To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  We passed flat-roofed houses that were little more than stucco boxes, flaking and cracked by the sun. Stray dogs ran around everywhere. It was almost dark when we got to Miguel’s house—another box in a line of similar structures. Strung between the bare or dead trees out front were six or seven heavily laden clotheslines.

  Miguel asked us to wait for a moment while he talked to his wife. When she came to the door, she looked us up and down sternly. She was dark skinned, regal, and severe. I saw a little girl peeking out from behind her. Then a lanky boy of about twelve sporting crooked eyeglasses came out to talk.

  “Very nice to meet you,” he said. “Sorry for my English, I am still learning.”

  Miguel was thrilled. “Maybe tonight you can help my son with his homework? He has to write a speech in English and he needs help to make sure it is right. Is that okay? You will sleep in his room, he can sleep with us.”

  We entered the house, which consisted of two rooms. Miguel gave us the grand tour. “In this room we cook and my wife and I sleep, and our daughter sleeps with us here. We sleep here.” He gestured to a double bed in the corner. A Spanish-language game show was playing on the small TV. Next to the bed, a stained couch, a stove, a sink, and a few plastic chairs. Miguel led us into the second room. A small mattress with stained sheets and exposed springs lay on the floor, surrounded by tools, old toys, a stack of broken plastic lawn chairs, metal poles—possibly shower-curtain rods—and empty beer boxes.

  A naked lightbulb hung in the center of each room. A shared bathroom had a toilet and a showerhead, but no curtains.

  Gesturing to the bed, Miguel asked, “Is this okay? You will have to be very close. I know this is very different than America.” He looked at us with a humbly furrowed brow and sweetness in his eyes.

  “Yes, of course. Yes, oh my god, of course, this is amazing!” I said.

  “My wife wants to make you a good dinner. I must run to the market to get some supplies, but I will be right back,” Miguel said.

  “Oh, we will go with you and pay for everything. It’s the least we can do,” Weston said. He looked at me for confirmation, and I said, “Of course!”

  “Oh! Thank you!” Miguel said. He laughed and slapped us on the back as if we were old friends.

  We crammed our bikes into the son’s room and followed Miguel out the front door, followed him to the market, and bought everything he asked for. Meat. Onions. Cilantro. Weston asked him if he wanted ice cream and Miguel didn’t seem to hear. “I don’t know if they have a freezer,” I whispered. Weston’s eyes got wide, shaken by his assumption, and nodded. Miguel asked gingerly if we could buy some beer, and we picked up a twenty-four-pack of Tecate. He was thrilled.

  As we walked home, he told us about his family. “My son Alejandro is very smart. He is the top at his school. He will work in the U.S. No question. He is studying English and, you saw, it’s pretty good. He will get better. I am proud of him. My daughter, Litian, she is smart, but I don’t know. She is light skinned, that is very good, not like her mother. Alejandro has the dark skin like his mother, but he is smart, so he will be okay. My wife, her skin is too dark. Here, it is a bad thing to be so dark skinned. People don’t like her in this town because of it. It is racist here. She has indigenous in her. She is a beautiful woman, but she is very dark. I’m glad Litian is light skinned. It will help her if she is not as smart as Alejandro.’

  He asked if we wanted to smoke, meaning weed, and Weston said yes. Miguel took us down a different sandy street in the dark, found a man who seemed to just exist underneath a tree, and told us to wait by the wall. When he returned, he said he needed twenty dollars. Weston, who always seemed to manifest money from thin air for these moments, pulled out a twenty and handed it to him. Miguel slipped into the shadows for twenty minutes, but when he returned with a paper bag, he was grinning.

  By the time we got back to Miguel’s home, his taciturn wife had finished frying the perfect hand-shaped tortillas. I looked at her differently now. I noticed her skin and thought about people being rude to her. About how she didn’t speak much, and perhaps that was to stay invisible. She accepted the meat we’d bought and instructed us to sit on the couch. Alejandro appeared with his speech written in English and asked me in a crisp rehearsed sentence, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I practice my speech in English with you, if you please?” I obliged happily, and he fixed his glasses and began reciting. He was holding the paper and his hand was shaking. He stopped after one sentence. “Please do tell me if my English has mistakes.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said, smiling with my whole face in that way you do when you want to encourage someone in a tender moment.

  He read his work, which had a few misplaced or misconjugated words, but it was wonderful. I made some edits, and Alejandro was very pleased. He sat down beside me to scrutinize what I’d written. Miguel explained to me how important it was to him for his children to learn English. It was their ticket to a better life. He bragged how his son was the best in his school, the best English-speaker in the entire town. How English could get him jobs in hotels and tourism and restaurants around here—or better yet, help him thrive when he made it to the United States.

  Miguel got me thinking about how strange it is to be born in a country whose influence has spread around the world like an infestation. The world’s hunger to speak English is emblematic of this. Some cultures welcome our films, television, and music, or feel drawn by the prospect of money and power. Others resist. Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that. Sitting there watching Alejandro studying my markup like it was holy scripture made me wonder, what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders?

