* * *
•
That year, Papi was diagnosed with polycythemia—the excessive production of red blood cells. He had to get a pint of blood drawn once a week, a phlebotomy. But it didn’t cure him of the mysterious illness—he was a stone the weight of a supernova. He kept drinking profuse amounts of whiskey, the only thing that made him feel better, killing himself to kill the sickness or curse or whatever it was. One day, at the Tijuana clinic where his blood was drawn, he begged the nurse to remove more blood. She refused. When she left the room, he took the needle and stabbed himself, sucking up syringeful after syringeful. Again and again, he eliminated blood from his body, squirting it into a trash bin until finally he felt lighter, better. He hopped into his jeep and drove across the border to visit his mother. He passed out on I-5. His jeep hit the median and flipped over twice. Miraculously, it came to a halt right-side up without hitting other vehicles. The final impact shook Papi awake. He assessed the damage and drove on.
* * *
•
I was determined to fix myself. The idea that I had lost my fearlessness was unacceptable to me. I needed to recover it. I took swimming classes at the local gym, pausing in the middle of laps to grasp the side of the pool and calm my panic attacks. I went on a guided excursion in Malinalco, Estado de México, jumping from the tops of small waterfalls into river rapids below—which induced panic attacks so increasingly terrible I had to be escorted out of the canyon early. I took guitar lessons. I climbed mountains. I learned to ride a motorcycle and bought a black Yamaha FZ16. I drove the motorcycle to work, cutting my commute from forty minutes to ten by weaving through the Mexico City traffic. But it was useless. Fear thrashed inside my body. I felt rigid as a concha de mar, empty of everything but the ocean’s echoes. On the summit of a volcano called Malinche, I felt the unconquerable pull of the abyss on my limbs. I curled into a ball on the slope, battling the vertigo I had never before felt, and I cried.
* * *
•
My nightmares were always the same. I’m back at the secret beach. The sea level begins to rise. I turn toward the mountain, and use the foliage to climb. At the top, I encounter corrugated steel gates that rise to the end of the sky. Paul is behind a foggy window on a locked door. I beg him to open it. The ocean is lapping at my feet. He shakes his head. “You’re going to have to find your own way this time,” he says. But I can’t, and I drown.
* * *
•
The tomatoes in Papi’s backyard blackened and shriveled. The comfrey and other curative crops sagged and stank. The coastal wind carpeted his rotting garden with salt. Papi drank bottle after bottle of whiskey. His skin became the color of maíz amarillo.
* * *
•
I went to see a psychologist in Polanco. She diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended EMDR therapy: eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. Mimicking the rapid-eye-movement (REM) stage of sleep, in which we dream, EMDR is a guided and conscious imitation of dreaming. The therapist asks the patient to meditate on the traumatizing experience while exposing her to bimodal stimuli and steering her away from negative associations. I reimagined myself drowning as the therapist moved her fingers in front of my eyes, left to right, left to right, and asked me to describe what I saw. After several sessions, I began to observe that my body was glowing as I drowned. A golden light was buoying me—a magical light from my mother. I had never been in real danger. I was never meant to drown. My mother had been protecting me. This “realization,” however imagined, eradicated some of my worst symptoms: my flashbacks and my panic attacks. I had reframed my recollection of the trauma. But my nightmares and sleep apnea persisted. I felt depressed, exhausted and, worst of all, afraid.
* * *
•
Papi poured powders and potions into his whiskey. He awoke feeling refreshed, and began to revive his jardín. But the improvement never lasted. The mysterious disease always returned: his hands shook, his legs became so heavy he could hardly take a step. He crawled up the stairs and collapsed on his bed. His body shook with unknown crashing energies. All night, the turbulence kept him wide awake.
* * *
•
While walking back from the cinema one evening with a friend, I noticed a taxi pull over beside us on the curb. A man leaped out with a gun, shouting, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” in Spanish. I thought he intended to kidnap us. But he just wanted our money. I handed him my purse, my phone, my jacket, almost joyous with relief. Back in my apartment, I curled up on the floor and succumbed to violent tremors. I coughed and shuddered. I desperately needed to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come.
* * *
•
I went to a club in Polanco with a handsome, shaved-headed Venezuelan. We danced. My legs and arms felt too heavy; I couldn’t enjoy it. We decided to go back to his place. I tried to wave down a taxi in my golden Bebe dress and heels, and fell through an open sewage hole in the sidewalk. I opened my arms in time to arrest my fall at the height of my chest. I looked down at the nothingness stretching all the way to the swamps of Hell. The Venezuelan hauled me out with his muscular arms, gasping at the sight of my bloody shins. Vamos al hospital! he cried. I shook my head. I wanted to go home, to crawl into my bed and stay there forever. This was an omen if ever there was one: Mexico wanted me dead, and would swallow me whole if it had to.
