The Best American Essays 2016

Chapter 1

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The Best American Essays 2016.

Jonathan Franzen.

Cover design by Christopher Moisan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

"The Lost Sister: An Elegy" by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in Narrative Magazine, Fall 2015. From The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright 2015 by the Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

"In Praise of Contempt" by Katherine E. Standefer. First published in the Iowa Review, vol. 45, Issue 3, Winter 2015/2016. Copyright 2015 by Katherine E. Standefer. Reprinted by permission of Katherine E. Standefer.

"Black and Blue and Blond" by Thomas Chatterton Williams. First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2015. Copyright 2015 by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Foreword.

ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING-and puzzling-comments I"ve encountered on the art of the essay comes from one of America"s foremost essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After the remarkable Elizabeth Peabody showed her good friend Emerson an essay written by her future brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson "complained that there was no inside in it." Though he never wrote an essay on the essay-most of his remarks on craft and composition are scattered throughout his journals and recorded conversations-Emerson did know plenty about essays and essay-writing. What could he have meant by an essay having "no inside"?

Hawthorne had published the essay Emerson complained about, "Foot-prints on the Sea-sh.o.r.e," in 1838. A personal, meditative essay (easily found online) that recounts an afternoon spent in near-solitude at a sandy stretch of beach near his home in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, "Foot-prints" was like nothing Emerson ever wrote or would write. A more accomplished essayist than usually acknowledged, Hawthorne, borrowing from his ill.u.s.trious predecessor Washington Irving, called the essay a "sketch." Hawthorne published many sketches, intermingling them with his "tales" and making no distinction between fiction and nonfiction when he collected them in various volumes. With its neocla.s.sical language (perhaps he"s having a bit of fun calling caught fish "scaly prey") and private musings mixed with erotic suggestions stimulated by his characteristic voyeurism, "Foot-prints" is about as far from Emerson as an essay can get.

But how is Hawthorne"s essay lacking an "inside"? I don"t think Emerson (he and Hawthorne shared no warmth) is complaining here about mere surfaces, superficiality. What I think Emerson finds missing is an interiority, an inner dynamic of creative conflict. Hawthorne seems too evasively comfortable in his little private excursion to the seash.o.r.e. There seems to be little at stake or at risk emotionally or intellectually. Unlike Emerson"s own essays, Hawthorne"s "Foot-prints" contains no centripetal force. Its movement does not seek a center, a vital "inside." Or so I suppose Emerson thought when he enigmatically criticized Hawthorne"s essay.

It"s not a long way from "Foot-prints on the Sea-sh.o.r.e" to "Once More to the Lake." These are both satisfying essays in their way, but Emerson favored a different kinetics, one that-as it turned out-had little influence on future essayists in the way that his literary hero Montaigne indisputedly did. Both essayists are wholly attracted to Pyrrhonism (from the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who allegedly maintained that nothing can be known with certainty). But Montaigne"s stance of "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?) represented a skepticism immersed in his presence and personality-which centuries later still come alive on the page. In nearly all of Emerson"s writing we do not encounter an engaging personality. We know his thoughts and style of thinking, but we rarely get a glimpse of the man himself. Montaigne"s essays are his memoir; Emerson"s essays, with their chilly impersonality, might be considered almost an anti-memoir. Disappointed readers will always ask the same question: "Where"s Waldo?"

Emerson was preoccupied with sentences. As biographer Robert D. Richardson observes in his succinct book on Emerson"s creative process, First We Read, Then We Write, Emerson spoke of writing only in terms of sentences, not in terms of the essay. But the art of the sentence was not achieved without great struggle. Richardson cites one of Emerson"s letters to his friend Thomas Carlyle: "Here I sit and read and write with very little system and as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." This isn"t what one would expect to find in a student"s guide to composition, but Richardson"s admirable book is as close as anyone can come to workshopping the essay with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Coherence wasn"t one of Emerson"s compositional goals. He famously wrote that "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Richardson expands on this by citing the comments of a Williams College student, Charles Woodbury, a young man Emerson befriended in his sixties and often spoke to about writing, life, and ideas. "Neither concern yourself about consistency," he once said. "The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process . . . If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet."

