I called Amá every evening as she went on her daily walks around the neighborhood, carrying a big stick to scare away the dogs. She’d left in February, and it was now April; things would have started to look normal by now—unremarkable. Just as I suspected, it was difficult to get her to video message, so we just talked on the phone. She didn’t tell me, but she told my sister that Apá had stopped driving her around, so she had to walk to the market and to church. She said he was in a bad mood all the time for some reason, and generally avoided her. I didn’t mention to Amá that I knew this.
“How are you, Amá?” I said in a low voice.
“I’m great, mijo, just getting my exercise running some errands,” she said.
“That’s good, Amá. That’s good. Have you been walking a lot?”
“The fresh air is so good for me.”
It didn’t take long for Apá to dig up a part of him we hoped he had long since buried.
I promise, mijo, I’ll tell you everything.
*
It was noon, and Apá was home for his midafternoon nap. Amá was in another room reading near the window, the same window I’d spent weeks trying to seal with caulking unsuccessfully, when there was a knock at the door to the courtyard. Anytime anyone knocked it was usually for Apá, so Amá never bothered to answer. She didn’t know what she had done to upset him, but she was trying to avoid him until he simmered down, so she let the knocking go on and didn’t answer. The knocking turned to banging, and Apá yelled to Amá to answer the door, but she pretended not to hear. According to him, anything she did, she did wrong. After a minute or so, he woke up from his nap, put on his hat, and walked to answer the door, muttering things at Amá.
The door had a little window on top about the size of a notebook, which you could open to see who was knocking without having to open the entire door, but Apá never bothered to use it. He opened the door, and two men armed with assault rifles asked, “Are you Marcelo Hernandez?” Calmly, Apá said, “Yes, that’s me,” and asked them what was their business.
“You need to come with us. Is anyone else in the house?”
And without changing the tone of his voice, without raising his arms, without changing anything about him, Apá calmly and casually said “No” and walked out the door without looking back.
Panicked, Amá called us—Apá had been kidnapped. You hear about it on TV, but you never think it could happen to you. Amá grabbed her purse and nothing else, without bothering to check what was inside, and called a cab. She didn’t have time to think—the only thing on her mind was to flee, because she didn’t know if they would return. In a matter of minutes she left behind the house that had called to her for over a decade—what had consumed us for so many years. She left behind the four suitcases that made up the entirety of her belongings we decided she would take with her to Mexico. In that house, brought over in Amá’s suitcases, were all of our family albums, some of the pictures half a century old—all of our family’s memories, gone. She left the dog on the roof, her only companion, and she left Apá, the one who saved her, unsure of his fate or where he might be. In the end, Apá’s maniacal insistence that she return, her eventual agonizing return, and the pain of saying goodbye was all for nothing because we would lose it all—the windows I obsessed over, the endless shaking at the tips of my fingers from laughter when there shouldn’t have been laughter, the weeping.
She told the cabdriver, “Just drive west, keep driving, keep driving, somebody will pay you at the other end.” She had no money.
*
I had prayed for her to one day return, but not like this.
I didn’t sleep for two days, and I could hardly eat. If it was up to me, I would have boarded the first plane as soon as I got the call, but we had to work together as a family. I was working with a class of kindergartners when I found out. Amá had managed to escape and was safely tucked away somewhere in a large city. All of the family, her sisters, were calling us, asking where she was, but as much as it pained us, we couldn’t tell them. We were paranoid. We didn’t know who was watching, if they were tapping our phones, if she had been followed. We couldn’t trust anyone. All we could say was “Please, trust us.” We didn’t know how far the kidnapper’s reach was—if they might be outside our houses in the U.S. We didn’t know who was involved, so we assumed everyone was. Never in my life had I ever considered owning a gun until then. Besides, I already knew how to use one, thanks to Apá.
We spoke to men who shouted on the phone, who made promises and demanded a lot of money we didn’t have. I heard Apá’s voice; it still sounded calm and collected, but tinged with an undercurrent of fear. I knew they were telling Apá what to say because I knew those weren’t his words. I booked a flight to Mexico to meet Amá where she was hiding, and the rest of the family stayed behind to handle the calls. I made promises to God. I didn’t buy a gun.
*
By chance, Amá’s Mexican passport was in her purse, which allowed us to buy a plane ticket for her to Tijuana. We met her in an airport. Her eyes were red and sunk deep into her head, like faraway lights floating in water. She too hadn’t slept. She had a small borrowed blanket wrapped around her. In her purse were her blood pressure medicine and monitor, cell phone, and a few mints. We held each other for a long, long time, longer still than most people held each other at airports. “Tell me everything that happened,” I said.
It seemed like the more I engaged with the border and immigration, the more it ground us into a pulp, as if we were deathly allergic to it. Amá had only been in Tepechitlán for two months. Since we hadn’t told anyone that she was returning to Mexico, and she just suddenly appeared one day, if a kidnapping was already planned, Amá’s arrival would not have changed its course. It might have been merely an inconvenience, a slight variation of plans. But I feared the worst: that the kidnapping had occurred because she returned—that we played a part in it by not being subtle in making her comfortable. Two months was enough time to plan anything. Tepechitlán was not what it used to be; the entire state was being fought for by warring cartels for its convenient central location.
Rubi stepped in and hugged Amá while I continued to make more calls.
*
A chance for Amá’s return had been inconceivable before, but now, though under unfortunate circumstances, one was possible. We knew she wasn’t safe anywhere in Mexico; we knew that from that point on, Mexico was a thing of the past for our entire family. We would never be able to return. It didn’t matter that I had a green card—that was beside the point; there would now be different reasons that I could not cross back. We were afraid for our lives. We knew their eyes were everywhere. In reality there was nowhere you could hide. Even in the airport, sitting on a hard bench, I looked at people walking by and wondered if any of them were involved. I tried to see if anyone was staring at us.
Our only hope was to fly Amá to Tijuana so she could surrender herself to border patrol and ask for asylum. It was a long shot because at the time, we didn’t have a lot of information about who the kidnappers were or their motives and Mexican citizens didn’t usually qualify for asylum. In April of 2016, the race for the U.S. presidency was picking up steam. More and more, it seemed like the country was making it harder for cases like my mother’s to be processed.
It felt like she was in the middle of a tug-of-war, with forces larger than us tugging on each of her arms, or pushing her away. We had just taken her to Mexico, and now we were bringing her back. I called our lawyer because we didn’t feel like we could call or trust the police, and he explained to us what we needed to do and the possible options. Suddenly we found ourselves back in the same scenario as before with the U visa: trying to convince others of the scale of Amá’s suffering.
My only job was to bring her over. I wasn’t supposed to think about Apá, or focus on anything else other than bringing Amá. And was she really better off with us in the States? Could we really protect her more than if she stayed in hiding somewhere in a small hut on a coastal village in the Gulf Coast? Who were we to those people who had Apá? We were insignificant, we were nobody. But we wanted to be together and be nobody. When she left, we promised ourselves that if anything happened, we would do whatever it would take to get her back. And that was what we were doing.
*
Before we boarded our plane, I begged Amá to eat something. We sat down at a Chili’s. It tasted like all the food had been prepackaged and cooked in the U.S. I took a picture of her poking at her soggy potatoes just as she looked up at the camera, and sent it to everyone back home so they could see for themselves that she was safe.
Our drive in the taxi to our hotel in Tijuana felt just like the trip to Juárez, except this time, we were trying to cross Amá over. She had no appointment like Apá; she would undergo no biometrics, but simply present herself unannounced. We arrived in Tijuana on Saturday morning and decided we would wait until Monday morning to go to the border, when we would be sure the supervisors were on shift. I knew most people asking for asylum were not staying in hotels, I knew the incredible privileges we were afforded and didn’t take them for granted. I was merely doing for Amá what was in my greatest capacity. If I had more money, I would have probably considered flying her over the border in a Cessna. We were doing all that we could to help, to get us through it, however little or much that was.
We arrived and checked into the hotel. Amá lay down on the couch in the lobby with a sweater over her head while we waited for our room to be cleaned.
“Mom, wake up, our room is ready,” I said quietly, as if I too believed she was sleeping. Sleep was a faraway thing that receded more the closer we came toward it.
