Both Sides

by Gabino Iglesias

  When you surveil, you know things about them their closest friends and lovers do not. In this line of work, it’s not hard to see how something like god could exist. Not in any benevolent sense, but that there is something out there watching us. You know that if something isn’t watching you, something is trying to find you.

  It’s strange to think if we’d arrived seven months ago, or even two, she’d have ran or grabbed her husband’s gun, but seven months solitary, she’s open to trust whatever reality we’ve led her into. She stares solemnly at the snow falling through the forest outside the window. The book held softly in her hand.

  For the first time I see the cover. It reads Ishmael. She moves dream-like to the cabinet and removes the pitcher. She slices fruit and adds protein powder with the drugs in it. The ritual of blender and powders and citrus.

  “You got a favorite show you’re missing, ma’am?”

  I point at the dusty movie theatre screen, as I unpack the cable tool bag. Her eyes shift to the book by the sliced fruit. Knife in hand. Without looking up she points the knife at the book.

  “Not a fan of television I prefer…”

  My partner stretches plastic wrap down the hall and the pup rises and trots towards him.

  “Is all that necessary?” she says, turning towards the shadow my partner is casting.

  Her eyes shift to him then to me, then to the panel where her husband’s gun was stashed beyond the fed’s obsession.

  My partner looks up with the charm of an angel, that leads the winged to great falls.

  “Bad wires. We had a storm short things further up the grid. And some of the insulation they put in couldn’t handle the jolt.”

  I point at the book. “What’s that about?”

  She turns back to me and studies my face.

  It’s about a gorilla telepathically telling a man how the world began. It’s about leavers and takers. She pauses.

  “You seem familiar. Do I know you?”

  I smile. “Nah, ma’am just got one of them faces.”

  I watch her finger the smoothie, knife beside her. What is in there will make her sleep. Make her not experience this. What she will know is a nice chat on a lonely snowy day, then, just as the storm outside peaks and the world is blank, she will close her eyes and forget this life ever was cruel.

  My partner removes the silencer.

  We stand here talking, and for a moment, I can see the child she was, in monsoon-glimmering barrios, streets shimmering with wet datura petals, and me in a field of snow, hand still innocent, holding a rifle, holding my brothers hands, holding this moment in the lines in my palm. She sips her smoothie then heads over to the bags.

  “Getting out of the snow for a bit?”

  She looks at me like I’m a ghost, and perhaps I am, that this unreality is the valium she takes, or the exhaustion of sleepless nights, but she moves as if dead or unreal and asks.

  “Do you think someone can start over? Do you think there are second chances?”

  “I don’t know ma’am. I guess. I’m a little old for tomorrows.”

  I smile softly, waiting for the smoothie to make things simple.

  Then my partner fucks everything up.

  As we’re talking we hear her dog howling frantically, followed by my partner screaming, then the sound of something crashing, and the widow rushes over, and I follow. My partner is strangling her dog. His gold gun is out, and the arm holding it is bleeding. The widow screams and runs. My partner raises his trembling arm, and fires. The first bullet hits the wall, the second explodes her kneecap. The book claps bloody against the wall. She whirlwinds against the china cabinet, shattered glass slashes her face and arms but she keeps moving. As she thrashes towards the hidden board where her husband’s empty gun is stashed, I raise my gun and fire. Her body pops and stops, then collapses. She’s on the ground convulsing, her eyes locked on mine crying, roll back. I step across the book, aim the gun, and fire again. Everything she ever was, stops. My hand is shaking. I look down at the blood sprayed against the words on the open book—this is the story of leavers and takers. I feel like I am dying. I feel like weeping.

  The sky is still, and everything is perfectly, blank. The snowy landscape unspoiled by a single footprint, or fallen branch, and we are returning, with her body inside the trunk, alongside her dog, and I can’t find it in me, to look at my partner, without, pulling the trigger. He is staring silently into the icy entropy, whiskey flask pressed against lips.