He was intellectually suspicious of many conventional rhetorical techniques, which he saw as obstructions to original thought. He dismisses skeletons, outlines, and scaffolding as creative interferences. He dislikes cla.s.sifications and categorizations. In his journal he admits that many left his lectures "puzzled." As an orator and one of the most prominent lecturers of his time, he had a devotion to eloquence, but it was not the rhetorical brand of eloquence many expected. Rhetoric comes from the outside and is something we tend to impose on our thoughts. Emerson"s eloquence sought the unsystematic inside: spontaneity, surprise, magic. As a writer and thinker, he was more interested in the spark than the fire.

Yeats memorably said, "Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry." Emerson aspired to the poetry that originates from that quarrel with ourselves. At the core of the essays we find a remarkable self-opposition that seems to be an abundant source of creativity. A mind in process, he knew, is rarely rhetorically persuasive. Toward the conclusion of one of his finest essays, "Circles," he writes, Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Trigger warning: Emerson"s essays are not "safe s.p.a.ces." Not even for himself.

And Emerson is not for everyone. For many readers, all that can be seen is the outside-the lofty exhortations, the bewildering transitions, the poetically expressed abstractions. But unless we read him with keen attention to the Wittgensteinian struggle with language going on "inside" the essay, we miss the literary and intellectual exhilaration. There was some fun had at Emerson"s expense a few years ago when someone discovered the English philosopher John Stuart Mill"s surprising comments in his copy of the essays. Mill was not impressed and apparently enjoyed annotating the margins with "nonsense," "fudge," "stupid," "pooh," "trash," "sentimental," "superficial," and "very stupid."

A preeminent logician and hardheaded Utilitarian, Mill, a stickler for precision, was clearly no Concord Transcendentalist. Yet despite his marginal barbs, the two thinkers had something important in common: they shared-along with Montaigne-a pa.s.sion for free and open discussion and a rare mental capacity for self-opposition. In the chapter "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion" in his cla.s.sic argument On Liberty, Mill demands a level of tolerance and respect for opposing opinions that would seem humanly out of reach at any time, and especially so in our current climate of polarized intolerance. For Mill, like Emerson, nothing was truly settled, and he proposed an all but impossible moral obligation on individual thought: "We can never be sure that the opinion we are attempting to stifle is a false opinion; and, if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." He believed that "all silencing of discussion is an a.s.sumption of infallibility," and he maintained what to him represented a crucial distinction: there is "the greatest difference," he wrote, "between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and a.s.suming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation."

Emerson, as I read him, would certainly agree with Mill"s receptivity to contrary opinions, whether they are debated in a public arena or deep within ourselves. And perhaps that simply shows how irrelevant he is today.

The Best American Essays features a selection of the year"s outstanding essays-essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide a.s.sortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately 100 are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selection. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgements and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the list of notable essays in the back of the volume. Today"s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

222 Berkeley St., #11..

Boston, MA 02116.

Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form-such as a contribution to a collection-but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the publication and not in ma.n.u.script or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not a.s.sume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note that, owing to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date of publication, and author contact information) will no longer be considered.

I"d like to dedicate this thirty-first volume in the series to the great essayist, neurologist, and scientist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who died after a brave struggle with cancer on August 30, 2015, in New York City at the age of eighty-two. He wrote brilliantly right up to the end, and we are pleased to once again include one of his essays in this series, though, sadly, one of his last.

As always, I"m indebted to Nicole Angeloro for her keen editorial skills and uncanny ability to keep the annual express train running smoothly and on schedule. A special thanks to other publishing people with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt-Liz Duvall, Carla Gray, and Megan Wilson. I"m extremely grateful to Jonathan Franzen for agreeing to serve as guest editor and for contributing an introduction that is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of the essay. What he says about the essayist"s difficult embrace of risk and honesty can be felt throughout this exceptionally diverse and often emotionally turbulent collection.

R.A.

Introduction.