She opened her eyes and stood up. Her movements looked robotic. She was trying her best to look normal, untroubled. We all looked the same, and I wondered if people could tell from the smiles on our faces.
“Finally,” she said as she picked up her small purse, her only possession. I thought about all of those days we’d spent arguing over what should go in her four suitcases, how I nearly stormed out of her house when I couldn’t convince the others that she didn’t need to take a toaster with her, that she could buy one over there. We were starting again from zero. Always starting again.
*
A tall and slender man helped us to our room with our luggage. “Thank you,” I said. “My pleasure,” he said. He stood at the doorway and smiled at us. I didn’t have anything else to say, but he remained there. My mind wandered elsewhere. I didn’t get the hint, and he tightened his lips and walked away. Rubi and Amá walked in and plopped themselves on the bed, breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
“You didn’t give him a tip?” Rubi asked, lying back on one of the double beds.
“I blanked—do you have some cash? I can go give it to him.”
“No, that’s fine, we’ll catch him on the way out.”
Rubi closed her eyes and padded the plush pillows. We were all tired, but she was the one who’d booked the flights, who’d read the reviews of the hotel, who’d kept me calibrated. Without her, I probably would have stormed into Tepechitlán by myself with a death wish. I smiled and nestled against her warm body. For a moment, we felt safe. The blinds were drawn, and the door looked sturdy—the windows were thick and double-paned. It was quiet except for the steady hum of the traffic outside. We felt hidden, but we still couldn’t allow ourselves the pleasure of releasing the tightness winding in our bodies. Even lying in the bed felt like uselessly pushing against a wall, and the entire world was on the other side, holding my father perhaps in a dark room somewhere on a mountain.
Amá still didn’t talk about Apá, and I didn’t want to tell her what I knew. I closed the curtains tighter so that it was completely dark except for the small sliver of light coming from beneath the door. I blocked the gap with a towel and turned on a desk lamp.
Rubi went to sleep immediately, with all her clothes on. I went over to Amá on the other bed. I held her on the edge, neither of us speaking. I wanted her to be mad, to scream, to find a gun and swear vengeance, but instead all I felt was the sharp edges of her bones. It was nice to be completely silent, each of us knowing what the other was thinking.
“Mijo, I want to take a shower,” she said as she held my hand.
“Sure, let me turn on the water.” I walked over to the bathroom to draw her a bath.
The towels were neatly stacked, and the tile floor was cold on my feet. I turned on the water and adjusted it for her. I let my hands run beneath the faucet, not to clean them but to feel the vibration of running water. The sound of rushing water calmed me. It felt mechanical—predictable. I liked how certain it was: I could turn the lever, and water would always come out. I set a towel on the floor for her to step on and put the toothbrush we bought at the airport near the sink.
“The water’s ready, Amá,” I said.
“Thank you, mijo.”
It was four in the afternoon on a Saturday. She hadn’t really slept since they took Apá on Thursday. She and Rubi went to sleep to the vibration of the highway traffic outside. She would not wake until the next day in the afternoon.
*
I couldn’t sleep as well as Rubi and Amá, so I spent most of the night watching reruns of HGTV’s House Hunters International and arguing with the homeowners in the show about their poor taste in kitchens.
The next day, we got dressed and headed downstairs to eat. Our waiter lit the candle on our table and bragged that their kitchen was the finest in the city. It almost felt as if we were just out on another weekend afternoon, eating dinner. We all ordered chicken because the waiter said it was to die for. He said it like that, “to die for,” even though we had been speaking Spanish the whole time.
There was an American couple a few tables over from us who weren’t so quiet. The husband was wearing a loose medical gown and had an IV stand next to him, with a tube running into his arm. The hotel was a hotspot for American medical tourists who came for cheap procedures. The man looked like he was in recovery. Through a small fold in his robe, I could see that he had bandages around his waist. Hotels catered especially to those Americans, offering free shuttles to and from different clinics, which were mostly conveniently located in the hotel district of the city.
When the food came, we ate quietly. The waiter stopped by our table to ask if everything was fine. We nodded, and he refilled our glasses of water. I thanked him, a reflex. Everything seemed to be a reflex. I grabbed our room keys out of reflex; I looked at the attendant in the eyes and thanked him out of reflex. I felt like my body could function without me, like if my spirit left the room, my body would continue, thanking the waiter, saying “Excuse me” and “Please” and “You’re so kind.”
I ordered a dirty martini. I had never ordered one before, but I didn’t know why I wanted one then. I felt like a dirty martini was supposed to say something for me to the waiter and those around me that I couldn’t say myself. I said it loud so everyone around could hear. I asked to make it extra dirty, without knowing what that really meant. I’d heard people liked their dirty martinis extra dirty. I wanted more alcohol, but didn’t realize having it dirty meant less.
Amá’s eyes were still red. It was difficult to deny the language our bodies spoke without our will or permission.
“How was your chicken?” I asked Rubi.
“It was whatever,” she said with a bland look on her face.
I was instructed not to answer, but continued to receive calls from strange men who left voice mails demanding things and what sounded like impersonations of my father. I put the phone away quickly.
“Who was that?” Amá asked.
“Nobody, Amá, it’s nobody.” I said, but I knew she didn’t believe me. After dessert, the waiter brought our check with a broad grin.
*
We finished eating, and I forced the last of my dirty martini down with a bitter look on my face. It wasn’t very good—not that I knew the difference anyway, but I wanted more vodka, less olive brine. Amá never liked it when I drank. In my head, I imagined myself calling the waiter over and saying that it was too dirty. In my head, the waiter knew what I meant by “too dirty,” and he knew me by name and would ask about my work. But I didn’t say anything. We walked back up to our room without leaving a tip.
Our rooms were exactly as we left them. I looked for any signs that anyone might have entered, but I couldn’t find any. I felt like everyone around me knew something that I didn’t, like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone, or in the movie The Truman Show, and everyone around me was playing a role. Everyone was looking at a small invisible camera except for me.
*
Better yet, I felt like I was in the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. Everyone around Connelly’s character, Sarah, knew something that she didn’t. Their absurdity was justified by the fact that they had seen everything happen before, they knew how it would all end. Perhaps absurdity was the only remedy and explanation for having seen the future.
There was no real point in trying to make sense of anything. We were back on the border of Tijuana and San Ysidro, just as we were in 1993 trying to do the same thing again and again.
In the Labyrinth scene with the Fireys, they removed their limbs according to the whims of their games, which had no specific rules. They tried to remove Sarah’s head but didn’t understand that hers didn’t work like theirs did—you couldn’t just saw it off and put it back together. I remembered Sarah’s eyes shot with terror. Theirs were two realities that had so much to do with each other, yet so little. And the worst was that the Fireys could not understand why Sarah’s head could not be unscrewed off her shoulders like theirs. Perhaps if she stayed a little longer, they would hold her down and laugh unknowingly as they sawed it off, until realizing they couldn’t put it back together, that she could not just laugh it off like them.
My phone kept ringing, and the men promised to do the same to Apá, and sometimes they laughed too.
Sarah looked rich in the movie. The white suburban girls always looked rich. If only the Goblin King had wanted money instead of innocence, like the people who had my father, perhaps Sarah could have saved herself all that trouble.
They knew Sarah would reach the palace, and they knew she would return with her kidnapped brother safely in her arms. Sarah was the only one out of the loop, like in The Truman Show. All uncertainty was concentrated into one person; for everyone else, it was repetition.
It was the last movie Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, directed before his death. I couldn’t remember if anyone died in the movie, or if they just disappeared.
And what do you say to someone whose loved one has died? I never knew the right words.
In Spanish, when someone dies, you say to their loved ones, “Mi más sentido pésame.” But this had always sounded too artificial to me, or too much of a template for what we should have said but couldn’t. It seemed like the easy way out. I thought you should have to struggle a little, even if that meant saying something that you would regret in the future. I didn’t know if anything like that existed in English.
I remember the first time I heard someone use the words “Mi más sentido pésame.” I was confused. It sounded like something in the phrase was missing. The syntax seemed off. Literally translated, it means “My greatest sentiment, it weighs down on me,” or “My sorrow, it is your sorrow too.” More appropriately it means “My deepest condolences.” But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it should mean “Believe me, I know what you are feeling,” or “What I am capable of feeling I possess because of this,” or “The weight of this, I too am carrying it.” It is a template for empathy that people use at a time when sorrow won’t allow them to think, when all they can do is move their mouths.
