The service was held in Floater Junction, a poor-man’s resort town and Benito’s favorite getaway in all of America, not that he’d ever ventured out past the state line once he got himself situated. So great was his love that, upon learning his prognosis, he’d put most of his savings into an unmarked plot near the city center. Floater Junction was only three hours from home, meaning he’d never been free of its siren song, because for three hours in every direction, breaking up the rustic scenery of Ho-Chunk Nation, were nothing but billboards promising:
ALL YOU CAN EAT
WHERE THE WINNERS PLAY
and FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY
On our way in, me and Monica saw an enormous white bedsheet hung from the catwalk of one of these billboards. It bore a political slogan in runny black spray paint. Like all resort towns, Monica told me, the place was a hotbed of immigrant labor.
“There have been raids recently. I hope you brought your papers.”
She loved to joke about my “papers.” Her sense of humor was underdeveloped, if not her intelligence. Indeed, my green card never left my wallet. I’d even flirted with sewing it to the sleeve of my favorite jacket. Benito never got his green card. He’d been here on an expired H-2B and probably died just in time, the stupid sureño, not to be deported.
At the funeral I cornered Benito’s cousin. He had a way of speaking, vigorously doleful, like a statesman passing the buck for some heinous oversight, and I figured this was true no matter the setting.
We spoke in Spanish. On second thought, maybe he cornered me, his opening gambit being, “She can’t help falling in love with her Mexican laborers. But it’s not as tawdry as people think. Just look at her and Benito. Together 26 months. Did everything together. Saw the Northern Lights. Took salsa dancing lessons. He would’ve married her had things worked out, I’m sure of it. And you, you’ve been with her three months now, is that right? I’m sure you’ll do right by her too.”
Monica had asked me—instructed me, really, with tear-shined eyes I couldn’t say no to—to tell everyone we’d been together three months, when the truth was closer to three weeks. Eighteen days, to be precise, since I’d done the estimate on her bathtub tiling and noticed the way she stood so close, asking repetitious questions, touching my arm to direct my focus as if in constant fear I would be distracted, and inviting me to join her in a virgin sangria no fewer than four times.
“She told me there’s good reason for this,” the cousin went on. We were standing in some shadowy middle-space between the chapel and the reception hall, picking at slices of yellow cake with sugar-packed frosting. From there we could hear the organ droning on, another hymn about lux perpetua and requiem aeternam. As there were so few of us, we’d all been invited to take a flower from Benito’s casket. The cousin wore his in a lapel. Somewhat at a loss, I’d stuck mine in my jacket pocket.
“Her father was very badly beaten in a barfight. In the streets he grew dizzy and collapsed. Everyone passing by assumed he was drunk. They laughed or sneered and stepped over him, the way we all do, naturally enough, when we think someone is either stupid or out for sympathy. All except for a crew of Mexicans jackhammering across the street. They rushed over and got him to his feet. They checked his I.D., put him in a cab, and told the cabbie his address. The cabbie realized her father’s condition. He said they were crazy and called an ambulance. The Mexicans scattered. I guess they thought anything involving a siren was bad-news-bears, and not without reason. The cabbie hung around. He told the paramedics what’d happened, and later, when he came to, the nurses or whoever told Monica’s father.”
There was a glint in the cousin’s eye that gradually brightened as something in my face gave away that, yes, I’d already heard this story, that it’d served as pillow talk after a bout of not-so-virginal sangrias, my work phone buzzing nonstop on the nightstand. Later I’d had to call back the company’s founder and tell him the whole salacious truth, but since I was the cofounder, there wasn’t much he could do.
After the burial, we holed up in a dumpy hotel with a concrete pool and wood-paneled walls, the perfect incubator for the funk we were in. Monica changed out of her black dress into loungewear, and I knew we were in for the day, slated to watch TV and talk very little. I kicked off my dress shoes, hung up my jacket and tie, then flopped on the bed, flipping through channels.