  Miguel’s wife made us fried tortillas and meat with cheese and beans, and it was delicious. She merely nodded as we lavished her with compliments in horrible Spanish. “Incrediblé comida!” We got very full and laughed and Miguel told more stories. After a while, the fatigue of riding bikes all day caught up to us, compounded by social exhaustion from being guests on exhibit in such a tiny space. But Miguel kept handing us one beer after another. “Maybe we should sleep soon,” I proposed finally. “We biked very hard today. We are so grateful…”

  “Oh yes, we will go into the other room!” He leaped up and led us into Alejandro’s room. We said our thank-yous to the lady of the house and the kids. Miguel now sat down on the floor with a fresh six-pack of beer. “You aren’t too tired, are you?” he asked with the eagerness of a kid afraid of being sent to bed. “Can we keep talking?”

  “We are really tired, but yes!”

  Miguel handed out beers and went on talking. He was getting visibly drunk, and Weston and I had a “what-have-we-done” moment of eye contact with each other. But when Miguel started rolling joints, Weston perked up. Miguel stumbled up to open a window.

  “I was in Nebraska for eleven years,” he said. “You know Nebraska?”

  “Yes, I’ve been there—” I was about to say how boring it is.

  “It is so beautiful,” Miguel said between puffs. “Such nice streets. Nice people. So much work. I want to go back.” He described it like it was paradise. “I had another wife then. With her, two sons. My boys. They are with her still in the U.S. I had a problem and was deported. A bad problem. I can never go back legally. They will put me in jail for the rest of my life,” he said. I wondered if he would tell us what he’d done. He didn’t.

  “I did try to sneak back in after they deported me the last time. You pay these guys three thousand dollars in Tijuana to sneak you over. They hide you in trucks or sometime they will pay you to take drugs through the tunnels in the desert between San Diego and Arizona. There are many tunnels. My friend signed up right before me and paid the three thousand dollars, but then he went missing after he came to the meeting place and paid the money. They found his head a week later in a trash can
in Tijuana.” Miguel shook his head as he spoke, telling the story as if to admonish us, to teach us a lesson about the dangers of trusting crooked people.

  He cracked open another beer. “I will get back to Nebraska. My sons are there. I just have to be patient. These tomato farmers are crooks and they work us like animals. I can’t stay here. I have to be patient. But I have hope. You will see me in the U.S., no question. My son is smart,” he said, motioning to the kitchen, where his son had been before.

  He was slurring now, saying half-words and mumbling, and he kept slipping into Spanish. I wondered what would happen to his current wife when he left. If he would bring her with him. He didn’t say, and I was too sleepy to ask.

  “Miguel, don’t be offended,” I said, “but I am about to fall asleep from being so tired. Keep talking and hanging out, but I might fall asleep.”

  “Oh, of course, I am being rude. Yes. Sleep. Weston, do you want to smoke more outside?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  Weston and Miguel walked outside and left me in the dark. It would be Weston and me on this mattress. I huddled to one side and closed my eyes, but instead of drifting off, I fumed. Mad at Weston’s bike, mad at his choices and his philosophies. But I also thought of Miguel’s kindness, his son, his wife and daughter. I was sleeping in a man’s house who saved our butts when we needed it most. I would’ve passed through this alien tomato farm world without ever really knowing anything about it, but Weston’s bike broke. His frustrating choices slowed us down and led us to Miguel. This shitty situation had given us the opportunity to receive the kindness of a stranger, to see the life and home of a person we’d have never known. I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.

  In the morning, we woke to find that Miguel had gone to work at dawn and left us a note scribbled with well-wishes. His wife made us eggs, rice, and coffee. And his son informed us he was going to skip school to help Weston fix his bike.

  Alejandro took us to the closest bike shop, but they only had old mountain bike wheels, nothing that could fit Weston’s frame. He needed a new rim, hub, new spokes—the whole wheel. A task we thought would take an hour turned into a daylong quest. We took the bus to a bigger town, where Weston left me at a little restaurant. It had Wi-FI, so I checked Instagram and FaceTimed my mom. I didn’t tell her anything about Miguel’s scary stories. I told her we’d stayed with a kind man and his family. I told her all her prejudices about Mexico were wrong. I told her it was safe and perfect.

  Around 3 p.m., Weston finally returned with a brand-new front wheel and tire, though it was 20 percent smaller than his back wheel.

  “Thank goodness for Alejandro. He saved me. He translated my haggling,” Weston said.

  Alejandro blushed. Weston leaned in. “Do you have twenty dollars to give him as a tip? I don’t have any more money.” When I handed Alejandro twenty dollars, he shyly tried to refuse, but I insisted and shoved it in his pocket. “Little dude, you’re smart and you speak incredible English and you’re going to make a great life. Thank you,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE OF TOWN, the tomato farms stopped abruptly and left us with cliffs and coastline—not quite desolate desert, but not as shrub-covered as California’s hills. In some of the fields between us and the beach, we saw a red grass of some kind that looked like pools of blood, like we were gazing at the world through a color filter. For the final hour before twilight, we climbed away from the beach, up into steep, treeless hills, and at last light rolled down a long, thrilling grade into a small town nestled in a canyon with a hotel.