Mi más sentido pésame. Our chicken is to die for.
I went back down to the bar by myself, took out my laptop, and pretended to work on something. “Dirty martini with Bombay Sapphire, please,” I said to the bartender, pointing at the bottle.
There was a painting on the wall that I was drawn to. I noticed it when we first arrived. It was a picnic scene. Everyone in it was young and cosmopolitan. They were lying on the grass, drinking wine and eating what looked like bread, or cheese, or both. They all looked like they had just gotten good news, or anticipated getting good news soon. Either way, something good was happening to them, and they were aware of this—they knew their future.
It didn’t look like they had any plans to leave. It wasn’t clear how long they had been there. I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon, but there were shadows from the large branches hanging overhead. It probably wasn’t morning. Their brown skin glistened. They were dark-skinned like me, they were beautiful. It was obviously a painting of leisure—one that I’ve seen many times before but with different actors. They looked like they came from money. They looked as if they all had the last scene of King Lear memorized to perfection. They’d read all the French Surrealists and could recite certain lines during sex. You loved to hate them, and they didn’t care much about you. Maybe they all made love to each other at one point, often in groups of three. They were tender lovers. It didn’t look like any of them would be in bed by midnight.
I wanted to be glamorous like them. I called my friend Derrick and wept over the phone. I had had enough. I didn’t want any more of this. I wanted something else, anything but this, this goddamn place, these goddamn papers, these goddamn people leaving voice mails on my phone.
It felt like somehow this had all happened before, and was destined to happen again, so what was the point in being mad? If that was the case, I should have surrendered, I should have stopped fighting, if there was no point in changing the outcome. I kept crying into the phone, and my friend just listened to me weeping softly, silently, at him.
“I’m sorry but I can’t tell you where I am,” I said.
His voice was calm and reassuring. I didn’t expect him to say anything, but I wanted to hear someone breathing, so I kept up the conversation. After a while I hung up and took the last drink of my dirty martini.
*
I couldn’t help thinking how far removed I felt from the kind of life the people in the painting lived. It looked like something Joan Didion would write about. I loved being confused by Joan Didion. I loved not knowing the people she made references to in her essays, and I purposefully never looked them up because I wanted them to stay mysterious and never lose their splendor. She said it with so much languor and abandon, not caring if her reader knew who those people were or not. I remembered a passage where she talked about someone named “Axel Heyst in Victory, and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms.” I had never heard of those people or those works. I didn’t know if they were books, or movies, or plays, or all three, but they sounded like something I could never access. They sounded strange and shiny in my mouth. I didn’t know what a chiffon dress looked like or how it would feel against my skin, or a frangipani. I adored it all. A distant glamour that was always walking away. I guess that’s why I ordered a dirty martini at a hotel bar in Tijuana—because I didn’t want to be drinking a dirty martini in a hotel bar in Tijuana.
Our chicken is to die for.
*
I paid my tab and ate the olives that I’d set aside for the end. I could taste the vermouth infused into them. They were still very salty, and they left my lips dry. I hadn’t taken a shower since I left Sacramento on Friday, but it didn’t bother me until I got to the elevator. When I touched the metal button of my floor, it felt oily. I imagine that it tasted like the inside of a battery, or chewing on a copper wire. I ate a chicken’s heart and liver that tasted like that once—all metal in my mouth. Apá forced me to eat it, though I didn’t want to. It made him angry. “Eat, it’s good for you,” he yelled. The taste of iron and the gelatinous texture slid slowly down my throat. I closed my eyes until the door opened on my floor.
I felt guilty that I’d brought my mother to this hotel, thinking this would all make it better, that the food, the martinis, and the fresh linen would make it all go away. I smiled at an employee walking by and struggled to open my door.
In the bathroom, I stripped down and looked at myself naked in the mirror. I had gained a lot of weight in the last few years. Most of it was from the Prozac. I stared at my caramel skin, at all the hair below and around my bellybutton, at the hair on my chest and around my nipples. It looked like ripples in a stagnant pond. My thick black pubic hair looked like an oasis in an empty desert. I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue as far as I could. I examined myself for a long time. The flat fluorescent light in the room highlighted my scars, cellulite, and stretch marks. I had a strangely shaped body—skinny but round in all the wrong places. I rubbed my beer belly that I’d sworn I would never get and turned on the water. I planned to take a taxi to the border checkpoint in the morning. I knew I needed some sleep.
The next day I had to be patriotic. I needed to tell them that America was the safest place for me and my mother. I didn’t know how it would work; if they would detain her, take her away and keep her, make her go back and wait in Mexico, or pass on through. We were going to ask to be paroled into the country on a humanitarian basis, and ask for asylum.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the newly formed UN on December 10, 1948, did not foresee our specific situation, but it did foresee our suffering. It had defined our cause half a world away, half a century before. Our pain, again, might have looked different than others, but according to the declaration, we at least needed to be heard. We at least had the right to make our case, though that would change two years later, when a different man would come to occupy the White House.
*
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world . . .
Now, therefore,
The General Assembly,
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . .
Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 13: (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14: (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.1
*
Was our claim political? Were our bodies and our pain political? I took a shower and went to sleep. In the morning, we packed our bags and said a quick prayer. We got into a taxi and headed one more time to the border, as was our right.
Everyone was a possible border agent. Everyone was out to get you with their night-vision goggles, with their floodlights, with their dogs. Everyone you touched could touch you back. You were not an apparition, even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story is a ghost. This is not a story.
My dentist was an agent. Each teacher was an agent. Every paper I ever touched was an official paper that would be labeled and filed away for later use against me. Even my pastor was an agent, scanning the congregation with his small eyes. All anyone had to do was pick up the phone and call.
*
I was afraid of the doctor because forms in the hospital were official. They looked official, with their carbon copies and letterheads. They were written in the official language—English. And English could say anything it wanted. English could change its mind on you midsentence, and then change back while you weren’t looking. English could make you say things you didn’t want to, or mean to; it could make you agree to things you didn’t know you were agreeing to. English was the language of small print. Even those same forms that were translated into Spanish were still only the same English forms with Spanish masks. I was afraid that one of their questions would lead to another question that couldn’t be answered.
No health insurance, no number.
*
When I was run over by a car in high school, I pleaded and mumbled to the EMTs to let me go. “I’m fine, please, I have to make it to school,” I said as I lay on the side of the road where the car tossed me. Its hood was dented to the shape of me. The EMT tried to cheer me up by saying “Relax, you’re getting out of school today, kid.” I moved my fingers in slow circles and gripped the grass tight to keep myself planted to the ground as they stabilized my neck and hoisted me on the gurney into the ambulance, bits of grass clenched in my palm. And still I begged, half conscious.
“Please, I’m fine, I’m not hurt. I can move,” I said, and wiggled my toes, but they wouldn’t listen.
Amá sat quietly by the side of the hospital bed, startled to her feet each time the door opened. The white woman who hit me with her car brought blueberry muffins. She said she was a devout Christian, and Amá felt compelled to pray for her nerves. We prayed for her together.
“We’re Christian too,” we said, as if trying to make her happy. We didn’t press charges—we didn’t think we could—and the woman thanked us profusely. I didn’t know why she thanked us, if it was for not pressing charges, for praying for her, or for understanding her predicament. She was very tense and shaken by the whole situation, so Amá kept patting her shoulder, just to make her go away. She left the muffins with the price tag still on—$4.99.
The line wrapped around for about half a mile, past small shops that sold perfume, American clothes, and cell phones. The last time Amá and I were together in Tijuana, I was five, and she was thirty-eight. I didn’t remember much of the city itself, but Amá said it didn’t change, only the names on the businesses. Everyone else was in a hurry, but no one was really moving much. They looked like they had done this before—a glazed and sedated expression on their faces. There was an air of monotony and fear, even though it is difficult to be afraid and bored at once. We took our spot at the end and began waiting.
The man in front of me was also rolling a large suitcase, and he stepped aside for a minute to see how far the line went on. He shook his head, “chingado.” Neither of us could see the front. I could sense the frustration in him, but like me, like all of us in line, he hid it as best he could. We were the ones asking for something—an entrance. If the line took two days, a week, a month, for some of us it would still be worth waiting. Our desperation could be measured by how long each of us would be willing to wait. We could probably guess how far any person in line had traveled to get there by how long they were willing to wait.
