by Ed Finn
“Have you been back here, since?”
“For school. Once. Field trip.”
Tejón laughed. It came out all at once in a sharp bark. “Field trip. Puta madre.” He shook his head and spat again. “Did they tell you how many people used to die here, on your field trip?”
Ulicez said nothing. Of course they hadn’t mentioned it. They were there to look at the solar farms, after all, not to relive ancient history. The corporate outreach lady stood in front of his class with her transparent tablet shimmering in her hand and never breathed a word about the war. The guns. The heads.
“They don’t know, do they? About before?”
Ulicez shook his head.
“Well, they’ll never hear it from me,” Tejón said.
TEJÓN SAID NOTHING AS Ulicez approached Mariposa. There was a clear demarcation between the farms and the town; the farms grew in gleaming black rows behind neatly cut curbs, and beyond the curbs were maquilas, and beyond the maquilas stood Mariposa, the city of transformation. The hum in Ulicez’s teeth stopped and he turned to mention it to Tejón, but the old man was already gone.
Then the maquilas began to trill the end of the night shift. Squinting, he thought he saw Tejón drifting into the crowds of exhausted factory workers hustling toward the buses that would take them home. Or maybe it was just another old man with salt in his beard. For a split second, Ulicez wished he could access the logs from all the drones they had passed under during their walk. It would help him confirm that Tejón had really been there. It was like that in the night, way back when. One minute the old man would be at his side, or his father’s, hefting a shovel or pickaxe or flashlight, and the next he would be gone, having disappeared down a bend in the tunnel like the badger he was.
Now Ulicez faced the white stucco wall and the tiled arch that bridged its welcoming gap alone. He peered up at the lantern they’d hung from its center. It flickered, golden, with artificial candlelight. Slender palms, bereft of any dust, grazed the edge of the wall. He stepped through the arch.
Nothing happened.
He looked to his left, then to his right. No guards. No helpful theme park types, no strategically placed neighbors circling him like sharks. This early, no one was out. He saw another brown guy delivering mail. The mailman lifted his eyebrows at him, gave him a silent nod, but said nothing. And maybe that was that. The mailman’s eyes had clocked him. Maybe that was enough.
He pushed forward into town, past the rows of bone-white stucco homes with pretty new red roofs. Why did everybody do that Spanish Revival thing out this way, Ulicez wondered, when it just made the houses look like shopping malls? Here everything was raw: the pavement black and even and soft as the soles of new shoes, the skinny little lemon trees leaning perilously over fresh sod lawns, the botflies so clean and quiet he didn’t notice them until they flitted away. Here they didn’t drain your blood, or chew your tissue; botflies harvested only data.
Mariposa extended fifteen miles from the border on either side, subdivided into a compass rose of quadrants with their own set of homes, businesses, schools, and service centers. In the center was a brick-paved plaza. And in the center of that stood a labyrinth of cacti and other succulents. They grew exactly where the old border crossing station used to be. He knew the spot all too well. Blindfolded, he could have pinpointed it on a map. They must have planted the maze on sod; obviously, they had not dug very deeply. Ulicez had seen aerial views of it: a twisted, thorny spiral buried deep in the new city’s heart. Try as he might, he could never plot the way out. The thorns meshed together too tightly.
Now he stood before it, fingers curled tightly around the scorching wrought iron that made up its fence, and peered inside. He lifted one hand and poked his index finger between the thorns. Beside him, one of the dusty pink prickly pear flowers in the garden unfurled. “Are you lost?” it asked.
“Not really,” Ulicez said. “Actually, I’m going home to my wife.”
“You should take one of my flowers, then,” the cactus said. Ulicez could not spot the speaker doubtless hidden somewhere in its folds, but that didn’t matter. “It’ll score you some points at home.”
It wasn’t until he was walking away that Ulicez realized the cactus had made a joke.
