The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  “Jesús Manuel García,” read the judge.

  “Presente.”

  They were called up to stand before the bench in groups of five or six, the same formulation repeated again and again.

  “Mr. Manuel García, did you enter the United States illegally near the town of Nogales?”

  This one had the build of a fourteen-year-old; he was smirking shyly as he lifted himself to his feet. The earphones through which proceedings were being interpreted for him were not working. His attorney intervened. The attorney was a big, bearded man, and, like his colleagues and the Border Patrol representatives, spent most of the hearing fingering his iPhone.

  There was a delay while replacement headphones were found.

  “Gentlemen,” said the judge, “if you don’t understand, please stand, or speak privately to your attorney.” Nobody stood or approached his attorney. They were young men, self-conscious among their peers. “Mr. Manuel García, did you enter the United States illegally near the town of Nogales?”

  There was a pause as Jesús Manuel García listened to the translation.

  “Sí.”

  “You have been charged with illegal re-entry after deportation. Do you understand the charges and the maximum penalties that you are facing?”

  A pause.

  “Sí.” He glanced at the men alongside him.

  He was wearing a thin hooded jersey in a camouflage pattern, the kind worn by many of his fellow defendants, bought from the stalls catering to migrants on the Mexican side of the border. This is also where you buy your black plastic three-litre canteens and your electrolyte powder and the plimsolls soled with carpet that leave no prints.

  “Mr. Manuel García, you have agreed to plead guilty to the petty offence of illegal re-entry. In exchange, the government agrees to dismiss the more serious felony offence against you. Do you understand?”

  “Sí.”

  “Mr. Manuel García, please speak up.”

  There was a pause, he said it loudly this time, almost shouted, and the other defendants laughed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Manuel García.”

  She asked him how he pleaded.

  He listened, and said quietly, “Culpable.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Manuel García. You are going to be deported and removed from the United States. The charge will always be on your record.”

  Others, repeat offenders, were sentenced to time in jail—nine months, a year. Yet there was little palpable tension in the room. When Manuel García’s group of half a dozen had received their sentences they were led from the room. One of them wore a T-shirt with the words “Keep Calm and Chive On.” I didn’t understand what it meant. One of them was wearing a white facemask. One of them was on crutches. “Bring ’em down!” came a warehouse holler.

  And so it went, “Culpable,” “Culpable,” “Culpable,” “Culpable”…until, after an hour, the process achieved such momentum that it seemed unstoppable, and indeed once those sixty had been processed, another sixty shuffled in, and tomorrow the same, and the next day; and there was nothing in the fashion of the proceedings to give one hope it would ever ease, this filing of people.

  * * *

  —

  I ARRANGED TO meet one of the agents. The thing about Border Patrol is the solitude, he told me. Once you’re trained, you’re on your own—stationary in your truck, watching the line for eight, nine hours at a time. You need to know how to take that, Tom said, as we drove south from Tucson into the desert the next day. As well as being a Border Patrol officer, Tom was the agency’s local PR rep. He had been well briefed; he was compassionate and reasonable. Nobody wants anyone to die out there. The comedian Billy Connolly, he said, was recently a guest. Took him and his crew up in a chopper to film the wall from above. That’s a funny guy. Tom himself had been a patrolman, quite senior, but he no longer spent much time in the field, and he missed it. I got the impression that handholding the media and chaperoning pasty British writers was not real work, to his mind; wasn’t the kind of work his father would have admired. The PR front dropped a notch when we stopped for a burger at a Wendy’s on the Nogales road.

  “If I was in their shoes? Maybe I’d want to cross, too; but I’ll say this: I wouldn’t cross in the desert; I wouldn’t cross where it’s impossible to carry enough water to keep me alive. I’d cross in one of the towns. Sure, you’re more likely to be apprehended, but you’re a heck of a lot less likely to die.”