* * *
•
I flew to the coastal town of Puerto Escondido. I needed to force myself back into the ocean. I could no longer live with this fear. But I had barely checked in to my hostel when the electricity in the port went out. It rained for the first time in months, a torrential pour that wouldn’t stop, with lightning and thunder. The next day, the sea level started to rise. I stood on the shore as the waves crept closer and closer and enveloped my feet. Even the locals were dumbstruck, taking pictures of the water on their phones, calling their friends and relatives: “¿Estás viendo esto?” The flooding consumed restaurants on the beach, sent families running to cars. Purple clouds spat lightning on the sea. I went online and checked the National Hurricane Center’s website. The probability of a hurricane in the next forty-eight hours was forty percent. A few hours later, it was at sixty percent. My return flight wasn’t for another week, but the sounds of the waves cracking like the whips of an angry God and the thunder and howling wind hurling itself against my cabin walls made my body ache with terror. The owners of the cabin complex told me they were leaving that night; there were no other clients; I would be alone. I tried to sleep. My body trembled with fear. What if the ocean reaches my cabin doors? What if it takes me again? I believed the flooding was tied to my presence. Don’t be silly, I told myself. That’s nonsense. Suddenly: a knocking at my cabin door. I could see a human silhouette in front of the window of the flimsy wooden wall. I held my breath, paralyzed. Who could it be? I reached under my pillow and grabbed my phone, checking it for service. It had none. If the figure forced its way into my cabin, it could do anything to me, it could rape and kill me, it could drag me into the ocean, nobody would know. I prayed for the shadow to disappear. It knocked again. “Qué quieres?” I screamed. No response. I checked my phone a second time. Still no service. Knock. Knock. I wept. I stared at the window; the shadow was shifting its weight. After a moment, it turned around and disappeared in the direction of the sea.
I bought a flight back to Mexico City the next morning. In the Associated Press, I learned an American had died on the same beach the same day I had stood watching the lightning on the water. The waves had pulled him out to sea and drowned him.
* * *
•
Melville writes:
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of m
any of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all those creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
I had pushed off the isle in pursuit of my father. How similar was his country to the sea—its properties and its myths—all-consuming, unfathomable, full of corpses and secrets, sickening, indomitable, capable of driving souls insane. How strange, that the Spanish word for “swim”—nada—is the same as the word for “nothingness.” The sea had consumed me; in my quest for my father, who had introduced me to el mar, I had discovered its true meaning: Nada. Nothing. Nonexistence.
My childhood and drug-induced perceptions of nothingness as the most fertile ground in the universe were, after all, hallucinatory. Life was not full of meaning and mystery. Lives were droplets of blood in a sea of nothing. Humans were dreaded creatures, remorseless tribes, dreaming themselves into existence.
“There is no quality that is not what it is merely by contrast,” wrote Melville so many years ago. I highlighted and starred this sentence in the book.
I moved to Mexico because I believed, like Melville, that the poetry of a sunset is in the entanglement of night and day, in the limbs of light yielding to the dark. I moved to Mexico to unshelter myself: to discover death and, through it, life. What I didn’t expect was that discovering death would make me terrified of living—that my capacity for joy would recede into the past, irretrievable.
* * *
•
I returned to Los Tuxtlas on the anniversary of my near-drowning. I took two friends—a Puerto Rican art curator, Maria Elena, and a Mexican programmer, Ro—and brought a large piece of cardboard, a knife and a marker. I was determined to give the deadly beach a name: one that would give it a positive connotation in my mind. On our first day in Los Tuxtlas, we camped on a popular beach. We awoke to find that Ro’s red vehicle had been mutilated. The name of the Zetas drug cartel had been inscribed in massive letters on the hood of the engine, the roof of the car, the bumper and each door with a blade: ZETAS. ZETAS. ZETAS. ZETAS. ZETAS. As we drove, searching for the hidden beach, we saw a military checkpoint up ahead. Maria Elena tossed me her bag of marijuana, beseeching me to hide it: You’re the only white person here, she said. I stuffed it into my bra, heart pounding. The soldiers, with AK-47s, asked us to step out of the vehicle. I held my breath, terrified I was going to Mexican prison. They searched Ro, interrogated Maria Elena and left me alone. After determining we weren’t Zetas, they informed us we had been marked for death. They advised us to ditch the car.