THE HOUSE LOOKED LIKE all the others on its street: eggshell white with an unscuffed wood door in muted turquoise and a dusty red tile roof, with a stubby little palm tree out front and some pink gravel in the yard. It was like that book about the kids who go to different worlds, and on the final one all the kids come out and bounce their balls in unison. Ulicez couldn’t remember the title, or even what the story was about. All he remembered was that image: all the kids outside, bouncing their balls in rhythm with one another, like the whole street was really just made up of two mirrors reflecting one very lonely child. It had given him nightmares. Now he lived there.
Elena opened the door before he could even knock on it.
He’d been hers since he saw her step off a bus and into the driveway of his school, holding a melting bottle of frozen water to her bare neck. The sight of her rooted him to the spot, as though he’d accidentally shocked himself on the old metal plate surrounding the streetlight across from his building. She had looked up and smiled, and for the first time in his life, he had not looked away. He had looked right back. She walked over to him, held out the bottle of water, and asked him if he was thirsty. And that was that.
Now she stepped through the door, wrapped her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss worthy of a telenovela. Lots of sucking, lots of licking. She cheated a little to her right as she did, and he couldn’t figure out why she was turning him in that direction until she kissed his right ear and whispered: “There’s a camera in the planter just over there.”
She pulled away and gave him a big smile. “You walked?”
He plastered on his own smile. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” He looked her up and down and squeezed her wrists. “You look great.”
In truth, Elena looked WASP-ish in her little white sundress and her tiny gold sandals and her baby-pink fingernail polish. She’d washed her hair and ironed it flat. If she’d been wearing black, he’d have thought her on her way to a funeral. Instead, he noticed the way she’d done her makeup. It was streaky with inexperience: the stuff under her eyes was paler than it had any business being, somehow highlighting the shadows there instead of hiding them. She didn’t meet his gaze.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked.
Her smile’s wattage increased substantially. Her voice climbed an octave. “No, nothing. Come inside.”
He followed her. The house was pure MUJI: bland, brand-free, everything all eggshell and fake white pine, all the way down to the pearly tile floor in the foyer and the not-quite-Mason-jar pendant lamp above it. It seemed bigger inside, airy. The kind of house white people had on network television.
“Let’s have a shower,” Elena said.
Maybe constant surveillance and performing a good marriage would have fringe benefits beyond citizenship. “Twist my arm.”
The mirror smiled at them as they entered the bathroom. “CUSTOMIZE PROFILE DATA?” it asked, when Ulicez stood in front of it. He said no, thank you, and started stripping. It blanked once his nipples were reflected in its surface.
“They shy away from nudity,” Elena said. “Automatic. Antilitigation factory default.”
Not for the first time, Ulicez realized that Elena was the brains of their particular operation. He touched her elbow and turned her around and kissed her for real, this time, just something simple and closed mouthed with a long hug at the end, like normal people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. A sigh shuddered out of her. Something really was wrong.
“You missed me that bad, huh?” he asked.
Something coughed up out of her: a laugh, a sob, he couldn’t tell. She hugged him tighter. “Yeah.”
She pulled away and they stripped off the rest of their clothes. Even t
he shower mechanism was absurdly minimalist: you had to wave your hand to start it, and then do some complicated gesture-fu to make it warmer or colder. They’d obviously been going for Minority Report and wound up with Close Encounters instead. Finally the water reached a reasonable temperature and Elena stepped in. They’d got their hair wet when her eyes finally met his.
“I’m late.”
It was as though the water temperature had dipped suddenly and steeply. Out of habit, he remained perfectly still. They used to do that, in the tunnel, when they heard someone walking above. Now he did it every time he felt the slightest shift in adrenaline.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
His voice had disappeared along with his motion. He worked his mouth a little to get it back. “You sure?”
“My app is.”
“But you have an IUD.”
“I know.” She swallowed. “I checked. The strings are still in. But the test still came back positive. It’s in a drawer over there, if you want to see.”
