Imagine a map, Cynta says. Color drug activity purple. Before the closures, you would have seen a few blips. Now the entire fucking border is purple. Stop watering half a plant; parasites move into the dry half, it dies.
The Terlingua hippies used to take their town band, Los Pinche Gringos (the Freaking Gringos), over to Paso Lajitas on weekend nights for a binational all-ages hoedown: grandmothers dancing with nine-year-old boys, fathers dancing with babies in their arms. But this is now a five-hour trip for the Americans; they can still cross at Lajitas but legally have to come back in via the Customs Station at Ojinaga.
So no more dance parties.
“This was a bicultural community before they closed the border,” she says. “The people over there aren’t numbers, they have names and faces. We’ve danced together, reached for onions in the store at the same time.”
But the hippies struck back.
So far they’ve sent a solar-powered water pump and two wind-powered generators across to Boquillas, begun facilitating a craft-importing business for the Boquillans, bought a solar water pump for Paso Lajitas, and are working on one for San Vincente, which, in the meantime, is being served by a Terlingua-provided reverse-osmosis water filter.
“At least they know we haven’t forgotten them,” Cynta says. “And they know we’re not our government. Love thy neighbor, right? Not only does it give you the warm fuzzies, you get to live in the world without worrying.”
Cynta’s been sick, with Lyme disease. Her adrenals are all but gone. She recently, briefly, lost the use of her arms.
But she’s feeling pretty good today.
The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.
I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR. YOAKAM
In certain places, the border possesses a lovely kid’s-book geometry. For example: Per my map, there should be an exact spot where the border stops being the Rio Grande and starts being a fence.
And there is. It’s behind a brick works near El Paso.
Standing in the shade of a big tree are two round, middle-aged Mexican guys.
“Dónde está Mexico?” I say.
“Aquí,” one answers.
We introduce ourselves, reaching across the border, which is just: a monument and a stripe on the concrete.
Yellow Shirt/White Hat is Jesse. Red Shirt/Black Hat is Tomás.
“So,” I say, stepping across, “this is Mexico?”
“Yes,” says Tomás.
“And this is the U.S.,” I say, returning to my native land.
“Yes, yes,” says Jesse, stepping into the U.S. “Mexico now, now U.S.”
We step giddily back and forth; straddle the line so we’re in both countries simultaneously; stand on the line, declaring ourselves to be nowhere at all.
Using my arms and baby Spanish, I ask: Why don’t the people, the Mexican people, come from there (I gesture to Mexico) to here (I make a grand sweep encompassing all of America and the grand opportunities contained therein).
“Problems with the migras,” says Jesse.
“I don’t see them,” says Tomás. “But they see me.”
We agree that Mexico and America have been good friends forever. We agree that, historically, the rich man has, forever, been stamping on—we all simultaneously perform the same gesture: stepping one foot each down on some imagined Poor Man. I snag three bottled waters from the van, and we drink to our shared respect for the worker; them in their country, me in mine. Occasionally, a foot, absentmindedly kicking at a pebble, will wander out of its own nation, or one of us will briefly emigrate to keep the sun out of his eyes.
As I pull out, a Border Patrol truck’s blocking the road. The agent looks like Dwight Yoakam. Technically, he tells me, I’ve broken the law.
“You, uh…you saw me go back and forth?” I say.
“I saw you standing in Mexico,” he says. “What I could do—and of course, I’m not going to DO this—is take you to Juárez and have you cross there. No biggie. But just so you know.”
This, we agree, is the beauty of the United States: Here we stand, the Law and the Lawbreaker, joking about the fact that he’s busted me, comfortable in the knowledge that he’s not going to shake me down, as would most assuredly happen if this was, say, Juárez, where he says some drunken cops recently shot at a journalist who’d taken a photo of them getting wasted, then beat the crap out of him.
“Although how much have you got?” he says. “Ha ha!”
“How did you know I was even down there?” I say.
“Camera,” he says, nodding up in the direction of the sky.
I LOVE YOU, I DO, BUT NOT IN THAT WAY
I leave Texas, drive across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and see no sign of a crisis, no sign of an overloaded system at the point of breakdown, no crime, no discourtesy even.
Which, of course, does not mean that crises, overload, crime, and discourtesy do not exist.
It just means I didn’t see them.
Everywhere I go, the next town ahead is said to be the really dangerous town, the one that justifies all the cartel fears and border paranoia, the town where the real shit goes down. Ditto for Mexicali.
I walk across the border at Calitex, and find, on the exterior wall of a strip bar, an inadvertent poem:
25 Beauty Full
Girls on Scene
Continuously dancing from 3 p.m.
