Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  “Wait here,” he said. He walked to the center of the field, scanned the forest, then beckoned me with a hand. I heard twigs breaking behind him. A man holding a rifle appeared with a dog. The dog ran toward David, but then stopped to urinate on one of the poppies. I held my breath. David spoke to the armed man for what seemed an eternity. The tension in their faces was not dissolving. Eventually, I couldn’t take it. I walked forward with a ditzy smile, hoping my blonde hair and green eyes and petite stature would save us. “Mucho gusto, señor,” I said, sticking my hand out to shake the stranger’s. He looked at me with a bewildered expression. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures? I’m not identifying the town. It’s a story for a financial newspaper about coffee prices.” The man seemed to relax, realizing I posed no threat. “Está bien, no hay problema,” he said.

  * * *

  •

  In December 2012, Piedragil’s body was found facedown on a pile of coconut husks in a garbage dump near Acapulco, hands tied behind his back, blindfolded. He had multiple gunshot wounds. I saw the photograph of his corpse in one of the Mexican tabloids. He looked more asleep than dead, as if passed out drunk on the bed of coconuts. He wore huaraches and his usual earth-toned clothes: green shirt and brown pants. I remembered his words in Acapulco: “If someone wanted to kill me, I’d be dead already.”

  DROWNED

  On April 23, 2011, during what is known in Mexico as Semana Santa, or Holy Week, I sped through a heavy storm into the known territory of bloodthirsty Zetas: Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz. I traveled with Rodrigo and three other friends, including my coworker Paul, a blond, blue-eyed adventurer who covered Mexico’s economy. He and Nick had become two of my closest friends in the capital. Nick had refused to come with us to Los Tuxtlas, saying it was too dangerous. Paul had laughed. He was carefree and lighthearted, the opposite of Nick, who was introverted and serious. Paul had secured a transfer to Brazil, where he had longed to work for years. The trip was a goodbye journey. Paul’s departure weighed on me. I had a secret crush on Paul, perhaps because he was the first man I had befriended in years who seemed utterly unmoved by me in any romantic sense. When I tried to charm him by discussing what I believed were fascinating subjects, such as quantum entanglement and out-of-body experiences, he rolled his eyes. I was not used to censoring my amorous feelings, but I knew there was no point in making confessions to Paul. He seemed to tolerate my friendship only because I enjoyed traveling, like him.

  In a National Geographic en Español article that year, a mutual friend had written an enticing description of Los Tuxtlas, the northernmost tropical rainforest of the Americas. The volcanic region was home to a dwindling population of jaguars, and the central town of Catemaco—which means “burned houses”—had gained a reputation as the national and international epicenter of black and white magic. The article included a frightening photograph of a brujo sacrifice that involved cutting the head off a black cat, but the other images made the region look as verdant and beautiful as the rainforest near Uruapán and the coast of Colima, where my parents had gone on their false honeymoon. I hoped to encounter brujos in the rainforest; the boys were eager to see jaguars. “I’d rather die than live afraid,” someone said as we drove through a storm. And in the solemn silence that followed, every person in the vehicle nodded, one after the other. So ignorant and young were we—was I, with my fearless smile.

  Everyone knows Holy Week is the worst time to go to the beach in Mexico. Families occupy every square foot of sand. But Paul and I were determined to find an uncrowded beach in Los Tuxtlas if one existed. We were confident in our investigative abilities. I believed we could find not only an uncrowded beach but a hidden one, full of foliage, like those in the photographs of my parents’ trip in southern Mexico.

  We walked through the streets of Catemaco until we came across a stone building that lacked a front wall; the fog drifted in and out as though the building were breathing. We entered and discovered a drinking establishment. We ordered a pitcher of beer at the bar. I asked the bartender, a German expat, if she knew where to find a secret beach.

  “She wants a beach with unicorns and waterfalls and fairies,” Paul said with a smirk. The woman smiled mysteriously. She leaned forward and drew us a map on a napkin.