  His father? A strict man who required academic excellence of his only child. Tom, no scholar, was punished for his poor grades with long periods locked in his room. He did not become, therefore, a sociable boy, and grew up to experience solitude as if it were normal. It is what made him effective, before he was singled out by his employers for his manner, his diplomacy. It’s a kind of strength, isn’t it, being able to abide solitude?

  Following Iraq and Afghanistan and Border Patrol’s corresponding expansion, more and more ex-soldiers joined up, Tom said. But BP is not the military; it’s a very particular thing; there’s nothing “kinetic” about it (the army word: kinesis). The job, in essence, is to sit, to watch—and only then, sometimes, to track and to apprehend. You are a security guard, you are also an agent of punishment. To be alone, furthermore, is to be unwitnessed. It is the perennial test of the desert: when you can do whatever you wish, without anyone there to censure you, how do you behave? Take a man who has seen action in one desert and put him in another, on his own. A man who’s shot at nameless foreigners and seen those same foreigners shoot back. The way blood can stand on sand for minutes before it sinks in. Put him on the line.

  Even in this relatively lush desert there is only so much to occupy the gaze—limestone outcrops, prickly pear, paloverde, mesquite; the sky and its carnivorous birds—before that gaze turns inwards. In the patient desert once again you will find the familiar silence, save for the radio crackle and the wheeling hawks. It is those men who either crack up, said Tom, or, alert to the danger within themselves, quit.

  Coming back from Nogales I’d passed through the checkpoint at Amado on Interstate Highway 19, a dozen agents halting vehicles under a hangarlike white canopy that bridged the northbound road, a secondary line against those who had illegally crossed the border thirty kilometres south. It was the scrubby badlands flanking the checkpoint that Tom and I searched, though I was aware it was mainly a performance for my benefit. For him, the trek was not, as it was for me, a mere succession of obstacles. He was barely conscious of its physical demands: he knew an ankle-turning rock when he saw one, how to negotiate a steep scree slope (crabwise). I tried to see the desert through his eyes. His focus was the mark that betrayed a human’s recent presence; the aberration: broken or pushed-down grass, overturned stones, the slightest darkening of the sparse soil where it had been kicked. It was unforthcoming ground, this shattered limestone; even our own prints were impossible to trace when we turned back. This was the work, then, the daily work. The country scarcely changed. A week might pass without your apprehending anyone. But that, Tom said, is not a week of failure. There were, he assured me, no quotas. Sure, a beautiful place to work. Not that you think much about its beauty.

  The ground was littered with discarded belongings. People had been coming this way for years; for generations, in fact. It was one of the great Sonoran routes, following the course of the Santa Cruz that once, before its water was pumped and diverted, snaked between the Santa Rita Mountains and the Tumacacori Mountains. The artefacts lay there under the ironwood tree where people had rested for shade, along with empty water bottles and plastic bags and clothes. All of it slowly being drawn into the rocky ground. It was hard not to be reminded of the aftermath of a great flight; or a rush burial. I looked at Tom with his sidearm in its holster; and, reflected in his Ray-Bans, myself in my sunhat and my desert-wear. Our breathing was audible. Back in the truck, we rolled slowly along a d
irt track, Tom leaning from his window as he drove, scanning the verge for prints, kick-marks, flattened vegetation. Cutting sign, they called it. Some of these tracks were regularly raked smooth with the aid of three tractor tyres dragged behind a Border Patrol truck. I remembered the tiantian, the moat of sand that ringed the fort at Jiayuguan on the edge of the Gobi, smoothed each evening to betray the footprints of deserters.

  You hardly needed to leave your vehicle, if you knew the roads well enough: just noted where the trail crossed the track, and drove to the next road along to see if the trail reappeared there. If not, you waited; they would come to you, too tired to run. They had been here, of course, the young men in their hundreds, but not lately. High above us on a knoll, enclosed within a gleaming cyclone fence, stood one of the new line of watchtowers designed by an Israeli defence firm. We walked to the fence and I looked up at the watchtower. Its gaze was fixed southwards: radar, high-res video. It was alert to the slightest lateral movement, and in Nogales officers were stationed at their screens, ready to send agents.

