The Uncomfortable Dead Read Online Free PDF

keeps sending out over the TV. This guy’s a real pain in my balls, so I wasn’t listening much, but then a couple of guys behind me started hollering something like, “Das Juancho, das freekin Juancho!” So I turn around to see what was up with this freekin Juancho and there were these two half-drunk muscle-bound studs going on with their mantra: “Das goddam Juancho, Juancho!” pointing at the TV. I flipped around to make sure I wasn’t the one who was nuts, as usual, but it was still bin Laden, all elegant with a field rifle in his hand and the rag around his head and that dopey face of his. So I flipped around again to talk to the Juancho fan club. “What’s with this fuckin Juancho?” I says, and them, half slurring because of the booze, they tell me that there on the TV was none other than their buddy Juancho, and just lookit how the prick had done himself up. And I kinda found out that Juancho ran with these guys, he had been a taco vendor in Juárez and got tired of his crappy life about three years ago and wetbacked it over to open a butcher shop in Burbank, California. Me, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the whole thing, so I turn to the TV again and, sure enough, the sonovabitch was still there, so I went to ask the two drunks what else they knew about Juancho, and were they sure it was him, and when had he grown that shitty beard, but the guys had disappeared, gone, nada. I searched the bar and the sidewalk and all, but there was no sign of them. And I says to myself, Now ain’t that a pisser. Bin Laden’s alter ego is a taco vendor from Juárez. But then I started getting it all together and I says, Alvarado, what do you know about Burbank? And the thing is, I do know something about Burbank. It’s the skin-flick capital of the United States, a shit town near Los Angeles, triple-X companies and motels … Fuck, fuck, film, film, long live savage capitalism! And I put two and two together, and I ask myself, like, what if it was the Bushes who’ve been making the bin Laden communiqués, those messages from hell, in a porno studio in Burbank, California, where they even have all the desert you might want? What if they concocted the whole thing? What if it’s all a dream factory starring a Mexican taco vendor by the name of Juancho? But to tell the truth, even I couldn’t believe that crock, and I kept telling myself, You can’t be serious … But it does make a cool story, doesn’t it?”
    Héctor turned off the machine. He went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and splashed cold water on his face. Like a lot of people who live alone, he was in the habit of talking to his mirror persona, but now he couldn’t think of anything to tell himself. He thought it over again and broke out into roaring laughter. Kafka swimming in his briefs in Xochimilco. Bin Laden played by Juancho in Burbank. And, of course, when he wasn’t doing communiqués, like Alvarado said, Juancho spent his free time fucking on film and getting paid for it. A free version of A Thousand and One Nights, as told in a taco emporium in Juárez: crazy but funny, the dumbest prick on the border.
    The third tape started as always—“This is Jesús María Alvarado” —like he was trying over and over again to establish that he had come back from the valley of the shadow of death. After the name, there was a pause and a cryptic comment, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back,” and then a long silence and a click that put an end to the call.
    There was a fourth call that started off with the usual, “This is Jesús María Alvarado,” then without a word of explanation went into some verses:
    Where I will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.
    And that was all. The poem sounded familiar, but Héctor couldn’t remember where or when he had heard it.
    The progressive Monteverde lived in the Roma Sur neighborhood about twelve blocks from his home, so Héctor decided to