(Pete Yahnke Railand, MigrationNow.com)

During his tour of the border town of Nogales, Arizona, Senator John McCain got to play a real-life maverick on the evening news. As part of a delegation of lawmakers working on immigration reform in Washington, McCain witnessed an immigrant scrambling over an 18-foot fence and getting apprehended by border police. The encounter was instantly distilled into a dramatic tweet. The scene, reproduced on the nightly news loop, painted by McCain seemed almost made for television (indeed, some questioned whether the tweet was an elaborately staged stunt). But the Senator was also channeling a primeval refrain in the American psyche.

As the blistery lower lip of the American Dream, the rim of desert connecting the U.S. and Mexico is where the nation’s deepest Hobbesian nightmares are projected daily, with headlines about “aliens” hopping the fence, traversing the desert, being brutalized by smugglers, and all manner of military-style security interventions — from buzzing surveillance drones to traffic checkpoints to border-patrol campaigns with names like “Gate Keeper” and “Hold the Line” (subtly evoking their infamous Eisenhower-era “Operation Wetback”).

The border-as-battleground lives on in the public imagination as a mash-up of the spaghetti western, Cops and CSI. It’s a final frontier, inscribed in the crawlspace between gritty reality and pure fiction: a construct of legal doctrine and geopolitical convention. It’s undergirded by nativist racial anxieties and both steeled and eroded by commercial forces that alternate between craving the free movement of capital and convulsing with fears of labor competition and unbridled markets.

(Santiago Armengod, MigrationNow.com)

The border’s fictional valence derives in part from the fact that it is the physical embodiment of a fantastically irrational immigration system. Today, immigration policy is a tangled mess of draconian green cards, family reunification waiting lists, asylum case law, and highly restrictive employment-based visa programs. And for all those who fall outside this thicket of statutes, they are labeled variously as undocumented, unlawful, irregular, or the loaded term of choice on the Right, “illegal.”

The border delineates an imagined geopolitical terrain — its arbitrary nature is precisely what gives it power. Border “security” is a measure of the political establishment’s faith in its ability to control or capitalize on the human osmosis that any artificial boundary is destined to invite. To that end, by 2014, the Obama administration will have presided over two million deportations, by some estimates.

Border security is measured by its power to symbolically cleft America from an increasingly alien and violent outside world, namely the Global South countries that have long served as an offshore repository for Western commercial excesses. The border fence — a ragged, porous barrier strung together by wire and concrete — inscribes the line between citizen and other, them and us. That’s precisely why the immigration restrictions (and border enforcement) has tightened and relaxed over time in accordance with labor market churn and economic cycles, which are in turn often rocked back by the undertow of nativist fears and jingoist racism.

Then again, the border is only as impenetrable as the authorities make it. Many “open borders” activists imagine a world in which those gatekeepers simply stop enforcing the gates, and begin to chip away at them from the inside.

Enter Immigrant X: an alternative universe of fictionalized anti-border renegades, the brainchild of a group of pseudonymous bloggers who operate as an imagined community of grassroots anti-border activists located in an unnamed “Western democracy.” The team includes a saboteur who works for the immigration authorities, along with a network of clandestine border resisters with anarchist leanings. Together they operate an underground railroad that liberates migrants from detention.

Their stories describe sabotaged raids, a network of underground safehouses. In one post, “Raid Interrupted,” the rebels get tipped off in advance of raids and share the intelligence with migrants whom the immigration agents have targeted, and try to spirit them away to a hideout, a friendly squat. In anotherdispatch, they use their own remote controlled drones to disrupt an enforcement action:

@Immigrant_Z Keep it in position. I crowd is gathering. The border policewoman looks really flustered.

ImmigrantX Wed Mar 06 2013 at 3:52 PM

@Immigrant_Z Take it up. She wants to take a swing at it with a baton.

ImmigrantX Wed Mar 06 2013 at 3:53 PM

@Immigrant_Z The person she stopped has walked off, good one. Get it high, she is pretty close.

ImmigrantX Wed Mar 06 2013 at 3:54 PM

In terse, cinematic prose, the group’s manifesto presents the project as an attempt to imagine a world beyond borders:

Your rights as a world citizen are not defined by your race, religion, place of birth, nationality or lack of. They are afforded to you by your existence.

Wherever you live on this earth you have the same rights as all those who live in your community not matter how or why you came to this place.

A law that is unjust should be disobeyed through ingenuity and creativity not by violence or hurt those we oppose or seek to help.

Written from the perspectives of people threatened by immigration law (an asylum seeker separated from her family) or empowered by it (a government agent who likens her shameful complicity in the system with a marriage to a “criminal spouse”), the stories compose an alternative reality designed to expand readers’ vision of what’s possible beyond what passes for the politics today. The group has attracted thousands of twitter followers, though it’s not clear whether all are aware that the project is fiction.

As the legislative reforms to deal with undocumented immigrants are continually watered down and scuttled in legislative chambers around the world, direct intervention from grassroots activists doesn’t seem any less realistic than expecting politicians to fix a system that has benefitted both capital and the state enormously.

(Kevin Caplicki, MigrationNow.com)

Other anti-border web projects range from the practical to the fantastical.

In 2009, a group of tech and art activists known as the Electronic Disturbance Theater launched a pilot for an experimental GPS mapping tool aimed at helping migrants navigate the dangerous desert path and avoid detection by authorities. As the project gained media attention, it got mired in right-wing backlash before it was ever really implemented.

Experimental poet Sesshu Foster took a more nostalgia approach with East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, a fictional online scrapbook of an East LA enclave that has been “reinhabited” by undocumented immigrants. Festooned with monochrome illustrations of antique “discarded” public transit cars and grainy vintage neighborhoods, the fantasy rail line shuttles passengers to various “stations” mapped out in morgue photos of a smashed storefront, ramshackle barrios, and a post office transformed overnight into a teeming processing center for Japanese American “enemy aliens.” Traversing time the way migritude transcends nationality, the Dirigible links multiple human habitats under one literary hemisphere.

(Archival photo, East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines)

Beyond dwelling in a fugitive imagination, some activists have used more direct tactics in the analog world to challenge the immigration regime. While many migrants are fearful of even participating in street protests, for fear of exposing themselves to arrest and possibly deportation, some immigrant youth have escalated their anti-deportation activism be plunging head-first into the system.

In recent months, several youth have infiltrated detention centers to report on the dismal conditions and dysfunctional bureaucracy from the inside. There are also real-life analogues to the saboteur approach of Immigrant X. Earlier this year, following the shuttering of a refugee camp in Calais, France,anarchist volunteers were reported to have made “regular trips to France to give would-be migrants sleeping bags, phones, bikes, books, food, and help them to find squats.”

These actions reflect the inspiration of various anti-border initiatives that have sprung up over the past decade in Europe. The NoBorder Network (now inactive) emerged in the early 2000s to advance grassroots anti-border initiatives across the continent, like pressure campaigns against airlines complicit in deportations. Activists have since carried on that ethos with civil resistance campaigns operating inside the European Union (which technically is supposed to allow relatively free transborder mobility) and at the “external borders” between “Fortress Europe” and Global South nations, activists have launched various direct actions like “no border” camps promoting migrant solidarity, and protest flotillas on the Mediterranean in defense of migrants who attempt the perilous sea journey to southern Europe. The grassroots group FrontExplode (a play on the EU border patrol FRONTEX) has staged protests at airports against refugee expulsion flights.

Compared to the monstrous scope of the immigration enforcement regimes around the world, these pro-migrant micro-aggressions may be dismissed as a nuisance by authorities. But if McCain’s live-tweeting of a single border ensnarement can spark a media flurry, the next battlelines in the immigrant justice struggle will be waged on a digital horizon.

I recently spoke with Immigrant X from his location — somewhere in northern Europe — to talk about why social media and the online world might be an ideal arena for envisioning more militant resistance to borders and xenophobia. Though X did not want his actual name disclosed, he did reveal that he has been a humanitarian aid worker for over a decade, working in conflict zones in Africa and South Asia. His partners in the project are one fellow humanitarian worker as well as a third collaborator who “works in the immigration system.”

Michelle Chen: What was the genesis of Immigrant X? How did you come up with the idea?

Immigrant X: For a long time, I wanted to do a project on immigration but could not figure a viable way to do it. Two years ago I had just finished a project using social media that looked at the marketing of international aid;  the argument was that marketing can influence the program decisions of non-governmental organizations (or any organization for that matter). I created an organiszation and staffed it. It was primarily satirical. People that followed would be caught unaware and then finally click to the fact the organization was not real.  I thought I could do something similar for immigration.

With Immigrant X I wanted to flip this idea on its head. Start with an organization that clearly states that it is not real and let people wonder if there is more behind the façade that is real or could be real. The intention is to provide content that is very believable and engaging. So not just to be a website of an activist group, but to honestly look at the people behind the group itself. The site and Twitter characters are an environment to tell a story with a beginning a middle and an end. I also knew that this project was quite big and wanted to include other people to make it work.

The social media presence is something very alive to write fiction in. There is an immediate reaction and engagement with an audience (many who don’t know they are an audience). I think social media gets people to engage with ideas in a different way. It is more a one on one conversation with the writer who may have to justify or modify the story in real time. It is not just writing in fact but often a sort of performance.

(Cesar Maxit, MigrationNow.com)

MC: Your project seems to intrigue many because it creates an imaginary space in which people can envision an immigrant-led insurgent movement tha goes far beyond the reform rhetoric in many countries. Why do you think it’s necessary to push those boundaries?

I think you have a really key point in your question. The Immigrant X characters see no hope of reform. They see that direct action, which is non-violent and disrupts the immigration system, is the only moral and viable choice they have. Through civil disobedience they try to give “illegal immigrants” the chance to have the freedoms that should be normal. I wanted Immigrant X to present an alternative world that could be debated and maybe made a possibility one day.

The debate on immigration I personally feel has gone backwards. What was once impossible to say is now possible in public. This change has been swift in the last 15 years. Racially charged and intolerant rhetoric has always been a part of public discourse but popular far right political parties are now the mainstream in most European countries and so this intolerant discourse is now commonly in the mainstream media. I think there are some organisations that want to push these boundaries but they are under resourced and small. That is why Immigrant X is described as faction. Groups are doing similar things to Immigrant X, actively resisting (but for a limited time usually). We describe what could be real but would be very difficult to tell if it weren’t fiction. That is what I hope that Immigrant X can open up a bit of a different discussion.

MC: Your site could be seen as misleading or trivializing the issue by some activists who can’t or won’t engage in the kinds of radical actions you describe in your stories. What do you say to people who might not see the point of using fictional narratives to think about other ways of resisting the system?

Yes, this is the big danger for us that we are seen as hoax or trivialising the efforts of activists who are taking substantial risks. Endangering their own security and often victimized by law enforcement or harassed and are marginalised in their communities. The other danger is that we are seen to be promoting a new dangerous form of activism. The story, as it moves along, will show the implications of this form of activism.

To me the point of using a fictional narrative is to explore the issues related to direct action that is character based. The costs and benefits are explored through the characters with an audience who can think along with the writers. That it is an organic process is the main justification I see.

MC: You state your location only as a “Western democracy.” Why is it important that your narrative is not tied to a specific place or government?

The location of a “Western democracy” was used so that it would be more difficult to target our group by the police or intelligence services. That we are clearly describing actions in theoretical locations is safer. The issues surrounding immigration and the form of resistance we describe are transnational. It could be Australia, Canada, US, France, Sweden, etc. Since the 1990s, western governments have learnt from each other and have put in place increasingly stricter measures to control migration across borders. At the same time it has become increasing more dangerous and the creation of extra-territorial borders creates another platform for abuse and extortion.