  In 2014, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez’s mother, frustrated by the slowness of the federal investigation into his killing, sued Lonnie Swartz in federal court. It would come as a surprise when he was indicted for second-degree murder. I hadn’t mentioned the case, but Tom wanted to talk about it. A rock, if you think about it, he said, delivered with velocity and precision, is a lethal weapon. Ask the Israeli Defence Force. “People think, ‘Hey, that jerk shot him for throwing a little stone.’ ” Next to the track stood a lollipop sign warning of rough conditions ahead. “I don’t know what happened, but I know what a rock can do”—and he crouched, selected a fist-sized chunk of volcanic rock, stood and pulled back his arm and with all his strength launched it at the sign. It hit it in the centre, with an explosion of dust and a bang that echoed from the hills.

  * * *

  —

  SOME DAYS LATER, in the car park of John Fife’s church in Tucson, fifteen men were waiting, Mexicans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Hondurans. They had entered America illegally; many had been deported several times. Not all of them were young. On church property they could not be apprehended by the police or Border Patrol. Citizens of Tucson needing day labour could come here and liaise with the manager, Ereberto, who would allocate the appropriate worker or workers for a set daily fee. For six days a week the men were able to earn a living, at a fair wage and with minimal risk of arrest and deportation.

  I sat among a group of them on the kerb, in the shade of the church wall, and handed out cigarettes and cans of San Pellegrino lemonade. Occasionally a truck or car pulled in and one or two of the men were called away by Ereberto to go with the driver to mow a lawn or tile a roof or lay paving or clear a dead person’s house. After an hour, only one guy was left, and in the absence of the others he became talkative. His name was Enrique. He was in his early twenties and wore a young man’s clothes—oversized baseball jersey and jeans, backwards baseball cap over his frizzy ponytail. He lived in the future, when things would be better. After all, his life today was better than it was a year ago, wasn’t it? He was quickened by his own words.

  It was approaching 2 p.m. and the light had an astringency to it, a penetrating quality that differs from heat. The lemonade was gone, the cans lined up on the kerb between us. He was from Honduras, he said. Like thousands of others each year he crossed Mexico on the roof of la Bestia—the Beast, el tren de la muerte—the notoriously perilous network of freight trains. It took him twenty days to reach Monterrey in the north-east of Mexico. He had already been deported from that city three times, he said. “A lot of people die, you know. You can see a lot of crows beside the tracks. Sometimes on the train people are asking for water or food or money. Bad people. You don’t have money, they push you off the train. I see that kind of people.”

  He and two friends from Honduras caught a lift to Sonoyta on the border, and it was from there that they entered the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. “No fence,” Enrique said. “Only desert. Only desert.” It took him nine days to reach Tucson. “For three days, no water, no food.” He became separated from his friends when he left them to search for water. “I almost died. I was looking for them everywhere. I was screaming, asking names. And I never found them.”

  He repeated himself: “I spent three days in the desert, by myself.” He could scarcely believe it. He wasn’t one of those wide-eyed Salvadoran farm-boys with no conception of the desert’s hardships, the sort who tries to cross wearing flip-flops and carrying a few bottles of Coke. He had heard the stories, and there he was in the middle of one. He found a rancher’s water tank. “I couldn’t believe that. How God is.” Then he came upon a can of beans. A can of beans, sitting there in a dry wash! “God is the only one. The only one. The beans were bad, but anyway I ate them. They give me energy for two more days. I got lost but then I find a town, I don’t remember the name. A truck driver had a flat tyre. I helped him, and he gave me a ride to Yuma.”

  From there he hopped a train to Tucson, hiding in the restroom to avoid the guard. The friends he lost in the desert? They too survived. They were now in Indiana, working as roofers. He was saving for a bus ticket to join them. A car pulled in, and Ereberto was calling him, but he didn’t stand up. “I’m feeling like I am in the middle of my road,” he said. “God is the only one. The only one. The one who choose. If God wants me to go back, I’ll go back.”