  “A few minutes after the signs for Playa Jicacal, you’ll see a dirt path leading into the jungle. Take that road until it ends. You’ll see an abandoned hotel there. Get out of the car and look for a staircase leading into the jungle.”

  * * *

  •

  The next morning, we drove for hours along the coast, following her directions. Every beach we passed was so crowded with people you couldn’t pitch a single tent. “I have a gut feeling you’re going the wrong direction,” I said. “Oh really?” Paul said. “Since you have a gut feeling, then you must be right. From now on, I won’t make a single turn unless your gut tells me to.”

  He made a sudden U-turn. His friend Brian sighed from the back seat. “There is so much sexual tension in this vehicle,” he said. “Will you guys just have sex already?” The others cringed in awkward silence.

  We searched for the secret beach all day, and at some point I fell asleep. When I awoke, we were on a bumpy dirt road under a canopy of trees. Amber sunset light drifted through the dense green canopy in thick lines. Butterflies the color of butterscotch floated in the air. At the top of a mountain, three dusty white buildings rose out of the earth by a stone well. Spiders had spun webs in place of windows. We parked, got out of the car and heard a rustling in the trees. A Mexican man with a missing arm emerged from the rainforest. “Buscan la playa escondida?” he asked. We nodded yes, we were looking for the hidden beach. “That way,” he said, pointing with his intact arm.

  A stone staircase spiraled down the mountain. We followed the crumbling steps and saw the sea. It was lapping the verdant sides of the mountain. The wind lashed my face with the taste of salt and the smell of mariscos. We descended farther. At the base of the mountain, the steps spilled us onto the secret beach. The sand was covered in a pearly carpet of crabs that we displaced with each step. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have just found the only Mexican beach without a soul on it this weekend,” someone said.

  Darkness crept over everything. We hurried to pitch our tents and gather dry wood for a fire. A chorus of insects made a foreboding sound, like an E-flat that seemed to rise endlessly in pitch. Strange, glowing insects that were not fireflies emerged from the dark. They were black, bee-size bugs with two blue lights in front of their bodies. When they drifted into the smoke of our campfire, they fell into the sand and their lights flickered off, as if they had fainted. “Look, it’s the fairies you’ve always dreamed of!” Paul joked. He scooped up a few that had fallen into the sand. He blew on them gently, getting the sand off their wings, and their lights came back on in his palms. Suddenly, even he was perplexed. “Those lights are their eyes,” he said. We watched the creatures as they glided over the sea, then twisted in and out of the foliage on the mountain. We tried to keep them from the smoke, which seemed to make them sick.

  In a mystified tone, my friend Becca said: “They’re protecting us.”

  Brian snorted. “Either that or they’re warning us.”

  * * *

  •

  The next morning, Becca and I dove into the Gulf of Mexico. We took our bikini tops off to feel the cold water against our naked skin. Gold particles of light winked in and out of sight around us. On the mountain behind our beach, a clearing in the jungle revealed a herd of grazing sheep. It looks like a scene from the Bible, I thought, breathlessly. I threw my head back onto the water. I had the sensation of reaching a summit: I had found a secret paradise in my father’s country. I closed my eyes and reveled in the feeling of expansiveness that the ocean gave me. This was the meaning of life: moments like this—careless, weightless, free.

  I opened my eyes and turned toward Becca. I felt disorie
nted. She was much farther than she had been a few seconds ago. I could no longer feel the ground under my feet. I tried to swim toward her, but my efforts gained me not an inch. I was moving away. I realized, with consternation, that a rip current was sucking me out to sea. How many times had I gone skinny-dipping off the coast as an intoxicated adolescent? Nothing had happened then, and here I was, a sober adult, caught in a rip current. I told myself to remain calm and conserve my energy. I knew I had to swim parallel to the shore. I did the breaststroke north along the beach. The ocean pulled like a conveyor belt toward the horizon. I grew tired. Becca, the only person who realized what was happening, stared with her mouth agape. The waves became turbulent, blinding me, gagging me. I let go of my bikini top.