(Josh MacPhee, MigrationNow.com)

The Netherlands is considering at present the use of more administrative deportations without due process (or for all intents and purposes the chance of due process). Detention centres are being built with private contractors. So the immigration industrial complex has a global reach. This does impact policy. I narrative by governments is being written on immigration where human rights seem of little concern as well. There are also counter forces at work in all countries with different arms of government treating immigrants differently (some humanely, some not). Counter forces where local civic entities have different policies from one town/city to another area are a common theme.

The US is big and maybe has similarities to Europe as a whole. “Illegal immigration” supply routes are primarily through North Africa through southern Europe. Policies in Italy are have become harsher and administrative deportations have become the norm (as on your southern border). At the same time as in Italy, French immigrant groups have become more vocal and have taken stands in the last few years against oppressive labor conditions (similar to US and have copied the “day without immigrants” strikes). Many issues are local but many are certainly transnational. Border enforcement agencies also have similar propaganda machines it seems. Stories about criminal aliens safely sent home and whatnot.

So I thought that being an organization without location would give us more room to move. It also would be possible to land somewhere if it were really necessary for the story.

Originally published in Jacobin Magazine.

Achebe was also a fearless crosser of borders, with a dynamic grasp of the power of migration–of people as well as words. Things Fall Apart was translated into dozens of languages and broke through countless barriers in the literary world. The author himself spent much of his life in England and the United States, drawing richly from the social interfaces he encountered as an African writer and teacher in a cultural realm that would forever brand him as other.

Achebe’s landmark 1977 essay on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is best known for its trenchant criticism of a work many see as a “classic” of colonial-era literature. But toward the end of the piece, in which he assails Conrad as a virulent racist and “purveyor of comforting myths,” he illuminates contrasting aspects of the migratory experience. In a discussion of language and appropriation, he implies a stark contrast between two forms of border crossing. First there is the colonial invasion depicted in Conrad’s novel:

Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?

Achebe ends with a somewhat jarring reference to a recent news report that reflects the same colonial mentality, but in a context closer to our physical and mental habitats:

The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:

“In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language.”

I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically erroneous in the context is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad’s withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialects!

In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt. Surely the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our writer means something else — something appropriate to the sounds Indians and Africans make!

Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad.

Conrad sought to rob a people of their voice; Achebe crafted stories that cultivated powerful new languages. At the end of a literary conversation that spanned over eight decades, he left behind a more globalized world, swirling with a flow of people and ideas, collectively extending the narrative threads that he spun from his people’s own words.

(Patrick Dell)

Dear reader, are you an original person or an unreal one? Such a question may sound nonsensical, but it is exactly the question that American culture asks the immigrant. The immigrant is a fake citizen, not a “real” American like the Tea Partiers, but a bad actor with can’t quite work the accent, an undercover jihadi terrorist whose birth certificate is a forgery. And the immigrant is also utterly real, the heir to an honorable “authentic” tradition that shames the rest of us fraudulent Americans, we boring white capitalists who are materially wealthy but spiritually possess only tolerance and unbelief. It is the immigrant who still glows numinous with origin, who is still the progenitor of the ways of the “old country,” typically imagined through the lens of early Twentieth Century European immigration. We are more familiar with this real/fake divide in another less obviously political realm: that of Western tradition of art and literature. You might define this tradition as essentially an OCD freakout about whether art is real or fake. Think of mimesis in literature, truth in Platonic philosophy, and photographic realism in painting. Johannes Göransson’s poem, Haute Surveillance, combines all these meanings of pure, fake, authentic, corrupt, synthetic. The poem is an evil Leaves of Grass—not a welcoming cosmic paean to all American citizens, but a nihilistic porno where the pure and the fake copulate with a sordid glory. By real, Göransson means: children burning in bombed buildings, the bodies of foreigners, sperm and blood, traumatized soldiers strangling their wives. By fake, he means: film sets, stunt doubles, poetry. You can see this combo in how he depicts America: America is not an emancipatory pluralistic haven, but an atavistic theater of war, brutally real and, as Baudrillard has written, as simulated as a video game.

Against the “taxidermy museum” of high culture, Göransson champions art as pure corruption: 1) the damaged image, unreal artifice, paparazzi virtuality—all of which authentically represents our times; and 2) an immoral purifying violence, the kind of physical sadism that Artaud said would shatter the false reality that, he wrote, “lies like a shroud over our perceptions.” (I plagiarized that last phrase from Wikipedia.) And in this way, the foreigner is a snuff film actor, fake, real and the subject of violence. Haute Surveillance imagines immigrants as self-documenting artists, tourists who “always film themselves with tacky plastic video cameras,” and primitive bodies that “must be entered into the pageant as objects to be classified and quantified.” Consider the Orwellian and Derridian subtext to the words “undocumented immigrant,” a phrase that implies that immigrant rights will win simply if all immigrants are indexed, surveilled and quantified. Göransson is less concerned by whether art or a person is pure than with the nativist, cultivating connotations of a word like “purity.” Both art museums and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement are monsters that classify and purify. For Göransson, himself an immigrant from Sweden, “The foreigner is a perverted virgin”—both impure American and a pure body.

—Ken Chen

Excerpt: Haute Surveillance

When I’m petted by a nurse, when I’m having my blood drawn I inevitably imagine new fashions for immigrants. The blouse will be skin-tight and most postures will look like a scarecrow’s. A bicyclist will find me in the morning. The ads will be exposed to the snow. The tag line will be: “Feel at home, screamer.”

The sales will be overwhelming.

I go to my high-school friend’s funeral and put a postcard in the coffin: “Wish you were here in the belly of the slaughtered whale.”

He goes to my funeral and leaves a note that says: “You weren’t here, you didn’t see anything.”

*

Question: Do foreigners always film themselves with tacky plastic video cameras?

Question: Do foreigners know how fantasize like bling blong blang.

Question: Has a foreigner ever asked you for direction out of the mess room?

Question: Have you ever shot a foreigner?

*

All of the foreigners were shot because of their incestuous relationships on the set. It was a horrible set: the blowtorch looked tacky and the walls were too soft. I don’t ever want to go back there to see what happened in the heat and the way the confetti got so wet and the skin was so yucky. I was so blond, I was your brother.

*

All of The Shining was shot with sets. The snow was salt. The cameramen and the camerawomen wore stilts as they ran through the snow. It was 110 degrees inside the soundstage. The air was saturated with gasoline fumes. The cameramen and camerawomen wore gas-masks as the ran through the rooms chasing the little boy. There were antenae in the walls. The production crew built up an entire hotel inside. Nothing was fake.

*

It was The Real Thing.

*

That is what I have always wanted to create. The first time I got close was with In the Penal Colony because I made it with a stick and a stone and an orchestra of genius children.

But I got even closer with a mute girl and my ki-ko-pe body.

My prettiest trousers were down along my ankles and my scotch-guard crown fell on the ground.

This is how we reproduce a ki-ko-pee body: every mouth must bite, every eye must hurt, every spasm must infect the image.

That’s what they say on TV.

Also, they say I’m a moron for the way I went along with the Starlet’s experiments with ki-ko-pee bodies.

*

The Parable of the Ki-Ko-Pe Body: People have accused me of plagiarizing my films. The parables must have been created by a teenage girl, my accusers say. A girl with a cutting disorder or a virgin with fantasies of the Third World. Or an anorexic.

*

This is the first lesson in haute surveillance: Always write like you’re a teenage virgin.

Always reach for the gun.

*

Gasoline, cannibalism and sweets

Do you own this place? Did you invent it for the Cancer?

*

Today I cleaned my cadaver and painted the nails red.

An homage to patricide.

A stalemate in Grand Hotel Chasm.

Grind Hotel.

*

“The Black Night of Godlessness”

(A smelly smouldering wick is left behind.)

*

There are many reasons why the expresident’s antibody was brought here on a bier. He thinks it is because the children burned inside buildings. Bombed buildings. Art. Sand. Femur-strands. The looted museum of his memory. All of it continues to burn.

He thinks it’s on account of his wife, who wants me to teach Art to the shellshocked soldiers.

*

I think it’s because of the economy.

What are you talking about, says the president.

A bunch of shit, I admit. Whenever someone says it’s the economy, they’re talking about Art.

You were brought here for Art, I tell him.

*

Culture is a taxidermy museum but the horses are beautiful and the letter openers disinfected.

The cum on my face tickles as I type these pages out.

*

The Foreigner Body: Must be entered into the pageant as objects to be classified and quantified. And it must be banged up. Banged. Bang. That was the sound of a door. The foreigner’s body must be a door. It must be shot with the finest surveillance equipment. It must be shot. It must be numb with cum.

*

I love Kleist

*

When the guards asked me all those questions (Is your body a faggot? Do you speak radio? Why are your spasms so infantile? What would happen if we pulled this plastic bag off your head? How is your wham-blam-dunk?) I could barely make out what they said. I denied everything, not because I liked hearing my voice underwater, but I knew that was what the kidnappers wanted me to say. They loved the way I said No. They could listen to me say No all day long and far into the night. This was a test. They knew I was up to the task at hand. They even removed the bag from my head.

*

I don’t want to defend abortions on moral grounds.

I believe in abortions because I believe in Art.

*

When the nurse and I watched the black widow walking in a funeral march, I could hear the nurse breathing.

She looked magical.

This book is for my nurse.

But the eyes are for the widow.

*

The Widow Party: I wrote a play called The Widow Party. It was performed at Links Hall in Chicago last May. It’s about two widows – one black and one white. The black one speaks through a little tape-player she carries on her chest, the white one was played by Patrick D. He gets killed over and over. To get his act right we wrapped his penis in cellophane. The black widow was played in black-face by Jen K., who recently collected the favorite sayings of all the soldiers dead in Iraq. My favorite one is “at the end of the day a wreck is still just a girl.” It came from an army doctor from Memphis, TN. My second favorite was “You love your country like you love your dog. When it’s over you bury it in the backyard and pray that the badgers will keep out.” That one came from a young man from Sunflower, MS. That’s a town in which I drink champagne out of my mother’s hands. My black mother who bleeds. My white mother who treats me with shards and shakes me tonight as I enter into New Jerusalem on a stolen horse.

*

There’s no greater cliché than a soldier masturbating into a glass of champagne. There is no greater cliché than a mother.

*

I have seen the photographs the Starlet took. They have been circulating over the Internet and handed around at protests. There is the footage of the naked man being bit by dogs, the image of the heap of naked man piled into a pyramid, the footage of a man with a hood over his head and electrical wires strapped to his hands, the image of the man with Disney mask on his face and on his genitals, the image of a woman puking into a meat hell. I think I know why but I’m not telling. Atrocity kitsch.

*

All the students claim they have brothers or sisters or uncles who’s been to the war and when they return they try to strangle their spouses at night in their sleep. It appears the war is connected to the bedroom in a cliché way. But those pathetic sprawling bodies in the dark: those are the bodies with which I want to populate this skin flick.

*

There are so many soldiers in the mansion that they have been given a room of their own. It’s a large room but there are so many soldiers that they have to cram them in on small cots. They’re here to be decontaminated, to have the violence from the theater of war rinsied off them like swans. It’s not going so well. It seems every day a soldier kils another soldier with some sharp object. I’ve been instructed to teach them how to write poetry in order to direct their violence to something more constructive. Father Voice-Over doesn’t realize that Art is a Violence. And vice versa. There is already so much Art in these muscular bodies, I cannot prevent them from expressing it.

