* * *
When Miguel stepped out of Nogales International some six hours later, a news crew was filming outside baggage claim. Traffic through passenger pickup was much higher than he thought it was going to be—an artifact of the latest goings-on, he supposed—and he was surprised to find a line of white, unmanned cabs standing alongside the noticeably shorter line of yellows manned by greasy-looking Latinos.
He snapped a photo, the white line noticeably longer than the yellow, and labeled it, The Cabby—still holding strong in rural America.
Most people chose the real cabbies, especially in smaller cities like Nogales, but Miguel was in a hurry, and the annoying Norteño music coming out of several of the yellows made him walk that much faster and duck into the front seat of one of the whites.
The video screen built into the windshield lit up, flashing the Advantage International Shuttle logo. Then an attractive Latino woman with an attractive Latino voice appeared in the display and said, “Where can Advantage take you today?”
A call came in while Sandro was rubbing his eyes. Shit. It was Marianne again. She’d called twice while he was in transit. He routed the call to voicemail and glanced at his watch. Nearly 7 PM, local time. He’d have enough time to head back to the hotel and take a look around Nogales before crashing.
“Sir?” the cab said.
He leaned back into the comfortable leather seat and said, “The Montezuma Hotel, on Escalada.”
“Ah, very good. Then please buckle up. We’ll be there shortly.”
The cab turned south on I-19 and headed for the city. The sounds of the road fell away as Miguel pulled up the latest newsfeeds.
Tempers along the border had flared while he’d been in Japan. Human rights groups in both Mexico and the US had converged on Nogales. Most held marches, organized and unorganized, near the border walls and the downtown area and at the crossing from the US into Mexico.
But one group took a bolder stand and had been helping dozens of Mexicans cross the border. They’d found a weakness in the RFID firing software: they wouldn’t fire at a target when someone with a valid US RFID was standing nearby, and so they’d set up ferrying points along the border. Five or six simultaneous crossings were organized each night. Most were foiled, with many arrests made for each, but one or two of these “Big Brother” crossings, as they’d come to be known, would succeed, and it was beginning to fuel the opposition to the Border Patrol’s new system.
For the last two nights, resistance to the BP officers’ arrests had escalated beyond the boiling point. Firearms were involved, and the police, rightly so, had protected themselves. The results: five dead, eighteen wounded.
Miguel had called the police and all the hospitals he could readily find the numbers to after boarding the scram in Tokyo. Something in his gut twisted every time he forwarded Sandro’s picture and asked if Sandro had been found among the dead or wounded. Miguel had let out a long, thankful breath when all of them replied no. He thought of making contact with Sandro’s online chat group, but was embarrassed to realize he’d never kept track of where Sandro surfed, or the identities of his online fraternity.
The cab dropped Miguel off at the New Montezuma Hotel, a few blocks north of the wall. He checked in and headed south, but slowed when he saw a crowd.
Along International Street, the street that hugged the US side of the wall through most of Nogales, two lines of protesters were marching, one on either side of the street. Something must have happened only minutes ago because there was a crowd of people in the center of the street, the two halves of the conflict being separated and slowly dismantled by a dozen police. Miguel snapped a couple of shots, though he could already see three news teams on the scene. Doubtless there were ten more photogs like Miguel sprinkled throughout the crowd.
Miguel pressed forward just as the police were zipping people’s wrists and packing them into the waiting vans. The next few moments passed by in slow motion, Miguel snapping frames the whole time.
An Anglo woman—five-six maybe, weighing a buck and a quarter, tops—was browbeating this hulk of a man. The woman’s face was beet red, and she was choking back tears as she shook a papaya-sized hunk of asphalt at the man. “My son died because those animals snuck across in the middle of the night and needed a car!”
The guy, Mexican by the look of him, went two-fifty and ninety-five percent lean. He was wearing broken-in jeans, a black tee, and a cowboy hat. He looked calm, like he wanted the woman to do something with the asphalt.
