Both Sides

by Gabino Iglesias

  We exit and silently drive to the warehouse. My partner makes the sign of the cross at every church we pass. There isn’t much to say, I’m too high to form words, and he has nothing to say that doesn’t make everything more uncomfortable. The landscape is emaciated and buried in emptiness. Icy cornfields crackle like lake waves. I smoke more pills, these ones to wake.

  Abandoned buildings drift past. An hour passes. The frozen trees all look like grotesque angels, weeping from the weight of ice on warped branches. I point, and tell my partner the trees were planted decades ago, as part of a downtown revitalization that has slipped into disarray. I aim for something cordial to break the silence. He shrugs and says if it didn’t find a way to survive, it isn’t worth telling him about, and goes back to his phone.

  The killings are recent, but partners like this aren’t. Smoke dances across the exposed skin, of my fingerless wool gloves. Snow crystals swirl through the tiny crack in the window the smoke escapes through. I turn sixty this year. When I was his age, I pulled the trigger, but now, at least this past decade, or the past twelve years—it’s hard to keep track—time blurs. I supervise. I accompany others. Like a father or a brother taking a child hunting for the first time, and showing them how to stay downwind, sharing the ache of knees in cold morning mist, quietly hunched in blind, waiting for the animal. The partners were promising once, but now they’re mostly fuck ups, psychos, or someone demoted, or sent because their boss doesn’t trust my boss, but the boss above both bosses, demands at least, some attempt at synastry, between factions waiting for the other to slip.

  I never had a problem killing, but then everything changed.

  In the distance, trains whistle through the icy abstract. A solitary sex worker shivers in the falling snow. The amphetamines tighten the colors, crystallize the edges, but heighten the unreality. We move through the industrial sector of town, the smoldering factories paralyzed from a holiday strike, remnants from protest banners flap from boarded up windows. We arrive at the warehouse. Our gangland money is life support for a community near breathless. We’re buzzed in. Boots crunch snow. Cigarette smoke weaves. Our beige cable uniforms in conjunction to illusion. Inside the warehouse, a cable van with plastic wrap and supplies for the disposal of the widow awaits us. The fixer, bearded but anonymous as me, hands me the keys. We inspect the supplies and go over the traffic log and back road maps one last time, before heading back to the widow’s’ house. Our hackers are monitoring, ready to switch the traffic lights. To understand us is to understand we are agents of order.

  They fear she may know, names of kings, of senators, maps, and memories connected to shadows, and she may not know not to speak, even if it’s only the shivering movements of lips mid-dream.

  My partner drives, as I watch the snow fall, the way I did as a child on the way to hunt with my father, then shift my attention to the tablet, where I watch the widow read her book, her black hair falling like my ex-wife’s. I slip into the memory of another life. One of Christmas, and children, and porcelain snow falling. Of a wife, a forever, a farm, failure. Of a tree struck by lightning burning like a votive. As we pass a church, I catch myself doing the sign of the cross mid-motion, but my partner does not see. For seven months the widow has provided a focus, a peace that is impossible to express, other than the degree of sadness I feel, as the snow leads us to hello. It’s strange to watch someone, nearly every day, for seven months unseen, and then to say goodbye this way. It’s like she’s become a friend. There is also, the haunting curiosity, of this book she continues to reread. No matter the zoom, or the angle selected I can’t quite see the title. There is part of me that hopes to ask her about it, before the snow seals everything in silence. All around the blizzard builds, yet my partner, hands steady on the wheel, smiles calmly. With the makeup concealing his tattoos he appears almost cherubic.

  THE ROAD

  The road always reminds you of your wife. The phone rings, or vibrates with text, but its not her, not anymore. You and her are now abstractions to each other. Human connection is never constant, it slips in and out of focus, like radio signals from falling planes.