*

Tonight I want to make a movie about skin.

Decoy skin.

I want to make it for the enemy.

To lure him out.

*

I can’t hear a thing in here.

*

Media makes stunt doubles.

This poem for example is about mine.

He wears a wig to his assassination.

The erotics of writing reminds me of the needle on a record player.

*

Of all the movies I made with the Starlet, my favorite was our mumble-version of Hiroshima Mon Amour. Or the Jacobean piece we filmed in a shooting range. The clothes I wore were positively repulsive by the time she was finished with me. My body was covered with wax. I played the part of the wax figures. She played the part of the slaughter. It was also a mumble movie. It was hard to hear anything in the ricochet.

*

Miss World: This novel is a spell, but I can’t help it if this novel turns into a pile-up of disgusting bodies and glorifications of black-outs.

*

Whenever I come to the soldiers’ barrack, they are engaged in some kind of art production: bodies in fetal lamb poses for example, or snuff videos of daddy, ouch-ouch-it-hurts, corny dances (like the hostage crisis, the twist, the pork out, the pile up, the photographs). They love to wear Mickey Mouse masks when they hurt each other like children. Don’t pork me up, Mickey, I hear one man cry as I slam the door. I can’t help them, I can just hope to contain them. I need to keep them apart from the anti-abortion protestors and the actors. Swine hunt! Swine hunt! I hear from the inside as I swiftly lock the door.

*

The expresident wants every body naked. And he wants no sound. It should be deaf in here, he says, and then he points out that there are stains on my clothes and that the letter opener is making an awful racket in my mouth. I’m a dangerous man when I get around the wrong instruments. Milk and blood, milk and blood, I think to myself. It’s always this way after a riot.

*

Sometimes virginity is a state, like concussion or starvation.

Other times it’s a visual phenomenon.

The world looks clean and violent.

A foreigner is always a perverted virgin.

Throw the foreigner’s body in the backseat.

Have you ever worked at a meat plant?

Watch me read the messy transcriptions.

Johannes Göransson is the author of Haute Surveillance (2013) and Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as three books of poetry, Dear Ra (A Story In Flinches), Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse), and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and blogs at montevidayo.com.

Arturo E. Romo-Santillano

1.

It all starts on Bunker Hill. Some people say we emerged from the 2nd Street tunnel to the stairs, ascending Angel’s Flight to the top of the hill, a bunch of us with Elote Girl with corn silk in her long dusty hair and her sack of corn that she sells steaming with mayonnaise on the street corner. That’s not really true of course, not in the literal sense (what is?), that’s pure reductionism but that’s what I am going with because, because— Anyway, yeah. We need a simple gesture at the beginning—especially for things that seem to have no real beginning or end.

Because it’s not easy to think of the teriyaki-flavored Buddhist chain of cause-and-effect events (lingering aftertaste of ginger) that caused me to be dangling from my line, roped securely to my harness outside the 45th floor of the United California Bank building, watching the war, the regular ordinary war they had going on at that time between the zeppelins and the dirigibles, the skyship versus airship war for the skies of Los Angeles, when the Kraken appeared out of the clouds and forever changed the world as we knew it.

I might be the first person in modern times to see the Kraken.

Fulminating out of the sudden swirling vortex of a huge black thunderhead, lashing out at the nearby bank and oil company skyscrapers with hellish flashes of lightning, lightning bolts popping and exploding like the thrashing arms of a wild monster, purplish and black—so overbearing at first that I thought I might be seeing spots and about to faint, perhaps I was suffering from a stroke caused by years of stress and thinking wrong thoughts texted into my head from the invidious culture of advertising—on the other hand, it simultaneously occurred to me that perhaps two of the dirigibles and zeppelins firing on each other had collided, exploded directly overhead and this enveloping darkness signaled that they were about to crash down upon my neck. So I hid my face against the black glass and sharp edge, raising my arm over my skull to ward off the massive debris that I felt would most likely follow the great shadow.

Winds wildly whipping my (fake) company jumpsuit such that my collar slashed at my neck and my own hair stung my cheeks as it flicked about insanely didn’t bother me in the least, even when the gale-force winds caused my line and anchor rig to sway back and forth freakily across the black glass-divoted surface of the building, and all it took was a couple of snags or scrapes against the window edges to send me spinning dangerously, so that my line was going to wrap and perhaps shear and I was going to smash hard into the side of the building which whirlpooled around (and around) like I had become the hopeless center of a me-centered lunatic universe spiraling totally out of control.

I had not had time to spike a piton in a window-cleaner’s track as a stabilizer. I knew what was about to happen and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had the piton filched from a cargo pocket and gripped tightly in my fist when it did happen.

The slack in the line combined with a drop in the wind slammed me face first into the reflective obsidian black glass of the building (I glimpsed my reflection careening forward) so hard that I blacked out.

I came out of it feeling like I was coming up for air. I felt myself floating toward a fluid surface and gulped air, trying to breathe and clear my vision.

But I wasn’t swimming, I was spinning 51 floors above Hope Street, downtown L.A. gone light and blurry below. The piton I’d been gripping was gone; I was feeling at my smashed face with my numb fingers. They came away bloody; my nose seemed to be broken, along with one or more front teeth. I tasted blood.

But I could see, more or less, and the impact with the building had slowed somewhat the spinning, so I found another piton and executed an E, lifting my right leg and my right arm parallel to flail the building, stiffly and weakly, attempting to halt the spin. I wasn’t sure, but a couple of burning airships had landed atop the tower above me and burning pieces and raw ejecta might fall on me at any moment. But I didn’t have time to consider it; I had to knock a piton into a window-cleaner’s track or spacer column. So first I clawed my grappling hook onto the next spacer that came around—it took several tries and I was worried my spin would accelerate, but I got the hook on a crease without losing it or my grip, and knocked a piton in. I clipped my harness to the piton and looked up.

We were all looking up.

When I looked up, the window was flying to pieces so I didn’t even have time to turn away before I was hit. Three masked gunmen who emerged from a black Honda firing dozens of shots in murderous unhurry blasting the window apart and missing all the patrons but striking me in the head. As I went down beside the counter, I didn’t even have time to register what I felt. I’d come from China only the year before, working to bring over my daughter. I rode my bicycle to work every day.

When I looked up, turning my face from my mother’s shoulder as we walked on Eastern Avenue back to the apartment with my sister and my aunt (Eastern curves north at Medford by the Big Boy #2 Auto Service), this giant bucket thing like a big steel arm swung loose on this huge truck turning the corner, swung over crushing us against the cinderblock wall, killing us instantly except for my little sister who suffered severe head injuries and me, a toddler not even old enough to talk or say the word “crane”.

When I looked up I couldn’t see a thing, not a light of any kind. Who knows, but maybe I wasn’t even looking “up.” I’d gone down in the black hole of the tank to save my co-workers, who’d failed to come out or answer my shouts. I thought I might be able save them, but I couldn’t locate them—instead, I blacked out. I must’ve taken a little breath or somehow tried to breathe.

When I looked up, I was flying through the air into the street; the driver had run the red light. It had been a nice warm evening, mom pushing me in my stroller. It was at the downtown L. A. Art Walk.

When I looked up inside the Red Line tunnel, we saw or really just heard the 4 x 4 concrete blocks stabilizing the shaft in the Santa Monica Mountains above us shift and buckle. They basically exploded. I jumped aside a yard or so but they landed on me anyway.

When I looked up there was a big school bus and it didn’t stop. I was pushing my bike like my parents said to in the crosswalks, but the driver didn’t see me somehow, even in broad daylight.

By the time we arrived at work, we’d lost so many of our people it was hard to even call them a “team.” When I had time to glance sideways, I saw traffic whiz by on the San Bernardino Freeway through the photochemical afternoon haze of delimited expectations. I saw fuzzy remnants of black plastic tarps or whitish plastic bags partially buried in the sand, feathery soft and wind-tattered like petrolate feathers, wispy on windswept soil under a broken fence line. One time I saw a wheel ejected explosively from an unseen collision in the opposite lanes come bounding and bouncing over the center median like an unwanted missile as if charged with all of civilization’s automotive kinetic energy and bounce. I saw skinny topless girls lolling on the faraway faded beaches of an obsolescent titty calendar on the wall in the oily dank quiet garage bay with hydraulic lifts, waiting for a mechanic beside the coke machine. I saw neighborhood teenagers filling out their nightly schedules trying out skateboard tricks in parking lots under the streetlights out of the sight of cops. That was when I had time to glance sideways. I glimpsed the high-tension lines marching toward the horizon of the Chocolate Mountains and black stains of cooking grease trailing from the back door of a restaurant to the grease pit next to the dumpsters.

I always carried my tools close to my person: Swiss Army knife, bottle of aspirin, fake ID with social security card, pictures of actual children, scraps of paper with contact information for children and wife, work gloves, anti-entropy ideology (which starts by replacing the word “cool” with the word “folded” or “unfolding”), climbing kit (pitons, harness, belaying devices and descenders, carabiners, ropes, hooks, clips, chalk, gloves). First aid tape and whatever little medical first aid I could get. In a bag with extra little baggies. You get killed so many times for carrying too much gear or too little, it helps you get your gear kit in order, over the long haul.

In his ground-breaking analysis of Pacific Rim urban planning for the new millennium, Laundromats, Liquor Stores and Storefront Psychics: Los Angeles Rules the World, UCLA social scientist George Carlin writes, “I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, ‘There is no “I” in team.’ What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality and integrity.’ Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, “We’re the So-and-Sos,” take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it’s unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don’t participate; it will be your death. And if they tell you you’re not a team player, congratulate them on being observant.” Such an expert analysis of modern industrial trends. Which is why Carlin is considered an expert on such subjects by crowds of people in auditoriums and lecture halls on universities and TV shows, by people who sit back and clap.

But we don’t go for that.

As I said before, we emerged as a people from the earth, from the depths underneath our feet or conduits underneath the four to ten sub-basements with their nylon earthquake shock-absorber pylons, the motion isolator supports, flexible electrical conduits, utility service tunnels, etc. We enter the buildings from below and begin to climb. Many times our teams and crews are eliminated by security, or predatory gangs, or the mishaps and accidents that constantly occur.

We never give up. That’s not our official motto or anything, that’s just the way it is. That’s why they kill us.

When the experts are saying their thanks on stage, thanking their moms and God, nodding at standing ovations and sitting on panels with the checks in the mail, we’re in the shadows—standing in the aisles with a flashlight or in the back door staring out over the parking lots. We’re cleaning up after the shows are over, locking the doors and holding the gate till everyone else has gotten into their cars and driven away. We’re walking the gangways high over the convention floor pulling cables and junction boxes, coiling the cables and turning off spot lamps. We’re driving around the parking areas cleaning up trash or evicting a drunken couple fucking in a vehicle against the back fence and sending neighborhood skaters on their way. We’re cleaning the hall and emptying trashcans, sweeping and vacuuming carpets in aisles, hallways and lounges, floor to floor. We took tickets and set up for the Republicans and evangelicals, Democrats and Teamsters, SCIU, AWP panels and keynote speeches, celebrity benefits, anime conferences, e-hardware and Internet conventions, and porn industry galas.

Which history of famous porn stars mentions us by name? Which economic study of the industries of desire and disgust records our extensive labor inputs?

You’ve seen us wave goodbye, pointing at the exit with flashlights, nodding as you go, standing with our hands folded waiting for the show to be over, pushing the cleaning cart, sweeping corners and swabbing toilets. You didn’t notice us at the time; maybe you nodded as we came out of the elevator. Our uniform blended in. We got on with the work.