“I know it's early,” she said, plunging her hand in a brown paper bag. “But I'm breaking the seal on the whiskey.”
“Good.”
I was thinking of Benito’s cousin, his vote of confidence in me and what my fraudulent three months of chemistry with Monica portended. I was thinking of his too-shiny black suit and too-linty black shirt and too-shaggy black hair, and how he reminded me of a boy I’d grown up with in Culiacán, a boy who happened to have a dead tooth, and how the entire time Benito’s cousin was talking, part of me was searching for the dead tooth and then, in turn, congratulating him for having taken care of it.
I caught Monica looking in the mirror, dragging a white tulip from her hair and humming a familiar ballad, one that had repeated every twenty, thirty minutes on our long drive to Floater Junction. I didn’t go out of my way to ask if it’d been “their” song.
We drank our whiskey out of plastic cups, no ice. When one show went to a commercial break, we flipped to another show and vice versa: from pawnbrokers to cold cases and back again. The light outside waned and we hardly noticed.
Before long, we were on our sides making out. Monica saw me straining in my slacks and unzipped me. She had long acrylic nails. They looked black but glittered dark green in certain light. I pulled up her shirt and buried my face in a cloud of Sol De Janeiro. She had on her sexiest bra, too nice for just lounging around in and maybe a strange choice for an ex’s funeral, but what was I suggesting? That she'd chosen a specific set of lingerie to honor a fallen lover?
She wiggled out of her shorts, rolled me on my back, and began licking and stroking me until I turned a vibrant, straining pink. Sometimes she liked, and sometimes she didn’t like, when I roughly fucked her throat. I gave it a few test pumps to see how she reacted. The commercial break ended. I was watching the pawn shop show but in a detached sort of way, feeding her only half strokes, not wanting to gag her, just wanting her to weep a little mascara for someone other than Benito. I told her to turn around and drop her pussy on my face, to distract me from the free cable.
Afterward we drank more whiskey and watched more TV.
I said, “I really don’t want to do this brunch thing tomorrow. Would it be alright if I bailed?”
“That’s a good idea. I should bail too.”
“Stomach flu. That’s a good excuse.”
“A better excuse is I don’t wanna fucking go.”
“I don’t care if we stick around though. We have the room for another night.”
She didn’t answer for a long time, drawn in either by her own morbid thoughts or by an uncensored lipo on E!
“We’ll play it by ear.”
I got drunk and dozed off and woke up around four a.m. to Monica crying. She was crying very softly though, not making much noise at all. I spooned her close, kissing the hair at the base of her neck and caressing her softly all over until she decided she wanted to make love, really make love this time, not even changing her position, just guiding me in from behind and letting me take her on our sides like that with her cheeks all wet with tears.
***
Come daybreak, we started drinking again almost immediately, lounging out by the concrete pool but not dipping a toe in the filthy green water. Our chaises were sherbet-colored, made of sticky vinyl straps. She called someone around nine, already slurring, and explained that we wouldn’t make brunch on account of our stomach flu.
I remembered how the story ended, the one about her father, which incidentally I’d let Benito’s cousin finish, not caring one way or another what he spoke about while I waited out the reception and swallowed more cake.
“The next day,” after every bite he would thumb a bit of icing from his mustache, “he and Monica—she was only seven or eight—went to the same intersection where all the drama had taken place, and wouldn’t you know it, the Mexicans were still there, still working. Her father thanked them. He shook each of their hands. He offered them, oh, I don’t know, fifty dollars or something, maybe a hundred, which they absolutely refused to take. And you know Monica. She’s very introspective. She goes to therapy and all that and writes out a lot of these revelations in her public diary, you know, to share with the world. She’s very brave in that respect. And also very egotistical. But she’s the first to tell you she’s egotistical. She devotes several entries to it, in fact.”