IF AN ESSAY is something essayed-something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author"s personal experience and subjectivity-we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, who you saw there, and how you felt about it afterward: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. Bloggers, both pro and amateur, operate on a similar presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like The New York Times, has softened up to allow the I, with its voice and opinions and impressions, to take the front-page spotlight. Book reviewers (who nowadays are basically all amateurs, since almost none of them earn a living wage) feel less and less constrained to discuss novels with any kind of objectivity; it didn"t use to matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable, but the question of "likability," with its implicit privileging of the reviewer"s personal feelings, is now a key element of critical judgment. And literary fiction is looking more and more like essay. Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgrd, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

And yet the personal essay itself-the formal apparatus developed by Montaigne and advanced by Emerson and Woolf and Baldwin-is in eclipse. Many large-circulation American magazines, including The New Yorker, have all but ceased to publish pure essays. The form persists mainly in smaller publications that collectively have fewer readers than Adele has Twitter followers. Is the essay becoming an endangered species? Or is it a species that has so fully invaded the larger culture that it no longer needs its original niche?

A personal and subjective micronarrative: the few lessons I"ve learned about writing essays were given by my editor at The New Yorker, Henry Finder. I first came to Henry, in 1994, as a would-be journalist in pressing need of money. Largely through dumb luck, I produced a publishable story about the U.S. Postal Service, and then, through native incompetence, I wrote an unpublishable piece about the Sierra Club. This was the point at which Henry suggested that I might have some apt.i.tude as an essayist. I heard him to be saying, "since you"re obviously a c.r.a.p journalist," and denied that I had any such apt.i.tude. I"d been raised with a midwestern horror of yakking too much about myself, and I had an additional prejudice, derived from certain wrongheaded ideas about novel-writing, against the stating of things that could more rewardingly be depicted. But I still needed money, and so I kept calling Henry for book review a.s.signments. On one of these calls, he asked me if I had any interest in the tobacco industry-the subject of a major new history by Richard Kluger. I quickly said, "Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I want to write about." To this, Henry even more quickly replied, "Therefore you must write about them."

This was my first lesson from Henry, and it remains the most important one. After smoking throughout my twenties, I"d succeeded in quitting for two years in my early thirties. But when I was a.s.signed the post-office piece and became terrified of picking up the phone and introducing myself as a New Yorker journalist, I"d taken up the habit again. In the years since then, I"d managed to think of myself as a nonsmoker, or at least as a person so firmly resolved to quit again that I might as well already have been a nonsmoker, even as I continued to smoke. My state of mind was like a quantum wave function in which I could be totally a smoker but also totally not a smoker, so long as I never took measure of myself. And it was instantly clear to me that writing about cigarettes would force me to take my measure. This is what essays do.

There was also the problem of my mother, whose father had died of lung cancer and who was militantly anti-tobacco. I"d concealed my habit from her for more than fifteen years. One reason I needed to preserve my indeterminacy as a smoker/nonsmoker was that I didn"t enjoy lying to her. As soon as I could succeed in quitting again, permanently, the wave function would collapse and I would be, 100 percent, the nonsmoker I"d always represented myself to be-but only if I didn"t first come out, in print, as a smoker.

Henry had been a twentysomething wunderkind when Tina Brown hired him at The New Yorker. He had a distinctive tight-chested manner of speaking, a kind of hyper-articulate mumble, like prose acutely well edited but barely legible. I was awed by his intelligence and erudition and had quickly come to live in fear of disappointing him. His pa.s.sionate emphasis in "Therefore you must write about them"-he was the only speaker I knew who could get away with the stressed initial "Therefore" and the imperative "must"-allowed me to hope that I"d registered in his consciousness in some small way, and that he cared about my development as a writer.

And so I went to work on the essay, every day combusting half a dozen Merit Ultra Lights in front of a box fan in my living room window, and handed in the only thing I ever wrote for Henry that didn"t need his editing. I don"t remember how my mother got her hands on the essay or how she conveyed to me her deep sense of betrayal, whether by letter or in a phone call, but I do remember that she then didn"t communicate with me for six weeks-by a wide margin the longest she ever went silent on me. It was exactly as I"d feared. But when she got over it and began sending me letters again, I felt seen by her, seen for what I was, in a way I"d never felt before. It wasn"t just that my "real" self had been concealed from her; it was as if there hadn"t really been a self to see.

Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, makes fun of the "busy man" for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the night and realize that you"re lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your carbon footprint is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there"s no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn"t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard"s Copenhagen was compared to our own age, those subjective tweets and blog posts don"t seem so essayistic. They seem more like a means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we"d never bother reading in a printed book, and b.i.t.c.h about how busy we are.

I quit cigarettes for the second time in 1997. And then, in 2002, for the final time. And then, in 2003, for the last and final time-unless you count the smokeless nicotine that"s coursing through my bloodstream as I write this. Attempting to write an honest essay doesn"t alter the multiplicity of my selves; I"m still simultaneously a reptile-brained addict, a worrier about my health, an eternal teenager, a self-medicating depressive. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multiselved ident.i.ty acquires substance.

One of the mysteries of literature is that personal substance, as perceived by both the writer and the reader, is situated outside the body of either of them, on some kind of page. How can I feel realer to myself in a thing I"m writing than I do inside my body? How can I feel closer to another person when I"m reading her words than I do when I"m sitting next to her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness. But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible only on the page.

Here I might mention two other lessons I learned from Henry Finder. One was "Every essay, even a think piece, tells a story." The other was "There are only two ways to organize material: "Like goes with like" and "This followed that."" These precepts may seem self-evident, but any grader of high school or college essays can tell you that they aren"t. To me it was especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. And yet: Doesn"t a good argument begin by positing some difficult problem? And doesn"t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold proposition, and set up obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments, and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but satisfying conclusion?

If you accept Henry"s premise that a successful prose piece consists of material arranged in the form of a story, and if you share my own conviction that our ident.i.ties consist of the stories we tell about ourselves ("I am the person who was born in the Midwest and defected to the Northeast; I am the person who married young and later defected from the marriage"), it makes sense that we should get a strong hit of personal substance from the labor of writing and the pleasure of reading. When I"m alone in the woods or having dinner with a friend, I"m overwhelmed by the quant.i.ty and specificity of sensory data coming at me from random stimuli. The act of writing subtracts almost everything, leaving only the alphabet and punctuation marks, and progresses toward nonrandomness. Sometimes the work consists of distilling a familiar story and discovering, in the process, which seemingly essential elements can be omitted and which new elements unexpectedly need to be added. Sometimes-especially in the case of an argument-a completely new story is called for. The discipline of fashioning a compelling narrative can crystallize thoughts and feelings that you only dimly knew you had in you. The default organizing principle for the essayist, therefore, is "This followed that." Every essay in this volume, with the exception of Ela Harrison"s love letter to the art of translation, tells a chronologically ordered story, advances a sequential argument ("This follows from that"), or both.

Henry"s other organizing principle, "Like goes with like," comes in both basic and expert versions. The basic version holds that when you"re looking at a ma.s.s of material that doesn"t lend itself to storytelling, you should sort it into categories, grouping similar elements together; again, this may sound self-evident, but the selecting of categories often leads to fruitful insights, as in Richard M. Lange"s investigation of why merely witnessing a violent death is traumatic. In the expert version of the principle, the grouping of like with like becomes the very engine of the essay"s meaning. Two beautiful examples are Jill Sisson Quinn"s "Big Night," which turns on the alikeness of studying salamanders and entering an adoption lottery, and Justin Phillip Reed"s "Killing Like They Do in the Movies," which reads the history of American lynchings through the eerie lens of Hollywood horror flicks.

My main criterion in selecting this year"s essays was whether an author had taken a risk. There exist other modes of essay, lyrical modes, free-a.s.sociative modes, political modes, and I admit to excluding some fine instances of them simply because they didn"t satisfy my taste for intensity. In the essays I did choose, risk itself comes in different forms. There"s the perennial risk of upsetting family and friends by writing about them or revealing secrets to them. There"s the professional risk that Laura Kipnis took in publishing "s.e.xual Paranoia Strikes Academe." There"s the risk of advancing a potentially controversial theory of anti-Semitism or postcombat stress; the risk of being called a bad person for sleeping with married men or for severing contact with a parent; the risk of looking beyond racial ident.i.ty at a moment when #BlackLivesMatter is focusing national attention on it. There is, finally, the risk I feel most grateful to a writer for taking: shame. As Arthur Miller once said, "The best work that anybody ever writes is on the verge of embarra.s.sing him, always." The writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them. Your material feels too hot, too shameful, to even think about? Therefore you must write about it.