We emerged from the earth to ascend, bound together, networking our teams via safe houses and contacts. We were those “so-and-sos, trade unionized”—together, we proceeded. Via portals and tunnels, harnessed and geared as we moved into the day. Roped, strapped in, tool belt, carabiners clicking. Strapped into blowers, blowing leaves, strapped into trucks, driving endless routes, jammed in traffic, staggering out of back doors at all hours carrying slopping steel pans and tubs to the grease pit—turning back again—tied to soiled aprons—frying, grilling, chopping, blasting pots, pans and trays with spray in clouds of steam boiling out of the dishwasher when we opened it and stacked it higher. Hey, didn’t I see you at the Grand Canyon or Yosemite National Park, getting your lunch? Didn’t you leave your magazine in the motel room—so I glanced through it before I tossed it? Stacking cars on the parking structure, stacking pallets and dead cars in wrecking yards, stocking shelves in the big-box stores all night. Flattening cardboard boxes and aluminum cans and filling shopping carts to push down the avenues. Delivering parts from San Pedro docks to warehouses throughout L.A. and the Valley, crawling under fleet vehicles changing brake pads, pulling transmissions, welding mufflers and radiators, climbing through ceilings two stories from the ground to pull wire through conduits, minds and fingertips numb, breathing dust and plastic resin, our faces blackened and skin exposed to soot and tuolene solvents, roof tar and herbicides, staple gun in one hand, sweat-stained life lines on the other.

Staggering, long resume of job histories like the South Kaibab trail zigzagging up the Grand Canyon.

You saw the grave markers. Those pegs scattered across broken ground, little ribbons of fluorescent orange tape flying. Bladed ground prepared for new construction. Someone gone for every tied-off piece of orange tape flicking in the breeze across the clay ground of an open field.

Maybe you saw the markers alongside the highway, white crosses and plastic flowers to commemorate lives lost on the way, or the pile of votive candles, real and fabric flowers, mylar balloons (“We’ll miss you!”—“Rest in Peace”—“Love”—“Smile Now, Cry Later”—), hand-written cards and sometimes stuffed toys, against a nearby fence or the streetlamp on the corner where it happened.

On one job, while climbing a 240-foot steel cell-tower by Altadena, I reached 200 feet and spotted an expensive alloy clip still attached to a guy line, and knew something had happened to the last steeplejack, because for what we make to risk our lives at these heights, you don’t leave that gear behind. (I left it clipped in place as a commemoration of whoever it was, a reminder to the next guy.) It was like working your way alone (as member of a team or crew or collective, we still have to play our individual role on jobs requiring hazardous solos) in some intricate far corner of some sub-basement level, I don’t even remember which level of course, and I came across another crew’s duffle bag emptied and discarded in the tunnel behind the pipes—(I’d only found it accidently; leaning against the pipes to wipe my face in the stultifying heat, I touched a strap)—and pulled out the bag. You get those shocking messages once in a while: “Somebody like you came this way. Somebody like you was doing exactly what you are doing. Likely they were killed doing this, exactly what you are doing. Watch yourself.” What happened? Who took out the other guy? Who stole his gear and discarded the bag? That’s exactly the kind of intelligence you never get from the people contracting the job. Their line always is, “Don’t worry. We’re just scouting new talent. The last crew had no problems at all.” At most they might say something like, “The last group was involved with drugs. They got sloppy, made mistakes. We let them go. You guys are clean, eh?” You never get the real story.

One or two teenagers in their cowls clutching their sacks of paint might pass furtively along a crawlspace or tunnel—taggers. You might be outside on the stairs or crossing a bridge—they’ll give you the owl-faces with their lizard eyes, then go back to spray-painting.

Everybody who’s not some total nihilist is a sell-out; you got half a life, you’re a sell-out too. They’re more anarchist than the anarchists. That glowering owl-look from huffing too much fumes says it all; they’re going armed now, too.

Sometimes there are unmistakable signs that individuals are living inside the walls, merging with the infrastructure. Old retirees or women living within utility closets or under bridges or under the stairs. That’s how the owners want us. Coming from a long line of subway tunnel families and high steel ironworkers, my favorite writer, Rick Harsh, author of the trade classics, Belaying and Rappelling with Guts, and Sensual Buildering and Erotic Stegophily: I Like it On Top, writes, “The fucking fascist-capitalist assholes both as a class and as individuals goddamn want us motherfucking dead or fucked up and frozen in catatonic postures of shit-eating horror, blind-sided by their horrible motherfucking goddamn fuck-off piss-ass delusions of grandeur, those motherfucking assholes—that’s why we have to camouflage in the infrastructure.” Possibly the most famous quote about why we must unobstrusively excel at the highest techniques of parkour and structuring, else we are lost. No wonder his books are passed hand to hand and studied by cold ugly fading LED lamplight deep underground in dank filthy utility tunnels with the intermittent rumbling of heavy traffic or subway trains or mineshaft cave-ins.

Word came down also that you didn’t want to get a reputation for being too good at your job, either, as employers had paid local gangs to take out crews or units that got too proficient or too prominent and asked for higher rates, driving up demand. One crew, among the best in their line, was driven to a service road in the Verdugo Hills and shot in the head at close range. One team came under fire at a gas station: four were killed, including a fourteen year old who was famously expected to become “the next Rick Harsh.” A family was found slaughtered at home, bludgeoned, stabbed and shot—the rest of the team was never found. Of course, the media suggest that these crimes are endemic to our community: desperate elimination of the competition, due to overwork or drugs or epidemic violence or “secret histories” or “unknown genetics.” It was counterintuitive, but tunnel rats respected for acuity suggested that powerful contractors with connections to the Philipines and Central America, to Citibank and Bank of America, respectively, wanted a more disorganized labor pool. That that was more to their liking, historically; they had more experience with the brutalization of supply. Legislators and attorneys general suggested that crews would be subject to indefinite confinement in secret prisons and subject to torture if they were stopped in public without permits and licensing, in order to protect the public order. Some suggested it would even “protect” the workers in the aggregate by “sacrificing” a portion of individuals. Anguished death agonies unheard of in the secret prisons should be considered, podcasts argued, as a small price to pay for lower taxes. Pundits or academics would say that it was just competition between aboveground and underground, between base and superstructure (“inside” and “outside”) workers that had taken a violent form, maybe just random or isolated cases of crews or teams fighting amongst themselves because they were infected by Southland gang cultures and the dirty criminality of Lakers fans, though I personally never saw anything like that—it made no sense. It was true that “things happened,” that is, whole groups disappeared, leaders were assassinated—throughout the years with the accumulation of thousands of such deaths and disappearances—and no official inquiry or media attention or importance placed on any of these lives gone, so that they were erased—history was erased, as if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of vanished lives had in fact never existed. What was actual, instead—in fact, in actual hard fact—were the corporate logos and company names we affixed, rappelling from the roofs of high rises and skyscrapers to affix them like subconscious beacons on the dusky city evening skyline.

Electronic billboards and vinyl murals broadcast perfectly anesthetic deformations of desire. Ceaseless supply moving to demand, our teams and crews entered buildings from underground, repurposing light and motion-detectors, rerouting alarms, switching video-surveillance closed-system monitors over to the Saturated Fat Network or Pornographic Home Industry, as we installed marijuana gardens or organic plots behind the fence line. I didn’t have anything to do with it myself, but drug gangs paid some workers to tend marijuana plots and heirloom tomatoes to supply to locals. I appreciated picking my own fresh chiles, potatoes, summer squash, Anasazi beans, kale and chard. With hydroponic gardens installed in sub-basement levels and dry-irrigation crops sown on freeway medians and embankments behind rows of oleander, we occupy interstitial margins, overlooked and forgotten spaces. Politicians whip citizens into a self-righteous frenzy about imaginary sins and corruption, whilst we raised the city about them—we push wheelbarrows, carry hod, shoulder drywall and solder plumbing. We electrocute ourselves and fall sixty feet down dark shafts. We fix cars, tend babies, begonias, lawns or laundry, empty bedpans and piss bottles, shift old people in bed, strip the beds and change bedding, bathe the enfeebled, disabled and demented. From either side of the window, behind glass, everything on the other side appears normal, routine, ordinary.

Buildings and boulevards, avenues and malls, freeway exchanges, parking lots and vehicles, the whole built cityscape was real, but we who lived inside walls—we had no visible life. The visible life was of things.

Perhaps, momentarily, what I would see in a single dangling wire (a single, loose, disconnected TV cable line) from a telephone or steel power pole was something different that others could not see. Anyway, what we saw everywhere could always—and in every case—be denied.

In the baleful gaze of the woman peering from under the covers in a crawlspace beneath the stairs, as three of us ascended, I saw the history of a whole people.

If our peoples were deemed to not have existed (or if allowed some sort of existence but never really counted), if the service workers that tended the grounds, swept the walks, cleaned the offices, corridors and hillsides, did misdemeanor community service picking up trash on the freeway medians and embankments wearing orange reflective vests, framed tract houses on building pads bladed across landscapes, and kept green the greenways of executive golf courses and resorts, transforming swaths of the terrain—in fact, we who also overnight, in the dark, reconstituted the world of the financial towers downtown while the rest of the world slept, so they might awaken in the morning and find “their” world as they presumed it (a world possessed by all those possessed by it). The artifice of this material world sustained that false, comforting illusion people cherish at any given moment: that all was as it had ever been—served up with bread and pastries baked for the coffee stand or cart or shop from two to four a.m. and delivered by the trucks negotiating the predawn streets in submarine hues of greenish shadow and gleam, the roasted coffee beans providing fresh roast unseen to those same locations, and fleets of shining taco trucks and lunch wagons sprayed down, washed, restocked and steaming by the hundreds in dark yards before they rolled along the avenues under the streetlights. It was as if the civilization were sleeping, dreaming of a distant Hollywood life of a ghostly Shangri-La where sweaty faces and grimy necks, toil-weary backs and arms, calloused hands and dirty torn fingernails were themselves the strange dream.

In the morning, people rushing to work might have seen the others at the end of their shifts, might have been awakened by a disposal truck banging down dumpsters or caught some vague fleeting bit of conversation between garbage-men before turning back to sleep, or while trying to beat rush hour might have paused at a stoplight behind a work truck laden with welding equipment and chained oxy-acetylene tanks emblazoned with yellow warning stickers looped with rubber hose, and did not bother, never thought, never imagined or ‘dreamed’ of marginal lives channeling the velocity of their own into the mainstream of broad daylight except to feel some impatience perhaps at having to pause for a truck at the light. In the spotlit gaze of unblinking storefront security cameras and mannequins, we became as shadows.

A gas company work truck or some old flatbed Ford 550 or a 1960 Ford pickup fitted with plywood siding to extend the bed four or six feet in the air, so overloaded so often with pallets or vegetation or metal junk that the frame of the vehicle is irrevocably bent and the driver must proceed slower than traffic, or any of various step vans, or the groundskeeper’s pickup truck loaded with mowers, edgers, blowers, tools, bags, and stuff. Like you, some hold in hand the first cup of coffee of the day. Those are the ones who did not work all night.

Maybe you saw cops pull people out of a vehicle. A couple of cop cruisers with their light bars flashing at daybreak, starting early. No wonder traffic was slowing. Men kneeling on the sidewalk, hands behind their heads. Maybe you’d pay special attention if one was a woman. Did they pass that confinement law, or whatever the new law was they were talking about? You couldn’t recall.

