At first, I wanted to see him. I would get up early, before the sun was up, and slip out of the tent I shared with my parents and little brother (my parents pretending to be asleep, and me pretending I didn’t know that, which was pretty much how our family worked), emerging into the dim light that spilled over the camp like weak coffee, staining everything—the military surplus tents, the grassless, dusty ground, even the hot and humid air, heavy as a blanket, which somehow stunk even more than it had the day before—a drab brown.
Already the camp would be busy with people drifting to and from the latrines and charging stations, or lining up for food and water rations, mangy dogs slinking through the trash piles, one anxious eye on the lookout for a blow or kick or thrown stone, stupid strutting chickens and roosters whose constant crowing had just about driven me crazy in the weeks after we got here, and which still set my teeth on edge. The clash of music streaming from countless devices, another kind of crowing. The camp was never quiet. It just got less or more noisy.
I would walk out of camp, past the soldiers who might have been kids from my high school in Ohio except for the machine guns. Their pimpled faces were as blank as the dark shades they wore, which reflected everything back, only smaller. At first they’d scared me; they radiated a sleepy malice, like snakes sunning themselves. I didn’t know what might set them off. I was afraid of drawing attention with a wrong move, a wrong look. So that was one thing at least that hadn’t changed. Just as I’d done in the halls of Garfield High, I tried to make myself invisible around them; I was good at that.
I would climb the hill along with the others drawn to the spectacle. There was always a ragged line of people on the crest, even when the sun was at its zenith, heat hammering down on colorful upraised umbrellas that reminded me of strange mushrooms fruited overnight. Some held vigil throughout the cold nights, as I had tried to do at first, ignoring my dad’s orders to come away, and Mom’s pleas. Finally it was the disembodied cries and wails ghosting across the dark space between the hill and the wall that discouraged me. Of course you still heard them during the day, but they weren’t as creepy. You could see they came from human beings and not an army of ghouls or zombies. It was a different kind of horror, more manageable somehow.
I would reach the crest of the hill and push my way to an open spot where I could see across the thorny wire of no-man’s land to the Great Wall, hazy and dark in the distance, rising up like a New York skyscraper toppled onto its side but still intact, tall enough to dominate the horizon. There was always someone with binoculars willing to share, and I never had to wait long before I was able to search each of the cells that together constituted the Wall. Some people made jokes, comparing the brick-like boxes with their solitary occupants to the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, or Hollywood Squares, but to me a more apt comparison was the trucks that transported chickens, their beds comprised of stacked cages open to the air, so that anyone driving behind them experienced an onslaught of feathers and shit.
These cells were open only on the side that faced us, allowing the inmates to see out. The other side was a solid wall of one-way glass, reflective as the shades of the camp guards, so that the inmates couldn’t look back into the country that had denied them, while people on the far side could gaze through as if through a window. One thing about this president: he kept his promises.
Like I said, at first I wanted to see him. Dale Emery, the boy I loved. The boy who betrayed me. I’d known him at Garfield, but we didn’t hook up until after the marches started, and even then we were careful. His folks wouldn’t have approved, though I was born in Akron and my parents had green cards. I didn’t even speak Spanish, and I’d only been to Mexico once, to visit relatives on Mom’s side. Dad’s folks lived with us; they didn’t have papers, so that was another reason to keep things on the down-low. After the protests were criminalized, Dale and I stopped marching but found other ways to be together. He had the most beautiful eyes, like chips of September sky, and his kisses made me understand the rapture of ice melting in the sun.
On the hill, I looked for those blue eyes. I ached to see them, to know he was there, suffering for what he did to me, to my family. But I never did catch sight of him through the clouds of flies, the flocks of scavenging birds, the crusted filth that thickened around each inmate until they no longer cried out, no longer moved, and were replaced by another. There was no shortage of inmates, it seemed.
After a while, longer than I’m proud of, to be honest, I stopped hoping to see Dale and started dreading it. Despite everything, I didn’t wish that degree of suffering on him or anyone. It’s not that I forgave him. When the police were deputized to act as immigration officers, and the National Guard was mobilized, I knew things were going bad, but I thought our family would be okay. Our friends and neighbors would protect us. Instead, we were turned in. The whole town assembled as we were marched away, not just our family but hundreds of detainees, all of us marched south to begin construction of the Great Wall. Then, too, huddled with my parents, trying to calm my little brother, I searched for Dale’s sky-blue eyes. That time, I saw them. And in them I saw the truth: he was the one who’d made the call. Not a word passed between us; I saw a cloud of guilt darken his eyes, and then his awareness of what I saw, what I knew, and then he turned away forever, while his parents in their red MAGA caps shouted and waved and carried on like it was Christmas and the Fourth of July baked into a cake with the Super Bowl on top.
We were in the first wave. How many died in those marches, I don’t know. We lost Nana. Grandpa passed in the hard months at the border, working on the Great Wall. It seems so long ago now—not even four years. A lifetime. I guess we were lucky. After a few months, Mexico took us. The story was that they agreed to pay for the Wall, but everybody knew the money was a ransom. So we were deported. And the president got to tweet about another promise kept. That deal, like so many others, didn’t last long, though. Turned out that building the Great Wall was another job Americans didn’t want to do themselves.
What’s become of Dale, I don’t know. He dm’d me for a while, but I blocked him. By the time I regretted that, the Virtual Eminent Domain Act had passed, giving the president control over the Internet. Last we heard, two years ago, the New Mexico National Guard was in a shooting war with the California National Guard, after the New Mexicans crossed into California in pursuit of illegals seeking sanctuary there. That was when the digital wall went up. Nobody knows what’s taking place behind these walls now, the real and the virtual. We see smoke rising. The lights of fires reflecting off the clouds. We hear rumors that are almost impossible to believe. But still the cells are filled like clockwork.
“I thought I’d find you here, mijo,” comes a voice I know.
I’m surprised. It’s the first time he’s joined me here. I shrug and offer the binoculars, but he declines with a shake of the head.
“Did you ever think he did it to save you?” asks my dad softly. “Dale, I mean?”
“I know who you mean,” I reply. “Of course I’ve thought it. Doesn’t matter though, does it? He’s dead, or as good as. The whole damn country is dead. Or as good as.”
“We’re the country, too,” he says. “And we’re not dead.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
He puts an arm around my shoulders, and I pass the binoculars on to the next pair of grasping hands. There’s nothing to see anyway. Even so, it’s a long while before my dad and I turn and make our way back down the hill.