Shame, in digital media, occurs most frequently as a transitive verb, an action you inflict on someone else. As a noun-a thing you might fear experiencing yourself-it tends to remain carefully hidden. Social media, in particular, are celebrated by their advocates for enabling the construction of personas through which the user can "safely" experiment with different aspects of his or her personality. But most of these personas are self-flattering in one way or another, cooler or c.o.c.kier or handsomer than the real person behind them, and the Internet is structured to create communities of the intensely like-minded. Although the virtual world may look from a distance like a free-for-all of essayistic self-exposure, it actually functions more like a system of avoiding the potentially shameful self.

What distinguishes the essay from most of the writing that occurs within this system isn"t the presumption that your private story is of interest to strangers. The difference is that the essayist"s experiments aren"t safe. Risk is implicit from the minute you decide to write "an essay" rather than something casual, fragmentary, impromptu. The sheer act of carefully crafting a story raises the stakes. And the rigors of craft-the demands of form, the solitary sustained engagement with twenty-six letters and some punctuation marks-have the terrible power to reveal where you"ve been lying to yourself and what you haven"t properly thought through. The rigors of craft give you substance. And then, instead of sharing with a closed circle of friends or with a community safely known to be like-minded, you submit the finished written thing to an audience of readers who may or may not be sympathetic. To publish an honest essay is, always, to risk shame. But the reward, if you"re lucky enough to get it, is connection with a grateful stranger. The essay as a species may be verging on endangered, but a mediated world of buried shames has greater need of it than ever.

JONATHAN FRANZEN.

FRANCISCO CANTU.

Bajadas.

FROM Ploughshares.

bajada noun.

1: a steep curved descending road or trail.

2: an alluvial plain formed at the base of a mountain by the coalescing of several alluvial fans.

-Origin 186570, Americanism: from the Spanish feminine past participle of bajar: to descend.

20 December.

Santiago quit the academy yesterday. We were on our way into town when I heard the news, speeding across the cold and brittle gra.s.slands of New Mexico. Morales must have told me, or maybe it was Hart. I called Santiago as soon as I found out. You don"t have to quit, I told him, you can still finish, you should stay. I can"t, he said, it"s not the work for me. I have to go back to Puerto Rico; I have to be with my family. I wished him luck and told him I was sorry to see him go. He thanked me and said to finish for the both of us, and I promised that I would.

Of all my cla.s.smates, it was Santiago I most wanted to see graduate. He marched out of step, his gear was a mess, he couldn"t handle his weapon, and it took him over fifteen minutes to run the mile and a half. But he tried harder than any of us. He sweated the most, yelled the loudest. He was thirty-eight, an accountant from Puerto Rico, a husband and a father. Yesterday he left the firing range with a pocket full of live rounds, and the instructors ordered him to sing "I"m a Little Teapot" in front of the cla.s.s. He didn"t know the song, so they suggested "G.o.d Bless America." He belted out the chorus at the top of his lungs, his chest heaving after each line. We laughed, all of us, at his thick accent, at the misremembered verses, at his voice, off-key and quaking.

In town, over drinks, Hart went on about the winters in Detroit. I can"t go back there, he said, not like Santiago. f.u.c.k that. He asked Morales and me about winter in Arizona. Morales laughed. You don"t have to worry about snow where we"re going, vato, that"s for sure. Hart thought it sounded nice. Nice? I asked. Just wait until the summer. Have you ever felt 115 degrees? h.e.l.l no, he said. Well, I told him, we"ll be out in the heat, fetching dead bodies from the desert. Who the f.u.c.k walks in the desert when it"s 115? he asked. I drank my way through another beer and went rambling on about how everyone used to cross in the city, in San Diego and El Paso, until they shut it all down in the "90s with fences and newly hired Border Patrol agents like us. If they sealed the cities, they thought, people wouldn"t risk crossing in the mountains and the deserts. But they were wrong, I said, and now we"re the ones who get to deal with it. Morales looked at me, his eyes dark and buried beneath his brow. I"m sorry, I told them, I can"t help it-I studied this s.h.i.t in school.