Let’s get back to the original line of questioning we were going over, eh? What about the war between the zeppelins and the dirigibles in the skies over Los Angeles?

I heard something about it, I don’t remember exactly what. I figured it didn’t have anything to do with me, frankly. I have enough trouble trying not to get killed by gangs or random, crazed, heavily armed individuals, or by accidents on the job.

Really? You don’t know anything about the Volunteers of the Zeppelin Attack Dirigibles, and their defense of hillside communities and crowds of protestors?

I probably saw something about it on the news. Yeah. Pretty sure.

You’re sort of disappointing as a narrator.

Hey, they subcontracted me on this job. That’s the way it works. They contract out, no questions asked. Our crew had to retrofit the foundation at the basement levels—jacking up one side of the building at a time, imagine—to meet new codes.

But still, the War of Los Angeles is pretty important. It’s a major social issue, and you don’t seem to know much about it.

If you let me check with my co-workers, my backup probably can—

No. No, no time for that here. Besides, your compas are even more injured than you are. I don’t know if they regained consciousness. They’re being tended to.

Sorry, I never was asked about social issues before.

Don’t you care about your community? I mean, you live in this city, too.

I tend to keep my head down—or up, in this case—

It’s in all the papers.

Yes. Mainly my reading is confined to work-related questions. Did I tell you about my favorite quotes by my favorite author, Rick Harsh, author of Belaying and Rappelling—

Yes, you already mentioned that.

Did I tell you about his motivational instruction, “The fucking fascist-capitalist assholes both as a class and as individuals goddamn want us motherfucking dead or fucked up and frozen in catatonic postures of shit-eating horror—”

Yes, yes.

I said that?

You did.

Often, we find such concepts useful, when you are thinking about how to extract your own crushed or broken fingers from the belaying device at fifty or more storeys—

No doubt. We are rather more interested in the first documented sighting of the Kraken.

I never suspected for a second the existence of such things. Never in this world! Imagine?

This may be the first documented sighting of one, yes. That’s why we’re trying to document it here. We’d like to complete your testimony, for the record.

So really, you don’t want to hear about my job situation, is that what you’re saying?

Basically. Yes.

Oh.

As you were saying, you were roped outside the 51st floor of the United California Bank Building dangling above Hope Street and 6th, sent crashing into the side of the building by gale-force winds out of black thunderheads above you?

That’s right. I thought I was dead right there. Before we go on, can I get some medical attention for my face and my hand? I’d like to get my face sewn up and my fingers splinted.

We’ll get you some primary care as soon as we finish this interview.

It’s getting hard to see. I’m worried about losing sight in my left eye. I feel as if I might black out.

Yes, let’s proceed with answering the questions, shall we? That way, we can get finished as soon as possible and we’ll get you fixed right up. Your co-worker is a lot worse off—in critical condition—and we’d like to get him airlifted out of here as well. We just want to document the important details while we’re waiting.

Can I have a drink of water?

Of course. I have some M&Ms, would you like some?

I don’t think I could hold them; these fingers are really—

Of course. You must be in a great deal of pain.

About a five on a scale of one to ten.

Let’s get on with it, then we can get you to the doctor. You said, you knocked a piton in and clipped on your line. “I clipped my harness to the piton and looked up.”

I clipped my harness to the piton and looked up.

2.

It did start on Bunker Hill (or underneath it).

As you know, the sky has become a striated vortex of polyethylene or polypropylene snow or dust (resin pellets), capable of sudden dynamic weather formations that defy climatology. Who can account for strange sudden orange clouds blowing in after the Santa Anas, raining down not the harsh stinging desert sands and alkali chalk lifted off the scoured high deserts (off vast desertified landscapes such as the now dry alkali flats of the former Salton Sea or Owens Lake), but instead drawing curried and burnt sienna curtains over the atmosphere, winds either soft or harsh sifting almost invisible semitransparent flakes and sharp, hard-edged glinting reflective flecks sweeping across the terrain, threatening urban citizens (particularly young children, or the elderly and infirm) with asphyxiation, or severe eye and lung damage resulting from breathing yellow particulate, sparkling glittery winds? What do people hiding from inclement weather in shopping malls, abandoned public buildings like libraries or schools or Starbucks say about the Orange Gyres? They speculate that some secret US government agency like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conspired with radical environmentalists to foment orange gyres over the urban centers of the planet in order to hide the wholesale theft of internal combustion automobiles and major appliances like refrigerators, microwaves and popular consumer goods from former “First World” nations. China (and sometimes Brazil) always figures in the theories. Water heaters, 1970s Oldsmobile Cutlasses, store manikins, screen doors, and refrigerators occasionally falling to earth out of massive violent orange thunderheads blotting out the sun only adds to the conspiracy bullshit.

As you know, I said fuck you (in my mind) to your generous offer to unlock the glass case in the lobby, remove the black cardboard directory of suites and offices, expose the panel and unlock that one too, step through into the service corridor (“watch your head, some of these pipes are hot—as you know”), skedaddle semi-sideways the length of the southern side of part of the elevator core, ascend a series of ladders and gangways to the sixth floor (where you could feel the heat of the eastern face of the building through the wall) to a nearly perfect air-conditioned cubicle ensconced inside that “inframundo” with CCTV feeds to a central flatscreen panel, digital feed from security sensors indexing energy use, infrared cameras, movement sensors, and security cameras, to a board giving the operator in his or her comfy pilot’s chair total access to all spaces, interior and exterior of the structure.

And you with your “fuck you.” Don’t you feel childish?

Sorry.

Our generous offer to unlock the glass case in the lobby, remove the black cardboard directory of suites and offices, expose the panel and unlock that one too, step through into the service corridor (“watch your head, some of these pipes are hot—as you know”), skedaddle semi-sideways the length of the southern side of the elevator core, ascend a series of ladders and gangways to the sixth floor (where you can feel the heat of the eastern face of the building through the wall) to a nearly perfect air-conditioned coffin ensconced inside that “inframundo” with CCTV feeds to the flatscreen panel, digital access to security sensors indexing energy use, infrared feeds, movement sensors and security cameras, to a mixing board giving the operator in your own comfy pilot’s chair total access to all spaces, psychological and horticultural, interior and exterior of the structure. It could have been the perfect job for you. No more climbing up the outsides of the tallest structures in the city during shit storms and wars.

It’s not really my thing.

Compunctions! What does this squeamishness come from? Why? You don’t want to inform on a prostitute ducking into a broom closet to change her rag and shower in a mop bucket, flush ragazzi out of the Hope Street garage entrance planters to protect the shrubbery, not even inform us that one of our former security supervisors has returned to his old habits and unrolled his bedding beneath the generator housing in sub-basement A, when it’s clearly unhealthy to do so (given the magnetic fields) and unsanitary for all involved? That we must comply with all state, federal and municipal codes for the welfare of all concerned? You know this is a cushy position that must pay several times your current income. Even if the office is difficult to access.

Nah.

Oh, not your thing. Steady work, paid vacations, health benefits, full package, inside job.

Thanks.

Inside job! Come on!

Thanks.

“Fuck you,” eh?

Ah well.

All right, all right. Back to our original agreement. Install the jacks, lift the building ever so gently so that no one notices anything, retrofit and align the isolator columns, service the shock-absorbers, upgrade the flexible conduits and give us the premium-quality maintenance of the elevator core your people are known for. Sixty-two stories’ worth!

Certainly. (It was the warm handshake, the brotherly squeeze of the shoulder followed by the wink, that stayed with me. The wink especially. A wink, really? A wink.)

Come on. What’s a wink?

That’s what we wondered. Then the accidents started happening.

Accidents? Really? Your team had quite the safety record previously. I shall have to note these “accidents” for our insurance representative. They’ll be contacting you. What happened?

After we’d finished up in the sub-basements, we were cleaning up to leave when Sergio went upstairs and found the exit locked. It wouldn’t be the first time that management forgot about us and forgot to allow us access to leave.

No doubt, some oversight by the plant supervisor. I’ll check on that.

So we packed up and tried the alternate routes. We had to drag our men out by their feet from the air ducts, because the air ducts were full of carbon monoxide. The men nearly died ascending those routes.

That’s terrible! You’re suggesting engine exhaust fumes from the street or some other source is finding its way into our HVAC air ducts? Not good! Something else to check on. Go on. You had other incidents.

Yeah. We made our way to the central elevator core—

How? How did you get to the elevator core?

We made our way to the central—

Yes, but how? How did your people—

…

You’d rather not say? Really? No problem. It’s not really important. A little unusual perhaps, but go on—as you were saying—the central elevator core.

We planned to steeplejack the corporate logo as per the contract and get signed offon the specs. To do so, we had to ascend to the roof. All elevators began descending as soon as we emerged into the shafts. It was as if whoever was monitoring building security was trying to physically eliminate us. The elevators began rapidly to descend, cutting us off and threatening to crush us.

I wonder if that could be related to a computer error we noticed that morning. Perhaps your coworkers tripped a safety device when they entered the shafts.

We’ve never heard of “safety devices” that send elevators down on workers in the shafts.

All right. I’ll check with the plant supervisor and security. What else?

We gained the NW stairwell of the building and began ascending.

You did, yes. How did—

We gained the NW stairwell and one of my men was hit by a piece of steel rebar. Stabbed through his leg above the knee, just missing an artery. He was bleeding badly when we pulled it out of his leg.

There’s no record of any work involving rebar on that day anywhere in the building. Perhaps your man somehow injured himself. Did you see this occur personally?

Yes.

Please, go on.

I left Saul behind with him, saying we’d finish the job quickly and be right back for them. After we left them, they did not answer their cell phones. We left them messages, but they didn’t return our calls. We don’t know what happened to them.

Really? We don’t have any records of unauthorized personnel exiting the building from that area. Perhaps they got tired of waiting and left to seek medical assistance. Did you consider checking the hospitals in the area? Perhaps they know something about your friends. Don’t worry. I’ll have someone check. So, yes, go on—

We were attacked on the roof.

Yes?

Three individuals attempted to gain access to the roof while we were preparing to go over the side.

They attacked you?

We assumed they were going to.

What did they do?

They advanced toward us. They told us they were building security. They were armed.

Then what happened?

We were complying with their request to see identification and papers when I got a funny feeling.

A funny feeling?

Yes. So, so we disabled them and put them back in the stairwell and locked it.

This was when your coworker was injured?

No, he was fine at that time.

Were the other men injured?

Yes, they were all injured. One was badly injured. He caught a spring loaded grappling hook in the face, and the other, the claw end of a wrecking bar.

Well, I’ll have to check with security to see what they have to report. As far as I know, no reports were made of security personnel in the roof area. But I will double-check on it. Curious, indeed. So you defended yourself with your steeplejack equipment, got into your rigging and went over the side. Then what did you see?

3.

When I looked up, a pickup truck was stopped on the freeway, and someone was lying in the lane ahead of it, on the pavement shiny with blood and broken glass. Then I caught a glimpse in the side mirror of a big rig truck going too fast to stop.

When I looked up, out of the sudden swirling vortex of a huge black thunderhead lashing out at the nearby bank and oil company skyscrapers with hellish flashes of lightning, lightning bolts popping and exploding like the thrashing arms of a wild monster, purplish and black, it simultaneously occurred to me that perhaps two of the dirigibles and zeppelins firing on each other had collided, exploded directly overhead and this enveloping darkness signaled they were about to crash down upon my neck, so I hid my face against the black glass and sharp edge, raising my arm over my skull to ward off the massive debris that I felt most likely would follow the great shadow.