  WAKING JUST TO DIE

  The widow is dead. You wake in the night, naked with rifle, and peer through the drapes at the movement outside. Outside the window, you see a hunched Christ holding a cross, stumbling wearily across what looks like red waves—but when you look, it’s bodies, brown bodies. They are adorned in bright indigenous fabrics. The hemoglobin waves crackle then clot, and swarms of insects hatch from eggs beneath its surface. In the Christ’s hand is a chain, wrapped around wrist, dragging children behind him, black children, garbed in strange clothes, and you recognize them, they are of the Orisha. These are the children of Ogun, and Oya and Oshun. Sweat burns down your face. As the blood parts, you see your female cop partner arrive in the taxi.

  LA FRONTERA

  Our car is parked on the American side of the split cities, with a hole in the trunk positioned over a hole in the parking lot that leads to the wish. Our guns and bullets are moving piece by piece through the ventricle. Beside sodden tunnels are sallow cheek hunched children navigating to hope. And here I sit, on cantina bench dripping with chemicals, watching the Mexican block of buildings shift like technicolored Rubik’s cubes. One bright colored bar opens, with fresh tunnels beneath, another bar closes as old tunnels are discovered and sealed. Construction workers swirl in dusty nebulas. Everything is a mask wearing a mask. Everything weeps with sweat. My body is a widow shaped hole. The Americans pour through the gates, in endless lines for medicine and new smiles. Holding tax-free liquor and smokes, eyes on whores and drugs and dreams. Everything watches. Everything scans. These guns we shipped will go to the local police, others to the local cartel. This is not about violence. Or evil. This is about balance. We are agents of order. I search the other blank white faces. Somewhere in there is a caravan of smugglers like us. The Mexican locals, watch us all. Wondering what they can take from us, what we have come to take from them. I take a seat on the bench and the pills disintegrate me. My partner is in the dentist with the other wives. Our workers are moving the guns and the hand of the widow from the compartments in our station wagon, through holes in the parking garage, to the tunnels, that spider-web beneath the divided cities. In the streets, all around me, pharmacists announce their wears in mangled English. Everyone is scanned for what they have come to take. Dick pills for this one, opiates for that one. Every wound scanned, every hunger measured.

  A white haired, American citizen, invisible as us, sits next to me. He is holding a carton of cigarettes bought in the tax-free border zone. Shadows drip across our plastic faces. The sun slowly suicides. I am empty, the killings fall through me like rainfall, and I am left clear. I wonder if he has come to kill me, but he chatters about whores and cheap booze. He is as meaningless as a dream. He is another American citizen in a swarm of white hair and blue eyes that collect like locusts. The border is where Americans feed their shadows. The hills swoop and descend, with crumbling technicolor houses, vibrating with eyes. In the sky are drones and Israeli satellites, and wonders of such paranoid splendors. In the passage ways surrounding the cities, migrants tumble, bloody and dehydrated through sun-blackened ravines. But none of this matters. I have no insights, to the people, who live and die, and dream and dance so beautifully here. They are alien. I am simply a silent ghost, a parasite. I say lo siento when I bump shoulders, and move with quiet grace. I see others like me. Moving in and out of shops. There is a quiet density to them. A control. The real sicarios pull silence and shadow around them like a funeral veil. On every cor
ner someone is watching, a child or an old man, or woman, with a camera phone clicking and sending images of any stranger who is to strange. The city whirls with chemicals and curses and miracles. My partner is inside, with her teeth growing whiter and straighter. Everyone in the waiting room is one image closer to their online illusion.