I noticed that not many other people had luggage, except for a small purse or bag. They looked like they were going to work. Those fortunate enough to have a SENTRI visa came and went almost daily. The checkpoint was just another small burden, an inconvenience, their morning commute to work. They would be the first to leave if the line stopped for good.
Rubi and Amá had a worried look on their faces. “Everything will be fine, don’t worry,” Rubi said to Amá as she massaged her shoulder. I tried to look calm, but I knew I was a nervous wreck. Border agents were trained to spot that kind of behavior. They would ask the same questions over and over to see if they could trip anyone up. They looked for eye contact, tenseness, and they paid close attention to what people did with their hands, always the hands.
Amá practiced what she would say so that her nervousness and incipient shock from the whole experience wouldn’t be misinterpreted for fraud. Just as in my immigration interview, it was the border agent’s job to assume that everything was a lie. I didn’t know how these agents could wake up in the morning and prepare themselves to deny any truth. To them, everyone was lying, everyone was trying to sneak in drugs or people to the other side. Everything we said needed to be perfect.
I didn’t want to, but I asked her again.
“Amá, do you remember your facts?”
I quizzed her, I interviewed her, just like I did with Apá. Perhaps I was making her more nervous than if I just kept quiet and let things go on as fate intended. I still thought I could control the outcome of our lot; I still had the gall to think that anything I said or did could make a difference. Her eyes began to water a bit, and she looked away as she spoke. I stopped asking questions.
While still waiting in line, I heard someone singing. An elderly woman behind us was pushing herself alongside the line of people in a wheelchair. On her lap was a child who looked like he could be her grandson. Every few feet she reached out her hand with her palm up. She pointed to the child on her lap, with his beautiful brown eyes and curly black hair. She stopped beside us and continued singing.
I had heard the song many times before; it was called “El Bayo Cara Blanca.” It was about a famous racehorse who never lost a race, and was praised like a god for making some rich while leaving many more in ruin and misery for betting against him. The song said that the horse eventually went blind, unable to race anymore, unable even to wander the fields by himself. His owner thought the only solution was to shoot him. What was the point of running, if he didn’t know when to stop running? The moral of the song, because it was one of those kinds of corridos that needed to end on a moral, was that fate was cruel, and that no one could escape what was already written in the stars for them.
The woman on the wheelchair had no instruments, and the child was too young to sing along. I was surprised by the strength of her voice. She sounded like Chavela Vargas, with that distinctive rasp of pain at the end of each breath, making her almost break into laughter. It didn’t seem like that voice could come from such a small body, but it did.
“Do you have any change, or anything?” I said to Rubi.
She scrambled through her purse for some change. Everyone in line knew the song. Everyone could have sung along if they wanted to, but most of them tried to avoid her sharp glances. She looked to the crowd for anyone paying attention, for her audience. Her stare was piercing. Unlike the rest of us, she was unwaveringly present. She didn’t look bored or glazed over; she wasn’t afraid of looking straight into people’s eyes, and holding them. She wasn’t the one trying to cross.
“I have a hundred- and a five-hundred-peso bill,” Rubi said.
“Give her the hundred, not the five hundred,” I said.
We knew the pesos weren’t worth much if we traded them on the other side, but out of reflex I gave her the smaller bill, worth roughly seven dollars at the time. I could have given her more, but I didn’t, unsure if we would need to stay longer in Tijuana. Rubi gave me the rolled-up bill, and I placed it on her palm. She didn’t stop her song, just nodded at me, rubbing the bill with her fingers, feeling the edges and grooves, and putting it in a small pouch around her neck.
*
“Ay qué rechulo animal / No mas hablar le faltaba . . .” went the song.
Hers was an implied contract—if you stared or mouthed the lyrics to the song, you were confirming that you could see her, that you could hear her. You were doing what most people didn’t do for beggars, admit they were there. But she wasn’t a beggar; she was giving you something in return, it was a transaction. You entered an exchange in which she offered her voice for your money.
And you validated her plea. In this way, theft was a common thing. If you heard her and sang along, either out loud or in your head, but didn’t give anything, you were stealing what wasn’t yours to keep. Temporarily—the sound. Permanently—the memory. It’s a lie we tell ourselves—that our emotions are ours, and of our making. In truth, they are given to us like small gifts wrapped inside a word. Her song would be over in minutes, but the memory wouldn’t. Hearing her meant that you entered the contract, and you would either keep it or break it. If you kept it, it was because the song she was singing brought it out of you—it was because you couldn’t deny her gift. She rescued those emotions and memories from the depths you worked so hard to bury them beneath. She knew which songs dug the deepest. “How beautifully she sings,” said my mom. “Pobre mujer, mujer sufrida.”
Her product was nostalgia. Everyone in the line was already hurting in one way or another, and hearing that song only made it worse. For a moment, we held something inside us that was not part of that border line we were in, something outside the distance between us and the people on the other side, not part of the green-and-white immigration trucks we saw driving alongside the wall.
“I remember that song from when I was a little girl,” Amá said with a slight smile.
“I knew a horse like that, it never lost, until one day it did,” she said.
Amá knew the song well, and she knew a lot about horses.
“Amá, what’s a ‘caballo de siete cuartas de alzada’?” I asked her, hearing the words in the song.
“It’s a kind of horse, like a quarter horse.” She looked directly at the woman, who in turn looked back.
The line wasn’t moving—I wanted to get there already. But the woman continued her song, not caring if the line moved or not.
It was as if her song was telling me to leave that place. To never come back. She was making me remember something that I had lost, something that I was sure to never forget again—the horse in my childhood, she was a quarter horse, she was a racing horse, she did what she naturally was born to do, despite having a small child on top of her. She wasn’t racing against anything, because she didn’t need to. We only put two horses against each other to make us think we’re the ones that make them run, that we have anything to do with their insatiable desire to get away. Apá ran after me because he had to, not because he was born to do that. He was born to run the other way.
*
Maybe there was pleasure in the small wound made by that woman’s cries at the same time as grief—Chavela Vargas back from the dead. The wound was not so much because we hurt for her, though we did, but because at least once we also wanted someone to hurt for us.
The merchants stood outside their stores alongside the line, occasionally looking up uninterestedly, and back down at phones in their hands. The noise and the traffic lifted a cloud of dirt into the air.
For everyone in the line, there were two outcomes: they made it to the other side, or they didn’t. It was as simple as that. But the old woman on the wheelchair wasn’t looking to cross. She would move up and down the line for the rest of the day, hoping that someone remembered her song. How freeing it must have been, to walk up to the line and have no intention of crossing.
The woman’s left eye was cloudy with cataracts. Maybe she would soon be blind. Maybe people would be less compelled to give, if they knew she couldn’t tell who was listening, making eye contact, mouthing the words to her songs—who was hurting most on the inside.
*
In the face of the border agent at the front, I couldn’t just be the son of a farmer, the grandson of a farmer, the great-grandson of a farmer. I had to put forward what being the son of a farmer had allowed me to become—not in spite of, but because of. A code-switch, moving back and forth between languages. I needed to exercise my best English, my courteous manners, my “yes, sirs” and “no, sirs,” “yes, ma’am, no, ma’am.” I had to get them to see themselves in me. To enter into our own contract.
It wasn’t so much a matter of conveying the grief Amá was carrying all the way from Tepechitlán. Anyone who looked at her could see something terrible had happened. It was again, as with the U visa, a matter of empathy. How easy it was to say “I am suffering,” and how much harder it was to get other people to believe her.
Since I would initiate the conversation, I needed to strike just the right balance of casualness and respect. Maybe I would talk about “the game,” whichever game that may have been. Didn’t someone usually play on Sunday night? Maybe I would talk about how it was Monday morning, and chuckle about things that felt particularly American—say I hadn’t had my coffee either, or ask how the traffic was, coming in. These were American things to worry about. So many years I had spent trying to decipher and mimic what it was to be American. I washed it on and off my body like water, so that I wouldn’t feel dirty when someone called me a wetback.
How do you like your steak?
Rare. Extra rare. I like my beef still moo-ing.
The chicken is to die for.