“When he stopped at a light,” she shouted, “they shattered his window with this!” Her knuckles were bone white as she shook the asphalt at him again. “They dragged him out of his car, beat him to death, and took off, all before the light turned green!”
The man smiled. “I’m Mexican,” the man said without a trace of an accent. “Does that mean I’m going to kill children?”
“Maybe not—” she shook the asphalt at the wall “—but your Godless indios over there will if they’re given the chance!”
“Yeah, and maybe I’ll tell them how to get to your house.”
That’s when Miguel saw him.
Sandro.
He was standing at the back of the crowd on the far side of the street, watching. Miguel snapped a shot immediately, but the woman got in his way. She’d lifted the asphalt high over her head while the man glanced nervously at two cops who were zip-tying a nearby protester’s wrists. The woman heaved the asphalt as hard as she could. It caught the man just above his left eye socket and sent his head sharply backward. He went limp and fell over like a giant redwood. His cowboy hat tumbled among a forest of legs as his head thumped solidly against the street.
Miguel backed up and scanned the crowd for Sandro. He kept the shutter release clicking—no telling what the camera might see that he would miss. The crowd noise intensified. A handful of people fought their way forward in defense of the woman, a few more for the man. And then the lines on either side of the street stormed forward like warring packs of wolves.
The police didn’t stand a chance.
As it turned out, neither did Miguel. By the time the violence had eased, Sandro was nowhere to be found.
* * *
The buff Mexican, Miguel found out that night, had been taken to intensive care with intracranial hemorrhaging. Three others had died, one from a severe reaction to the tear gas, two by trampling. Forty-seven more had been wounded. The woman ended up in jail on charges of assault, but hadn’t received so much as a scratch.
The chaos of the riot, the shouting, the screams of pain, and the tantalizing closeness with which he’d missed finding Sandro all spelled sleeplessness for Miguel. He stayed up until four drinking Single Village Mezcal and horchata, scanning the riot pictures for Sandro. He found only two pictures that had something resembling a clear shot of Sandro. One was obscured by the woman and her damn asphalt, and the other caught only the back of Sandro’s head, but in both there was the telltale sign of a cane among a veritable sea of legs.
It had to be Sandro, which led Miguel to the uncomfortable conclusion that Sandro had had something to do with the conflict. Just how, he didn’t know, and before he could figure out where his grandfather fit into this increasingly complex puzzle, sleep finally took him.
The next morning, while wolfing down greasy eggs and bacon from the buffet, Miguel realized he had three new messages from Marianne. He tagged the messages for follow-up and left the hotel.
He attended two marches near old town that morning and asked around while weaving among the crowd and the old adobe buildings, showing a recent picture of his grandfather, but no one admitted to knowing him. After absorbing six hours of shouting and sign-waving and staring at an endless sea of faces, Miguel was ready to give up. He was never going to get anywhere this way.
Just as he was heading toward one last crowd, an incoming message popped up. It was from Sandro’s bank. He opened it immediately and scanned the contents. He hadn’t expected anything from them—c
ertainly not this quickly—but it verified that the monies had been transferred from the estate of one Dr. Anthony Bayless.
He sat down on an ancient wooden park bench and searched the net. There were several references to Bayless. Some were recent, reporting his death five months earlier. He’d lived in Nogales for eighty years and—Miguel whistled—had died at the age of one hundred and fifty-three. The age was not completely unheard of, but it was still impressive.
Bayless had moved to Nogales after being crowned a hero when he’d helped to combat the outbreak of tuberculosis in 2041. It was a scary episode in Nogales’s history, a time where nearly ten thousand died from the spread of the tuberculosis superbug. It was yet another super-resistant pathogen, the fourth to achieve that status since the first in 2025, but it was the first that claimed airborne transmission. The outbreak wasn’t given much press in the States at first because it was localized to the Sonora portion of Nogales. But when the outbreak crossed over, and was attributed to an illegal immigrant crossing, it had fueled a mass political hysteria that had given the president the firepower he needed to upgrade the entire Mexican border wall to a thirty-foot monstrosity.
