Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  You befriended a machine operator at the shipyard, Joe, a short kleptomaniac with bulging tattooed muscles. He picked fights with lazy gringos in the shipyard. His comedic, careless personality reminded you of Charlie’s. He was a drug dealer, and sold grams of cocaine in little vials. The white powder made you feel confident on the weekends. Joe invited you to barbecues at his house. I stole a pair of beautiful Chihuahuas, Joe bragged. A male and a female. You’ve gotta see ’em. They were ugly, like all Chihuahuas, but you pretended to be impressed.

  You thought Joe was crazy, and the feeling was mutual. Once, you went fishing on a boat Joe had stolen. About a mile from the Coronado Islands, you became seasick. You bid Joe farewell and jumped into the water. Joe cried out in terror. Are you crazy? You’ll drown! You felt immediate relief, and swam the breaststroke through the water. The ocean stretched past every horizon around you. The vastness was exhilarating; you felt yourself expanding to match it. Your body was as efficient here as on the decks of ships. When you grew tired, you simply floated on your back. You swam until you felt rocks under your palms. You crawled onto a small stretch of sand, saltwater catching sunlight on your eyelashes. You stretched your tanned limbs, watching birds overhead.

  Joe told everybody about your stunt. You know what this puto did? He just jumped out of my boat in the middle of the fuckin’ ocean. He swam like ten miles to the Coronado Islands. He’s a lunatic!

  One weekend, you stopped by Joe’s and knocked at his door to see if he wanted to play pool. Nobody answered. A neighbor emerged from a nearby house and informed you that Joe had been killed. His body had been found on the sidewalk with bullets in his back and his face.

  You asked yourself: Why did my two friends die? Why does everyone I love suffer or drop dead? Is it me? Am I causing their deaths by getting too close?

  Your head was filling with too many questions; knowledge wasn’t coming quickly enough to let your brain breathe. You needed answers, information; you needed understanding to relieve the pressure in your skull. But school was becoming impossible. One day, when you couldn’t figure out why your teacher had marked your answer to a certain exam equation as wrong, you tried to articulate a question in your accented English: I do the equation again and I again have 105 grams, you said. The teacher was a white lady who instinctually distrusted you. She sneered, walked up to the blackboard and reproduced the equation in front of everyone. She underlined “105 gr.” Enunciating each word as if speaking to a child, she said: The answer is 105 grams. But I marked it as incorrect because you wrote “gr” instead of “g.” The abbreviation is “g.” In Tijuana, “gr” was an acceptable abbreviation. You tried to explain. She interrupted you, accusing you of making excuses—you were lazy, you didn’t want to accept responsibility for your mistakes. It was humiliating. In Tijuana, instructors saw you as gifted. Here, they treated you as if you were stupid. The whole education system seemed engineered to inspire in you an unbearable sense of inadequacy. Worse, it was slow—in a monotone, meaningless way. The formalities and structure and redundancies forced students to crawl through facts as if through molasses, and become exhausted before absorbing a single thing. You decided to quit. You didn’t need a college degree. You didn’t need to play by made-up rules. You would become your own teacher. You would gobble up knowledge quickly, with the efficiency you brought to building oil tankers. You decided you had set the bar too low with your childhood ambitions. You would teach yourself medicine—not just traditional medicine, but homeopathic medicine, Chinese medicine, curanderismo. You would become an expert in everything. You visited the library for books about biology and world wars and economics. You became fluent in English. You used your savings to buy a house, the Cutlass and a motorcycle.

  * * *

  •

  You were speeding on a Honda CX650 when you saw a curvy girl with long black hair at a bus stop. She was eye-catching. You stopped and offered her a lift. The girl blushed and accepted the ride. You were now aware of the allure you held for women, in spite of your ongoing anxiety. Maria was a cross-border resident of Mexicali and San Diego, studying in the United States and spending weekends south of the border. You started dating. She was a shy, sweet girl, cooking and cleaning at the house you had purchased in Lemon Grove, studying with you in the evenings. You rarely spoke; you were comfortable in silence, enjoying each other’s company. But one evening, as you cuddled in bed, she stared at you with intense uncertainty and an evident desire to speak. A whirlwind of secrets swirled behind her lips. Finally, she yielded: I have to tell you something.

