“What are you working on?” Ana asks.

“Pirated DVD sellers,” Pablo answers. “In El Centro. Human-interest, color kind of piece. You?”

“The elections,” she says, as if the answer is obvious.

It is.

The elections are on everyone’s mind.

Victoria is thrilled about the PAN candidate.

“A conservative and a woman,” she chirped during Pablo’s last visit to Mexico City, a sop from Óscar to write a story about a literary festival. “As I’ve always tried to tell you, PAN is the progressive party, not PRI or PRD.”

“You like her mostly because of the title of her book,” Pablo answered. The PAN candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, had written a self-help bestseller entitled God, Make Me a Widow.

“At least she writes.” Veronica chuckled. “Your guy can’t even read. My God, Pablo, he’s Rick Perry!”

The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, had stumbled when a reporter asked him which three books had influenced him most. He couldn’t come up with three, and finally muttered something about the Bible. And he has Perry’s carefully coiffed hair, not a strand out of place, and he couldn’t tell another reporter the price of a pack of tortillas.

“He’s a serial adulterer,” Victoria went on cheerfully, “has fathered not one but two children out of wedlock, and then he has an affair with that actress.”

“He married her,” Pablo responded weakly. And a little jealously—Peña Nieto scored a gorgeous soap opera star, the aptly named Angélica Rivera. “Anyway, he’s not my guy.”

“No, of course not,” Victoria said. “You’re going for the lefty. López Obrador is only running because he thinks he was robbed the last time.”

“He was robbed the last time.”

“So he’s Al Gore?”

“And your choice is, who, Sarah Palin?” If we’re going to play the American comparison game.

“She’s much smarter than Palin.”

“Well, don’t set the bar too high.”

He kind of enjoyed bickering with Victoria over politics, and it was indicative of a thaw in their relationship. Pablo had come to accept her getting remarried, even accept that Mateo had a “stepfather,” who seems, actually, to have had a good influence on Victoria. She’s become much more liberal about Mateo’s visits and is even open to Mateo coming to see him, maybe on a holiday to Cabo or Puerto Vallarta or even El Paso.

The last option is more in Pablo’s budget, and he’s already started planning the trip. He’d pick Mateo up in El Paso and take him to Western Playland Park for the waterslide and the roller coaster, and then drive out to Big Bend and go camping.

He can’t decide whether to ask Ana to come with them.

Victoria, with her unerring radar, had brought that up, too. “So you and Ana are a thing now?”

“I don’t know what a ‘thing’ is,” Pablo answered disingenuously.

“Sleeping together,” Victoria prompted. “Having sex. It’s all right, Pablo, we’re divorced. You have every right. I get it. I like Ana, actually.”

“So do I.”

“Well, I should hope so. If you’re doing her.”

“For God’s sake, Victoria.”

“And you’ve lost a little weight, too,” Victoria said. “Men only become conscious of their waistlines when they’re doing someone, although you didn’t bother with me.”

“I was thin when we met.”

“Yes, you were.”

Victoria was always nagging him to eat better, drink less, and go to the gym, but then again, Pablo has long felt that she (barely) sublimates her innate fascism with exercise and diet regimens and has recently taken to attending weekly “boot camp” sessions where she probably achieves orgasms as some steroid-enraged instructor screams at her.

Ana doesn’t nag him about anything, another of their many unspoken understandings. Pablo recognizes that they have a common survivor’s mentality, something that can only be shared by people who have lived together in a war zone. The resultant attitude is one of “whatever gets you through the day.”

For Pablo that’s usually beer and junk food. For Ana, it’s wine and cigarettes and the occasional blunt. And work. She’s always been diligent, but for the past year Ana has brought an almost demonic energy to her reporting. When she’s not at the desk in the office, she’s on her laptop, and it’s harder and harder for Pablo to get her out to a bar for a drink.

They see each other in the city room and late at night at her place (okay, their place), when he rolls in from the bars and Ana is just back from covering whatever it is she’s covering. She has a glass of wine and a cig, maybe a puff or two on a joint, and then they go to bed and have what can only be described as “desperate sex.”

Victoria was a machine in bed. Not at all the ice maiden that one might expect, but an orgasm-producing mechanism of staggering efficiency, both for him and herself. Ana is nothing like that—Ana in bed is chaos. She approaches climax like a galloping, out-of-control horse that suddenly sees the cliff ahead but can’t stop running.

Victoria’s orgasm was usually announced with a triumphant shout (another item on her checklist successfully ticked off), Ana’s with an “oh-no” whimper followed by tears and a desperate clutching at him as if he were all that kept her from falling into the abyss.

That’s all that Ana seems to want from the relationship. She doesn’t want to “improve” him, doesn’t ask “where this is all going.” She seems satisfied with the companionship at night, the friendship, the love, if that’s what you can call it.

For Pablo, sex is more of a delay of sleep.

He used to love to sleep, relish sleep, bury himself in the blankets and roll in sleep.

Now he hates and fears it.

Because with sleep comes dreams.

Not a good thing for a man who has covered thousands of murders. That’s not a figure of speech or hyperbole, he realized one night while doing the math. He has literally attended thousands of killings. Well, not the actual killings—although a few he missed only by moments—but the aftermaths. The dead, the dying, the grieving. The dismembered, the decapitated, the flayed.

He doesn’t need a website to see these images.

Doesn’t need Esta Vida because this is his life and he has his own vid-clips running on the insides of his eyelids, which is why he hates to close his eyes and yield to sleep.

So Pablo looks perpetually tired, but then again, Pablo has always looked perpetually tired. And he is trying to get into better shape, eat a little better, drink a little less, and while he will never get his ass into a gym, he is going out to the park one or two times a week to kick the fútbol around a little bit.

Now Óscar comes out of his office, his cane clicking on the floor. “What are you working on?”

“I thought I’d go to Mexico City to do a piece on Peña’s hairdresser,” Pablo answers. “The hours, the stress…”

“That is a joke.”

“Yes.”

“Mildly amusing.”

“No, I thought I’d do a classic on-the-street survey,” Pablo says. “Slice-of-life interviews from various barrios. What people are thinking, who they support and why. Give the Juarense point of view.”

The election promises to be close, at least vis-à-vis Lopez Obrador and Peña Nieto. The polls have Peña Nieto with a five-point lead as of two weeks ago, although the other parties have complained bitterly and loudly about perceived media bias toward the PRI. PAN is far behind, in the 20 percent range.

“Go to El Paso, too,” Óscar tells Pablo. “See what they’re thinking el otro lado.”

“Do they even know we’re having an election?” Pablo asks.

“Find out,” Óscar says. “It’s a story either way.”

“Got it.” Pablo sighs. He hates crossing the border. The traffic, the lines, the waiting at the checkpoints…

“Be careful to write your story in a neutral way, please,” Óscar says. “No slant that one party or the other has a bias toward a cartel.”