Late that night, after a fruitless seven-hour search for anything that might connect Sandro to Bayless, Miguel’s hunger finally got the best of him. He ordered up a chicken Caesar and lay on his hotel bed, watching the local news, which did nothing to ease his nerves.
“Officer Adam Giaterri of the Border Patrol,” the female anchor was saying, “was shot through the neck at 10:18 PM local time in what the authorities are calling a ruthless sniper attack. No others have been reported wounded, and no group has stepped forward to take responsibility. The president earlier called it a clear retaliation over the violence that erupted two days ago…”
Miguel threw down his fork, no longer hungry. “What the hell are you doing, Grandpa?”
An incoming call trilled into his earpiece: unknown number, no handle.
He tongued the pickup. “Hello?”
“Hello, Miguel.”
“Jesus Christ, Grandpa, where are you?”
“Never mind that. I need you to do something for me.”
“Come to the hotel. I’m staying at—”
“Miguel, listen to me. I don’t have much time. They’ve frozen my assets, and I need money. Bad. I need you to send it to this account number. As much as you can spare.” A bank account and routing number popped up via Miguel’s overlay system. He recognized it as the same Bank of Ireland account Sandro had used to transfer the Bayless money.
Miguel brought up Sandro’s bank and attempted to log in. A message appeared, asking that the owner of the account call Bank Security in Tallahassee.
“Grandpa, this is getting out of hand.”
“Miguel—”
“Did you have anything to do with this border patrolman?”
“Miguel! I can’t talk. Not now.”
“Then when, because I’m not giving you anything unless we talk.”
“Miguel, please. You just have to trust me.”
“This isn’t negotiable. We meet, face to face, and then we can talk about the money.”
The line was silent for a long time, but Miguel could hear a hushed conversation going on in the background. “You know the downtown fountain in Sonora?”
Miguel paused. “I’ll find it.”
“There’s a panadería due east of it. Meet me there tomorrow. Eleven o’clock.”
“Why did they freeze—”
But the line was already dead.
He tried calling the number back. No one answered.
Miguel poured himself two fingers of mezcal and stared out his window at the amber lights of Nogales. In the distance, the blinking red lights of the wall trailed off to the horizon like some celestial device set to take his grandfather farther and farther away.
He downed the mezcal in one gulp.
He stared at the wall for hours, drinking, wondering what he might have done differently, wondering how he could deliver Sandro from this gathering storm when Sandro himself seemed to be at the center of it.
Ninety-three more immigrants were caught that night. An unknown number snuck through. One attempted crossing ended in gunfire: three Mexican men dead, twelve wounded. The only comment from the CBP was that the strong success the program had already achieved would most likely accelerate the schedule for a full rollout.
* * *
Miguel woke with a screaming headache. It’d been quite a while since he’d last woken up still drunk from the night before, but not so long ago that he didn’t remember how shitty it felt. Only after scrubbing his face for five minutes did it strike him that the sun was awfully bright outside. Checking the time, he realized it was after nine already.
The rental he’d arranged for was waiting for him in the hotel parking structure. He hopped in and rushed south to the wall, and though he tried to use his press ID to grease the skids, it still took over an hour to make it through.
He was amazed how third-world Mexico seemed, even this close to the border—maybe especially this close to the border. There were so many migrants using Nogales as a launching point for crossings that huge portions of the shanty towns were little more than temporary housing.
In some ways Mexico’s predicament was understandable. NAFTA had been disbanded thirty years ago as an almost complete failure. Global warming had plodded on at a steady pace despite the ever-tightening global controls over greenhouse gases. Mexico’s farming industry had been crushed, and its Gulf-side tourism had been pummeled to the point of collapse by the incessant arrival of hurricanes storming in from the Atlantic.