To tell the truth, with all the wars in the news, War on Drugs, War on the Poor, War on Litter, War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Time, I have not had too much time to pay attention to the War of Los Angeles, with the Dirigible Attack Zeppelins hunting and destroying the ELADATL Volunteers in their home-made airships. I’m sure somebody will win or lose or something, making the skies over Los Angeles safe again for human-powered flight. I suppose. I’m a long way from being able to afford a bicycle plane or one-man gyrocopter—I’m a pedestrian. I do know several people who have been injured by falling debris, but look around, there’s so much trash, psychological and ideological, littering the landscape, it’s hard to pinpoint any real source. Meanwhile, I got a job to do.

Impact with the building slowed the spinning somewhat, so I found another piton and executed an E, attempting to halt the spin. A couple of burning airships had landed atop the tower above me and burning pieces and raw ejecta might fall on me at any moment, but I didn’t have time to consider it, I had to knock a piton into a window-cleaner’s track or spacer column. First I clawed my grappling hook onto the next spacer that came around—it took several tries and I was worried my spin would accelerate, but I got the hook on a crease without losing it or my grip, and knocked a piton in. I clipped my harness to the piton and looked up.

The attack zeppelin appeared to descend from the clouds close upon the ELADATL dirigible. They were close enough I could make out the insignia and writing on the sides. The dirigible seemed to be damaged, attempting to maneuver, using the central library tower as cover. Directly out of the roiling column of the black cloud came the Kraken, purplish tentacles furling forward, writhing and flexing as they coiled about the zeppelin. Before the zeppelin exploded, I could see the wires or strings controlling the tentacles, which I noticed were moving stiff and shiny as paper mache. I actually think the Kraken was made out of paper mache. Of course I never said anything about that because how.

Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for more than 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems.

Courtesy Rafael Dumett (rafaeldumett.lamula.pe)

Don’t call Rafael Dumett “Latino.” To the Peruvian-born, San Francisco-based writer and professor, the loaded term, sloppily used in the media to describe a supposedly monolithic ethnic group, is inaccurate at best, damaging at its worst. The word glosses over too many of the intricacies of a people deeply varied in ethnic makeup, language and culture.

Dumett, who is of mixed indigenous and European origin, embodies the heterogeneity of the “Latino” experience. As an educator, he channels his energy into crafting work entrenched in the most complex aspects of Latin American culture and identity, like his film Both (2005), which examines the immigrant experience through the eyes of the film’s transgender protagonist.

Dumett’s most recent book, the Spanish-language El Espía del Inca (La Mula Publicaciones) is an alternative history of colonization in the form of a novel. The story focuses on an all-seeing Inca spy tasked with rescuing Emperor Atahualpa from Cajamarca, a city in the north of present-day Peru, where he is being held captive by the Spanish. Rooted in the true history of the conquest of South America, Inca raises timeless questions about the inescapability of the legacy of colonization.

In this edited online dialogue with Culturestrike, Dumett talks to Nyki Salinas-Duda about Incan history, identity, and why he probably won’t like it if you call him a “Latino” author.

Salinas-Duda: What inspired El Espía del Inca?

Rafael Dumett: There are endless reasons for writing a novel, and the writer in not necessarily conscious of them. In my case, I had just finished writing the script for Both and as we were entering the post-production stage in which I would not need to write anything, I came up with a writing project to keep busy because I cannot live without a project to work on. I was looking for something that would be relatively short and about a subject that I knew well. I decided to write a book modeled after Konstantin Stanislavski’s Building a Character, which is formatted as an actor’s journal during the rehearsals for a play. The director, who is the real protagonist of the book, proposes a series of exercises and activities geared toward stimulating the actors’ bodies and their physical imaginations—thus implicitly creating a roadmap to get closer to the character—which has left its mark on twentieth century acting.

Well, I thought I’d write something like that but with an imaginary Peruvian director who would be a combination of theater directors I admired, with whom I had worked and/or whose work I had seen and which would indirectly speak about the theater community in Peru and Peruvian actors whom I know relatively well. The problem was finding the play they would be rehearsing. I’m not sure why I got it in my head that it needed to be a historical piece about Peru, but since there wasn’t one that I found compelling, I decided to write it and add it as an annex to the novel. I remembered that one of my teachers in school had mentioned it would be interesting for someone to write about Felipillo, one of the indigenous boys who acted as an interpreter between the Spanish and the Inca.

And so, I used this character as a starting point in my research. I started reading about him and became fascinated. And through him, I got to know other very interesting characters and their universe got hold of me. I abandoned the idea of the novel and began to think about writing a 5-part series of plays that would share the same characters, with one hundred characters on scene. But it became clear to me that it would be extremely hard to produce such a play—for practical reasons—so I decided to [go back to writing] a novel, which took me about eleven years to complete.

What do you hope to achieve with El Espía del Inca? How does it challenge the discovery narrative and why do you feel it’s necessary to provide an alternative to that history?

Five or six years after I started writing the novel I realized that what I wanted to achieve with it was building a bridge to my father. My father is originally from Ayacucho, an Andean region of Peru, and his mother tongue is Quechua (he learned Spanish later). This area of Peru has a strong culture and history. The first “empire” to emerge in the Andes (the Wari empire) originated right there.

The empire of the Incas began when the Quechuas who lived in the Cuzco region were able to defeat the Chanca ethnic group, who lived in present-day Ayacucho. The independence of all of Latin America was sealed when the pro-Independence troops and the Spanish troops fought each other in Ayacucho. Later, when Peru fought against Chile in the nineteenth century, the only real nucleus of resistance was in Ayacucho. And, more recently, the Shining Path movement—one of the most lethal [guerrilla movements] in the world—started there as well.

My whole life, I had the awkward feeling that I didn’t know my father. That I did not have all the elements to be able to truly understand his behavior. That’s why the novel’s protagonist (a spy who works for the Incas as a “man who can see everything”) is not an aristocratic descendant of one of the royal lineages of Cuzco, but rather he is the son of a farmer from an area that is subjugated by the empire and who, because of his unique skills, is recruited to serve the Inca as a spy.

My father is not from Lima but from the rural town of Ayacucho, an Andean region that in ancient times was occupied by the Chanca. [They were] a very resilient and combative ethnic group that in the middle of the 15th century, lost the war against the Incas and were dominated by them. Maybe because my father is not from the capital but from the Andes–and specifically from [Ayacucho]–I can easily see things from the perspective of people that don’t belong to the center, but to the periphery, the people who are not conquerors but have a history of domination, of submission.

What in the traditional narrative of the conquest were you hoping to challenge with the novel? What about indigenous or Latin American identity did you hope to impart to readers?

I’m a bit wary of the classic story of good guys and bad guys we tend to re-tell about the conquest in which certain characters always play the role of victims. I’m fed up with focusing our anger on the Spanish who came to conquer us and destroyed our cultures, while failing to take a close look at the members of the various governing elites—Inca, as well as other ethnic groups that were subjugated to the Incas—who with their wars, social factions and alliances of convenience with the Spanish made the conquest possible, and even conspired to make the conquest possible. I am not someone who believes (as the [geography scholar and author] Jared Diamond does) that the Spanish conquest of the Incas and the Aztecs was inevitable due to their technological and immunological superiority. I believe the conquest could have been avoided, or at least delayed.

What is the importance of challenging the norm, whether it be in concepts of gender or history?

When Lisset Barcellos, the director of the film, and I began designing the story that would later become Both, the only thing we knew was that we wanted to take up the concept of a documentary produced by Les Blanc that we had greatly enjoyed. It dealt with people of very different origins and with very diverse personalities who shared the trait of having very separated canines, and how this fact affected their lives in various ways. We wanted to assume the perspective of a person with a special trait. However, we didn’t know what that trait would be.

In the very early stages of the film script, the director discovered that she was intersexual and the film decided on its own that that was the trait we wanted to elaborate on, that we had to elaborate on. We also wanted to tell the story of immigrants, especially because we found the classic stories about immigrants who cross the border as “stowaways” to be extremely boring, and we wanted to create something different. All the other elements we found along the way. The fact that the protagonist was a stunt double in B-films. That she was bisexual. The presence of explicit sex scenes—which we saw as completely necessary and which wasn’t something we wanted to avoid as we didn’t share the [traditional] American sense of horror in regards to sex in film. The fact that all of this shocked some people did not surprise us, but it was not something we were striving for. What we wanted was to present a complex character, being respectful of the character’s complexity while tackling the themes the film deals with in a credible, serious and sensitive fashion.

(Courtesy Rafael Dumett)

How does your activism or social awareness inform your creative endeavors?

There is something exhibitionist about the term “activist” that I dislike. I much prefer the term “solidarity”. And no, I don’t think that my paltry gestures of solidarity inform my writing in any significant way. At least not in a conscious way.

What is your experience living in the Latino diaspora in North America versus in Peru? What are the differences in acceptable cultural norms?

In Peru, as in the rest of Latin America, there is no death penalty. Abimael Guzmán, the head of the terrorist group Shining Path, had been sentenced to remain in prison for life and for Peruvians, that is enough. Nobody feels (not even his direct victims) that he should be executed in order to provide closure to their grief, something I frequently hear the relatives of victims of similar crimes say in the U.S.. In Peru, we have an inadequate system of social security, but the concept of health care that is accessible to all is not foreign to us.

In the most recent presidential elections in Peru, the runner-up was a woman, and the reservations about her qualifications did not stem from the fact that she is a woman (she is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori). This is not uncommon: the current mayor of Lima is a woman and her main rival is also a woman. This does not mean that machismo isn’t present in Peruvian society. It means that we don’t have a problem with entrusting women with political roles of significance. Why should we? They are the ones who usually manage the finances in our [homes], they are in charge of raising children when fathers avoid their responsibilities. However, we lack a solid culture of democracy and any political advances of note have been a result of imposition, not debate. Abortion remains illegal. And harassment of gays is tremendous.

Do you feel your work addresses stereotypes that U.S. Latinos encounter? Does it specifically impact your community?

I have learned to become completely indifferent to the stereotypes that people around me may hold about me. I have been, in succession, a “University-educated, white-skinned limeño (native of Lima)” when I lived in Peru, a “person from a warm country” when I lived in Germany, a “non-Arab, non-black French-speaking foreigner” when I lived in France, and a “South American” or, if when said with contempt “sudaca” while traveling in Spain, prior to being “Latino” now that I live in the US.

However, I don’t really know what it means to be “Latino” beyond being someone who speaks Spanish, originates from Latin America and perhaps likes to dance salsa and appreciates good food, good drinks and good sex. (I prefer the word “Peruvian.”) It would have been exhausting to try to be aware of others’ expectations of what I ought to write while I was writing. I don’t know if what I do challenges stereotypes of any kind and it is not my place to say how my writing impacts my community.

I have written plays in which the main character is a man with a keen interest in astrophysics, an adaptation of Faust in Peru, a film in which the main character is an intersex stunt double, an erotic film script in which the main character is a water performer (which unfortunately was never produced), a spy novel set during the time of the Incas. And currently I am writing a science fiction film that takes place in the 22nd century. As you can see, to label my writing as “Latino” not only does not shed any light which will help one to understand it better, but may instead be an obstacle.

How do you process being viewed as “white” or light-skinned and also having immediate indigenous heritage via your father?

