Yes, that’s right, Swift Feather. And Ma? Who’s she? he asks.
My husband takes his time to think about it, and finally says:
She would be Lucky Arrow.
I like the name, and I smile in acknowledgment, or in gratitude. I smile at him for the first time in days, maybe weeks. But he can’t see me smile because the room is dark and his eyes are probably closed anyway. Then I ask him:
And you? What would your war name be?
The girl chimes in, without taking her thumb out of her mouth, lisping, thething, and fumming her words:
Pa, he’s the Elvis. Or the Jesus Fucking Christ. Either or.
My husband and I laugh, and the boy reprimands her:
You’re gonna go to hell if you keep saying that.
He probably chastises her more because of our praising laughter than because of the content of her statement. She certainly does not know why she should be censured. Then, taking her thumb out of her mouth, she asks:
Who’s your favorite Apache, Pa? Geronimo?
No. My favorite is Chief Cochise.
Then you get to be Papa Cochise, she says, like she’s handing him a gift.
Papa Cochise, my husband whispers back.
And softly, slowly, we fall asleep, embracing these new names, the ceiling fan slicing the thick air in the room, thinning it. I fall asleep at the same time as the three of them, maybe for the first time in years, and as I do, I cling to these four certainties: Swift Feather, Papa Cochise, Lucky Arrow, Memphis.
§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 5″)
“On Reading”
“On Listening”
“On Translating”
“On Time”
§ NINE BOOKS
The Cantos, Ezra Pound
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
New Science, Giambattista Vico
Blood Meridian & All the Pretty Horses & Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy
2666, Roberto Bolaño
Untitled for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger
The New Oxford Annotated Bible, God?
§ FOLDER (MUSICAL SCORES)
Metamorphosis, Philip Glass
Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso el Sabio), Jordi Savall
MISSING
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place
created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.
It is in a constant state of transition.
The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
—GLORIA ANZALDÚA
You better hope you never see angels on the rez.
If you do, they’ll be marching you off to
Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.
—NATALIE DIAZ
SPEED
Light poles flicker beside us, aluminum and white neon. The sun is rising behind our car, coming up from under the inch of concrete at the far eastern tip of Route 50. As we drive west across Arkansas, chicken fences stretch out endless. Behind the fences are lonely ranches. Lonely people in those ranches, maybe. People reading, sleeping, fucking, crying, watching television. People watching the news or reality shows, or perhaps just watching over their lives—over a sick boy, a dying mother, over a cow in labor, and eggs hatching. I look out through the windshield, and wonder.
My phone rings as we are driving past a soy field. It’s Manuela, finally calling me back after a long silence. The last time I talked to her was nearly three weeks ago, right before we left the city. She doesn’t have good news. The judge ruled against the petition for asylum that the lawyer had filed for the girls, and after that, the lawyer dropped the case. She was told that her two daughters would be transferred from the detention center where they had been waiting, in New Mexico, to another detention center, in Arizona, from where they would be deported. But the day they were supposed to be transferred, they disappeared.
What do you mean, disappeared? I ask.
The officer who called her to deliver the news, she tells me, said the girls were put on a plane back to Mexico City. But the girls never arrived there. Manuela’s brother had made the trip from Oaxaca to the capital and waited at the airport for eight hours, and the girls never walked out.
I don’t understand, I say. Where are the girls now?
She tells me she doesn’t know, says that everyone she has talked to tells her that the girls are probably still in the detention center. Everyone tells her to wait, be patient. But she thinks the girls aren’t in any detention center. She says she’s sure the girls ran away, that maybe someone in the detention center, someone friendly, helped them escape, and that the two of them are possibly on their way to her.
Why do you think that? I ask, wondering if she is losing her grip.
Because I know my blood, she says.
She tells me she’s waiting for someone to call her and tell her something. After all, the girls must still have their dresses with them, so they have her telephone number. I don’t question her further about it, but I ask:
What are you going to do next?
Look for them.
And what can I do to help?
After a brief silence, she says:
Nothing now, but if you get to New Mexico or Arizona, you help me look.
VIGIL
A few months before the four of us left on this trip, during the period in which I was going to the New York federal immigration court at least once a week, I met a priest, Father Juan Carlos. Having studied at an all-girls Anglican boarding school, I have never been too fond of priests, or nuns, or religion in general. But this priest I immediately liked. I met him outside immigration court one day. I was standing in line, waiting to be let into the building; he was standing to one side of the line, wearing sunglasses even though it was too early in the day to wear sunglasses, and was handing out flyers, smiling at everyone.