Part of me hated the U.S. I hated what it had done to my family. But maybe Mexico would have done the same thing. I hated the suburbs, the college frat brothers who demanded an A for their C work in my class; I hated the evenly squared tiles in the grocery store, the way people looked at me when I left a building. And yet where else was there for me to go, for us to go? What other choice did we have, when America forced us to come, and a return to Mexico was no longer an option? I hated the beauty, but nonetheless there was beauty.
There was something different about Amá, something I hadn’t seen in her before. It was as if being back on the line woke up the instincts that had allowed her to survive her crossing, five months pregnant, in 1993. Up until that point I had been leading her, telling her where we should go and what we should do, but now I realized just how different a life she’d had before me—how much more normal what we were doing had been to them back then, and how much more she knew. She had done this many times before—crossing, that is—each time unique in its own way.
She had a dogged look on her face, her eyebrows stayed a little furrowed without breaking, and she gripped my hand a little harder. Amá was the kind of woman who would say, “Well, life is what it is” whenever I told her something tragic, but it was strange to hear her say that when it was happening to us, in that moment. Life was what it was, and she tapped into a part of her that she left behind on the border in order to keep on moving forward.
*
I could still hear the old woman in her wheelchair singing up ahead with her thundering voice. She began singing “Los Dos Amigos” by Los Cadetes de Linares. That song made my skin shiver every time I heard it. It was a corrido about two men robbing a train, and one of them getting caught. It was about a mother praying for her son, and her prayers being answered. It asked the basic question—was prayer even necessary, if what was going to happen would happen either way?
More people were now walking up and down the line, selling food, novelties, and newspapers. They wore badges slung over their chest, with their picture on them, an official-looking seal stamped over their faces. The badges made it seem like there was control, like there was a vetting process for who could sell, advertise, and function at the border. It was supposed to provide some comfort to tourists, especially white tourists.
I still could not reconcile whether I was a tourist or not. However hard I tried, everything about me said that I wasn’t raised in Mexico. I might have been born there, but I certainly didn’t fit the part. My shoes, my clothes, even how I held my body, told a different story. I tried to look bored. I tried to hide the fact that I couldn’t stop my heart from beating as fast as it did. I was still unsure whether they would let me stay with Amá or separate us once we went into the compound, and that made my heart race faster.
The line, after what felt like hours, finally began to move a little ahead, but then suddenly it halted again. They were letting in one group of people at time. Amá grabbed one of the suitcases and nudged me forward. Rubi was struggling with her luggage, and I could tell it was beginning to annoy her. The sun was starting to feel uncomfortably hot. “I’m tired of rolling these suitcases,” she said. We took off our jackets and used them for shade above our heads. They opened the door for the next group of people, and we scooted a little ahead.
I knew Amá didn’t want to tell me everything she knew, just as I wasn’t telling her everything I knew. Every time I got a phone call, I walked away from her and looked back to make sure she wasn’t listening.
The line moved a little more, and I could finally see the gates of the compound—the most trafficked border checkpoint in the western hemisphere. This was the case even before the caravans, before the humanitarian crisis and the new president’s policy of separating children from their parents. Soon the streets would be lined with migrants waiting months to enter with little to no food or resources; to simply be seen and hear their numbers called. Soon many of the privileges associated with asylum cases we hoped Amá would be granted would be repealed.
I could see the line of cars stretching across, ten lanes thick. It looked like a college campus. How normal everything looked in there; how manicured the hedges.
A guard waved us into the compound, which was clean and tidy. You couldn’t see into the windows, but they could see out. Everything we did was being watched on a TV screen somewhere in a dark room; perhaps someone was jotting down notes with a small pencil on a notepad about how I lifted my bag, my phone. A guard came up to us and yelled into my face because I was using my phone. I read his name tag—Rodriguez. I hung up with my lawyer and walked inside, Amá and Rubi ahead of me.
It wasn’t until we were inside that I realized we didn’t really have a plan. We were just going to surrender ourselves and say, “My mother is seeking asylum because she fears for her life.” It was odd to think of it as a surrender, as if she was, after so many years, finally coming out of hiding—“Here we are, take us.”
The line moved ahead, and suddenly it felt like it was moving too fast, like it wouldn’t give us enough time to think. In my head, I knew what I would say, but it wasn’t until then that I mouthed the words beneath my breath. Once they became breath, air, and vibration, they seemed strange, different in my head, not how I wanted them to sound at all.
The line moved even faster as we got closer to the guard’s window, which looked like a TSA queue. I really only needed to say one word, and the machinery of that agreement written up half a century ago in Europe would go into effect.
Asylum.
*
It was like waiting at the supermarket once we got to the very end, with one line breaking off into a few. At last it was our turn, and an agent waved us over to him. He had his rote routine and went straight into it, but we weren’t part of that routine. We hadn’t come to be part of the show; we couldn’t just show him Amá’s papers because there weren’t any. I didn’t know how to begin speaking: “Okay, so here’s the thing,” or “There’s this thing that happened, sir,” or “What I’m trying to tell you . . .” How do you walk up to a person and tell him you are running for your life? Wouldn’t it make sense to just start from the beginning? But when exactly did all of this start?
“So then what are you doing here?” he barked after I said Amá didn’t have “the proper documents,” as if he couldn’t fathom our presence before him, as if we should have been out there instead, trying to cross through the mountain or desert like everyone else. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I told him each detail of events. Amá’s eyes began to water, and he looked at us for a long time with clinical precision.
In my head, our conversation had gone very differently. I didn’t say half of what I was supposed to say. Maybe he was taken aback by our boldness, our gall at having walked right up to him with no plan in sight and asking to enter, to be paroled in on a humanitarian basis. He ran each of our passports, asked us to place our fingers on a small screen to scan our fingerprints, and looked at his computer for a long time, his glasses nearly falling off the tip of his nose as he studied the screen.
I didn’t want them to separate us; I would do anything to stay with Amá. I couldn’t afford to lose her again.
“Follow me” he said, and walked out of his booth.
“C’mon!” he urged, because we hadn’t started moving. We were locked in place, frozen with fear. We didn’t know what would happen next. It was too late now to turn around and walk back; our intent to enter had been made. We weren’t in the mountains, where we could see the U.S. ahead in the distance, where all you had to be certain of was that the sun was on your right in the morning and on your left in the evening. We were inside a building with no windows, and there were rooms where you could perhaps spend weeks and never know if it was night or day.
“Follow me,” he said again, and gestured toward a sitting area, where we took our seats. “Wait here.” And then he went back to his booth to help the next person in line, back to his routine, his everyday business, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. We’d wasted our energy on him; he was a nobody with no real power to decide our case, which was now officially in the system, making its way, slowly, to an immigration judge five years in the future.
*
Down a corridor, I could see the automatic double doors swinging open as people left the building. That was it, the U.S., right there, just a few dozen feet away, but it might as well have been as far away as the moon. We sat quietly in our small chairs inside what looked like a corral, surrounded by a waist-high wall. A few other people were inside already, looking down, avoiding eye contact with each other. I saw people filing by on their way out of the double doors, which let in a slight breeze each time they opened. It was right there.
It was chaotic in there, but no one seemed lost. Everyone knew where they were going except us and the others detained; lost yet locked in place. Another guard came up to us and said Rubi and I had to leave. We couldn’t stay with Amá. I pleaded with him. I tried to say anything I could, but nothing seemed to register with him. My voice got louder as a growing frustration welled within me. There was nothing else I could say to make him understand, to convince him.
I quickly took out a pen and scribbled my number on her arm, and a few other important numbers she might need. The pen wasn’t working well, so I dug it deep into her arm, and she winced a little from the prick. I told her to memorize the numbers in case the ink washed off, or in case they made her wash it off.
Amá sat between us and the guard. Looking ahead, her hands on her lap, resolute.
“You have to leave now,” the guard said, “or else.”
Or else what? I thought. It was ironic that he was forcing us to enter the U.S. He was forcing us to do the only thing we wished my mother could do, and what I myself hadn’t been able to do for over two decades. I looked at Amá and told her everything would be okay. I repeated my phone number again. She shook her head, tears running down her face.
“Now,” the agent said one last time, in a tone he hadn’t used before. We picked up our things and walked away from Amá again. Again she sat there with her hands in her lap, staring away from me.