I was well aware of this public diary, technically a Substack with a total of 24 subscribers—Benito’s cousin among them, it would seem—but had never been tempted to read a single word. A single word might’ve been enough to snuff out my love for her, if love is what you call it.
“Do you think you’ll ever actually get around,” Monica said, turning and smiling at me in her cheetah-print sunglasses, “to tiling my bathtub?”
“Not if you keep dragging me to all ends of the earth.”
“I’m really impressed, you know, that you agreed to come. It shows you’re secure.”
“So this was a test?”
“Everything’s a test.”
“Okay, fine. Here’s a test for you. Why did you two really break up?”
“Me and Benito?”
I didn’t answer. Of course her and Benito.
“Well, I told you. He wasn’t making any money. And as you know, I’m doing just fine. His pride got the better of him.”
“What do you mean ‘as I know’?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? You’ve seen my house. You’ve driven my car. You know what I do for a living.”
“I just didn’t like how you said it. ‘As you know.’ Like maybe I should have a little more pride too, is that it?”
She rolled her eyes and said, “You’re a business owner. Benito was cleaning hotel rooms for a living. Shitty hotels like this one.”
“After he got canned,” I added.
“Yes.”
Benito’s getting canned was an oft repeated and supposedly cute double entendre, as he’d formerly been employed in an actual cannery.
“I can’t help thinking,” I said, “about the saga you told me on our first night together. About the noble obreros turning down your father’s wad of cash.”
“I’m an open book. It’s the only way I know how to live with myself.”
“Not the only way,” I said, picking the bottle up off the pavement and topping off her cup. We had ice now. The sun demanded it.
“My, my. I’m getting to see a new side of you. A little bitchy and a little effete. I think I like it, in moderation.”
“It’s the whiskey,” I said, not catching the thing about feet. “It’s the whiskey and the heat. And the no-sleep.”
“Poor baby. Do you need a nap? Un poquito siesta?”
I paused halfway through refilling my drink. I pretended it was due to what she’d said, but the fact was a flareup of double vision had impaired me from discerning, for a brief moment, which was the right cup, and which was the hologram.
“Don’t expect me to correct your lousy Spanish,” I said. “Clearly Benito didn’t feel the need.”
Right around noon, when the entire courtyard was awiggle with heat lines and the concrete seemed to pulsate with volcanic activity, I snapped awake from an overcooked stupor and beat a hasty retreat, my vision black and my legs uncertain, to the hotel room, where I threw myself before the toilet and puked, not bothering to close either door behind me.
“Poor baby,” I heard her say between retches—and thought it was an echo replaying in my mind until I spotted her there, clucking over me in the doorway. My abdomen and ribs were in a permanent spasm, otherwise I would've snapped at her to give a man some space.
Instead, she knelt behind me, rubbing my back as I spewed some more. Viscid strands hung off my lips. I was too dizzy and exhausted to even resist when I felt her reach beneath the waistband of my cherry-red basketball shorts. Again I thought I might be hallucinating. The tiles in here, on the bathroom floor and on the cove base, fell somewhere between oatmeal and greige. I tried to guess a specific SKU. C4807 maybe, or J995.
After one last ejection, I managed to get semi-hard, which frankly I found shameful and alarming. “Jesus,” I said, “you crazy gorgon, let me wash my mouth out at least.”
“I don’t care if you do. Just come to bed.”
I brushed and gargled before doing what she said. She told me to lie back and let her play doctor. I was burning up. I had a fever in my head and chest. When she straddled me, I started moaning like a leper in the desert. She petted my hair back and peppered me with kisses. There was a swamp between us, a sickly pornographic vapor, and in the heat of it I blacked out, dreaming strange dreams about the funeral, about stormtroopers breaking down the chapel door and making a beeline toward the casket, which they proceeded to tip over so as to abuse Benito’s corpse with the heavy butts of their rifles, and while everyone screamed and cried and berated them, I alone fled into what else but a bathroom of floor-to-ceiling tiles, where I switched off the light, felt my way into a toilet stall, and cowered like a nun afraid for her purity—until I heard the door open and recognized the calm voice of Benito’s cousin. He brought with him a small flickering flame, and when I opened the stall to let him inside, he stood there in his unruffled suit bearing me a slice of cake with a candle stuck through the icing.