We walked to a supermarket to purchase red nail polish and red lipstick. We filled in the letters, drew random symbols over them, poured sand on them. We drove until we found the hidden beach. As we descended the spiral stone staircase, we saw a Mexican family in the water. They were moving east at an impossible speed. A rip current was pulling them into the horizon. We ran down the steps. I had brought a life vest. I could save them. But by the time we reached the sand, the family had reversed course—the mother was hauling her sons onto the beach. They were gasping for breath, gagging and coughing. One of the little boys joked, in Spanish: “Go on in, the water’s great!” I smiled and jumped in with my life vest. Afterward, trembling with the horror of what I had just done, I used a fallen bamboo stick to erect my sign, which read: Playa de las Hadas. Beach of Fairies. On the back, I wrote, in Spanish: Beware of rip currents.
* * *
•
Several days later, I flew to San Francisco for my sister’s graduation ceremony at the Academy of Art University. My sister had grown into a beautiful young woman, with her scarlet-dyed hair and enchanting gap-toothed smile. She produced surreal works of art featuring charming gap-toothed creatures. Michelle had episodes of depression, but she had a vibrant social life in San Francisco, promising artistic prospects and a crazy-eyed mutt with a natural mohawk. Our parents, our two abuelas and I watched her get her diploma. We visited her in her apartment. Michelle showed us a portrait she had recently finished: our father dressed in colorful shamanic robes, balancing in his palm a stringy, melting blackness. It was the image from her recurring childhood dream. She had finally purged herself of it.
We had dinner at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt hotel restaurant. I was supposed to share a room with my mom and Abuela Coco that night, while my father and Abuela Carolina shared the room next door. But Papi wanted to go drinking with me and my sister, so I exchanged places with Abuela Carolina. After barhopping, my father and I said goodbye to Michelle, walked to the hotel and fell asleep. Papi jolted me awake with a scream. He was hearing voices. He searched the room, returned to bed, whimpered, tossed and turned. In the morning, I saw his cross-shaped cicatriz.
* * *
•
In June 2012, a young journalist, Armando “Mando” Montaño, moved to Mexico City. We had befriended each other during an internship at the Seattle Times while we were both still in college. Mando had been following my posts on Facebook, “liking” my pictures, saying he was eager to work as a journalist in Mexico and explore his roots—his father was also Mexican. He was two years younger than me. After securing an internship at the Associated Press, he asked for my advice on where to live. I had moved back to Condesa while my roommate, Rodrigo, was visiting relatives in Bolivia because I could not stand the cockroaches of Roma by myself. I suggested my new building, where a rental services company called Live in Condesa grouped foreigners in large, vaguely themed apartments (artsy, party, studious) and provided a housekeeper.
Mando’s parents were worried about the country’s violence. But they believed he would be safe with me; they had met me during a visit and trusted me. I heard Mando reassuring his mom over the phone: Mom, I’m going to be fine—I’m with Jean! I showed Mando around the capital, feeling its allure for the first time in months. Your life is my dream, Mando said. He took pictures of me on my motorcycle, posed for some of his own. We curled up in bed, exchanging stories of boys we had loved, of journalism dreams. I confessed I was thinking about quitting my job. It had been a dream come true for a while, allowing me to report out of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico, spending time with the poorest of campesinos and the richest of commodities traders. But the stories that most mattered to me—about people instead of prices, about corruption instead of market trends—were the ones the editors in New York either turned down or altered beyond recognition. Mando encouraged me to become a freelance writer. Sí se puede! he said, laughing in his openmouthed way, black tresses dancing. On the weekends, we went to clubs in Roma and Condesa. The gay boys loved him, with his Clark Kent face and tempestuous limbs. I feel like I’m seeing Mexico City for the first time again, through your eyes, I told him. For the first time since the near-drowning experience, I felt oxygen in my veins.
On his fourth Friday in the city, I was tired after three consecutive weekends of clubbing. All I wanted to do was sip hot chocolate and binge-read in my bed. I informed Mando I would not be joining him at a party of expats that evening. I had to cover Mexico’s presidential elections on Sunday, and wanted to be well rested. My editors were sending me to the headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to shoot video of Enrique Peña Nieto. They expected he would win. Mando informed me that the Associated Press was sending him to the PRI headquarters on election night as well. If only we were being sent to the headquarters of the PRD, he sighed, referring to the Democratic Revolutionary Party, whose candidate had vowed to root out g
overnment corruption and help the poor after decades of policies favoring foreigners and lighter-skinned Mexicans. Peña Nieto, meanwhile, had run on promises to open up the oil industry to foreign investors for the first time in nearly a century. American traders were excited. Global spectators saw Peña Nieto, who resembled a black-haired Ken doll, as the man who would modernize Mexico. Mexican youth saw him as a puppet of the dinosaurios of the PRI. The PRI had ruled the country for more than seven decades with impunity and violence, massacring hundreds of protesting students ahead of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The party’s fall to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) in 2000 had seemed like irreversible progress. But now the PRI was making a comeback—and many of my sources in New York were delighted.
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