  Panic gripped me. I had never understood the meaning of panic until that moment. I had heard of people suffering “panic attacks” and had often referred to my own feelings as “panic.” I thought it referred to a sort of exaggerated anxiety. But when panic gripped me—and “gripped” is the right word—I discovered its true meaning. Panic is an animal that hides in your organs; it shreds you with its teeth, from the inside out. Rationality turns into a foreign language. The most horrible possibility becomes the only reality.

  I knew immediately it was the panic that was going to kill me, not the rip current, if I didn’t get it under control. But the knowledge that my life suddenly depended on my ability to slow my pulse made it impossible. I started hyperventilating the ocean into my lungs. I then understood fully—not just intellectually and emotionally but bodily—what the word “drowning” means.

  Calm down, I screamed in my head, trying to remember the meditative techniques I had taught myself in college. But the phrase “mind over matter” suddenly struck me as incomprehensible. My heart was exploding in my chest. Water was penetrating my lungs. I was exhausted. We were a fifteen-minute hike from our rental vehicle and a forty-five-minute drive from town. None of us had a flotation device. No one had phone service. With every breath of oxygen I took, I heard the gurgling of water in my throat—a terrifying sound with corpse-like connotations. Every neuron in my brain begged me to keep fighting, and every cell in my body screamed that it could not. It was the ultimate mind-body battle; both were losing. The blue Gulf of Mexico seemed to stretch out around me immensely, indomitably, in all directions, rising and falling like a panting creature, a predator intent on devouring me. After a few minutes, the inevitable became clear: I was not going to make it out of this alive. I hadn’t yet written a book, I hadn’t mothered a child, I hadn’t done a single thing to improve this world. I would die in my father’s country, senselessly, at the age of twenty-three. This was the end of my story.

  * * *

  •

  The taxistas of my father’s birthplace often asked me why I moved south to a country marked by northbound migration. Why would you abandon los Estados Unidos, a country so many dream of, to come here, to this Hell?

  For my job, I always responded.

  The answer was, of course, more complicated than that. There were many reasons: to understand my father, to unshelter myself, to expose corruption, to find adventure, to feel alive. How petty all those reasons seemed now. All of them had led me here: to the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Los Tuxtlas, where I would drown.

  * * *

  •

  Waves like animate limbs rose out of the sea and thrust their way into my throat. I coughed and swallowed to keep them out of my lungs. Meditate, meditate, meditate, I thought. But the ocean was ruthless. It kept entering me, mindlessly, without intent yet embodying an inescapable cause-and-effect that involved sinking and suffocating me. The sea had a solely material purpose: to fill me. The thought of its vast, unthinking body, wrapping itself around the entire planet, stronger than all ships, all whales, all continents, positioned itself inside my bones with all its weight.

  I sank. The discovery of my insignificance drained me of strength. I submitted to the sea. I meant nothing to the soulless universe, no more than cattle—like the sheep grazing on that faraway hill. How stupid I was, how absurd my pursuit of my father. I sobbed. My tears were a surprising comfort, a maternal caress on my cheeks. I thought of my mother: my beautiful, protective, hardworking mother. After everything she had sacrificed, she would be informed that her daughter had drowned. My mother had never wanted me to come to Mexico. She hated unnecessary danger; she despised futile questions. Her will was always to survive. Her focus was life, the immediate, the known. My father gravitated toward the opposite: death, the faraway, the unknown. In my obsession with the parent who rejected me, who rejected everything, I had become the mirror of a phantom. My obsession had dragged me here, off the coast of Los Tuxtlas, beyond a border I could never recross.

  In the end, it was my connection with my mother that felt most real. I sensed her in my skinny limbs, in my frantic, pounding heart. And through that link, something dawned on me: I was my father’s reflection, yes, but there was a distortion in the mirror. The distortion in the mirror was my mother. She had inflected my death wish with a need to survive—to embrace the fighting animal within me, regardless of its insignificance. No, no, no, I thought, or felt—a surge of refusal through every cell in my body. My mother coursed through my veins like a drug. I broke through the surface of the sea. I could see Paul treading water up ahead.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

  I gasped that I was drowning. His face was full of fear.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said, uncertainly.