“I’m not going to go look at your old pee stick. Gross.” He frowned. “What, did you think I wouldn’t believe you?”
She looked away. That was that. Two weeks in this little Uncle Sam theme park town, and they were already distrusting each other. He leaned back against one wall of the shower. So far Elena didn’t look any different. Her mascara was running, and when she paused to wipe the water from her face it smeared away from her eyes, making her seem instantly younger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I know we can’t stay, if we keep it . . .”
“That’s just a rumor. We don’t know that for sure.”
She gave him the look that meant he was being stupidly hopeful and hopelessly naive. “Remember what happened to Maria and Guillermo?”
Christ. She was right. Guillermo should have been a perfect candidate. He was supposed to be teaching magical realism to bored freshmen by now, putting his double Ph.D.s to use. His wife had a degree in early childhood education. They had a good relationship: the kind where everybody picked up their socks and the coffee was always fresh and the dishes got stacked at night. Exemplary. And they were doing well in Mariposa, or so they’d said: the kids at the daycare loved Maria, and Guillermo stayed out with his students, but not too late.
Then they’d gotten pregnant and come back to Nogales.
“Anchor babies,” Elena spat. “Fucking anchor babies. That’s what they’re worried about.”
“That’s not it. It’s just the cost—”
“It’s the same fucking thing, Ulicez. The exact same fucking thing.”
He checked the dial. Their time was running out in more ways than one. “Come on. The water’s about to get cold.”
He helped her out and reached blindly. “Where do we keep the towels?”
“Oh. Sorry. Shit. I was going to set some out, and then . . .” Her breath hitched. She was still digging in the closet. She leaned inside it with her back to him. “Oh, shit, Ulicez. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I thought we’d be okay. I mean, it’s .6 percent. Six-tenths. Six fucking tenths.”
Despite himself, he smiled. He reached past her, into the closet, and grabbed a towel. He hung it across her shoulders. “Well, at least we’ve got one thing going for us.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re getting better at swearing in English.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS orientation. Ulicez had to set up a separate appointment, because he’d come in earlier than the others on the bus, and he’d missed a last-minute time change that only the guys on the bus heard. That suited him just fine. He had enough to worry about and didn’t want to have to sit through a lecture on folding chairs with his fellow competitors.
The guy at the Newcomer Processing Center said his name was Paul. He seemed like a grad student: sandals, tawny curls in a ponytail, finally developing a real tan, occasionally pausing to check that the tattoo inside his left wrist was just as edgy as he remembered. The NPC was a big, airy building with exposed pipes and finished white oak beams against deeply saturated pastels: creamy mint, shrimpy pink. Ulicez guessed he was supposed to feel like he was in an artist’s converted loft space, and not an immigration office. Paul called up some forms and toggled them over to a glass panel on his desk. Together, the two of them looked at Ulicez’s file. It was all there: his height and weight and color stats, his birthdate, every address, every job. Every job they knew about, anyway. He had never been paid for the other work. That was really his dad’s job, anyway. Sometimes his dad needed help. That was all.
“Are my eyes really brown?” he asked. Paul cocked his head, as though he hadn’t quite heard him right. He didn’t get the joke. So much for shibboleths. “Is everything in order?” Ulicez asked.
Paul nodded. “Yeah, everything looks good. This is your new job.” He tapped one form, and the position appeared: junior laser technologist. His new responsibilities unfolded into a point-form list. He’d be working for a carbon capture company called GreenLock, using small autonomous lasers to inspect the integrity of the intake pipes, and maybe doing some repairs if the rods or mirrors inside them misaligned. He’d also have to make sure their power sources were all up to par, and that he knew the exact position of each and every one of them at all times, so none of them went around blinding the neighbor’s cat by mistake. There was his signature at the bottom of the list.
“Wow,” Paul said. “That all sounds really technical.”
