“You’re alive,” she said in her Spanish-accented English.

“Barely,” I said.

“So does that mean you’re not coming anymore?”

“Coming?”

“Don’t you remember anything from last night?”

That irked me, but I said, “Where are we going?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”

“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much—”

“Forget it, Pita.”

I was about to close the door when she said, “Isla de las Muñecas,” and went back to washing her hair.

2

Man, I really had been black-out drunk. But a light switched on inside my head, the darkness shrouding my memories cleared, and the rest of the evening came back in snippets. Isla de las Muñecas. Island of the Dolls. That was the reason Jesus and Elizaveta had come by. We’d spent most of dinner discussing the details of the excursion. We’d agreed to leave at 10 a.m. Jesus and Elizaveta would pick up Pepper, then come by my house. Pita and I would follow them in my car to Xochimilco, where we would embark on a two-hour boat ride to the island.

Pepper was a host for a Mexican copycat of The Travel Channel, a basic cable show that featured documentaries and how-to programs related to travel and leisure around the country. He caught a break at the beginning of his career when he got a regular gig as a presenter on episodes featuring animal safaris, tours of grand hotels and resorts, lifestyle stuff—and in the process became a bit of a mini celebrity. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until last year that things took off for him due to a documentary he hosted on El Museo De Las Momias, or The Mummies’ Museum. The story went that after a cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century the city cemetery in Guanajuato was filling up so quickly that a local tax was imposed demanding relatives to pay a fee to keep the bodies interred. Most relatives couldn’t pay or didn’t care, the bodies were disinterred, and the best preserved were stored in a building. In the 1900s, entrepreneurial cemetery workers began charging tourists a few pesos to check out the bones and mummies—and the place has since become a museum displaying more than a hundred dried human cadavers, including murder victims, a Spanish Inquisition victim in an iron maiden, criminals buried alive, and children laid to rest dressed up as saints. Most were so well preserved that their hair, eyebrows, and fingernails were still intact, and nearly all of their mouths were frozen in eternal screams, a result of the tongue hardening and the jaw muscles slackening following death.