  What? you asked.

  There’s something wrong with me. She inhaled a shaky breath and continued. If I get mad at someone…if I get really mad at someone…something bad happens to that person. Always. Always.

  You laughed dismissively—Me estás jodiendo—and then you fell asleep.

  Maria left for a cousin’s birthday party in Mexicali. You promised to pick her up at the Tijuana bus station. But on the morning of her return, you awoke to realize you had slept through your alarm clock. Hijole, ya me está esperando, you thought. You ran to your motorcycle, forgetting your helmet. You sped south on I-805. A rock had rolled into the middle of your lane. You noticed it too late. Decades later, you tell me: “If you start to think about it, she was already waiting for me. Like half an hour, maybe an hour. She was real angry. Like, This motherfucker isn’t coming to get me.”

  The pavement scraped the skin from your elbows, knees, shoulders, knuckles, cheekbones. Someone called 9-1-1. After a few hours in the emergency room, you hopped back onto your mangled motorcycle, drugged on painkillers, wearing bandages. You pulled up to the Tijuana bus station. Maria was waiting. I’m sorry, you said.

  Maria told you she wanted to get married. My cousin tells me you’re just using me for sex, she said. She looked at you with black, angry eyes. Although Maria was nice and pretty, you didn’t see a future with her. You told her you weren’t ready for a commitment. A few days later, she turned to you and said: I’m pregnant.

  That’s impossible. Do a test.

  What are you going to do if I am pregnant?

  I dunno. Do a test.

  What do you mean “I dunno”?

  I dunno. Let’s go to the doctor, let’s find out.

  I want to know now what you’re going to do!

  You’re not pregnant. We always use protection.

  She wept. She told you she was through with you. You dropped her off at her cousin’s on your motorcycle, then sped home, relieved. You heard the tiny sports car a split second before it hit you. Your body smashed into the windshield and bounced into the street. The tires skidded toward you. You slid along the flesh-eating asphalt. The car stopped an inch from your face. The driver stumbled out and stepped on your body in a drunken stupor. You were still conscious. I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint, you gasped, hyperventilating. The drunk gawked at you, then sprinted back to his car and sped away. By the time the ambulance arrived, you had lost consciousness.

  “If that hadn’t happened to me, I would say mal de ojo doesn’t exist,” you tell me years later. “But it does exist. Mal de ojo exists.”

  Mal de ojo is a curse caused by a look filled with negative energy, such as a glare, a scowl, a frown. You had never believed in the power of curses—you were confident that if they existed, disbelief or pure mental effort canceled their efficacy—but after the two incidents on the motorcycle, you concluded that curses, especially mal de ojo, were real. But Maria was not the first person to curse you. Surely, you thought, you had been cursed long before you met her, long before you arrived in the United States, perhaps even long before you were born.

  CIA TORTURE

  The second millennium came. You had two daughters and a handful of dead dreams. You discovered crack cocaine, which resembled a piece of calcite from the guts of the earth—pure and promising. The drug made you feel you were i
n touch with God himself. You had never been convinced by your mother’s Catholicism, but the existence of some kind of divine being was undeniable. You had felt it while meditating as a teenager, and again while smoking crack. It seemed more real than anything in this world, a blissful bodily filling and erasing, contradiction embodied.

  But then, one day, you started hearing voices in your head, lightning bolts in your chest. You noticed people following you. You turned to the Internet, and discovered a vast community of people reporting the same experiences: Targeted Individuals, or TIs. You read about Project MKUltra, about how between 1953 and 1973, the CIA conducted covert mind-control experiments combining LSD and intimidation techniques such as gang stalking on involuntary subjects in the general population. Was the CIA doing something similar now with electromagnetic or radio waves? You noticed a correlation between the torment and your crack use, and finally you figured it out: the CIA was trying to eradicate your drug addiction with its mind-control technology. Success would prove to them that their weapons were effective in dramatically altering human behavior. The simultaneous genius and evil of the possibility infuriated you; you became hell-bent on thwarting the project.