I always felt that, whatever the external perceptions could be, I was some kind of mix. But being some kind of a mix is far from being unusual in Peru. We are all mestizos in one way or another. From my early childhood I knew where I came from. My paternal grandfather was from Syria, and he came to Peru with his older cousin escaping poverty in the Middle East. He married a woman from a little town in the Andes of Ayacucho. My maternal grandfather is also from Ayacucho–which is a coincidence–and he married a woman from Cajamarca (Northern Andes) and they moved to Lima. I always liked the fact that my family came from “everywhere”. I never had a conflict at all.

What is the role of history and identity in your work?

It’s not my place to answer this question. I myself struggle to understand what people are referring to when they speak about identity. But, for reasons that elude me, I have always felt comfortable being a foreigner. Going from one language and culture to another. From one set of customs, habits and ethnic codes to another. Building, taking apart and/or reclaiming identities and roles, or modifying them. Distantly taking on the various perceptions and expectations that might exist about me and trying to play down their effects (perhaps unsuccessfully). I imagine that that comes through in my writing: for me, writing is a constant exercise in perspective.

You can read more about Dumett at his blog, Espia Inca. 

Nyki Salinas-Duda is a contributing editor with the Public Media Institute.

El Espía del Inca is available in Spanish for download on Apple devices here or Amazon Kindles through its website.

(Bill Keaggy)

1.

Jose Felicito Figueroa Gutierrez, I walked his western concrete sidewalk

Catarino Gonzalez Merino, I walked underneath urban ficus branches he pruned

Mateo Salgado Perez, I walked by his painted storefront, “LICUADOS NATURALES PROBIOTICOS JUGOS BIONICOS PARA SALUD,” perky portraits of spiky flamboyant fruits

Chelve Benitez Jaramillo, I took them from his fingertips and bit firm whitish fleshy strawberries at the farmers market, $4

Rogelio Dominguez Benitez, I lit the sacks of mesquite charcoal he trucked from his state, sending flames and sparks up in the dark

Hector Ramirez Robles, I admired his variegated folds of multicolored hues, processes unfolding and shifting

Jorge Mauricio Torres Herrera, fuzzy 15 year old mustache, I know his wry glint, wondering about his empty chair 2 days

Roberto Rivera Gámez, I sanded bookshelves he built, finished them in the garage and let them dry

Serafin Rivera Gámez, I like the way his life is a broad avenue of marvelous lives, exchanged and relayed across blue light of oceanic distances

Elisendo Cabanas González, I know women he was working for, women he supported year in year out, looking out for—unfailing—their finite and infinite joys possible

Marco Antonio Villaseñor Acuña, 5, I was privileged to move through any day that was heartened by his heart, that was brightened by his gaze, that was sweetened with his breath

José Antonio Villaseñor Acuña, brushing my teeth with the lime green toothbrush recycled from plastics he processed

Edgar Gabriel Hernández Zúñiga, I peeled and ate the orange he handed to me

Juan Carlos Castillo Loredo, he passed between me and the sun, looking over the sun on the ocean

Ricardo González Mata, he built buildings that I walked through in October, to the second floor of the Science Library at University of California at Riverside to read poems

Oscar González Guerrero, my vehicle necessarily runs on parts he delivered, while I believe he’s reflected in a cloud along the San Gabriel Mountains

José Luis Ramirez Bravo, his touch folded inside clothes I happen to wear, fabric on skin

Juan José Morales, swallowing coffee from hills in his homeland, might’ve been his suggestion that I wake up

Augusto Stanley Vargas, it was his cash I received in change, I put those coins into a parking meter that didn’t work

2.

i took his notion i noticed her fillip

i thank her for regional fusion i was swayed by the tenuous assurances across the avenue

i marched with one million may first

he cut my hair

he set my vistas aright

they were both quiche i bought them lunch

she made the tamales of the past and the tamales outside of time

they filled the playground with signs of life

she made everyone’s skin glow with sunset at bolsa chica state beach

he punched the button in the elevator he swabbed my arm and took my blood

“relax your fist now,” he said

(my blood has been tested, it was found to be basically exactly the same)

“just hold that for a moment,” he said

Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for more than 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems.

In an interview with Furious Fiction, writer Jennine Capó Crucet spoke briefly about the role sketch comedy played early in her career. I imagine Crucet improvising each scene—testing the authenticity and likelihood of every event—before writing a single word, and each word written reaping the benefits of such dramatization. It’s perhaps not unsurprising, then, that her novel, Magic City Relic, of which the following is an excerpt, contains characters and scenes that ring true.

Though I doubt she wants readers to double over with laughter, Crucet does seek to capture the everyday foolishness and hilarity indicative of a life lived—true to both the characters and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Using her native Miami as the stage upon which Magic City Relic is set, she explores the immigrant experience in terms of expectation, home in terms of history, and love in terms of longevity. Crucet employs humor to disarm readers before pulling the theoretical rug.

Crucet’s debut collection of short stories, How to Leave Hialeah, was awarded the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald.

–Nicole Sealey

Before I really registered the turns I’d taken away from the restaurant, I knew I was headed to our old house. It still felt automatic, driving to that address, even though it’d been months since I’d even seen it. The money my dad gave me was in my back pocket, the bills still in each of their three distinct envelopes. In the restaurant’s parking lot, where we’d said a rushed goodbye that felt more like a see-you-later, my dad warned me against putting the envelopes in so unsafe a place.

—The minute you sit somewhere you gonna lose ’em, he said.

I wasn’t worried about losing the money between that parking lot and my mom’s apartment building: I was worried about how I would explain the money at all, when I was supposedly walking hand-in-hand along the beach with my boyfriend Omar. My dad’s belated Christmas gifts to us meant that I had to think of some story, or admit that it wasn’t Omar I got up early to see, but my dad. And there was no way breakfast with Papi would’ve gotten the same kind of love from my sister and my mom: they might’ve forbidden me from going, or worse, insisted they come along.

As I sped out of that parking lot and refused to watch my dad in the rearview mirror as he climbed into his work van, I decided that seeing my old house would somehow give me an answer—that the right way to give my sister and her son my dad’s lazy cash would magically reveal itself to me. I’d learned about magical realism in my freshman writing seminar: the TA had made weirdly consistent eye contact with me during the two class meetings where we discussed it, as if expecting me to somehow know what she was talking about solely because pronouncing my last name required the rolling of an R. She held her palm out to me at the end of every point she made and kept saying, Right? When I went to her office hours for help understanding the paper topics, she kept referring to magical realism as my literary tradition, holding both her hands out to me, like I was supposed to drop my genetically allotted portion of magical realism into them for her, pass it between us like an imaginary ball while we danced at a rave.

I tried my best. I said to the carpet in her office, I don’t think we have any traditions like that, Miss. My parents don’t like . . . really read.

She cocked her head and, after blinking hard, grinned through closed lips. And I knew from that tightrope smile and from the slow way she talked me through the paper topics, saying again and again that my problems would be better helped by a visit to the campus writing center, that she thought I was an idiot.

And so now, as I navigated the city’s asphalt grid toward my old house, I fantasized that it would happen: that a parrot or an iguana would drop out of a tree and trudge over to me, talk to me in Spanish about my problems and tell me what to do in the form of haiku. Or maybe some palm fronds from the trees lining our old street would reach down and swoop me up and ferry me to an old spirit woman who would give me some ancient name and call me mi’ja and tell me how to cure my mom’s obsession with Elian Gonzalez. Better yet, maybe the spirit woman would become my new mom, now that Elian had stolen mine. I had high hopes for my old house as metaphor, my old house as fantastical plot element to be taken literally, my old house as lens via which I could examine the narrative of our familial strife. I was ready for what I’d been taught about myself, about what it meant to be like me, to kick in.

But when I got there, the trees had been cut down, the grass paved over. There wasn’t a parrot or a fucking iguana for miles. The squat palm trees that had lived in a clump in our yard for as long as I could remember were not there to wave any answers at me. I looked down the avenue, thinking I must be at the wrong place, but of course I wasn’t. The fence around the house: that was gone, replaced by a stronger-looking low wall that seemed less a gate and more a bunch of cinderblocks stacked in a row in behind the sidewalk. There wasn’t a carport anymore either, and the mango tree that had always dropped its fruit on top of that carport, pelting the aluminum roof every February, had been ripped out, a concrete slab covering the patch of grass where it once grew. The roof was now tiled in those clay orange curls you saw everywhere then, and the bars on the windows and door weren’t white anymore, but had been painted black, which somehow, and contrary to any guess I would’ve taken, made them less noticeable. There wasn’t a saint in the yard anymore; there wasn’t really even a yard, as all of it, paved like that, was now driveway eligible. There wasn’t a car parked in all that driveway.

The sun bounced off these new cement surfaces, making the house itself look like it was burning. The stucco exterior was still painted bright green, but with the sun pounding off of it like that, it seemed more like the irritating yellow of a glow stick swirling in a club’s darkness. I pulled off the street, the nose of my car inching past that gate.

It looked wrong, is the only way I can think to say it now. Like it was the echo of my house, or like a voice that I knew but couldn’t place. I was of course alone in the car, but I said, Oh my god, look what they did! What should we do! to the empty passenger seat. I didn’t turn my face to that seat—I let myself pretend my dad sat there, or maybe my mom or my sister; I don’t know if I really cared who, just as long as I could pretend that I wasn’t really alone. My hands trembled on the steering wheel; out of nowhere I felt like I had to pee. Why are you so nervous, I said.

If I indulged this sorry excuse for self-conjured magic, if I left myself talk to imaginary versions of people about imaginary choices I no longer had, I worried I’d never go back to my mom’s apartment, or to the freezing dorm room a thousand miles away, or to anywhere I didn’t want to be. I couldn’t let my imagination give me options; it was too painful to admit they weren’t real. I pulled my car into that new super-driveway, the house’s original green color dimming back into view the closer the car got. The yard stood solid and still. No part of that concrete was going to talk to me. I shifted my eyes to the dashboard, refusing to look into the house’s windows or at the front door, and watched my hand as it forced the car into reverse. I pulled out of that driveway faster than I’d rolled in, back into the street, and pointed the car more or less in the direction of Little Havana.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald and the Miami New Times. Her work has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Epoch, the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Gulf Coast. Originally from Miami, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University. She has completed a novel, Magic City Relic, of which this is an excerpt.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Central Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow whose work was selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011. Winner of the 2012 Poetry International Prize and finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming to Callaloo, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Third Coast, among other literary online and print journals.

(Jim Horsfall)

Fady Joudah’s 2009 book If I Were Another was a gorgeous translation that brought a loping, precise beauty to the work of the preeminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, just a year after his death. Interviewed by BOMB Magazine shortly following the book’s release, Joudah was asked how being a translator influences his own poetry. “I think it simply expands my syntactical and vocabulary meadow,” he replied. “It was an amazing editing experience, tonally speaking . . . Darwish changes his diction over these long poems (the selections spans 15 years) and also develops dialogue. Chorus becomes echo and scene. Voice becomes character.”

These shifting ideas of voice and register are also evolving in Joudah’s own work. His first collection, The Earth in the Attic (published as the winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Young Poets), is a feat of lyric verse that marks the arrival of Joudah’s singular voice: spare and full of white space, these poems concern everyday people living in the everyday world—which for Joudah is charged with politics, identity, exile, loss, and war. “The Bedouin Poem,” below, which will appear in his forthcoming collection, Alight, takes up this same constellation of issues but feels like a departure. The single voice has fractured. Whether the voices of the characters—a Bedouin with his family in Texas—bleed into the poem and jostle for attention, or the poet himself has become slyer and more allusive, readers get to see Joudah’s keen narrative instinct at play.

