The Uncomfortable Dead by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Subcomandante Marcos

this was the way city folk did their exercises and I got into the spirit of things, urging them on with, “A people united can never be defeated,” but I finally decided it wasn’t that, and that they were just like that, pushy, I mean, at least the pedestrian ones, cause the ones in the cars are all different. They just cruise around all the time and holler blow it out your ass at each other, or asshole, like they was really pissed, but they’re not, that’s just what they do, blow it out their asses, I guess. The other day, I asked Andrés and Marta what there was more of, cars or people. They said people. So I got to thinking why cars were more important than people, cause you could see plain as day that the city was made for cars and for antennas, but it sure ain’t made for people. So since they don’t all fit together—cars, people, and antennas—they had to dig a hole under the city, that is, under the ground. And down there you have a lot of people. There’s men and women and children and old people, and they even have policemen. They have people of all kinds and sizes same as up top. But what they don’t have down there is rich people.
    One day I went and took the metro to a station called … called … Gimme a second here so’s I can check the map … Got it, it’s called Azcapotzalco. After I got there, I went to catch another pesero that took a long time, and I finally got to a place that looks like a paddock but ain’t one. What they had there is a thing called a circus, and I went to see where it was that the giraffes lived. As it turns out, those giraffes are a lot like cows, meaning they have horns and all, but their heads are way up on the end of a real long neck that looks like somebody stretched them too much when they were being born, or maybe they just want to see real far and they stretch their necks far as they can, or maybe they just want to look like the houses in the city. So you might say that giraffes are like cows, but with antennas.
    Okay, now, back to the point, cause I didn’t really want to see no giraffes, what I had to do was see a comrade who was going to be seeing the giraffes at exactly 7 p.m. and who was going to have blue hair—the comrade, not the giraffes. The guy was a youngster, and you know youngsters don’t really mind much if they don’t get where they have to be on time, but he finally got there. In the Monster, you know, youngster boys and girls sometimes like to dye their hair different colors. Sometimes they dye it red or yellow or green or lots of colors, and sometimes blue. So the youngster who came late had blue hair. I went right up to him, but not too close cause you never can tell if he ain’t the one. Then I says real soft without looking at him, “The giraffes walk like they’re rock ‘n’ roll dancing.” And the young man answers without looking at me, “Giraffes united can never be defeated.” So I could tell he was the one, and he left his bread bag by the fence and walked away without another word.
    Guess you’d like to know how I knew I was sposed to go find the youngster with the blue hair, right? Thing is that the clues, that is, the instructions, came coded in the communiqués about the Broken Pocket, in the greeting to Don Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, and in the communiqué about the giraffes. El Sup had already told me that the communiqués would let me know where I was sposed to pick up or drop messages. Sometimes they would be live drops and other times they would be dead drops. So with the codes I could tell when and where I was going to get a message. I guess I’ll let you figger out how the codes went. That last one was easy. The difficult ones were in the communiqué about the video you must read. I had to go to this real uppity place called Santa Fe that’s real fancy and look behind a latrine, I mean behind the toilet, in a place that sells tamales.
    There was a message there from El Sup and I found out I had to pick up