Los Cruz illuminates the sins of el touristo even on this, the darkest Lima’s lonely streets, where travelers can pretend to be lost seeking a sanctuary of indifference to exorcise their contradictory indiscretions.

By day the street threatens to sink beneath the weight of the desperate and underfed, by night it’s only slightly less crowded with the empty souls of those who simply have nowhere else to go, Lima’s unforgiven denizens of the shadows, refugees from the Light.

An annulet circles, electric and golden suspending time as it hangs in the night, reaching for it, thinking to touch it in a search for purity, and almost too late I realize this neon nimbus belongs to someone, and though he is only a child, he is offering a purity of a different kind.

A silent agreement to ignore why I am here is tacitly implied, a flash of Yankee dollars and a few words of Spanish and we go our separate ways, neither of us can change the world, and he just wants to get through it as quick and clean as possible.