  You had a wife, on the other end of the phone, when there was blood on your shoes, and a body, broken, on the floor. And she asks how the trip is, and your words are blank and smooth as stones washed in the river, and she feels how automated you’ve become, how blank, and vast the chasm, between who you were, and who you are now, like a painting of a forest in reverse, stroke by stroke receding into blankness. One leaf, then another disappearing. The barn, the birds in the sky erasing, colored layer by colored layer stripped, as you recede from realism to abstraction, from flat beams of color, into white blankness. In that blankness, she fills it with fear, of infidelity or another family, but there is only her, and the work, and this body, that you opened for the first time. You watch the blood pour on the floor, as the angels read every memory and fear and dream they ever had, and wonder, what the angels will read when it’s your turn.

  And you begin to measure the distance with loved ones, with everything you can’t say. You know the phones are tapped, and if they’re not, you know better than to take the chance. So, you only share parts of yourself, the rest you cloak, or you fracture. And if there is a you in bed with your wife, there is another driving through the desert with kilos, and a black book of the dead, or soon to be dead. There is you at the race track, and you as a boy with your dog, racing through the gold field at dusk, and you sitting on the boat with friends, who no longer can be friends, because this canvas that is being unpainted, the blankness spreads into them, and you grow into emptiness, cast down a very long hallway you interact with the world from.

  But blankness is the death of form, and like a plant, unwatered, each of these yous, these worlds, fall like leaves, onto the surface of unswept floors.

  And then you wake up and your fifty or turning sixty, and your alone, even inside yourself, because you stop processing what’s happening, so it doesn’t show in facial expression, or some biometric or lie detector. You become unreal to yourself. You say you’re saving for a boat, to retire on some long stretch of water, but at the time you’re saving for this, you’re spending the parts of yourself, that can experience this world as anything other than something monstrous.

  VAVILOVIAN MIMICRY

  Summer, 2019

  We’re parked in a garage, miles from the border. I sit on the bench crushing pills as my current partner circles the station wagon, whistling and pressing stickers onto our windows and bumpers. This is our third job together. She’s gained weight since our last one. Her weight makes our illusion stronger. The pills have left my body a permanent strobing sweat. Outside the sun incinerates. Shadows burn fro m saguaros. Birds tumble from the sky. Their broken wings blistered against desert caliche. Slashed water jugs melt in the washes. Migrants stumble, their skin sunray sabered, across ravines, to an American hope more trickster than priest. Normally, we travel south in migration with the snowbirds. A blizzard of credit cards and pale skin. We wear the same shirts and shorts as them, our eyes the same empty blue as theirs. The same sixty-year-old bodies, softened from success and desert winters. But the killings this winter, and the regime changes requires proof of our loyalty. So, we migrate, not to escape the snow, but to cross the border for medicine and better smiles and to deliver these gifts from our bosses. On the radio they speak of tariffs and migrants in detention camps, and everyone is screaming. I lower my head and snort neon colored lines. The room softens. Mexico eats our sins the way the desert eats the rain. Anything that falls has to be treated as a miracle.

  We’ve waited a week for our border patrol agents to give us words to cross over. The gifts are these guns, and this widows hand. There is only one gun shop in Mexico. American women, grandmothers, mothers, students will buy a gun, and a buyer will buy from them, and we will dismantle and ship them south. The white woman’s hand, holds the chains, linked to a million tear-wet brown eyes. The news anc
hor says a 68-year-old anarchist was killed attacking an ICE facility. I hear my partner yell to turn the channel, but I do not turn, or shift or respond. I examine my empty features in the mirror. These guns are promises that nothing ends, everything watches, and America must be fed. My partner turns the channel and starts singing. Partners like this are more annoying than dangerous. They talk, they slather. But they are necessary. Alone in Mexico I am DEA or cartel, but beside her I am husband. Perhaps a grandfather. She is a cataract to the machinery of watchers that await us, a fat smudge of grease against the endless eye. In another life she was a prison guard, and a wife, to a man, slipping away, as the tidal currents of hospital gurneys, and heart monitors swept in. Cancer falling like ash through the snowbank of his body. But he passed, and the debts, grew like nooses from the shattered limbs of her family tree and she suspended, made a choice.

  Together we are another in a long line of citizens crossing over for a better deal.

  Together we are white; blank and anonymous as a virus.

