What We Are (47 page)

He looks at me like I'm crazy. He's here for a reason. Offers the mop to me, I nod, don't take it. His profession prevents a return to his birthplace in the foreseeable future, wholly and by extension. That's what he's saying in pushing the broom out,
el pinche futuro:
You want some? He says, “No.”

“¿No regresas al Mexico?”

“
No ahora.”

“Not now?” I ask. “Not ever.
Nunca. Eres en los Estados Unidos para bueno. Por vida
. This is it.”

“No,” he insists. “
Mi corazón esta alla
.”

“Sure,” I say. “Your heart is there but your ass is here.”

“¿Que?”

“
Nada
,” I say.

I watch him go back and forth, working, listening, trying to get the job done. Unless there's another paisa around cleaning windows in the Ante-Meridian, he's probably talked more with me in the last three minutes than he has with anyone else during the week.

I point to my ear. “
Escuchas, amigo. Necesitas hacer dinero, no
?”

“
Sí
.”

“¿Para tu familia?”

“Sí, claro.”

“That's why you came here.
Eso es el razon
.”

“
Seguro
,” he says, stopping for a moment. He takes a quick look behind me. The questions about his family paints me with guilt: anyone can be INS, even Canaanite nuts.

I say with hyperbolic disdain, “
No soy La Migra, amigo
,” waving the idea away with my hand. “
¿Recuerdes cuando ellos me traen a la pinche pinta?
”

He doesn't say anything. Looks behind me again, turns around and eyes the library, back around again. I still love the hell out of his indignant suspicion, his mission of self-/familial-/cultural preservation here on the gringo side of the border. He couldn't know it, but his own grandkids will be the very people he fears now, despises. All it takes is one little minute, amigo, with your feet kicked up on the couch, remote in your hand, ignoring the Girl Scout at the door, to lose everything you are in America. You came to this country for its gold and riches, totally unaware of the toll for admission: you lose your story,
amigo
, the story that makes you who you are. You lose yourself. No more adios. It's bye-bye now.

Bye-bye.

I lift my shirt up to show him I have no badge, no gun, no cuffs. He doesn't move. I do the same again, but spinning so that he can see the entire rim of my waistline.

“Baja La Migra,”
I say.

“
Sí
,” he says, smiling. “
Baja La Migra
.”

“Bueno,”
I say, reaching into my pocket.
“Amigo. Usas eso dinero para tu esposa. ¿Tienes una esposa?”

He nods once, nothing more.

“¿Como se llama ella?”

He nods very seriously, as if he's about to reveal top-secret data related to national security. “Juanita.”

“Juanita.
Bueno
.” I write down the digits of my account as well as directions to the nearest ATM. “
¿Y tu, como te llamas?
”

“Santiago.”

“Santiago.
¿Ellos te mandan al Mexico?”

“¿Quien?”

“La Migra.”

“Simon. Tres veces.”

“Three times they sent you back?”

“
Sí.”

“But you always return, don't you?” I nod, say, “Okay, Santiago. Fourth time's a charm, amigo. That's an American saying.
Tu tienes una mas vida aquí. Esos son los numeros para mi cuenta a la Banca del America. Todo es tuyo
.”

He nods, takes the paper, says nothing.

I say, “
¿Me crees?
”

He looks down at the paper, looks up at me. I meet his eyes and won't let go: I want him to know the truth: It's his, all his. “
Sí
.” Then he flexes his mouth, frowning. “Jes.” He nods, “I know you are
muy
truth-speaking,
señor. Es
in your face,
tu cara
.”

I smile, satisfied. I pull my cash out, six twenties and a few tens, my ATM card, hand everything over. With the g I've saved in the bank, this cat'll do all right: he can liquidate it wisely, stupidly, frugally, lavishly, whatever. The point is: he'll use it, he'll do it. I say, “Oh, wait.
Esperas
. I need maybe a twenty and that's it.”

Somehow, that bit of English gets through and he hands over an Andrew Jackson. I nod, say, “Well, man, we're straight.
¿Pero me entiendes?
”

“Understand jou?”