  6

  MATTER OUT OF PLACE

  The Black Rock Desert, USA

  I’d been living in Tucson for a month, periodically going out into the desert with No More Deaths, when I took a flight 1,200 kilometres north to Reno, Nevada, the heart of Walter Prescott Webb’s “charred mass.” I’d arranged to meet a man named Papa La Mancha in a casino hotel in nearby Sparks. I myself stayed at the only hotel I could afford, the Reno Sands, which was occupied by a mixture of “Burners” and gamblers who coexisted in a state of strained equilibrium, like prison gangs. Floating in the swimming pool was a white patio chair. When Raymond, the maintenance man, came to my room to remove the hairdryer that had exploded (I was trying to dry some socks), I asked him how many rooms they had. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “Nobody seems to know. I asked maybe ten people and I got ten different answers. One guy said five hundred, another guy was like eight hundred. Someone said a thousand. But I keep asking, and nobody knows for sure.”

  At 3 a.m. I was woken by crazed screaming. It was nearby, outside. When I looked out at the city shimmering far below my window, I could see nobody in the parking lot. It’s strange, I thought, how plate glass can sometimes seem clearer than air. The scream came again; it was a man’s, giddy and defensive. It was coming from above, ten storeys above my room and therefore twenty-five from the ground. The little bastard was up on the roof, smashed out of his gourd, being gently berated by some voice of authority—cop or security.

  “Just drop what you’re holding and come down.”

  “Hey man, howja like it if I took a back-flip off of this thing?”

  A pause, then a girl shrieking—then idiotic laughter. Then it was quiet again.

  Next morning, at one of the windowless twenty-four-hour bars, a muscled young Dutchman and a gaunt gambler in her fifties were admiring one another’s tatts. There was an abundance of wheelchairs and oxygen masks, and two amputee friends, one without an arm, the other without a leg. The names of the gambling machines were Midnight Eclipse, Lobster Run, Wolf Mania, Jumpin’ Jalapeños, Wild Aztec, Lotus Flower, Lucky Beans and Moby Dick. I felt that the whole flashing, beeping, chiming arena was on the brink of something hysterical—violence or sobbing or orgiastic sex. In that sense, it prefigured what was to follow. Gliding through it all, the people about to head out to the desert, with their wheeled cases and rucksacks, their boas and fur coats and spandex and piercings and wolf masks, were like some imperial mission from another planet. “Please respect OUR playa,” said a
sign in the lift.

  * * *

  —

  THE DESERT HAS always been a permissive space. For the Mormons who settled in Utah in 1847 it was a refuge for the free expression of faith, just as it had been for the Christian anchorites of third-century Egypt fleeing the persecutions of the Roman emperors. But while the desert could be both a sanctuary and—God knows—an unassailable barrier, it was also, in Mary Austin’s words, a “land of lost borders,” where the sureties of civic life evaporated along with its impositions. If for some the desert promised liberation from the rancorous body, it also offered—in its seclusion and boundlessness—sovereignty of the spirit, bodily freedom, and an almost overwhelming provocation. In any void, after all, potential is infinite. Not just a blank canvas but the biblical darkness.

  Until recently I’d known only that Burning Man took place each year at the end of August, two hundred kilometres north of Reno, on the Black Rock Desert playa (a dry lakebed, and one of the largest flat expanses on earth) and that it culminated with the burning first of a huge human effigy, then, on the final night, a structure called the Temple. The burning, it turned out, was not really the point of Burning Man. Although there was lots of music, constant music, most of it electronic dance music (EDM), it was less a music festival than an arts festival. But it was not exactly an arts festival, either. I wasn’t sure it was really a “festival” at all. There was no roster of performances. It wasn’t a “show.” You did not generally need to be anywhere at any particular time in order to see a particular thing happening. The point was that, in Black Rock City, as the encampment was called, something was occurring everywhere, all the time, and it was likely to involve you. Seventy thousand Burners, as we were called, camped for a week in one of the harshest environments on earth. That would be spectacle enough.