“Happy birthday, Benito,” he said. “Today you can make as many mistakes as you like. God promises to look the other way.”
***
Later we wound up in an unremarkable club, sharing a high-top with a Russian couple on vacation. To be clear, they were naturalized citizens but spoke with thick cartoon accents. I’m sure they thought the same about me, and about Monica, whose Midwestern elongation of vowels and smuggling in of syllables became more pronounced the more she drank. Where they were vacationing from, I never caught or can’t remember. The same goes for their names, so I’ll call them, let’s say, Boris and Saskia. Boris was a pulmonologist, Saskia managed estate sales. We talked about their occupations quite a bit, shouting at one another over bass-heavy music. I hate to shout so I contributed very little. They were attractive and in their thirties. Disco lighting would, every four beats, change the color of our faces.
“What have you done so far in Floater Junction?” Monica asked them.
“We only just got in today. Boris is speaking at a convention, or at least…”
“I was scheduled to. But schedules change. I don’t take it personally. Now we have more time to kill.”
“You’ve been here before?” Saskia said. “What would you recommend?”
Monica smiled at me mischievously, as if I had any clue what she was about to say. “My favorite—it’s a little bit ghoulish, I’ll admit—has always been the murder museum.”
“Oh my?” Saskia laughed uncomfortably, eyes darting to Boris, no doubt reassessing us as potential serial killers.
“You wouldn’t believe what they have there,” Monica said. “Actual murder weapons from famous crimes. Letters written in prison. Crime scene photos. Affidavits and transcripts.”
"Murder weapons?” Boris stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Your police don’t keep these under lock and key?”
“It’s possible I’m misremembering. Maybe there aren’t any murder weapons.” Again, Monica looked at me, and I had to remind her I’d never been there before.
Saskia said, “I have been to maybe similar museums in the Baltics. Old KGB cells. Interrogation sites. Very dismal places. Full of ghosts.”
Monica’s eyes flashed. “Fascinating.”
Boris smirked at her and said, “I wonder if you can go down to South America, say, or the Middle East, and buy tickets and line up with tourists to visit CIA black sites.”
“I very much doubt it,” Monica yelled over a thumping new beat. “Our empire, as you might’ve noticed, is still in full swing, still fully robust.” Then she laughed as though at a clever punchline, looping her arm through mine.
“We spoke to a woman today, eighty years old,” Saskia smiled, “taking a rest with her picket sign, enjoying a scone outside a cafe, and she said her husband, who is dead, had fought communists in Vietnam and would be rolling in his grave.”
“Isn’t it funny,” Boris put to us, “how Americans evoke communism. It’s almost never in reference to economics.”
“It’s as much an aesthetic to us,” Monica told him, “as an ideology. Sold to us as school-kids with our little Orwell curriculums as very gray and bureaucratic. Whatever evil we’ve committed in the world has always been the kind to wear oxfords or penny loafers. Only since we put a gauche celebrity in office have those been traded in for knee-high shiny jackboots.”
“Now you’re putting it in terms Saskia can understand,” Boris winked at her. “Shoes.”
Saskia gave him a rather hard shove, masking her real annoyance with pretend annoyance and saying how the old timers would often talk about the decadent days during the fall of the Soviets. “When Boris and I were too young to understand.”
“Which is too bad really,” he chimed in. “It wasn’t all bread lines, you know. Sounds like there was some fun to be had. No one was in charge. Or rather, the ones in charge were too busy looting the Titanic to give a damn about public decency.”
“We joke often,” Saskia said, “how maybe we came here just in time to enjoy the decadence for ourselves. Firsthand.”
