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stands scented the air with roasting cones of meat that, for fifty cents, would be shaved into tortillas and buried in sour cream, fried onions, and mouth-scorching chile peppers. Salivating, Bo chanted "Just say no to fat" and kept walking. The cooked meat was delicious and perfectly safe to eat. The frozen fruit pops further up the street, made with untreated water and named "death on a stick" by San Diego's college students, weren't.
    The crush of street vendors ended abruptly at the edge of a large cement plaza boasting a central fountain that had never, in Bo's experience, worked. The plaza sported new, one-story buildings subdivided into shops that catered to the basic needs of border-hopping Americans. Liquor. Mexican-made copies of designer clothing complete with fake labels. And prescription drugs for which no prescription was necessary here.
    Indians weren't allowed on the plaza. There were no churro vendors with greasy paper bags of sugary stick-donuts. No roasting meat that, on analysis, would turn out to be goat. Bo sighed. The plaza felt like a cumbersome spaceship set down in the midst of biblical Syria. Too clean. Way too quiet. The way Americans liked it.
    At the plaza's far side she climbed to an overpass that led into Avenida Revolución. The cement steps, recently completed, were already crumbling. That was just Tijuana, she admitted to herself, wondering if merely noticing constituted a form of criticism. Buildings in Tijuana were invariably half completed and then left that way. Paved streets turned to dirt where least expected. The city's slapdash architecture seemed to grope toward some uncherished goal and then give up halfway there in defiance. A sense of flux. Of things falling apart and being rebuilt endlessly and with no point.
    It's just a typical border town, Bradley. For once don't let it get to you.
    But it did. It always did. Bo wasn't sure why. Maybe the open acknowledgment of poverty, always guilt-inspiring. More likely the suffocating crush of noise and people and things, the ceaseless clamor. A sensory overload merely tiring to the average American brain, but frightening to Bo's, which was prone to dramatic overreaction even when protected by medication.
    "Kate Harding, 1892," she pronounced at a canvas-topped stall displaying at least a thousand identical pieces of terracotta pottery painted in nightmarish Day-Glo butterflies. "The British schooner Lily, 1901," she named a covered alleyway from which two men with gold teeth held out armloads of velour blankets featuring panthers attacking antelopes, an Aztec couple in full ceremonial garb doing something erotic, and the Last Supper. "And you," she remarked to an arcade of glass cases from which gleamed brass knuckles in sizes petite to extra large, enough switchblade knives to arm the entire population of Wyoming, and what looked like a collection of pie plates with razor wire edges, "are the Jennie French Potter, 1909."
    The litany of Cape Cod shipwrecks was comforting. Her Irish grandmother, whose hobbies ran to the unusual, had often rocked Bo and her little sister, Laurie, on the porch of the family's Wellfleet summer cottage, singing the names of the doomed ships. Having imprinted the list under optimal circumstances, Bo never forgot it and secretly recited its reassuring syllables sometimes, just to calm herself. The names provided a quiet pathway through Avenida Revolución, where you could buy just about anything.
    "I don't believe it!" she interrupted a mental retelling of the Andrea Doria story as the storefront marquee of a corner drinking establishment came into focus half a block away.
    "Shooters, $1.50," the sign said in English. "Dancing Nitely Hear Record Star Singing Sensacion—Chac!"
    Too easy. The name was too unusual for there to be more than one bar singer using it. Bo shook off a sense of unease. A sense of moving along some track she couldn't see toward a destination, which, at best, did not seek out her