I took a flyer from him, read the information. If you were at risk of being deported, it said, you could visit his church any weekend and sign up for sanctuary assistance. And if you had an undocumented family member who had disappeared, you could contact him 24/7 by calling the emergency telephone number written below. I called the number the next day, saying I didn’t have an emergency but wanted to ask what this flyer was all about. In a priestly way, perhaps, his explanation was more allegorical than practical, but at the end of our conversation, he invited me to join him and a few others during their weekly vigil the following Thursday.
The vigil was held at 6:00 p.m., outside a building on Varick Street. I arrived a couple of minutes late. Father Juan Carlos was there, with another twelve people. He greeted me, shaking my hand formally, and introduced me to the rest of the group. I asked if I could record the gathering on my sound recorder. He said yes, the others nodded in agreement, and then, ceremoniously but with a candid simplicity uncommon in men accustomed to podiums, he began speaking. He pointed to the sign hanging by the main entrance of the building, which announced Passport Agency, and said that few people knew that the building, which occupied an entire block of the city’s grid, was not actually just a place where you got a passport but also a place where people without passports were being held. It was a detention center, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents locked people away after detaining them on the streets or raiding their homes at night. The daily federal quota for undocumented people, he said, was 34,000, and was steadily growing. That meant that at least 34,000 people had to be occupying a bed each day in any one of the detention centers, a center just like this one, across the country. People were taken away, he continued, locked up in detention buildings for an indefinite amount of time. Some were later deported back to their home countries. Many were pipelined to federal prisons, which profited from them, subjecting them to sixteen-hour workdays for which they earned less than three dollars. And many of them were simply—disappeared.
At first, I thought Fa
ther Juan Carlos was preaching from a kind of Orwellian dystopic delirium. It took me some time to realize that he wasn’t. It took me some time to notice that the rest of the people there that day, mostly Garifunas from Honduras, were family members of someone who had, in fact, disappeared during an ICE raid. When Father Juan Carlos finished speaking, he said we’d all now walk twice around the building. Everyone started walking in a line, in complete silence. They were all there to claim their disappeared, there to protest silently against a bigger, deeper silence. I followed them, at the end of the line, my recorder raised above my head, recording that silence.
We walked half a block south, one block west, one block north, one block east, half a block south. And then once more. After the second round, we all stood still on the sidewalk for a few minutes, until the priest instructed us to place the palms of our hands against the wall of the building. I tucked my recorder into my jacket pocket and followed the rest. The concrete felt cold and rough against my hands. Cars whipped past, behind the line of us, along Varick Street. Father Juan Carlos then asked, in a louder, more severe voice than before:
Who are we missing?
One by one, the twelve people standing in the line, their hands firmly pressed against the building’s walls, their backs to the busy street, each called out a name:
Awilda.
Digana.
Jessica.
Barana.
Sam.
Lexi.
As each person in the line called out the name of a missing relative, the rest of us repeated the name out loud. We pronounced each one clear and loud, though it was hard to keep our voices from breaking, hard to keep our bodies from shaking:
Cem.
Brandon.
Amanda.
Benjamin.
Gari.
Waricha.
ERASED
Winona, Marianna, Roe, Ulm, Humnoke—I look at the road map, following the names of places we’ll pass today. We’ve been driving for almost two weeks now, and my husband thinks we’ve been moving too slowly, stopping too often and overstaying in towns. I had been enjoying that rhythm, the slow speed on secondary roads across parks, the long stops in diners and motels. But I know he’s right—our time is limited, my time especially, and it’s running out. I should get to the borderlands as quickly as possible, too—to New Mexico or Arizona. So I agree when he suggests we drive more hours and stop less frequently. I think about other families, like us and also unlike us, traveling toward a future impossible to envision, the threats and dangers that it poses. What would we do if one of us simply disappeared? Beyond the immediate horror and fear, what concrete steps would we follow? Whom would we call? Where would we go?
I look back at our own children, asleep in the backseat. I hear them breathe, and I wonder. I wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes, and what would happen to them if they had to cross the desert on their own. Were they to find themselves alone, would our own children survive?
FALLINGS
In 1909, Geronimo fell off his horse and died. Of all the things my husband tells the children about him, this fact is the one that both torments and fascinates the children most. Especially the girl. Ever since she heard the story, she brings it back up—now and then, unexpectedly and unprompted, as if it were a casual conversation starter.
So, Geronimo fell off his horse and died, right?
Or:
You know how Geronimo died? He fell off his horse!
Or:
So Geronimo never died, but one day, he died, because he fell off his horse.
Now, as we speed toward Little Rock, Arkansas, she wakes up and tells us:
I dreamed of Geronimo’s horse. I was riding it and it was going so fast, I was about to fall off.
Where are we? the boy asks, also waking up, their strange sleep synchronicity.
Arkansas.
What’s in Arkansas?