“Here’s to decadence.” Monica raised her glass.
We all had a toast and then, purposely draining my Jack and Coke, I got to my feet and offered to buy the next round. It would be pricey, yes, but worth getting away from these Russians for a moment. Saskia was as inoffensive as a sexy Hummel, what with her cheek injections and her pouty lips and the ruffle choker above her cleavage, but Boris had slithered into my aura like a tapeworm. There was something profane about his handsomeness, something casually possessive about the way he studied Monica, who for lack of anything else to wear had changed back into her funeral dress, transforming its character with a bolder palette of makeup and twenty minutes worth of blow-drying.
The bartender had a tough time understanding me. My accent was no match for the pounding music, hence why I’d basically been a nodding mute for the entire night. I wondered, for no good reason other than to stoke my bad spirits, what conclusions the Russians were drawing about me and my relationship with Monica. So far, we’d made no mention of Benito or his funeral, but I was sure Monica had begun filling them in the second I left.
Behind the bar, directly to my right, was a doorway opening onto the top of a lighted staircase. A Latino in his fifties appeared. He was trudging from the bowels of the basement with a heavy crate full of liquor bottles. We nodded hello. As he restocked the shelves and the cabinets below, he called over his shoulder, asking me in Spanish if I was having a good time. I said I was, meeting his eye in the reflection of a smoky mirror.
“I saw you over there. That’s your woman? In the black dress?” His tone was awestruck, humorous, not sleazy in the slightest.
I laughed and said it was.
“How long are you in town for?”
“Just for the weekend.”
“And you been hassled yet?”
I shook my head. The man went silent as the bartender brought me two of the four drinks.
Then he said, “You all square, man?”
“La mica,” I answered. Green card.
He sucked his teeth like I’d said something reckless. “How’s your English? You been here long?”
I shrugged one shoulder as if to say so-so. I don’t know why. I’d been fluent for about ten years and proficient for longer, thanks to good schooling and a steady diet of romance novels.
“From what I hear,” the man said, “you so much as blow a red light and la mica might not be enough to save you. All depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On what.” He threw up his hands. “Who can tell anymore? What you ought to do is see if that mamacita will marry you. There’s a monastery up the hill. Brother Joseph, he runs the place. A true guerrilla. Very reliable. He’ll do it for a small donation.”
“Do what—marry us?”
The man nodded. He still hadn’t turned to face me. It felt like hackneyed espionage, like we were sitting on a bench talking to our newspapers. The bartender came with my other two drinks and I paid. Before I left I asked the gentleman his name. It was Pablo and, as I suspected, he was illegal. We wished each other vaya con Dios. I didn’t see him for the rest of the evening.
Back at the table, Saskia was showing the other two pictures on her phone. Over the heads of the many dancers, drinkers, and revelers, I spotted a late-night barre class underway across the street, a symphony of women striking choreographed poses, heedless of passersby or heathens in the opposite club. Handing the women their drinks, I doubled back to fetch mine and Boris’s. Gyrating bodies knocked against me. I wished the four of us, or at least the two of us, would shut up and dance.
The pictures turned out to be of Saskia, unclothed. They were from a boudoir shoot, taken in some sort of gauzy loft all draped with champagne-colored linen. She wore expensive looking knickers and, not unlike the barre class, struck a regimen of graceful yet less rigorous poses, accenting every dip and valley in her pliable body. Against all the ivory flesh and muted gold, her black hair stood out like an inkblot.
Monica was saying, “I’ve always wanted to do something like this. Just to have for myself when I’m older.”
I told her she would always be beautiful, causing her to blink at me, startled, to scan my face for even a whiff of sarcasm, daring me with something serrated in her eyes to express any, but upon finding none, kissing me long and deep before the other two, and when we pulled apart, Boris and Saskia were smiling at us, Saskia like we were adorable children, Boris like we were topless dancers.