  You smoked crack with fervor. The government punished you with what felt like a remote Tasering of your coronary muscles, causing you to collapse and writhe in pain. You called the San Diego Union-Tribune and requested to place an advertisement. A female representative typed as you dictated the message: Desperate cry for help, period. Unconsenting victim of aversive behavior conditioning. Seeking lawyer, activist, civil rights group and reporter. The representative hung up the phone. When you called back, she hung up again. You concluded that the newspaper was working with the CIA.

  While flipping through the channels on TV, you noticed something strange: channels without a signal synchronized with your thoughts. A horizontal line through the center of the gray static wiggled wildly if you were having agitated thoughts and went flat if you stopped thinking. When your brothers visited, you showed them how the line danced when you spoke and went still with your silence. You’re crazy, man, they said.

  You felt a constant electric current through your body: a cold, hard, painful feeling, like particles of ice in your veins. If you touched anything metal, you felt immediate relief, as if the current was dissipating. This gave you an idea. You drove to my mother’s house with a magnet and a piece of copper wire. You wanted to prove to Jeannette, scientifically, that something was happening to you. You held up the copper and the magnet, tied to a string. The copper caused the magnet to move wildly on its string, a physical impossibility unless the copper had a strong electric current running through it. Here was evidence that you were charging the copper as you held it.

  “Mom saw this?” I ask you years later.

  “Yes,” you say, emphatically. “But I guess she’s not analytical.”

  When I ask my mother about the demonstration, she says she has no memory of it. “I don’t know, maybe I ignored him….It’s not like you can take somebody like that seriously.”

  “So you’re saying it may have happened?”

  She shrugs. “When you don’t believe something, it doesn’t matter if someone tries to prove it to you—you don’t believe it. But knowing he was using hallucinogenic drugs…how could you believe him? Your father was very smart, but unfortunately he messed up his brain really bad with drugs. What he thinks is real is not real. What he thinks happened did not happen.”

  Downtown, among other crack addicts, you were believed. Surrounded by homeless people, you leaned your head back and placed a penny between your eyebrows. It instantly jumped off you, as if zapped by your corporeal current. The witnesses backed away in fear and amazement.

  Most of your friends were black men who lived on the streets. They were the only ones who listened to your theories and believed them. They, too, were uncooperative lab rats of CIA mind-control experiments. You smoked crack together, talked about the fucked-up world together, drank beers, played cards, walked on the beach. You soaked up their street slang, eager to speak like them. To this day, your language features a riveting hybrid of their rhythms and book-nerd Spanglish.

  Sometimes the torture did not feel like torture. You discovered enormous, ethereal shapes—sapphire spheres, crystalline cubes, mutated pyramids—floating above your head. They seemed both divine and dangerous. They looked like doorways to parallel worlds. But you couldn’t figure out how to open them. When you touched them, they became disfigured. They possessed a consistency between wax and clay, molding around your fingers. If you scratched them, their substance collected under your nails.

  You were unwilling to give up crack; you weren’t going to let a corrupt government dictate your behavior. But every time you smoked, the gringos commented annoyingly in your head, Look at him sitting there, and Watch him light up the pipe, and Let’s see how long he can handle this one, then zapped you with their icy rays. You collapsed on the ground, writhing as if with a seizure. You broke several crack pipes with these falls, until finally you stopped buying the glass kind and got a wooden pipe, as suggested by one of your friends. At night, the voices tormented you without cease, making threats and insulting you, and finally, crazed with insomnia, you decided to end your life. You were living with your mother at the time. You walked into the bathroom and filled the tub with water. Then you plugged the hair dryer into an electric outlet. You crawled into the tub, weeping and trembling, and as you reached up to pull the hair dryer into the water, your mother burst in through the door. She hauled you out of the tub, soaking herself as she summoned Santa María and blessed you with the sign of the cross.