“
Sí
,” I say. “
Yo
. Me. You believe me, but do you understand me?”

“Oh, no,
señor
,” he says, encircling me with the mop, not one wet string over the top of my shoes. He leaves me standing there on an uncleaned island, surrounded by slick, shiny new-age tile and the yellow too-bright
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
sign.

“No, no, amigo!” he's calling out, loud this time, American loud. “I no understand jou!”

THE END
of the day comes again like a warm brown stream of gutter water on the last ephemeral evening: cloudy with debris, filled with filth, flushable. I take a taxi driven by a dark-chocolate five-foot Cambodian named Samsay to the Norm Mineta International Airport, pull out my wallet with everything I own inside it and leave him a tip twice the five-dollar fare, pick up my care package at the US Air terminal, a paid-in-full e-ticket overseas—
Rest in Peace, Uncle, I love you
—think of a line I once read that went,
It's a part of morality not to be at home in one's home
, stroll past the lumpia-sharing, Ilokano-speaking Filipino security guards at the X-ray checkpoints, let momentum push me down the accordion-walled chute into the plane, smile past the stewardess and down the narrow aisle, pull out the book by Anonymous in my back pocket, take my assigned window seat, lower the blind to more clearly see the blank-screen visions of struggle and faith and purity and courage and hope and love and limits and beauty and, with no baggage, leave America for good.

A
LLOW ME
to introduce four lovely ladies, a literary hit squad of sorts, inviolate in their commitment to this book, and thus very much a part of the good fight:

The wife
.

Who tempers the cerebral undercurrents of a certain novelist, which is to say tempers his nuttiness, who's so down for this novelist she's way up on everyone else, who's listened on two hours sleep at 3:13
A.M
. to eight-thousand word chapter excerpts while the novelist masticated barbecue Cornuts drunk, who on their first real date in downtown S.M. not only tolerated but actually enjoyed the novelist's constant reference to his novel-in-progress, which he kept pulling out loose-leafed from his backpack to finger, explain, and finally read passages from, and who, when this novelist pressed, “You do think someone will take it?” not only said, “Yes,” but added the season (“This summer.”), which of course it was, whose beauty is unparalleled, who will return, with the novelist, to her West Virginia horse farm to groom her Arabians if the novelist ever earns enough bones, who always stays, whose longing eyes remind the novelist that his reason for writing is to keep the story of the species alive.

The sponsor
.

An incident of wisdom and generosity, unheard

Of in the hallway-long annals of academia, occurred

One summer: a fellowship (Juanito, big dog) was conferred

Upon a wanderer so committed to the Word
,

He was degree-less by a class or two. The passive-aggressive nerd

Who thought it mattered had no choice. He deferred

To your authority, Madame, which meant your bank account. I heard
.

Thank you for your faith. Consider me, like your old friend Algren, spurred

Onward
.

The agent
.

On a Sunday evening on a Park Avenue street corner, first time in the biggest city in the world, springtime, we meet.

I get five traits (witty, wise, erudite, cool, confident) in five sentences. You position yourself so that I have to look at you when you talk. I like that. I'm from the West Coast but I imagine that on this island of ruthless competition you call this “balls.”

“I want this badass on my team,” I think.

Less than a month later, you inform me that I'm gonna have to file taxes for the first time in years. A deal cut for your newest client, who once decorated his walls, like Bellow, with rejection letters. (The ceiling also counts as wall.)

It gets better. You get me the very press that calls itself “a family” and started the concept of free speech. Perfect karma for this loquacious benificiary, daily prima facie case of that right.

“You keep on doing what you're doing,” you say. “This is just the start.”

The editor
.

There are actually people in the world nuttier than we weebit writers, miraculous creatures housing the truest of known contradictions: a data-processor brain and a human heart. Somehow this not “in conflict with itself,” the thought and the feeling as one. And somehow the slush hardens into something with form, the transformation given to the slowest of motion. All along she dusts and steam-cleans in preparation for the moment she can sit down in the peaceful space of the desk, word-sword of a pencil sheathed behind the ear, kind chin on the platform of interlaced fingers, and watch the book ascend to its place on the shelves.