“I was just explaining,” Boris said, lifting and swirling his drink, “that Saskia and I are in an open relationship.”
That’s what got the ball rolling, but it was another hour or two before I wound up in a women’s toilet stall, shifting Saskia’s tight dress up over her hips. Boris and Monica were in the next stall over. We were all drunk, but probably not as drunk as we were behaving.
Saskia had on a similar thong to what she’d been wearing in the boudoir photos, with a prudish little bow where the two strips of lace met. I went to move it aside as I unzipped, then decided I'd better slow down—I wasn’t all that hard yet. Instead I lashed out upon her right cheek a fury of parochial spankings. The first one made her yip in surprise. After that she wriggled into my groin after every blow and I would have to stand back to deliver the next one. Boris laughed beyond the partition. Everything echoed up to the blacklit ceiling. Women, I assume, cycled in and out, making do with the other three stalls, touching up their lashes in the dingy ultraviolet, even shooting snaps or reels to the effect of some girls have all the luck, not knowing that Saskia, by my third or fourth attempt to mash in a rubbery, apathetic cock, was feeling far from lucky, especially listening to the pounding Monica was getting three feet over, a pounding that by rights belonged to her. She turned around to face me, caressing my jawline with one hand and jerking me off with the other, however this quickly became sad and demoralizing, so I tore myself away, zipped up, and left without a word.
An empty dance floor greeted me. Everyone was gathered by the window. The bartender craned his neck, trying to see over their heads, plugging a finger in one ear and shouting into his phone. Curious enough to forget my virility or lack thereof, I fought my way to the exit. The closer I got, the more I could distinguish the party lights from some external flickering.
Stale, sizzled air hit me like a wave of exhaust. “Dude, shut the door,” someone yelled, taking the initiative themselves. I was alone on a concrete stoop, a few feet above the sidewalk. My eyes watered. A jumble of black Suburbans crowded the street, hemmed in by local cruisers and wooden roadblocks. Angry mobs had gathered at either barrier. The ones who could still breathe were blowing whistles, pelting insults. The barre studio, now shuttered for the night, was part of a long block of storefronts. The second and third stories were apartments. It was from these apartments that people were being dragged, namely four men and two women—all living together, as I would later learn, in a crowded one-bedroom, working invisible jobs around Floater Junction. The women were openly sobbing, but the men were crying too on account of tear gas.
I leaned over the railing and retched, spitting out fumes, blinking heat from my eyes, reliving my midday purge back at the hotel. I saw the swan-like women of the barre class squatting and pliéing in a kind of metal zoetrope that encased my brain. I heard Darth Vader at the foot of the stoop. He was demanding to see some identification. I think I chuckled out the words, “La mica, la mica” repeating them as often as I could while fighting for breath. “Okay then,” he said. “Fork it over.” And I thought it was just as well that I was blind and couldn’t see this man, because he wouldn’t have a face.
Then I was jerked back—by another agent, I presumed, but no, I was back in the club and there were people cheering, and a woman who sounded maniacally, frenetically joyful kept chanting, “We got him, girl, we got him,” later identified as Kenaya Hanson, a 29-year-old dog groomer from Indiana, and after getting passed along a bit more, hearing cries of, “Lock the fucking door!” and “Keep those cocksuckers out of here!” accompanied by defiant fists beating on glass, by hysterical sobs and devastated laughter, by the life-conquering soundtrack of Dua Lipa, I at last wound up in Monica’s arms, still blind as a newborn and weepy as one too.
Someone handed me water. I drank half of it down. Tilting my head back, I poured the rest of it in my eyes.
“What were you thinking?” she asked. “Why did you go out there?”
Reasonable questions. I thought of the four men and two women getting hauled away, jailed, deported. I thought of Pablo and where he must be hiding right now. I thought of the angry mob with their whistles sticking it out through the gas, wondering if any of them would get brained tonight, and whether the sheet that would be thrown over them was already stowed in one of the cruisers, and whether the sheets were incinerated afterward or laundered and reused.