I realize I know very little about Arkansas. I know about the poet Frank Stanford, who shot himself through the heart—three times—in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and fell to the ground. The morbid question of course being not why but how three times. I don’t share this story with the family.
Then there’s the slightly more comic than tragic death of the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who did not die in Arkansas, but who was for some reason beloved by ex-president Bill Clinton, who lived in Little Rock when he served as Arkansas’s governor—so there is that connection. I once saw a photograph of a beer-red, chubby-grinned Bill hanging on the wall of a bar in central Prague. He did not look out of place there, as dignitaries always do in restaurant pictures. He could have been the brother of the owner of the bar, or one of the regulars. Hard to think that the man in that picture, full of bonhomie, was the same man who laid the first brick in the wall dividing Mexico and the United States, and then pretended it never happened. In the photograph, he is shaking hands across the table with Hrabal, whose Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Clinton might have read and liked. I had read the book during that trip to Prague. I read it in a state of quiet awe, and underlined and memorized strange and simple lines that I still remember:
“the minute I saw you I could tell you were supersensitive”
“he was a whoreson”
“a composer…once tore a chandelier out of the ceiling in his grief”
“a giant of a girl, but beautiful”
“the world was as deserted as a star”
More than his books, more than his harsh humor and Decameronian tableaux of human tragicomedy, more than anything, it is the story of Hrabal’s own death that has haunted me, always. He died like this: recovering from bronchitis in a hospital room, while trying to feed the pigeons, he fell out of the window.
But Hrabal does not live in Arkansas, so I don’t tell the family about him either.
ITEMS
In Little Rock, we see cars, malls, big houses—places presumably occupied by people, but we don’t see people, not on the street. At the city limits, there is a Walmart. We see many things there, as is to be expected during a visit to any superstore. Except there really are way too many things, more than normal, a puzzling number of things, some of which I am sure no one has ever seen before or even imagined. For instance, an itemizer. What is an itemizer, really? What does it do? What does it look like? Who might need one? Only this much is clear from the box: it has spring-latch and roller-mounted drawers (with adjustable dividers), has anti-skid strips, and comes with a lock mount, and its units can be stacked. An itemizer “eradicates the need to crawl inside the van every time by placing things at your fingertips.” I would imagine that if you gave an itemizer to someone brilliant and slightly intolerant to stupidity—say, Anne Carson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or Marguerite Yourcenar—they’d write a perfect poem about reindeer walking in the snow.
In the Walmart, we also discover that Walmart is the place where people are. These I like instantly: an old man and his granddaughter choosing avocados, judging each by its smell. The old man tells the girl they have to be smelled “not in the belly but right in the navel,” and then goes on to do a demonstration of avocado-navel smelling. This one I instantly dislike: a woman in Crocs who walks slowly, dragging her feet, smiles distractedly at people waiting in line, pretending to be lost or a little confused, and then—cuts the line!
We buy boots. The discounts are incredible. We buy beautiful, cheap, large, cow-family boots. Mine are not cowgirl boots. Mine are imitation-leather punk-lady boots—$15.99—and I put them on immediately, even before I pay, to the indignation of the children, who cannot conceive of usage before payment.
I feel like an astrolady in them as we walk out of the store, someone leaving footprints on the moon-gravel in a tremendous parking lot, walking across “a world as deserted as a star” as Hrabal would surely have said of this Walmart in particular. The boy says we have to keep the empty shoeboxes in the trunk, in case we need them, or in case he needs them, for later. I wonder if I’ve passed on to
him my documentary fever: store, collect, archive, inventory, list, catalog.
What for? I ask
For later, he says.
But I convince him we have enough boxes, reminding him that he already has an empty box he hasn’t even used.
Why haven’t you used your box yet, by the way? I ask, to distract him and steer the conversation in another direction.
Because, Ma, it’s for later, he says.
And he says it with such authority, like a real archivist who knows exactly what he’s doing, that I just keep quiet and smile at him.
That afternoon, we drive to the western border of Arkansas, to a town called De Queen, just a few miles from the border with Oklahoma, and there we find a decent-enough motel on a street called Joplin Avenue. Our children are thrilled by the idea of it, Joplin. The girl, instead of asking for a story, takes out her copy of The Book with No Pictures and reads theatrically to the family as she flips through the pages: “This is the story of Janis Joplin, the great witch of the night…” She makes me both proud and worried sometimes—five years old and a Joplin fan—but maybe more proud than worried. She and the boy are both exempted from brushing their teeth before going to bed just this one time.
DICKS, WHISKEY
The lights in the room are turned off, the children asleep in their bed. My husband and I quarrel on our own bed. A routine exchange: his poisonous adjectives whispered sharply across his pillow to mine, and my silence like a dull shield in his face. One active, the other passive; both of us equally aggressive. In marriage, there are only two kinds of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.
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