to see if you will jump from your transient zone of autonomy atop a rickety cardboard mansion. The media quickly brand you a "disturbed agitator" with "questionable ties to violent black-clad paramilitary groups bent on total chaos and revolution." You are declared a traitor, heretic, exile from civilization. At the first sign of blood from your chewed cuticles, the International Minister of Financial Services grabs a fire extinguisher and rushes forward, and troops open fire with realitybased ammunition, citing Unauthorized Use of Space/Light with Intent to Incite Apathy. In an instant, your corpse disappears, ostensibly devoured by the starving masses below. Quarks and gluons fly. Particles flow backward in time. This is followed by a break for station identification. Then several thirty-second commercial ads. Then the evening News.

))))--in my suburban garage right now is a stack of collapsed storage boxes. White chalk outlines on the wall for sexy imaginary tools I will never own. Blueprints for an empty home. All reminders of the odious debt and secret systemic cloning procedures of a previously aired life. At night, the neighborhood adolescents sneak in, procreate in the back seat of my car, and in the morning, I can still smell the exquisite smear of their artless sex on the upholstery and floor. Day after day, I clean out the broken condoms and cigarette butts, the abandoned fetuses, the pink dildos and yellow rubber ducks, and then drive myself to work once more.)