No shit, Ulicez thought. He opened up some footage of his work in the repair simulator, adjusting a YLF rod. “It’s easy, after a while. You just have to have good hands.”
Paul smiled. “You must be a real hit with the ladies.”
Ulicez wiggled his fingers. “If my wife’s testimony counted for anything, I’d already be a citizen by now.”
Paul’s face took on a concerned aspect. “How is your wife, by the way?”
Ulicez went perfectly still. “Excuse me?”
“Well, the house is saying that she hasn’t been feeling too well. The, uh . . .” Paul winced. “The toilet has been logging some extra activity . . .”
Morning sickness. Of course. Given how tightly they watched the water out here, the water meter would have probably noticed the difference in their usage from the other users on the line, and the toilet would have accounted for it.
“She gets nervous diarrhea,” Ulicez lied. He watched Paul turn a gringo shade of green. When lying, it was best to go for something that made the person hearing it not want to hear anything more. Something embarrassing. His father had taught him that much. “I think, you know, with this whole thing, this whole setup, she’s just on edge.”
“Right . . .”
“She’ll be fine now that I’m here.”
“Great.” Paul tried to adjust his posture. Something tugged at the edge of Ulicez’s awareness. Something he had missed. But now Paul was talking again. “You know how this works, right?”
“Yeah. It works like Murder, right? Like the game?”
Paul sighed heavily before starting what was obviously a memorized routine. “Your likelihood of obtaining a visa increases or decreases based on your social capital at the end of your six-week trial period. That capital is determined by the people who live in Mariposa. Every day, a new set of Mariposans is granted a certain number of upvotes and downvotes. If they tell anybody they’re a voter, they lose their votes. Even if they’re lying. The people who do play by the rules get more upvotes than downvotes to play with, but they can always choose to abstain, and not vote at all. If they do, the algorithm sorts them right back to the bottom of the deck.”
“So people who vote frequently, they’re sorted to the top?”
Paul smiled. “Yeah. It’s an incentive.”
Ulicez nodded. It was always possible that the closet racists voted constantly, of course. But he chose not to bring that up. Instead, he asked: “When does the voting happen?”
“At the en
d of the day. Around eight.”
“So after the voters have probably talked to their spouses?”
Paul squirmed in his chair. “Yeah. We started doing it at five thirty, and then at noon, but fewer people voted when they were on their way home, or at lunch, or something. We’re going to try it in the morning next.” He smiled sheepishly. “After they’ve had their coffee, of course.”
It wasn’t like Ulicez didn’t know all these things going in. It was on the waiver he signed when he began the application process. Everybody back home said it would work out for him—that he was a good boy, a nice boy; that years of being a nerdy kid who found Lego cooler than guns would finally count for something in a place like Mariposa. Still, it was different hearing somebody lay it out like this. Back home, with Elena asleep on his shoulder or his mother’s stories on the display, it hadn’t seemed entirely real. But here he was, his nervous sweat wicked away by aggressively conditioned air.
“How do the voters know they’ve been chosen? Do they just get a ping?”
“No. We tell them in person, the day before.” His eyes widened. “I mean, not we, not me, but someone on the, you know, team.” He didn’t say task force. He didn’t say agency. He didn’t say officer. But the words hung there all the same.
“Okay.” Ulicez looked at the documents on the desk. “I guess I should get going to my next stop, huh?”
Paul checked the time display. “Oh, yeah, jeez. Sorry.” He offered his hand and Ulicez shook it.
“Can you tell me where your restroom is?” Ulicez asked. “Best not to be fidgeting on my first day on the job.”
Paul tittered. Until this moment, Ulicez had not known that men could even make that particular sound. “Last door on the left,” Paul said.
It wasn’t until he was zipping up that Ulicez understood what he’d missed. The toilet had only logged usage, not content. It was not detecting the change in her hormones. The only hormone detectors in the town were ambient, meant to find explosions of cortisol that might indicate dishonesty.