  We got a room and ate Baja lobster for dinner in the attached restaurant. Baja lobster looks similar to the kind found off the coast of Maine, but without large claws, as if the claws have been removed, but the crustaceans themselves can grow to be gigantic. At the restaurant, they had one mounted on the wall, a prize from the past. It was the size of a duffel bag. We ordered two large ones and ate till we were full. We felt we deserved it.

  We slept hard, woke up, stocked up on snack food and cookies at a tiny market, and headed up the mountains again, away from the ocean.

  We cycled and baked on hot roads. The mountains leveled off and we were clocking fifty- and sixty-mile days. The heat created mirage waves over every dip in the road. Highway 1 crisscrosses Baja all the way down to La Paz, and it is the only main road. I had studied the map obsessively: the incredible thinness of the giant peninsula; the way it looks from a satellite, like gold, with almost no vegetation visible. The eastern boundary is the elongated, crystal blue Sea of Cortez, a breeding ground for manta rays and whale sharks. At the northernmost point of the narrow sea, the Colorado River empties into it. Or used to. For millions of years it spilled water from the Rocky Mountains into the sea, but California, Arizona, and Mexico rerouted nearly all of the river, so now the mouth of the Colorado is a dried-up and apocalyptic marsh.

  All day and night, semitrucks roared past us, their loud Jake brakes rattling down the hills like machine guns. Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga. But these truckers are also the caretakers of the road. When we approached a rig that had pulled over for the driver to check his load, he saw us, scrambled into the cab, and emerged smiling, with cold water.

  Somewhere in all those miles of heat and nothingness, I noticed time had changed. “Meetings” and “dates” and “days of the week” used to mean so much to me. They were necessary frames for my life, for the passing of time. Now I never knew what day it was. My alarm was the sun. I woke up when the light was too bright to keep sleeping, or when the desert heat forced me out of my hammock. The work day was movement, making it farther south. Any forward progress felt like work well done. The end of the day came when the sun approached the horizon and golden light signaled the coming darkness. Compensation for my labors simplified, too. After climbing a hill, I had earned a cookie or an orange. I would stop at the top, enjoy a snack and some water, and then glide downhill. This was my work. This was my new occupation.

  I enjoyed feeling like this. But it wasn’t pure. It wasn’t contemplative. It was survival. It was heat and simplicity.

  For days, we rode down the barren central spine of the peninsula. My knees were killing me. I ran out of water and drank Coca-Cola. The thought of California made me sad. It was behind me, full of happiness and people I knew. The only thing before me was my front wheel and the god-forsaken desert. Where had my optimism gone?

  Halfway down the peninsula, we did our first hundred-mile day. Riding at night was dangerous, but making a hundred miles during daylight wasn’t realistic: it took us almost all day to cover sixty. One morning, the map tempted us with a sizable town, Guerrero Negro, a hundred miles away. We talked through the options, then Weston and I decided to go for it—even though we’d certainly have to bike after dark. A hotel and a restaurant and maybe even Wi-Fi were worth risking our lives in the darkness.

  A relentless sun beat down on us from above, and the road radiated heat up as we cycled down the long straightaways between tan rock mountains on both sides. I drank lots of water. The day passed with almost no talking. We stopped to rest very few times. We found one café for lunch, inside a woman’s house, where we got Coca-Colas in glass bottles and ate tortillas wrapped around rice, beans, and chicken. Then we got back to the road. We pedaled in grim determination.

  We made it to the coast at dusk, with twenty miles left. More cars and houses appeared along the road. As it got dark, we hugged the narrow shoulder so as not to get hit. Weston’s bike had no reflectors and no lights. My bike had both. So I rode in the back, where cars would see me as they sped past. We rode slowly and deliberately. At the crest of a small hill, with sand dunes to either side of us, we saw the lights of town maybe five miles away.

 
; Guerrero Negro. Mecca.

  My legs were hurting me so badly I told Weston I needed a break. We sat on a sand dune and watched the cars ride by while we ate all of the food from our bags. All the snacks. The cookies and all of it. The pain had kept me from realizing how hungry I was. The inside of my knees felt like grinding metal on metal. My ankles were sore and my tailbone was raw. It was dark, so we didn’t feel rushed; it couldn’t get darker than black. Finally, Weston took charge. “We’re almost there, Jed. You can do this. Did you notice we’ve gone over a hundred miles today already! We’ll reach a hundred and eight by the time we get to town.”

  Weston was being kind, but I got up and hobbled back to the bikes. Fifteen minutes later, we rolled down the town’s main street, lit only sporadically by yellow lights. Bars and a few restaurants were open. Huge whale murals adorned the walls of the two hotels we checked out. We chose the second one, because it seemed to be the cleanest, with the most lights on. I was so delirious and in pain that I didn’t care what it cost.

  We rolled our bikes into the little room, and I collapsed onto my rock-hard bed. Weston turned on the TV. We were giddy at having made it, and the prospect of a hot shower and the novelty of sleeping with a roof over our heads. Just seeing humans walking around felt like some deep reward.