  There will be young brown children, strewn out like wilted crops, from these bullets. Fathers will hang from bridges, and mothers will kneel, crumbling like flowers from the sunlight of each bang. There will be innocents collapsing in marketplaces from bullets sprayed from mopeds from the ammunition moving silently from our cars. And I am here, as my son’s face grows blurrier and blurrier, and my wife and the widow all drift down a long black river to the beginning of when I said yes. I see the widow in every child, in every cloud, in every rippling puddle. In the distance is a rusty fence, dividing these two worlds, the American side grotesque with razor wires and on the Mexican, beautiful paintings of angels, and migrants and la migra, and the psychic vision of the first Spanish boat that landed, with a cross and a promise and plague. The border is a scar, a weeping wound, a black hole. This is defiance. We are art when you give us violence. I wish I could be of this. I think of swallowing the bottle and vanishing into the lips of Santa Muerte; a soft blackened breath, inhaled into whatever cosmic emptiness I’ve sent so many, but instead I sit, and wait for the cartel to signal that it’s time to move south or crossover.

  There are tariff threats and tomatoes moving ton by ton in unison to every drug, inhaled through American lung or vein. Bodies burn like palo santo. There are warehouses rafters clogged with prayers. The desert eats children like communion wafers.

  It is in Mexico that the American gangsters go to vanish each other. I have vanished many here. Some collapsed on concrete, spat at my face, others plead for their daughters, for mercy, but they all ended up in a pit that doesn’t exist, a silent scream burned into the universe. Bloody rosaries. Pendants of children. Madres, memories, miracles—but none of it was enough to stop this machine of need. There are young brown girls going to colleges, beautiful in blue gowns, with rows empty of fathers who have disappeared, like one day I will disappear. The breeze dances, and I feel almost human in its movement. A vendor sells ice cream to dancing children. Grilled chorizo rises to a line of tired, but smiling workers. The citizen gets up and joins his wife with bags of medicine and crosses back over, in a line that leads for hours, to a camera, and inspection for all that is brown or wounded, and dual framed photos, one of a smirking Trump with blue tie and Russian eyes. And another of the other, just as sinister but silent. There is musty ruin in the air, of sewage lines shattered from drilled tunnels. It clings like death to everything, but those who truly are flowers here. Everyone here is tired of stories of drugs and killings emanating in white beams. They want their beauty seen, their songs heard, true and cherished, yet we citizens across the razored wall return from work, tired, and turn the channel to whatever cinematic show of drug lords and killings help us drift to sleep. For the dream of America is always the dream of the gangster. A young boy sets a newspaper next to me. It is a signal that the job is done.

  The transfer is finished. The guns are moved. The cars vanished. The widow’s hand moves onwards to someone’s shelf. I sit and watch my partner leave the dentist, wave, then vanish into the line of hundreds, ready to pass back over the border. Perhaps another winter we will have another run. Of guns and dead children and the murders that make her beaches so bright. And all that halos that will quiver from my hands in between our next hello. Our maybe our bosses will tinker her engine, and she will drive off a Peruvian ravine, or she will take a drink and collapse in a bar in a blood bought paradise, or a bullet will split her face, and she will be buried in a hole hidden as god, or maybe she will grow old perfect and clean as everything American. But the cartels close every story, and silence everything that it touches. And I walk and take a seat at another cantina and drink as the bodies pour, and screams build a wall and a country and a empty American dream. The old man on the corner, whistles and extends three fingers. I have been requested to go deeper but alone. I finish my drink. I miss the widow. I miss seeing her each morning. I picture death falling over me like black sand.

  PAPER TIGERS BURN BRIGHTEST

  I run bloody through the dark forest of saguaro. It feels like for hours, rifle in hand. Naked, birds above are screaming. It’s like I’m a child again playing tag, reaching to the safe tree that is base, and I race, bare feet blistering open, broken nose clotting, and arrive at the ranch. And here in the safe house, I burst through the door my body weeping with blood and I crumble against the wall, surrounded by shooters who know my name is clean. I see the widow in every shadow, in every endless memory. I tremble on the ground as they pour me tequila. I swallow the pills and erase myself.