“I won’t leave, I’ll be right on the other side waiting, Amá,” I said to her as I left.
We headed in the direction of the double doors. I looked back to make sure she was there, to make sure all of this was real. She was, and it was. She was on her own.
My leaving looked nothing like hers.
I sat at the dinner table with a razor in my hand. It was one of the thin straight razors my father used to shave with. Even though I was already in high school, I still couldn’t grow a mustache or beard, but his razors were still around. It wasn’t that long since he’d been deported. On the paper on the table, my name was printed in every font I thought was at least close to the real thing; every ligature, type style, and size. It was my first lesson in typesetting, my first lesson in form, in composition by field.
I needed to make my own social security card to show an employer for a new job. I also needed a “mica,” a green card. Up until then, I’d been young enough that any job I took I could be paid under the table, but not anymore; I would have to be put on the books. I needed my name printed on that good cloth paper, the kind of paper with the small filaments of colored cotton like you see on money. But a real social security card was worth more than money. It was worth more than gold.
*
Courier New was the typeface that looked almost right. And yet, as I squinted at it beneath the desk lamp, no matter how I tried to align my name and glue it on, there was something different about the original. The ligatures between the graphemes felt like a secret code that couldn’t be replicated or cracked. I cut around each letter of my name with a razor, going around each serif, each foot, and each joint with precision. I had to do it by myself. It was something we all had to learn at one point or another, like learning to drive or tying your shoes: the big loop over the little loop, under and over. I couldn’t get my license, either, but this felt more important, made me feel like more of an adult. I could do things my friends couldn’t.
At a certain point, cutting closer and closer to the ink, along the edges of the letters, I couldn’t tell what was my name and what wasn’t. It drew away from me and back again. It felt like I was playing tag between what was familiar and what was not.
Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo.
I’d taken for granted the consistency of machines, how they could place things in symmetrical longitudes and latitudes, how easy it was for them to form a straight line.
*
My mother watched me do things she wished I didn’t have to do. I had to do them alone.
*
No one really left my town after high school, so the idea of going into a Walgreens to get a passport photo made me feel famous. I wanted to tell the photo clerk I was going to Europe, or Buenos Aires, or that I had a stint in Marrakesh. I wanted to say the word Marrakesh very slowly. But I wasn’t getting a passport; I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t tell her that. The camera clicked, and a single flash popped out like a wet firework. Stevie Wonder was crooning through the speakers above me.
*
I wondered what it took for something to be believable. To pass. At the tip of my razor was a question: Was it good enough, was I good enough? I always wanted to be the real thing, to move through the streets completely as myself. I wasn’t using anyone else’s name, but the fact that the card wasn’t real made it feel like it wasn’t my name printed there. Each name printed in small variations of Courier New carried its own weight, as if it were a congregation of Marcelos on the page, and we had all jumped into this body at one point or another.
I kept cutting parts of me that I thought would never come back, as if they were ever mine to begin with. I messed up on one name, cut across an a, and started again on another. I had plenty to choose from. I thought of all of those lost years pretending I was someone who I was not. Perhaps this was just the same. I was always aware of each of the twenty-four letters that made up the entirety of my name. It always took too long to say out loud, and I had to say it slowly to people. Even spelling it out was difficult for some; everyone always spelled it the Italian way, with two l’s. Sometimes I never corrected them, to avoid any tense moments.
It wasn’t so far-fetched or paranoid to believe that everything I did gave me away as undocumented. I policed my body to the point that I could do nothing without consulting the voice in my head first—“Is this a good idea? Have you said too much?” It was exhausting just to live like that.
Everything I did was first filtered, scrutinized, and assessed before it left my body. If I said “please,” it was a kind of “please” that was precise, that meant exactly what I wanted it to mean. If I was quiet, it was a deliberate silence. Laugh now, laugh hard, spit out your food. But I had no control over my name. Each time someone said my name, it said things back to them without me, before I could respond. And it was my job to put out all the small fires it sparked in people’s imaginations.
*
The border security apparatus is mobile and ready to be deployed anywhere in the country should it be needed.
*
I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. He stopped by my house and placed in my palm my freshly printed green card, tucked inside the smallest manila envelope I had ever seen. Whoever made it cut crudely around the edges of my skin and hair and made my head look blockish. The laminate was too thick, made thicker by the cutout of my face, glued onto the card from my Walgreens passport picture rather than digitally transferred. It was a joke. I laughed a little when I saw it and paid the other half I promised, and said “Thanks man, I owe you,” still chuckling. And he laughed, too, because he couldn’t deny how bad it was either.
The most glaring marker of inauthenticity was my thumbprint. It wasn’t really my thumbprint. I didn’t know who it belonged to. Maybe it wasn’t even a thumbprint, because there were hardly any ridges and grooves. It was just a large black smudge at the bottom right of the card. But it must have belonged to someone. I desperately wanted to know who.
Maybe it was a person who actually got their green card but stopped caring long ago about being found, and the prints were nearly wiped out because they were rubbed down to the bone from working, or from being copied over and over again.
*
I imagine the scene in the house where the mica was made—a kitchen table, much like my own. Someone is cooking in the kitchen, and the scent of poblano peppers roasting on the stove in the midafternoon of summer lingers in the throat. A child is doing her homework on the sofa. It is hot. A mother sits at the table, which is strewn with small pieces of paper, a laminating machine, and tiny envelopes. There is laughter coming from the TV, though no one is laughing in the room because the child is busy studying for a test, and the father is cleaning his work shoes, and the mother—the mother is steadying her good hand. There’s a calendar hanging next to her with her children’s soccer game schedule. She asks her kids to help because they have small hands, which don’t shake and are better at cutting out the silhouette of the people who have paid two hundred dollars for a green card.
The child obliges. Maybe she will use this as a basis for her art when she grows up. She will become a famous sculptor and entertain rich patrons by explaining the labor of forgery in late capitalism. Her brother is a little more resistant to the work because he is embarrassed, maybe ashamed. In any respect, this is a family business, just like their neighbors who sell Avon. They’re trying to be good people.
In a previous century, had they come from another country of fairer-skinned people, this family would have been called industrious, even entrepreneurs. They would be lauded for their creativity, and how they answered the demand of the market. In a previous century the children would have gone on to Ivy League business schools to start their own companies or carry on the tradition of the family.
The scene is peaceful. I imagine the courier who hands over the client’s raw materials having a charming conversation with the father or mother—about the weather, about their children’s school, about a PTA meeting where they were promised a Spanish translator but got none.
Present are the tools of the trade: fine drafting blades, rulers, glue, and of course, someone’s sample green card as a guide, someone’s thumbprint. Perhaps the thumbprint belongs to the father, and he copies it over and over again until it is unrecognizable and can’t be traced back to him. He presses down on the ink pad, sending himself out for the world to see.
*
The card is a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s like a VCR tape that slows down a little each time it gets played, gets a little more distorted, a little less recognizable. The change is gradual, but even the faces on the screen are stretched. In this scenario, let’s play telephone: Start with the words on the green card, spread the word down the line, and giggle when the last person repeats their story to you like a confession. “I did nothing wrong, I was only trying to make an honest living.”
Our luggage clamored against the tiled floor, but Rubi and I, holding Amá’s blanket, stopped right before the double doors opening into the U.S. Weeping must have been common there, because no one seemed too concerned that we were doubled over, with our hands on our knees. After a minute or so, the private security guard (clearly not an agent) posted at the door walked up to us and asked what was wrong. It was as if he was there by mistake, dropped from the sky like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Unlike the other guards, he seemed confused at our grief but also told us we couldn’t stay there, that we had to leave.
I’m leaving, my son, you don’t need me anymore.
We felt all of that chaos pushing us forward. We tried to lock our heels in the ground like stubborn mules, but it was no use; the push was greater than us, and we inched forward into the country of opportunity, the country of promise. I could no longer see Amá around the corner.
We emerged from the double doors to an unbearable brightness. There were no longer any lines. Everyone was scattered about, hopping on the bright-red light-rail train headed to San Diego. Everything looked authentically American—the shops, the sidewalks, the gait of the passersby going wherever it was that they had to be in a hurry.