It was a shame, too, because the United States, ever since the wall had been upgraded in the mid part of the century, had become progressively wealthier, both technologically and monetarily. Various administrations paid lip service to helping their southern neighbors, but those initiatives, no matter how heartfelt, would often be dismantled within a decade of their conception, leaving Mexico in the same place it had been a century earlier.
It was well after eleven by the time Miguel found the old square which held the bakery. Miguel knew in his gut that Sandro had already come and gone, and sure enough, no one was in the cramped bakery when he arrived except a hunched old Mexican woman who eyed him suspiciously from the far side of the counter. Over her shoulder, a squeaky air conditioner fought vainly against the oppressive heat. It was hot, but Miguel liked the ancient and fragrant smell of the bakery.
Miguel took out a hundred-peso note and laid it on the counter. “Café y dos churros, por favor.”
Miguel took his coffee and churros and sat down to regroup. A few minutes later, while Miguel was nursing his hangover with the scent of the coffee, Sandro entered the bakery. He used his cane—more heavily than usual—to make his way between the tables and sit across from Miguel.
Miguel snapped a photo immediately.
Sandro’s cane leans against a nearby chair as he wipes the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his faded denim jacket. His disheveled gray hair, his baggy eyes, his listless face—all telltale signs of a man who hasn’t slept in days.
“You look like shit,” Miguel said.
“Back atcha,” Sandro replied.
They both managed a weak smile.
An uncomfortable silence passed between them before Sandro reached into his jacket, pulled out a beaten manila envelope, and set it on the table next to the plate of churro crumbs. His hand rested a moment over it. Then he tapped it once and folded his hands in his lap. “The way I figure, you have a right to see that.”
Miguel left it there. “I don’t care what happened anymore. I just want to take you home.”
After a moment’s pause, Sandro nodded seriously to the envelope.
Miguel removed the contents. The top page was crisp and white. It was a letter, handwritten by Anthony Bayless. Miguel read it, and looked up at Sandro.
“An apology?”
Sandro nodd
ed. “Keep going.”
Miguel flipped the letter over and found a yellowed x-ray. It was a sagittal x-ray of the head. It seemed normal except for the bright white outline of a device near the base of the brain, where the spinal cord entered the cranial cavity. It was eerily similar to Miguel’s own CT scan taken only hours after his camera interface had been installed.
The following photograph was of a boy lying in a hospital bed. Miguel had seen a number of pictures of Sandro as an older teen, and though the top of this boy’s head was wrapped tight in white bandages and his face was slack as he stared upward, Miguel knew it was Sandro. Miguel assumed it was taken after the surgery for the implant he’d seen in the x-ray.
Miguel couldn’t help but judge the photograph with an artist’s eye. The balance was all wrong, and the lighting seemed to suck the life right out of the subject, but then again, there was clear synchronicity between the lighting and Sandro’s blank expression. What had the person behind the camera been thinking as he took this photo of Sandro? Probably nothing. Probably it had been the doctor who’d performed the surgery, or a member of the medical team who’d taken it. Doctor or photographer, he’d probably become numb to his patient’s feelings long ago, much like Miguel had become numb to the suffering around him.
Miguel flipped through the rest of the documentation: doctor’s notes, medical tests, psychological workups. He saw the phrases “tuberculosis in check” and “poor reception of implant” and “response times decreased” in the monthly summary pages from March and April of 2041. By the Lord above, Sandro had only been thirteen. Were they even allowed to do something like that to a boy so young? He flipped a few more pages and found a note from August of the same year that said “implant removed successfully” and “recovery slow but consistent.”
The year, 2041, was notable in that it was the same year of the tuberculosis epidemic in Nogales, the same year Congress approved the expansion and strengthening of the border wall. Sandro’s parents had emigrated at that time, but they’d died in the outbreak. Sandro nearly had, too, but he recovered when the bacteriophage for the superbug had been developed.
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