I have crossed so many borders. At border crossings you know without doubt how little you control your own destiny.

You surrender your passport and that alone feels naked and you are in between identities and usually there are men with guns nearby and you must pay some money and you must wait. You give up or take on power, depending. I always have the feeling that things could get out of control. The money changers, that’s a muddy purgatory they work in. They wear gold rings and watches and their fingers are dirty with money and when they see you coming—North American woman—they rearrange their testicles because they can. Men are allowed to touch their bodies in public any way they want to. I can pass if I am quiet, I’m that dark. My maternal grandmother was Syrian and my father was half Bohemian, first-generation American. My mother called him Gypsy. I have seen his photo from during the war, a tinted photo, with rosy cheeks, and my mother always said the color’s all wrong, that’s not the way he was. I harbor no memories of him, good or bad. My skin takes on the sun and stays brown, not the maple sugar brown I always craved as a girl but a kind of muddy tan, and sometimes, sometimes, if I’m obsequious enough, only the man who takes my passport knows that I am Katherine Jean Banner, born June 9, 1947, in the state of Indiana in the United States of America. When I cross borders I am grateful to my father for his skin. Rock and roll is usually playing. A child might be about, a bored boy teasing a parrot with a stick. Some countries will not let you in if you have a visa from Cuba or Nicaragua. There’s so much fear, you can breathe it in, you have to, there’s no choice. Crossing borders, I thought I could go through fear, get to the other side of it. I wanted to be ready for emergencies. To know the worst. They’ll probably put that on my gravestone, if I have a gravestone. Pauper graves don’t have them, and now I almost qualify, don’t I?

When I left Nicaragua I’d been in harm’s way too long.

All those borders I crossed with Deaver, the memories kill me. I entered his country, lived under his laws. You might say I had been assimilated. I knew women’s bodies, the blood and mess, the way the veins are never the same, the scars, the infections. Once near Los Manos I found a raped woman miscarrying in a stinking latrine. But Deaver took me back into his country to pleasure before all that, to pleasure that left me quaking, dying. I can’t stand it, I can’t. I’ll make you, he would say. I’ll make you do whatever I want, he would whisper. He could whisper that and make a woman say, yes, yes, whatever you want. I’ll make you.

On a long bus ride or a walk across town there was too much time to think.

Aversion is a stumbling block and stumbling blocks are all that are worth examining. Delight and love you just enjoy. Sin calls your attention to itself. Sin requires your attention. The memories, the little manipulations, the lies. What I did for him. What I did to him.

I always thought Deaver and I would leave Nicaragua together just as we had come together. Before we left San Cristóbal for Nicaragua I’d been working in the refugee camp—Casa Buena—with the Guatemalan refugees. I’d had to lie twice to soldiers, but after that they let me pass and I lived out there under a tarp, delivering babies and making do with what little I could scrounge from hospitals in the nearby towns. We hadn’t planned to leave together. He was traveling to Huehuetenango in the highlands of Guatemala, not too far across the border, and he’d offered me a ride back to the dirt road that led to the camp. I always liked being dropped at that inconspicuous place on the Pan-American High-way. I could walk in, carrying a load, past the cornfields, past the cypress trees, and soon the children would run out to greet me. His van was packed with woodworking tools and three bicycles and clothes in a leather suitcase and weapons and cartridge boxes and books. The weapons made me nervous and I asked him what he was going to tell them at the border and he said, Household goods. As though the trouble he risked was slight. At that time I had not yet developed a loathing for weapons, they only made me nervous. I still felt slightly bruised between my legs from our night together, a soreness I always relished days later. I wondered when he would return but I didn’t want to ask. I knew a French doctor in Comitán and we stopped there to see if I could beg some measles vaccine. Already that month three children had died from measles in Casa Buena.

Outside the Comitán hospital a crowd had gathered. I thought I recognized an Indian woman who cried and cried on the sidewalk. Her skirt was torn, her bare feet blackened with blood. She held up her baby boy, screaming, Mire, mire, look what they have done to him. He is all I have. And even from a distance I could see that her boy’s little toe had been cut off. A girl ran up to me and squealed. Like a hurt animal. Catarina, Catarina, the soldiers came across the frontier, they killed our people, they came from Guatemala, she leaned toward me, her arms out. I knew her. Her huipil, her blouse, was sky blue and dirty and turned inside out, revealing the wispy ends of embroidery knots and stitches. I hugged her, but Deaver grabbed my arm, his fingers digging in, and he said, No you don’t, you can’t stay here, let’s get the hell out of here. He pulled me away, I let him pull me away. The girl kept calling, Catarina, Catarina. Just come with me, Deaver said, they need nurses everywhere. A boy knelt nearby, playing jacks with a pitted rubber ball. A fruit vendor sold his mangoes half a block away.

I had very little with me in the way of personal possessions when I left Mexico with Deaver that day in 1982, thinking we were on a mission together. And I would hear the girl calling Catarina in the nights we spent in poor hotels. I’d hear her calling in that soft fold of time right before falling asleep. Waking dreams are sometimes worse than sleeping dreams. I knew that then. Nothing unnerved me more until the Cathedral Man.

Brigadista, brigadista.

His rags, his smell. His delight in my fear.

Crossing borders, I longed to divest myself of dreams.