By the time I could see again, I could also hear the door being rammed to pieces. People were screaming and flocking away, all except for the bartender, a brawny but beer-bellied guy in a hi-viz yellow T, who charged forward shouting, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Show me a warrant or get the fuck out of my bar!”
The agents declined. They put a gun, several guns actually, in the bartender’s face and told him to turn off the music and turn on the lights. He complied. He was later identified as Doug Davis, a 48-year-old father of one and a Marine. The rest of us they had line up along three walls framing the dance floor, squeezing between high-tops littered with bottles and glasses. Spots tumbled through my vision. I couldn’t get a bead on anything—my reality, my situation, my fear—only Monica’s hand in mine, cold and clammy, only the security of being near her and the feeling that I would lose all sense if anyone tried to separate us.
Boris and Saskia, highly disheveled, were extracted from the women’s bathroom, blinking with stupid innocence in the bright new light.
“Here’s the deal,” bellowed one of the agents. “No one’s going anywhere until we take down all your names and personal information. Our department will be going through tonight’s footage.” He swept a leather-gloved hand at various cameras around the bar. “Anyone found directly participating in the obstruction of justice will be charged to the full extent of federal law. Now . . .” He swiveled his head to petition the other agents.
One of them, wearing plainclothes under camo Kevlar and a gas mask around his neck, pointed right at me and said, “Him. That’s the runner.”
“He never ran,” Monica protested, stepping in front of me as they came forward. “It was me—I pulled him inside.” When I tried to push past her, she threw an elbow in my chest. “He’s legal. He did nothing wrong. This is all a complete waste of time.”
“So let us talk to him,” they said. “Come on out, sir. Quit your hiding.”
For the record, I wasn’t hiding. I was getting out my green card, frantic when I thought I’d lost my wallet, about to lash out and call Saskia not only a whore but a Fed, but I quickly found it in my jacket pocket, beside the dead flower from Benito’s casket.
Several people had their phones out and were filming. Whenever an agent barked at them to stop, they were laughed at, told that their authority amounted to a scout badge in Submission.
I finally convinced Monica to stand down. Handing over my I.D., it struck me not for the first time, but in the most visceral way, what a flimsy plastic tether was binding me to this country, that they could simply hold it to a Zippo, make a few keystrokes in some pocket-sized data terminal, and consign me back to Sinaloa, to the stifling maquilas and the relentless, even seductive recruitment tactics of the cartels. This is the future I made peace with the moment my card left my hand. They gave it a peremptory glance and said, “We’ll need to detain you while we run this through USCIS. Just a precaution,” they added, feeling the heat bristle off of Monica’s flesh, sensing the irate stirring of the crowd around them. “To verify it’s not fraudulent.”
“You want to talk about fraudulent,” heckled a livestreamer, 22-year-old Willow Nigrelli. A cry went up. An anxious murmur of endorsement. The agents replanted their feet. They hefted their rifles. They told everyone to quiet down.
I turned to Monica, which was a mistake. The sight of her broke me. We were both embarrassed by how stupidly hopeless it all was. No one answered her when she asked where they were taking me. I'd heard of people being dumped in parking lots. I'd heard of people being flown to Texas, to fucking El Salvador, legal citizens with no practical recourse. I decided no matter where they booted me I would bounce back. Even if it took loan sharks and shady lawyers, I wouldn’t settle for nineteen days. I had wasted my short time with this woman treating her like she was ill-gotten, like whatever she felt for me I must’ve stolen. At the very least I needed twenty.
I pulled her close and ran my fingers through her hair, static rushing from her body into mine and the mob only feeding us, mounting an electric surge of pity, love, chaos, hatred, fear, despair, plus whatever more specific baggage they’d accrued through the years.
Then the agents took hold of me. They led me away.
And though I didn't see it, that's when someone threw the first bottle.
