Hugo Montero, a cultural organizer, testifies from a Mexico City bar in May 1982 about placing Lima on a January writers’ delegation to Sandinista Nicaragua as a last-minute fill-in. The delegation’s head, the poet Álamo, was furious to find Lima aboard the flight.

In Managua, Lima attended none of the official events and did not return to the hotel for several nights. On the morning of departure, Lima’s roommate confirmed he had disappeared after the second day. Álamo stripped Montero of his role. Julio Labarca, the delegation’s Marxist theoretician, took charge: He called the police and led a meeting, concluding the group should depart on schedule. A Sandinista inspector questioned Álamo, Labarca, and Montero, with the interview dissolving into a comic dispute over Mexican versus Cuban tobacco.

Montero was the last to leave, writing Lima a letter urging him to contact the Mexican embassy. Before departing, Don Pancracio, a veteran Guatemalan writer, told him a riddle about a lost poet who survives despite losing everything—the poet loses everything but does not die.

Jacinto Requena went to the airport, expecting Lima to be among the returning delegation, but found only the other writers. He learned Lima had vanished in Managua. The next day, Montero told him the incident would cost him his job.

Xóchitl García pushed Jacinto to call Lima’s mother, but Jacinto framed the disappearance in literary terms, comparing Lima to Ambrose Bierce and Pushkin. Xóchitl rejected these analogies and went to tell Lima’s mother herself.

Rafael Barrios heard the news in September 1982. Barbara Patterson notes it worsened their already bleak domestic situation, with Rafael completely idle and spending his days with neighborhood teenagers who called him “Poet Man” (366).

Luis Sebastián Rosado recalls how, in March 1983, he received a call from Luscious Skin after more than a year of silence. They spend a month together, during which time Luscious Skin developed a theory: Lima and Belano’s 1976 Sonora trip to find the poet Cesárea Tinajero put them in the crosshairs of an unnamed organization. They fled together, then separately to Europe; Lima’s return to Mexico triggered renewed danger. The source is María Font, who had it from her institutionalized father, Quim Font. Rosado’s literary contacts find no record of Tinajero. One morning while Rosado is at work, Luscious Skin vanishes, taking money and clothes. He leaves no note.

Four narrators cover January 1976 through February 1984.

Amadeo Salvatierra’s account turns to General Diego Carvajal, Cesárea Tinajero’s employer and patron of the stridentists. Initially cold and suspicious, Carvajal won the poets over by ordering tequila, bread, and cheese. He had planned to help Maples Arce build the ideologically-designed city, Stridentopolis, in Jalapa. In 1930, Carvajal was killed at the Rojo y Negro brothel along with his bodyguard, a sex worker, and three gunmen. Amadeo describes it as a political assassination.

Joaquín Font testifies from La Fortaleza in March 1983. When his daughter visited and mentioned Lima’s disappearance, Font pretended he had read it in a newspaper, concealing that a fellow inmate had whispered the news to him two weeks earlier.

Xóchitl García, in January 1984, describes her life after separating from Jacinto: She deepened her friendship with María Font and devoted herself to writing poetry while working as a cashier. María had stopped writing by this time and cycled through a series of lovers.

Luis Sebastián Rosado testifies in February 1984 that Luscious Skin was dead. Police killed everyone at a Tlalnepantla boardinghouse during a drug raid. Luscious Skin carried no identification; the only clue was a slip of paper with the address of Julita, the sister of Rosado’s friend, Albertito Moore. Albertito and Julita spent the night finding and identifying the badly disfigured body at the morgue but declined to take custody of it. Luscious Skin had been seeing Julita after leaving Rosado, having taken her number from his address book.

Four narrators speak from September 1985 through January 1986.

Jacinto Requena reports that in September 1985, Lima returned quietly to Mexico nearly four years after his disappearance. He lives in a tenement in Colonia Guerrero, sells marijuana, and shares the space with a woman named Lola and her young son. Lima tells Jacinto he spent his time on a metaphorical river between Mexico and Central America, passing two allegorical islands: one frozen in nostalgia, where inhabitants sink comfortably under the weight of the past, and one oriented entirely toward the future, where restless planners threaten to destroy one another.

Joaquín Font testifies from La Fortaleza in September 1985. The Mexico City earthquake triggers a vision of the deceased Laura Damián, who assures him everything is fine. Afterward, Font lies to her spirit that the young poets of Mexico are doing well.

Xóchitl García testifies in January 1986 about her failed attempts to publish her work. Editors, she remembers, either do not know the visceral realists or turn her away because of the association. She eventually publishes in a minor magazine, Tamal, learns the trade, and begins an affair with the married editor, López Tapia, using her position to publish work by Jacinto and María. When she refuses his proposal that they live together, the relationship deteriorates. She secures newspaper copyediting work, quits her cashier job, and ends things with López Tapia.

Back in January 1976, Amadeo shows Belano and Lima the only surviving issue of Cesárea Tinajero’s magazine, Caborca. Her sole published poem, Sión, consists of three drawings: a rectangle, a straight line, and a wavy line. Amadeo confesses he has never understood it in over 40 years. Lima claims he once glimpsed the poem in a childhood fever dream. After a long examination, the boys claim to have understood the poem’s meaning.

Joaquín Font testifies in August 1987 following his release from La Fortaleza. He returns home to find his wife gone and remarried, his daughters scattered, and his son living with a quiet girlfriend named Lola. Font is mugged twice on neighborhood walks and lies to former colleagues about having traveled abroad in order to find work as a draftsman. He befriends his young employer, Juan Arenas, but Arenas eventually disappears without notice. At a party, Font spots his long-lost 1974 Ford Impala passing slowly outside the gate. When his glasses fall in shock, he realizes for the first time that he wears them—a moment he interprets as suddenly being able to perceive change. He looks for the driver, half expecting to see Cesárea Tinajero, but finds only a stranger or no one. The car vanishes, and Font concludes that fate governs everything.

Andrés Ramírez, a Chilean exile, testifies from Barcelona in December 1988. He stowed away aboard the cargo ship Napoli in March 1975, nearly dying of fever before reaching the city. He soon found dishwashing work and began experiencing involuntary numerical visions that led him to win a large soccer pool prize. He regularized his immigration status, opened bars and a restaurant, and brought his family from Chile. Still haunted by the origin of his luck, he hired Arturo Belano as a dishwasher and confided his secret visions to him. One night, Ramírez fell into a waking vision in which his entire Barcelona life seemed a hallucination in the Napoli’s hold; opening his eyes, he saw numbers swarming the walls. He resolved never to play again and gave Belano his final pay with a generous bonus.

Abel Romero testifies from a Paris café in September 1989. At a gathering of Chilean exiles on September 11, 1983, he met Belano and identified himself as a former policeman, now running an office-cleaning cooperative. Walking together afterward, Romero put his central question to Belano: If evil operates with purpose, there is a fighting chance against it; if it is entirely random, there is none.