Rubi and I sat down on the cement in the middle of the plaza and cried. We held each other, but we couldn’t feel our bodies. We wailed beneath the bright sun reflected in the polished floor below us. Everyone around us kept moving, nobody stopped. It was as if they were water, moving around and away from us, and we had become two large boulders in the middle of a river. We grew still and hunkered toward the earth we had become.
We couldn’t breathe, unable to hold our bodies together any longer. At least when I left Amá in Tepechitlán, I’d been able to walk away, I had enough strength to carry my bags.
I wanted my green card to be something I could give away, something I could trade legitimately for. I would give it to my mother. If that was an option, I would gladly have stayed in Mexico for the rest of my life in hiding, if it meant she was safe on the other side.
Trade me. Take me.
A woman who was standing beside us finally had the nerve to come up and ask if we were okay. What kind of question was that? I don’t know why I entertained her with an answer. Reflex. In between any breaths I could manage, I told her my mother was in there and pointed back at the compound. She looked at us with a puzzled and worried face, as if “in there” was nowhere exactly, a nonplace, as if it had no bearing on what was out here. But at the same time she kept shaking her head as if to say, “What a shame, what an absolute shame.” She apologized and walked away.
My leaving was loud, it could never hold still.
I held Rubi, and she held me. We took some pills to calm us down and looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, until our breathing began to settle. Holding Rubi’s hands, I could feel her pulse, and I tried to see if I could match it. We breathed and nodded to each other before getting back up.
*
We wandered through the town of San Ysidro, rolling our luggage behind us like a pair of dead dogs by the tail. We didn’t know what we were looking for, so we just kept walking. I didn’t have the energy to call back home just yet to tell the rest of the family what had happened. I didn’t want to stray too far from the compound. I wanted to stay close to Amá, even if she didn’t know I was there. She knew we wouldn’t leave.
We booked a hotel nearby. I was tired of hotels. I was tired of the same continental breakfasts, the same musky odor of the beds, the same towels, and the same mirrors, which told a different story about me every time—I was too fat, I was too skinny, I was too dark, I was too light, I was too bony. I was never just enough of anything.
We checked in and headed to our room. It was the same procedure. Open the door, close the windows, lock the door, roll up a towel beneath the door, unplug the phone, check the bathroom, check beneath the door, open all of the drawers, lie down and stare at the ceiling.
I had to take sleeping pills, even though the only thing my body wanted to do was sleep. I took another hot shower, too tired to care about the water shortage, even though my guilt didn’t drain as easy as the water. I thought I would make up for it later by not washing my jeans for a month. My skin was tender and red, my fingers started to wrinkle. I opened my mouth against the shower head and let it fill with water.
I lost track of time. Everything I ate tasted like almonds. Still the same hot shower, still my mouth wide open, still the curtains drawn, still the Do Not Disturb sign purposefully hanging on the door, still my dirty clothes piled on the floor, and the same goddamn home-improvement channel drumming about a chic midcentury remodel and young couples who didn’t deserve to be happy. I grew resentful of the other guests who smiled at me at the breakfast bar in the morning. I either didn’t return their smile or snarled beneath my breath and walked away. I started bringing my breakfast up to my room.
My paranoia was growing, and not being able to sleep didn’t help. I thought cars were following us and our phones were tapped. I kept changing my clothes at all hours of the day and peeking through the window. I was awake even when I slept, just waiting for my phone to ring, obsessing over its battery life.
It was a Wednesday when I got the call.
“Your mother will be released at the McDonald’s near the San Ysidro Port of Entry,” said a stern man.
McDonald’s?
It didn’t sound real. I didn’t know who to trust anymore, and my phone grew strange in my hand. I looked at Rubi, and she knew exactly what the phone call meant. We threw everything into our suitcases and took a taxi back to the port of entry.
Going back to the port, I thought about my jagged numbers etched on Amá’s arm, her map to find her way home. There was doubt in the man’s voice over the phone, almost as if he didn’t want to give us a guarantee that she was actually getting out, but only hold out the possibility. We returned to that bright plaza where everyone walked in different directions, where they hopped so casually onto the bright-red light-rail trains with the word Metro printed on their sides in large white letters, edging to the very tip of the border before whisking away to the north.
I waited inside the McDonald’s, and Rubi waited outside, in case she was released elsewhere. Every woman in the restaurant looked like Amá, and I had to stare closer and longer to convince myself that it wasn’t her. The smell of processed meat and oil from the deep fryer made my stomach turn. Families went about their business, eating their large burgers, dipping their fries into ketchup, and belching after taking long drags from their Cokes. It was difficult to concentrate.
There was too much noise, too many wrappers, too much color. I still hadn’t slept well, and I got nervous when people edged too close to me. I remembered begging my father to take us to McDonald’s as a child, refusing to eat what Amá had spent all afternoon cooking unless he took us to those golden arches.
*
I held myself at the edge of a table facing the street for a couple of hours. My eyes began to strain. I was suspended in a tightness that wouldn’t let me relax, and with each hour that went by I wound myself up tighter and tighter, scanning the busy bodies ahead. I was afraid anything would make me spring open. Worse, that I would slowly start to lose hope with each hour—the gentle weight of defeat pressing on my shoulders, unwinding, easing me down into a loose wire tossed on the floor.
None of the faces, none of the bodies, none of the shadows along that bright plaza were my mother’s.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a small woman with disheveled hair and a small plastic bag hanging off her arm. A large American border guard walked her up and left, patting her back as he turned away. She wasn’t moving; she was looking cautiously around her, hands folded at her stomach.
It was her.
I jumped out of my seat and ran toward the door, yelling “Amá!” It felt like I was holding her for the first time. She looked thin and like she hadn’t slept or eaten in days. I couldn’t believe she was there, in front of me, holding a plastic bag with “Department of Homeland Security” printed on it.
And again we stood there in the middle of the flow of foot traffic, motionless, with everyone walking around us, barely noticing or caring to notice the miracle that had happened before their eyes. She was wearing the same thin fleece jacket and gray sweatpants that she’d been wearing the day we left her. We walked away from the port, and I held her hand tight but not too tight, and Rubi held her other hand. We didn’t know who was keeping the other from falling.
“Don’t tell me anything right now, we’ll talk about it as soon as we leave here,” I said, still holding her arm, looking around suspiciously while Rubi hailed a cab. We wanted nothing more than to leave that place. It made our stomachs turn to think of staying there any longer. Part of me wanted to burn all of it to the ground, leave in my wake nothing but ashes, but instead I turned to my mother and smiled.
*
As we waited for our taxi, Amá pointed to her shoe and lifted her pant leg a little, revealing a large black box wrapped around her ankle with a black band. She had a GPS tracking device placed on her as a condition of her release while she waited for her court date in the U.S. A small green light flickered on and off, sending a signal to a computer somewhere about her every movement.
Her options were to either wait six months in ICE detention or wear the ankle monitor, which was an obvious choice. And she only had a choice because they allowed her case to move past the next step: to go through a credible fear interview. They wanted to make sure that my mother’s fear was legitimate, that there was a reason why she was running, why any of us were running. She rolled her sweatpants back down over the device and smiled, but her eyes were dark and tired. We hopped in the taxi and headed toward a car rental company outside town. With each mile we headed north, Amá said she could breathe a little better. With each mile north we felt our bodies unclick their tightness one cog at a time.
Because of the ankle monitor, her prison would be everywhere and everything, surveillance looming everywhere.
They told her she needed to establish a routine so that they could enter her patterns into an algorithm that would determine if there was any suspicious activity. She gave them the address where she would be staying and a list of the places she might frequent. They told her that at any moment, they could show up to ensure that she was abiding by the rules. “This is a privilege,” they said as they tightened the monitor around her ankle inside the compound. “You don’t want to ruin it.”
She was terrified of that device, and as much as she wanted to run away from it, she couldn’t. It was as if someone had told her she needed to hold a snake for six months, or else.
Or else what?
It was a long, invisible chain and the person or machine at the other end felt each and every little tug she made. They said it would talk to her if it detected any tampering. A voice from a thousand miles away would come shouting out of the little black box, and an alarm would ring, and agents would be dispatched immediately to find her. She needed to switch out and rotate the two batteries it came with in order to keep the device charged on a daily basis, otherwise it would set off an alarm. She was paranoid (as we all were) that it would unexpectedly die, so she switched batteries much more often than what was required, sometimes three times a day. We were always looking at the green light to see how the battery life was doing. We didn’t want anything to go wrong. It was always watching. At least, that’s what we were told.