  “Please don’t leave me,” I begged.

  The current was still pushing us into the horizon. The beach looked like a paradise you’d never be mad enough to swim to.

  “Don’t look at the shore,” Paul said. I tried to grab him, but he swam away. He reached out from a distance and gave me his hand. “I need you to back-float.”

  Back-floating had always been difficult for me. The absence of muscle or fat on my bones made floating nearly impossible without vigorous movement. Earlier that morning, I had actually said to Becca: I couldn’t back-float to save my life.

  I turned onto my back. The sea reached its fingers into my mouth. Then the fistfuls came. I swallowed. I begged my stomach to be big enough to contain the whole ocean if necessary. Paul placed a palm under my back, holding me up with one arm, swimming with the other. My breasts were bare on the surface of the water. Here I was: naked, mortal, mammalian. Paul warned me every time a wave was coming so I would hold my breath. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time, the water penetrated my throat. I looked at the shore: it was farther than it had ever been.

  * * *

  •

  Time passed. The ocean filled me. In what felt like another universe, Paul was saying: “I can feel the ground under my feet.” He let go of my body. I clung to him impulsively. “Brian, your shirt!” he cried, dragging me onto the sand. Brian ran for a shirt. Rodrigo was pacing back and forth. Becca was sobbing. “We thought you guys had drowned!” she cried. I crawled away from the shore, pinning myself against the mountain, as far from the water as possible. I coughed and gagged and puked the sea.

  As I lay gasping on the beach, I realized that something strange had happened to me, something I wouldn’t understand until reading Moby-Dick months later. I didn’t feel grateful to be alive. In fact, I didn’t feel alive at all. Although Paul had clearly saved me, I felt dead. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul,” Herman Melville writes of the sailor Pip after he sees the ocean stretching out forever in all directions, and goes insane.

  * * *

  •

  Paul left for Brazil a few days later. The near-drowning had so thoroughly messed with my neural wiring that my belief that my life depended on Paul extended beyond the incident, and I felt certain that once he left the capital, I would die. He let me sleep at his apartment the night before
his flight out of Mexico. I lay beside him, watching the glittering Mexico City skyscrapers from his open windows. Their lights remained on all night. I couldn’t sleep. My body was filled with a highly unpleasant electricity. Suddenly, Paul pulled me against him. I froze. Does he think I’m someone else? I wondered. Is he dreaming? I tried not to breathe or make a sound. I didn’t move until the sun came up. We said goodbye without smiling or crying. Paul told me, after leaving Mexico City, that in all his years of surfing he had never experienced a rip current so wide and fast as the one in Los Tuxtlas. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to save me. But, he said, “I knew from the time I swam into the current that I wasn’t coming out of the water unless it was with you.” I could no longer say I owed my life to God, to my parents, to destiny. I was alive because of a young man’s decision to swim into a rip current.

  * * *

  •

  I tried writing about what had happened, but I couldn’t find its meaning. In my journal, I wrote: “When confronting death, what keeps you alive isn’t your soul. Because your soul dies very quickly. What keeps you alive is the animal in you. The part you share in common with livestock.” I perceived the part of me that had endured as primitive and instinctual. My spirituality, my inquisitiveness, my adventurousness—those parts were dead. I had flashbacks, panic attacks and recurring nightmares. My lungs felt compressed to the size of fists. I tried to stretch their muscles by sucking in more oxygen, but they stayed small. Something very disturbing started happening at night. I later learned it had a name: sleep apnea. As I slept, my brain stopped sending signals to my lungs to expand, and my throat collapsed. Carbon dioxide rose to dangerous levels in my blood, prompting my nervous system to send emergency signals to awaken. I sat up, suffocating, struggling with all my might to breathe against the harsh grip of some invisible demon squeezing my airways. I gasped and gasped until I felt a whistle of air enter my throat. My throat opened, slowly, until finally the demon let go. The demon was death. It had taken me into its jaws and I had escaped, but I wasn’t supposed to escape. And so death kept hunting me. Fear dominated and drained me. I was drowning in the memory of the drowning.