  TWO WINTERS LATER

  I am steadier now. The new pills are helping. The colors feel cleaner. The orange juice doesn’t taste like rain water, or rust. My skin is clearing up. The bruises have healed. My arm is no longer in sling. If volunteering at the soup kitchen doesn’t stop the nightmares, it steadies my hands when the sun is relentless. They are flying me to another job. There is no killing this time, and I am not sure if it’s because they sense I’m unsteady or that I’ve paid my dues, or that someone else—younger—must earn their stripes. But this is a negotiation trip only, or maybe it appears to be that, to lure me to my execution. It is a relief I hope finds me. Whatever mechanism delivered me this far is broken. I turn sixty-two this year. My eyelids flicker, opiate-glimmered, and I step into the airport magazine shop for something to segregate this sensation, but there are just books on killings and a cover that mirrors a memory. Of the widow we erased that winter.

  And I flip it over, there’s a writer white as me, writing the story of the widow we buried in the snow, white as the power behind his fame. This world is not his, but he writes like he has the right to our crimes, to her tragedy. I see the book stacked with the other white writers’ books, at the airport stand, of missing girls and crimes, like mine, like ours, but their hands never twitch. They are family men and wives, who have never lived this life, but somehow need it more than I do.

  I want to drive to his suburban house and show him the source of his words, but know another writer, white as he, will wake to the news of his killing, and write, on pages white as the cum on their fingers, dreaming of the awards all this violence will bring, and know their cycle of sorrow theft will never end, and put the book down, and purchase a book on the history of the rose, and a book on the universe, to remind myself that maybe all the atoms of me, and them, will one day be part of something more beautiful than what we’ve done with them.

  EMPIRE

  Nick Mamatas

  El Warhol was a güero, so he was driving. His mask was mostly open-faced, basically a headband to hold his silver fright wig to his head, so the border patrol could see his face without him unmasking. Plus, he was a pluma, a featherweight, so wouldn’t spark the machismo of la migra. He was no tough guy. El Warhol’s partners in the back of the van had made less convenient sartorial and dietary choices. They were brutes. Donald Duck Jr., with his thick arms crossing his chest and fingers stuffed into his armpits, tried to look menacing but simply came off as insecure to El Warhol. A year ago, at a show in Reno, Jr. had found himself surrounded by people he took to police—blue uniforms, hands on their side arms, tense and standing on the balls of their feet, thinking they’re ready for anything—and by men he knew to be Mafioso. Nice suits, no guns visible, relaxed with weight settled into the saddle of their pelvises, actually ready for anything. Sunglasses at eight PM on a February evening.

  Take off your mask, sir, the police said. Take off your mask. You can’t wear a mask on the gaming floor of the Eldorado, sir. Like little white robots, Donald Jr. explained to his teammates after.

  “Neta!” one of the Mafioso said to him, like a question. Good accent. Donald Duck Jr. shrugged at
him. The Mafioso told him in Spanish that the police were not police, just minimum-wage guards, and then told the minimum-wage guards, in English, that if he, the Mafioso, and his “friends” could wear their sunglasses on the gaming floor, so too could the illustrious luchador Donald Duck Jr., of the Estados Unidos trios team wear his mask.

  You could run into fans anywhere, though only rarely did anyone at San Ysidro LPOE. El Warhol didn’t need to take off his mask. Donald Jr. would take off his mask, if enough men with guns appealed to him to do so.

  Then there was La Gran Depresión.

  He was the newest teammate, after Super Coney was unmasked in the middle of the ring and forced to retire in humiliation. Completo, but really they needed a new weight class for Depresión. La Gran Depresión, had he been white and working for one of the US wrestling promotions, probably would have just been dressed in a comically oversized pair of hillbilly coveralls and told to stand in the middle of the ring while everyone else bounced off him. He was that big. El Warhol had trouble driving the van with La Gran Depresión riding in the back. It burned gas like a mother, and the handling was all screwed up.