  My eyes slip shut, and the widow drifts through the watery routes between each breathe. I see the shadow her body burned into the warehouse floor, and the look in her eyes at the betrayal of this stranger that I have become. The shadow looks like a womb. It looks like my son. I catch myself instinctively sliding my finger against the glass car window, but the widow does not appear. For months that motion brought clarity. It brought peace.

  My partner taps the bumper at the final sticker. The last few hundred miles we’ve driven as a couple through rural America with stickers supporting Jesus and Trump. Now she is stripping those and layering stickers supporting national parks and coexisting and various yoga mantras. She does not know of the guns hidden in the station wagon compartments, nor the cases of bullets, nor the hand of the widow in ice beside the bullets. She doesn’t care to ask. What matters is the sip of good drinks, and the turn of a beach read in a forever rotating paradise our company pays for.

  On our phones are photoshopped pictures of us, as a married couple in this fictitious life, with fictitious texts. She did not know of the guns we moved last year, when we moved in migration with all the snowbirds with pale bare legs, across the desert like the strangest of snow. She did not know of the guns or the millions in cash stashed before, all she cared was when this was done, she would have more, that her tomorrow would always be better. No one wakes up wanting less. Who wants to give their tomorrow to someone else?

  We make a final inspection then depart. The sun drags behind us like a scythe. The road ahead, she drives and sings, and checks her crooked yellow teeth in the mirror and daydreams of the great American smile the dentist across the border will give her. There is no killing, there is no genocide awaiting. Outside our window flash billboards proclaiming Jesus is alive and buy Mexican insurance with cartoonish images of sombreros and mustaches. Flat high desert, gives way to a leviathan hillside splitting two cities with its great keloid scar of razor wire and cameras.

  MANIFEST DESTINY

  I am simply a mechanic sent to make sure the assembly line keeps moving. An insentient cog of fingernails and teeth, turning my piece of this machine. Of black and brown parts, grinding black and brown parts, as men white as me stand watch, safe and rich and clean, inside my private atrocities. It feels somewhere, something shattered, in the repetition of coke cloaked caravans and corpses. I am post-mortem. I am sunlight frozen. I am on the curb, crying at the dying bird. I hope to god there is nothing after this life, that I’m just meat for the fire, but there is a fear growing, that this will never end.

  SOUTHERN MIGRATIONS

  The widow’s corpse lays in my trunk, as I sit idle, car to car to a white cop, waiting for the traffic light to turn. Snowflakes spin like children in the strobing colored lights. The game hums on my radio, and he leans in to catch the score, then smiles and nods as if looking at a mirror, and I smile back. A mirror must be loyal to perception.

  There was a time, in youth, I felt cocky, that my ability to move unseen was because I was luckier and smarter than everyone else. Now that I’m older, and the jobs I am selected for are strictly because I’m old and white, thus invisible, or not a threat, it’s clear that my strength was always that I was seen by those in charge as one of them. White, blank, anonymous. A dove in a snowstorm. A plate of glass against a blank page. I look in the rearview, at the cars in the snowy distance.

  They send us in caravans. Like today, they will send someone ahead of me, sometimes two, who are not white, but driving clean, to draw focus from the local law when what I’m transporting is particularly explosive. Kilos or cellophane wrapped cash, or this body, wrapped in plastic like a raincloud, body arched in a bolt, ready to boom. We own the sheriffs in small rural towns where the respiratory system of the community, its breath, is threaded with the wrist of the quarterback and the rise and fall of rain on wilted crops. Or at least a county deputy or two. We pass through, and their mildewed school libraries have new computers and carpets, and the vultures circle the sky of other towns, and for a moment, when the children step on rival fields with new uniforms, they are not the decaying shame of an obsolete America. The drugs in my wheel wells power the stock broker, and the college kid on sweat haloed dance floors, where they’ll rise and pop pills and pen papers that will critique this red state with the moral purity of a bloodless coco leaf. Somewhere, in the caravan, another car heading south with guns or cash, or north with kilos will be driven by an old white couple, or a white mother with white children. And eyes—we have cameras in roadside businesses and gas stations, drones, and hackers surveillance on points throughout the journey. Whoever has eyes, we see through them.