  She drove you to the Bayview Behavioral Health Campus. A psychologist asked if you were hearing voices. You shook your head. “But she fuckin’ wanted to insist that I was hearing voices. And I did hear voices,” you say, laughing. “There was a TV playing over there in the room and I said, ‘Do you hear that TV? Well, I hear it, too. But that doesn’t mean I’m “hearing voices.” ’ There’s a technology in which they can make you remotely hear voices, and it has been documented. You can read about it.”

  At the clinic, the voices stopped. You were released. You decided to cross the border into Mexico. You were determined to be the most recalcitrant victim the CIA had ever known. You would not let them win! You drove your dark green VW Jetta into Baja California with a month’s supply of crack in a glass jar and your life savings in cash. Rebelliously, with the windows down, listening to jazz, you sped through the desert on the Transpeninsular Highway, inhaling deeply and defiantly from your crack pipe. Finally, you were free. Free of voices, free of electric shocks, free of stalkers. You drove joyfully, skirting iguanas and roadkill, watching as the ocean transformed from a dark savage blue into a celestial aquamarine. You lost sight of the sea for several hours, then it reappeared, now on the east, the Gulf of California. You saw sunlight dancing on the sky-like water, glittering through walls of mutant cacti that leaned and grasped and twisted in on themselves in a crazed paralyzed dance. You were anxious to get as far from the United States as possible, and did not plan to check in to a hotel until reaching La Paz, at the southern end of the peninsula.

  After several hours of driving, you felt an itch on your cheek. You turned your head. You leaned closer to the passenger’s seat. It was unmistakable: the headrest was zapping you. Cursing, you pulled into the next Oxxo—the Mexican equivalent of 7-Eleven—and bought aluminum foil. You wrapped a long piece around the headrest, trying not to tear it with your trembling hands. That seemed to stop the unpleasant sensation. But as you reached for your keys to put them in the ignition, they swung away from you with a sudden motion, as if repelled by your flesh. You held them in front of your face and watched as the keys, rather than hanging loosely in accordance with gravity, moved toward the dashboard. You forced the keys into the ignition, started the car and stepped on the gas.

  Back on th
e road, you saw a military checkpoint up ahead. You consulted your rearview mirror for an escape. A black SUV with tinted windows and American plates was tailgating your car. You took deep breaths, using the meditative techniques you had cultivated as a young man. You rolled down your window. A Mexican soldier asked where you were going. Praying he wouldn’t notice the empty beer cans and drugs strewn around you, you tried to explain that you were heading to La Paz for a short vacation on the beach. You checked the rearview mirror again. Two gringos in casual clothing were emerging from the SUV. They seemed to be friends with the soldiers at the checkpoint. They were chatting amiably.

  I need you to step out of the car, the soldier said.

  You opened the door, sweating, trembling. The soldier led you away from the car, asking innocuous questions about where you were from and what you did for a living. You glanced over your shoulder and saw four people crawling into your back seats, including one of the white men from the SUV. “It was like they were putting something in there, a piece of equipment or something,” you tell me decades later.

  After a few minutes of small talk, the soldier told you to enjoy La Paz. “I went back to the car, closed the door, and everything was intact,” you recall. But as you drove south, you noticed a difference: the whole car was buzzing with painful electricity. About five kilometers outside the beach town of Loreto, you parked your car on the side of the road. A new moon hid in the night sky. You sprinted into the desert with your crack. You walked until you reached a precipice. You could hear the ocean roaring beneath. You could not see it, or tell where it ended or where the sky began, but you knew it was there, a noisy liquid blackness blending into the mute vacuum of unlit space. You sat at the edge of the cliff, feeling your way downward as the wind whipped your skin. You wanted to lose yourself in the blackness, wanted to hang from the barren mountainside against those elements—pinned by the wind between sea and earth, fire on your pipe. You slid until you arrived at a thick barrier of brush. You lit up, warmth gushing through your veins. You melted into the night.