I almost felt a little at ease knowing she had the monitor on. Someone would always be able to see exactly where she was, which meant, by extension, that we would always know where she was at, which meant, hypothetically, that we could never lose her again, that she would never go missing like Apá.
We rented a car and drove away from the border. I drove fast, pushing ninety-five. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. Home. Home to the rest of the family, home to my bed and my own mirror, and my own quiet.
But it was as if something didn’t want us to leave. We were still stuck in the labyrinth, and the Goblin King was laughing somewhere in a room, tracking my mother’s device. On our way down the summit of Tejon Pass, we got a flat. I screamed at customer service over the phone, I screamed at the tow truck company, who said they wouldn’t be able to get there until the next day. We booked a night at yet another hotel nearby. I was almost certain that I had no more credit on my cards, but I tried anyway. Thankfully one of the cards worked.
The hotel belonged to the same chain as the one we’d stayed at in Ciudad Juárez when I took my dad for his appointment. The receptionist asked if I wanted to open a rewards account, since I stayed with them so often.
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” I said with a tired smile, even though I knew I would probably be back in another one of their hotels either way. Something always drew us back to the border.
Even though it had been two years since Apá’s Juárez appointment, walking into the hotel room made it feel like it was just the day before. It looked identical to the one in Juárez, and I almost expected to see the bustling streets of Juárez if I peeked out the window. It was evening, and the sun was going down over the rolling hills of the valley below. We were tired but didn’t really notice while driving up. My lingering paranoia made me shut the blinds, unplug the phones, and stuff another towel under the door crack. I did it very subtly so as to not scare Amá.
It wasn’t until we lay down on a bed that we realized just how tired we were. It was the same endless scene we had been performing. We all took a shower and tried to sleep. We would continue in the morning. Things would be better in the morning, we told ourselves. We could start over in a different car.
We were in bed for maybe three hours before we couldn’t stand being in one place any longer; the idleness was unbearable. We left in the middle of the night in a taxi, headed toward Bakersfield to catch the next Amtrak headed north.
*
“I love trains, it’s been years since I’ve been in one,” said Amá as she adjusted herself on the seat, with a small table in front of her. The sun would be rising in a few hours, and though it was dark outside the window, Amá stayed glued to the glass, looking over at us occasionally and smiling. The train started its heavy groan and trudged forward.
The sun started to rise, and we could see the outlines of the mountains in the distance. Mile after mile of orchards and fields zipped past us—the same orchards and fields Amá had worked for so many years, everything she had known.
“Isn’t this fun?” she said, taking a deep breath.
We got off the train in Stockton and had to switch to a bus the rest of the way. So far we had walked, taken a taxi, driven a car, boarded a train, and now were on a bus, all to get farther and farther north.
The family couldn’t wait until we arrived, so they drove an hour to meet us at our penultimate stop. We had arrived. Amá hugged her children, all of us, in the parking lot; she held them as if they were made of glass and would easily break, and they held her as if she was already broken, trying to put the pieces back together, though she would never look the same.
Weeks later, still waiting to hear news from Apá, we sat outside in my garden, and I asked Amá what had happened while she was in detention.
They separated the men from the women. There were pregnant women and women with small children at their feet. There were women nursing babies and older women, and young women. Nobody slept. We couldn’t sleep because they never turned off the lights, and there were no windows. I lost track of time. I didn’t know if it was day or night. No beds, just the floor.
I was afraid I would miss them calling my name, so when I closed my eyes, I still tried to concentrate on the noises. Whenever the doors opened, everyone looked up and paid attention. Some women had been there for months. They gave us the same food every day—bean burritos or ham and cheese sandwiches on plain white bread with lots of mayonnaise. I saved extra food in my pockets for later. We lay down on the floor to sleep when we could. Someone had left a small blanket, so I took it and used it as a cushion. I used my shoes as pillows.
They took away our laces and everything in our hair, so I found a sock on the floor and used it as a hair tie. I met a nice woman from Guatemala with two small children.
They didn’t let us use the bathroom when we wanted. They had their own schedules and took us in groups. We couldn’t shower. I took some diaper wipes from the nursing mothers to give myself a sponge bath, just to wipe my hands and face with.
They called me into a room and sat me alone in front of a screen. They said a voice would ask me questions from the speakers. There was a camera pointed at me. They said I wouldn’t be able to see them, but that they could see me. I answered their questions. I told them the truth and hoped they believed me. I went back to the large room and lay down on the floor. There was nothing to do but wait.
When they said I would be leaving, that they’d spoken to my son, I didn’t believe them. It didn’t really sink in until they took me and I saw the sunlight coming from a large door ahead of me. That’s when they put on the monitor and told me I would be sent back into detention if I didn’t follow the rules. The ink on my hand had washed away, but I remembered your number. After a while they let me go. I knew someone would find me.
For years I kept dozens of copies of my “documents.” I couldn’t throw them away, I couldn’t burn them. Among them was one with my name and a number whose individual digits added up to forty-four. The combinations that could add up to forty-four seemed infinite, and I was one among that endlessness. It was like choosing numbers for the lottery—my mother’s birthday, my street address, the day my grandfather died.
*
I dissolved the copies. I dipped them into a bucket filled with bleach, glue, and water. I turned them into pulp; the image of my face broke apart, spilling its ink into the rest of the sludge. But here and there I could still see an eye, my hair, my chin. How stubborn I was.
I ran my fingers through the pulp and squeezed it between my webs. I wanted all of it to go away, to meld together like a ball of mating snakes, one unrecognizable from the other.
*
The water was a cloudy blue, like the sky in a midwestern spring—pockets of blue behind an overwhelming gloom, the blurriness of spoiled milk or of my paternal grandfather’s eyes the last time I saw him before his death.
I wanted it to become something more than the sum of its parts—a rearrangement of the details of my life into a better outcome. Everything that went into the bucket was still there, nothing had gone away: the paper, the cotton in the paper, the dye in the ink, the glue, and the chemicals that gave the paper its clinical whiteness.
In the vat, the pulp would never return to what it was before. It was irreversible. There was a time I wanted to exist as a series of cyphers, to live in that impossibility of ever being put back together, by which I mean I wanted to not have a past.
*
It was a baptism of all my former selves, all trying to be redeemed. I had done wrong, I promised to do good. I dipped their heads in the water, rubbed their foreheads clean, and they all closed their eyes to receive something holy, the smell of bleach wiping everything away. They did what good Christian sinners do—disappear.
I slushed the mixture with my hands, making soft balls of pulp. In my hands, they could have been molded into anything I wanted them to be.
Fire would not do this. If I burned them, I probably would have kept the ashes and eaten them, or smeared them across my teeth and smiled at passing traffic. No one would know what I was smiling at, and they would all smile back.
*
I poured all of my names into bleach because I wanted them cleaned, sanitized, redeemed, rid of all their failures. And I thought long about the purpose of bleach—to whiten that which was not white—and my shame and disgust at how many times I thought of bleaching my own skin. All summer long, working construction to buy clothes for the school year, I wore long-sleeved shirts, large hats, bandanas around my face, and gloves. I wanted no part of my body to touch the sun, all to prevent myself from becoming any darker than I already was.
I was young; I didn’t know how to love my skin, because everyone around me said that to be beautiful meant to be what I was not.
*
I began molding the mixture into a four-legged thing. It could have been a horse, or a dog, or a cow. I wanted to make a horse, but it wouldn’t stick together.
The poet Richard Siken said that horses can run until they forget they are horses, running because that’s the only thing they can do without having to tell their bodies how to do it. I wondered what I didn’t need to tell my body how to do. When you are baptized, do you need to tell your body how to excise its sin, or does it just happen without you? Can you just toss your head back and let water, gravity, and the divine do the rest?
In that bucket I was creating a paper trail of my disappearances, of all the people that I was not. Maybe I could talk to them.
*
I made many more four-legged things and placed them in the sun to dry, to harden. I named each of them after famous lovers.
They were a record of myself that held my secrets. I could trust them never to tell what was written into them. The images and numbers were erased, but nonetheless they were there, coded. They were small vaults for which no one had the key but me—untranslatable, unbreakable.