Promotion.
On Buckets of Beer and Bottes
Of liquor
No cover
Charge.
But mostly, of course, Mexicali is just a town, waking up on a quiet Saturday morning: A gangly teen guy comes out of a changing room in too-baggy jeans, waits for the Judgment of Mom; a guy holds his toddler in a gentle headlock, kissing kissing kissing her repeatedly on the neck, which fails to stop her wailing; three slouching, hotted-out teenage girls loll on a bench, watching the street with eager who-might-love-me attentiveness; pigeons troop across the sunlit grass of a park like an overfed gray army. Whatever scams, corruptions, or cartel-related high jinks went down last night, all is well in the park this morning, with the bad boys still in bed.
It’s a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people’s dreams begin to be of leaving.
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.
If Mexico were as rich as we are, we’d only be getting their tourists.
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave.
Outside, a pregnant woman displaying much cleavage, selling Chiclets on behalf of a “home for poor women,” asks if I am sleeping in Mexicali tonight. It’s hot and I’m tired and my mind is playing tricks and I suddenly see her as she would be if, instead of a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, she were a Calitex soccer mom: The school does not properly emphasize reading; their vacation plans are proving difficult; she really hopes her daughter will stick with the cello.
But she’s not a soccer mom, she’s a Mexicali Chiclet-s
elling probable prostitute, and in spite of the far-along state of her pregnancy, asks, several more times, with increasing urgency, where I’ll be sleeping tonight, and only finally believes me when I say: America, for sure, honestly.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Imagine the following scenario: Two babies are born at precisely the same moment. Baby One is healthy, with a great IQ and all its limbs and two kind, intelligent, nondysfunctional parents. Baby Two is sickly, not very bright, is missing a limb or two, and is the child of two self-absorbed and stupid losers, one of whom has not been seen around lately, the other of whom is a heroin addict.
Now imagine this scenario enacted a million times.
Now imagine those two million babies leaving the hospital and beginning to live their lives.
Statistically, the Baby Ones are going to have a better time of it than the Baby Twos. Whatever random bad luck befalls the Babies, the Baby Ones will have more resources with which to engineer a rebound. If a particular Baby One turns out to be, say, schizophrenic, he or she will get better treatment than the corresponding Baby Two, will be generally safer and better-cared-for, will more likely have a stable home to return to. Having all his limbs, he can go where he needs to go faster and easier. Ditto if Baby One is depressed, or slow-witted, or wants to be an artist, or dreams of having a family and supporting that family with dignity.
A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber.
Now we might ask ourselves: What did Baby One do to deserve this fortunate birth? Or, conversely, what did Baby Two do to deserve the unfortunate birth? Imagine the instant before birth. Even then, the die was cast. Baby Two has done nothing, exerted no will, and yet the missing limb is already missing, the slow brain already slow, the undesirable parents already undesirable. Now think back four months before birth. Is the baby any more culpable? Six months before birth? At the moment of conception? Is it possible to locate the moment when Baby Two’s “culpability” begins?
Now consider a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “paranoia.” His life will be hell. Suspicious of everyone and everything, deeply anxious, he will have little pleasure, be able to forge no deep relationships. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his future condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Is he “to blame”? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition in himself? Clearly, he “did” nothing to “deserve” his paranoia. If thirty years later, suspecting that his neighbor is spying on him, he trashes the neighbor’s apartment and kills the neighbor’s cat with a phone book, is he “to blame”? If so, at what point in his long life was he supposed to magically overcome/transcend his condition, and how?
Here, on the other hand, is a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “being incredibly happy.” His life will be heaven. Everything he touches will turn to gold. What doesn’t turn to gold he will use as fodder for contemplation, and will be the better for it. He will be able to love and trust people and get true pleasure from them. He is capable and self-assured, and using his abilities, acquires a huge fortune and performs a long list of truly good deeds. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Can he, justifiably (at fifteen seconds old), “take credit for” himself? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition of future happiness to manifest? Where was the moment of the exertion of will? Where was the decision? There was no exertion of will and no decision. There was only fulfillment of a pattern that began long before his conception. So if, thirty years later, in the company of his beautiful wife, whom he loves deeply, Baby One accepts the Nobel Prize, then drives away in his Porsche, listening to Mozart, toward his gorgeous home, where his beloved children wait, thinking loving thoughts of him, can he justifiably “take credit” for any of this?