  THE WEEPING IS ENDLESS

  The widow is running, screaming through a black glass maze, in the same expanding universe as I float, naked in my mother’s womb, tiny feet kicking. And stars are bending to the shape of a boom, of God’s hello, welcoming humanity atom by atom into his loneliness. And all those atoms, contain my mother’s love, and the bullet and the hand that held the gun, and the hand that held the widow, as she was raised from her mother’s womb, and it’s all one singular Pangea, until the first wave breaks. I wake sweaty, in a motel in Sonora the television a crackling black frost and I am still living.

  THE BEFORE: ENTER THE WIDOW

  Winter, 2019

  It’s the first time in months I’ve seen the widow smile. Her bags are packed. I watch her on the tablet a final time, as my partner leans in and presses the intercom button on the box by the lonely iron gate. We’re buzzed in, and we weave slowly up the driveway. The unkempt gardens sprawling like a fading scream. Deer race through the snowy kaleidoscopic. The sun is gone. Everything is white.

  The mansion is massive, but collapsing into the lake. In its frozen state it looks like it’s being stabbed by a long blade of ice. There is a tarp covered in snow over the hole, suspended, like a wedding veil. The rest of the grounds are disappearing into the overgrowth. Winter-decayed vines grip the sides of the mansion like talons, dragging what the husband stole into the frozen abyss. In my peripheral, shadowy things move. I turn. But all there is is falling snow outside my window.

  Somewhere there is a bullet, lodged in a skull of a body lost in a forgotten forest, and from that hole grew the Porsche collecting dust in the garage—another bullet, another body, somewhere in an algae labyrinth of water-buried cars and submerged trees paved the pool frozen with insects and sleeping frogs. Someone’s child, someone’s forever. That all of this is an exchange. We used her husband’s cars to move guns into Mexico. Those guns silenced reporters, and mayors, slashed a line between us and them. The sun rises, the sun falls, and each morning, Americans awaking, bored and pharmaceutically intoxicated to a brown world, forever beneath. The cartel is everywhere. It is here, it is on every shore, in every foreign city—a perfect ballet of miracle and violence.

  I don’t understand this world, this country, this future we’re moving through. I understand neither sid
e. I am the grey inside the fear, the illusion of walls when everything is crumbling. We park the van and I see her shivering in the doorway, clutching her arms beneath her mink coat.

  After seven months watching her, this feels unreal. As if she were a beam of light, from some unseen film projector, disguised as a dying star, or something the mansion dreamt as it sunk into the lake, or something I dreamt drifting opiate-eyed across barren highways, of nights more weeping than miracle. But she is real, as is everything that follows this.

  RIVER

  You remember the last time you crossed over that time by the river. You studied the storm pouring into the crack that splits these worlds. The river, the sky and the rain forming one, single pulse. That’s what you think of sitting here, as his body trembles on the silent earth. That the government, the cartels...the people they serve, they say it’s separate, but like the storm, the government thrashes wildly from above, but it feeds the river, and the river rises back up and floods the banks, flowers the washes. Then returns to the sky. That there is no separation between the cartels and the government, they are one as the rain and the river. And all the cities, books and shows and all our happy little lives are flowering from its fertility.

  WIDOW

  It’s a strange feeling to surveillance someone for months, then speak to them, like this, and pretend to be a stranger. I know the widow’s sorrows, her wishes, her dreams. The songs she skips, and the songs she lets loop like an endless rainfall. You know which parts of the porn, she replays before she cums, then falls asleep. Which picture of lost loved ones, that are too much when she turns off the laptop or gets up and pours a drink. The emotions and memories that are the hardest to express when she continues to retype a sentence. I’ve fallen asleep watching her, and dreamed of her, of us, those dreams where you live entire life times with someone. I watch her move towards the drawer, like I’ve watched dozens of times. But this time the gun is not loaded. While she was gone our workers removed the bullets and dosed the smoothie in her fridge so this will end as softly as possible. Her Australian sheepdog watches us as he gnaws a bone.