—Krista Ingebretson

 
The Bedouin Poem

“The moon, in its Islamic shape, looked down.” T. Roethke

A fish in the tank, you say, is better than ten at sea, but it simply
ate all the other fishes in the tank, grew huge and ugly, and when
looked up on the Net, it turned out edible, a delicacy, in fact, in
some true marine community.

A step-dad, the Bedouin man put on a pair of flowery kitchen-sink
gloves, his wife and her children cheered his fearful hands.

The fish plopped out to hardwood floor sound-effect on a Texas
farm, or maybe it was carpet. Grilled and a memory, all who were
in the room wolfed it, except the daughter who was startled out of
sleep unto the scene, and the grandmother “who wore her lavender
mourning and touring veil like a Mohammedan.”

Later, the wife and children wanted a dog. To convince the
Bedouin they told him the puppy of litter and giveaways they
had found was instead one abandoned in a cemetery on burial
day, where an old bereft woman was kneeling “in her Sunday
black dress, and touching the ground with her forehead like a
Mohammedan.” Now, in love, the Bedouin naps on the floor with
the puppy by his armpit.

In his mother’s house there was room for anyone at the last supper.
Such is time, a hound or a pit-bull, what names may bring. The dog
never barks at a soul in town whom the dead mother knew, loved
or didn’t.

 
A Palestinian-American born in Texas and raised in Libya and Saudi Arabia, Fady Joudah is now an doctor at a veteran’s hospital in Houston and a field member of Doctors Without Borders. He has also translated Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden and Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me. Joudah’s next collection, Alight, is forthcoming this spring from Copper Canyon Press. 

Israel F. Haros López

BORDER BLUES AND REDS

redraw this turtle island
redraw the borders of your aztlan
whose bridge did you walk on
who hates brown skin
who hates white skin
who hates black skin
who hates red skin
who hates japanese internment camps
and all the mining hands and steel rails

who hates the weeping buffalo skulls
at the end of your pacific
now spilling black blood over tonantzin’s waters

redraw this memory
formed across the border
splitting your mind
splitting your heart
splitting your face

and tongue

re-member
all these songs
we are all singing

but let’s place all the hurt
on some papers
let’s place all the hurt
on some lies
stack trees and trees
of lies upon lies
let’s bury them
or burn them
or place them
inside the womb
of tonantzin

tell me how we gots tangled up
like this over and otra vez

tell me it’s only a one way street
that’s creating all this traffic

re-member this song
buried under too many snake skins
needing shedding
red and black skin
needing to push towards

this hoop
yellow red
black white
needing to mend

somewhere along these lines
these seven generations
didn’t get re-translated
to seven continents

someone
help me
omakiyayo
ayúdame

to write
world bill
2013

———————-

WOLF AND SPIDER HOUSE

illegal lettuce illegal oranges illegal restaurants illegal clean restrooms illegal bathed
children illegal tennis shoes illegal television illegal media illegal dental work illegal dvds
illegal ipods illegal coca cola illegal oil rigs illegal capitalism illegal strawberries illegal
agricultural illegal hollywood illegal fixing of your motor for below pep boy costs illegal
building of your houses illegal home illegal turtle island illegal stars and stripes illegal
pow wow illegal buffalo bill illegal papers illegal laws illegal tonantzin illegal water illegal
river illegal tonatiuh illegal códices illegal burritos salsa y casi no mas ketchup illegal
takos illegal sweating backs illegal blood illegal influenza illegal education illegal human
rights illegal children illegal fire illegal stone illegal memory illegal inheritance of land
liberty and the pursuit of someone else’s happiness illegal golden streets illegal steel
illegal border zebra illegal micky mouse tweety y super man azteka spider man calendar
illegal hope illegal new consciousness illegal time illegal teolol illegal corn illegal trees
illegal love medicine illegal true freedom illegal wine cellars illegal mortar builders illegal
penetration illegal ghosts illegal chihuahuas y coyotes illegal maya wolves illegal tolteca
condors illegal mexican american hummingbirds y serpientes sin papeles illegal red
earth black earth illegal poems illegal faces illegal facelessbook illegal words illegal
tongue illegal tanks illegal video games training children for future war crimes illegal
times illegal manifest illegal destinies illegal hope illegal scribe illegal laptop artmaker
illegal emotion illegal laws illegal ometeo illegal hands illegal yollotl illegal breath

Legalized temporarily

Israel F. Haros López is a visual and performance artists from East L.A. These poems are reprinted from the anthology Nahualliandoing Dos, a multilingual anthology from Aztlan Libre Press, an independent publishing company based in San Antonio, Texas “dedicated to the promotion, publication, and free expression of Xican@ literature and art.”

(Jose Bedia)

We’ve all tried to leave some part of our past behind. In the following story by Claudia Hernandez, the two main characters don’t just flee from their past, migrating from their war-stricken home country. Their past also kicks them out, turning its back on them, seemingly for good. But when one of them is forced to return in order to sell his parents’ house, he unexpectedly sees his childhood best friend, who welcomes him with open arms. In this story, as in many of her others, Hernandez shows us that those who migrate leave behind ghosts of their former selves.

Hernandez, born and raised in San Salvador, says that when she started writing about migration she discovered “a space that is always in the past, where people live without aging.” A creative writing professor at Central American University, she has published four books of short stories: De Fronteras (Of Borders), Otras Ciudades (Distant Cities), Olvida Uno (Forgetting) and La Cancion del Mar (Song of the Sea). “Old Friends,” translated by Daniela Ugaz and John Washington, is to be included in a forthcoming anthology of migration fiction to be published in Spanish
by Sur Plus.

–Daniela Ugaz

My brother and I had only one tie to the city that pushed us away: the house we were born in. The sooner we could sell it, the sooner we’d be free of its grasp. We had no other reason to go back. Our parents had died waiting for permission to return, our friends had also left or had become different people from those who had once loved us, and we had made a life in this new city, this new city that had given us refuge, schooling, work, schedules, children and lovers.

We knew we wouldn’t get very much for the house. And yet, for our parents’ sake, we still paid a woman to keep it clean inside, though we never did much of anything about its exterior. After years of neglect, the yard must have looked like a virgin jungle, the front of the house slowly being devoured. I told my brother to accept the first offer without haggling and to come back as soon as possible. I didn’t want him to have to deal with that climate and the snooty neighbors who wouldn’t forgive us for not dying there for a cause only my father had defended, or for finding happiness in a new place while they endured the hardships of our old home.

It made more sense for my brother to go and sell the house than for me to do it. He was still pretty little when we left. He didn’t have too many memories, resentments, or fears. He wouldn’t suffer if someone he didn’t remember gave him a mean look or made some false claim about us. And the whole thing would only take him a couple of days. Then he could come back and we’d forget that the past had even happened. Or maybe one day we’d look back at that night when we’d fled, crying and in a hurry, but we would come to understand that life, like nature, doesn’t take something without giving something better in return. We would remember that we were lucky to be able to grow up far from the chaos, far from the constraints and dangers of that city, and we would give thanks for whatever it was we were doing here and we would plan to have dinner together the next week. Except that my brother never came back.

He called me once he had arrived to tell me that the vines that used to crawl up the house had dried and, in many places, were completely dead. The house didn’t look good, but it also wasn’t the worst looking house on the street. The neighborhood had aged. But inside, he told me, everything was as it had been. The key turned easily in the lock. The furniture my parents had decided not to sell to the neighbors, in case they went back one day, was all in the same place. And the cleaning lady kept alive the same smells and quiet of each room. He even recognized the patterns of our old sheets. There was something, some still-lingering memory, about the way they felt that made him decide to sleep in the house instead of the hotel-room he’d reserved.

My brother was never the melancholy type. Of all of us, he was the one who mourned the least for all the things we left behind, and who most easily adapted to our new way of life. I never would have guessed that two days later he’d be asking me to help restore the place and come live in it again. I told him he was crazy, that there was nothing in that house worth what we had here. It was then that he told me that at night—after the cleaning lady had finally, after so many years, gone back to sleep in her own house with her family—he had seen the imaginary friend he used to play with when our parents wouldn’t let us outside because the streets were too dangerous.

He woke to a strange silence. He didn’t have to turn on the lights to see because, without even opening his eyes, he knew who was sitting on the edge of his bed. Without hesitation, he smiled. He opened his eyes only out of respect, looked at the friend, who had his back turned, and he couldn’t help feeling happy to see how much he had grown. His friend was always bigger than him, but now he was huge. Gigantic and brown. His head almost reached the ceiling. And he was wider even than the bed, and yet he weighed very little, not much more than a bag filled with air. My brother didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

He made room for him on the bed. He slept happily and woke happily and then went about the demands of the day. My brother longed to chat and play all night with him, even though he supposed they should stick with only looking at each other, and so let themselves ease back into their old comfort.

On his way back to the house one day, my brother bought a toy train. When they were little, they’d always wanted a train. But my mother preferred cars, and she preferred real little boys who had mothers she could wave to on the way out of school and invite over to drink coffee out of tiny cups or serve orange juice with watermelon in large glasses. And though she never saw him, my mother didn’t like the imaginary friend. But if she could have seen him, she definitely would have barred him from the house. She blamed him if my brother hurt himself or didn’t finish his math homework. She didn’t realize that the friend helped my brother get bottles down from the cupboards without using a stool, or made him laugh so hard his stomach hurt. She also didn’t know that the friend slept with my brother when she couldn’t stay by his side or when he was scared of the dark and the gunshots ringing in the distance.

My father didn’t have anything against the friend, but he did have something against his wife who was always saying he had to do something about him when he was struggling to get our family out of that bind we were in. And so, to not have to deal with it, my father told my brother he couldn’t talk with his friend anymore, that he couldn’t play his silent games with him, that he couldn’t see him at all and finally, that he couldn’t pack him in one of our suitcases when we were preparing to leave.

Later, my parents were amused by this friend and my brother’s insistence on remembering things that had never happened. I always thought it was magical. I would have liked to have had a friend like that, but I was the kind of girl that only played with what was there, and only remembered things that happened. I thought it was wonderful that my brother was different. And I was glad that he was happy, but I didn’t want him to live in that house again, even if, as the cleaning lady told me a few days after I demanded that he come home, he was doing well, was less tense, his eyes shone, his skin had more color and he was enveloped by a halo of silence that seemed very much like the silence of a scheming child.

When I asked her what my brother was up to, she told me he had ordered a larger bed and had told her that he was staying. He calculated that he could live a number of years with the money he’d made here as a financial advisor, and planned to find a part-time job simply for the sake of discipline. Then he wired me the entire sum of money he had decided the house was worth. He no longer expected me to live there with him.

He refused to talk to me anymore. Every week the cleaning lady tried to soothe me, telling me that my brother was smiling, that he was always smiling. I supposed he started remembering the private language he had had with his friend, because she told me that she heard him talking as if he were laughing, and sometimes he didn’t realize he was using that language when he talked to her, but this didn’t matter because they were coming to understand each other and he had even taught her some of the language. The first thing he taught her, she told me, was how to say good night.

As much as I tried to get her to come to reason, she never got it. She told me that my brother could make his own decisions just as I could make my own. When I told her that he was giving everything up, she told me that I clearly didn’t have a clue how great the friend was. She’d never seen him either, but my brother—who never was a great drawer, though he could get an idea across—had drawn the friend for her. The figure looked to her sometimes like a jewel, sometimes like a globe. She thought him beautiful. And she told me to come so I could meet him as well. She could put together a dinner for all of us if I just named the day and the hour. She figured I would still remember how to get around the neighborhood. When I arrived I would just have to look for the house with the green, newly budding vines growing up its sides.