You would not blame a banana for being the banana that it is. You would not expect it to have autocorrected its bent stem or willed itself into a brighter shade of yellow. Why is it, then, so natural for us to blame a person for being the person she is, to expect her to autocorrect her shrillness, say, or to will herself into a perkier, more efficient person?
I now hear a voice from the gallery, crying: “But I am not a banana! I have made myself what I am! What about tenacity and self-improvement and persisting in our efforts until our noble cause is won?” But it seems to me that not only is our innate level of pluck, say, hardwired at birth, but also our ability to improve our level of pluck, as well as our ability to improve our ability to improve our level of pluck. All of these are ceded to us at the moment that sperm meets egg. Our life, inflected by the particulars of our experience, scrolls out from there. Otherwise, what is it, exactly, that causes Person A, at age forty, to be plucky and Person B, also forty, to be decidedly nonplucky? Is it some failure of intention? And at what point, precisely, did that failure occur?
The upshot of all of this is not a passive moral relativism that makes the bearer incapable of action in the world. If you repeatedly come to my house and drive your truck over my chickens, I had better get you arrested or have your truck taken away or somehow ironclad or elevate my chickens. But I’d contend that my ability to protect my chickens actually improves as I realize that your desire to flatten my chickens is organic and comes out of somewhere and is not unmotivated or even objectively evil—it is as undeniable to who you are, at that instant, as is your hair color. Which is not to say that it cannot be changed. It can be changed. It must be changed. But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster.
If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive—if only for a few seconds more—the possibility of transformation.
THE PERFECT GERBIL
READING BARTHELME’S “THE SCHOOL”
RISE, BABY, RISE!
Sometimes, at moments of desperation in a creative writing class, I find it useful to introduce Freitag’s Triangle:
It’s especially useful because I get to point to the portion labeled “Rising Action” and explain that this—this—is the hardest thing in storytelling: getting one’s action to rise.
Sometimes at this point there are snickers in the classroom.
Whatever.
If you wanted a perfect, Platonic example of Action (Rising), you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” That’s essentially all it is: boldly rising action. He sets up a pattern (things associated with our school die), then escalates it. Some orange trees die, some snakes pass away, an herb garden kicks the bucket, some gerbils/mice/salamander, having been acquired by the school, cease to exist.
And we’re only at paragraph three.
“The School” belongs roughly in a lineage of “pattern stories,” which might be said to include, for example, Chekhov’s “The Darling” (woman with no real personality of her own takes on the personalities of a series of men with whom she gets involved); Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (guy goes around to a series of people, trying to buy the deeds to their dead serfs); “A Christmas Carol” (stingy man is visited by series of ghosts who try to convert him); and the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera” (tiny room gets filled with series of people). In each of these we know, fairly early, what to expect: we grasp the pattern.
So:
part of the fun of “The School” is going to be the gradual unveiling of a series of Things That Die.
But then immediately—writing short stories is very hard work—Barthelme is in trouble. The reader is already, here at the beginning of paragraph four, subtly ready to be bored. The reader knows The Pattern—and is suddenly wary that The Pattern may turn out to be all there is.
If I say: “I ate a small candy, then a bigger candy, then a candy the size of a room, then a candy the size of Montana…,” you get the idea. You know where I’m headed. There’s a certain pleasure in this: you’re in on the joke, your mind knows the general shape of the fun to be expected. But if I just keep going (“I ate a candy the size of the United States! The size of North America! The size of—” even typing this is getting tiresome, although I would have liked to get at least as far as “I ate a piece of candy the size of Uranus!”), you are going to start to dislike me. Why? Because I’m condescending. I’m assuming that this simple, linear pattern is enough to interest you. I’m treating you like a dumb beast, endlessly fascinated by a swinging weight on a cord.
A STORY IS MADE OF THINGS THAT FLING OUR LITTLE CAR FORWARD
When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track or, more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face.
A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent upon this.
In this case, once we’ve discerned the pattern, Barthelme is going to fling us forward via a series of surprises; each new pattern-element is going to be introduced in a way we don’t expect, or with an embellishment that delights us. For example: when it is time for the tropical fish to be introduced, i.e., to die, Barthelme capitalizes on our knowledge (born of many carnival-won fish) that killing a tropical fish is basically a fait accompli once you’ve acquired one (“Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface.”). This constitutes a gas station because, in the process of advancing the pattern, he has given us a little something extra: a laugh, yes, but more important, an acknowledgment that the writer is right there with us—he knows where we are, and who we are, and is involved in an intimate and respectful game with us. I think of this as the motorcycle-sidecar model of reading: writer and reader right next to one another, leaning as they corner, the pleasure coming from the mutuality and simultaneity of the experience.