On our way back to the academy, I sat in the backseat of Morales"s truck. In the front, Morales told Hart about growing up on the border in Douglas, about uncles and cousins on the south side, and I sat with my head against the cold gla.s.s of the window, staring at the darkened plain, slipping in and out of sleep.

3 January.

Last week my mother flew in from Arizona to see me, because-she said-we"ve never missed a Christmas together. She picked me up at the academy on Christmas Eve and we drove through the straw-colored hills, leaving behind the trembling Chihuahuan gra.s.slands as we climbed into the evergreen mountains of southern New Mexico. We stayed the night in a two-room cabin, warm and bright with pinewood. We set up a miniature tree on the living room table, decorating it with tiny gla.s.s bulbs. Then, wrapped in blankets, we laughed and drank eggnog and brandy until the conversation deteriorated into discussion of my impending work.

Look, my mother said, I spent most of my adult life working for the government as a park ranger, so don"t take this the wrong way-but don"t you think it"s below you, earning a degree just to become a border cop? Look, I said, I spent four years away from home, studying this place through facts, policy, and history. I"m tired of reading. I want to exist outside, to know the reality of this border, day in and day out. Are you crazy? she said. You grew up with me, living in deserts and national parks. We"ve never been far from the border. Sure, I said, but I don"t truly understand the landscape, I don"t know how to handle myself in the face of ugliness or danger. My mother balked. There are ways to learn that don"t place you at risk, she said, ways that let you help people. I fumed. I can still help people, I told her-I speak Spanish, I"ve lived in Mexico, I"ve been to the places where people are coming from. And don"t worry, I told her, I won"t place myself at risk-I"m not too proud to back away from danger.

Good, she said. We hugged, and she told me she was happy I"d soon be back home in Arizona, closer to her. Before bed we each opened a single present, as we have done every Christmas Eve since I can remember.

In the morning we ate brunch at the town"s historic hotel, feasting on pot roast by a crackling fire. Afterward we climbed the stairs to a narrow lookout tower where people crowded and huddled together in jackets, walking in slow circles to take in the view. Below us an expanse of sunlit plain stretched westward from the base of the mountain. I watched as the landscape shifted under the winter light. Behind me, my mother placed her hand on my shoulder and pointed to a cloud of gypsum sand in the distance, impossibly small, swirling across the basin desert.

24 February.

We caught our first dope load today, only our second day after arriving at the station from the academy. We were east of the port of entry when the sensor hit at Sykes trail. At the trailhead, Cole, our supervisor, found foot sign for eight and had us pile out of the vehicles. For four miles we made our way toward the mountains following toe digs and kicked-over rocks. Cole went in front and called us up one by one to watch us cut sign. We found the first bundle discarded among the boulders at the base of the pa.s.s. We spread out to comb the hillsides and after about ten minutes we had recovered two backpacks filled with food and clothes and four more fifty-pound bundles wrapped in sugar sacks spray-painted black. Cole had us dump the packs, and I watched as several of my cla.s.smates ripped and tore at the clothing, scattering it among the tangled branches of mesquite and paloverde. In one of the backpacks I found a laminated prayer card depicting Saint Jude, a tongue of flames hovering above his head. Morales found a pack of cigarettes and sat smoking on a rock as others laughed loudly and stepped on a heap of food. Nearby, Hart giggled and shouted to us as he p.i.s.sed on a pile of ransacked belongings. As we hiked with the bundles back to our vehicles, the February sun grew low in the sky and cast a warm light over the desert. At the edge of the trail, in the pink shade of a paloverde, a desert tortoise raised itself up on its front legs to watch us pa.s.s.

2 April.

Tonight we stood for hours in the darkness along the pole line. After we had tired of the cold and the buzzing of the power lines, Cole had us lay a spike strip across the dirt road and return to wait in our vehicles parked in a nearby wash. We sat with the engines on and the heat blasting, and after a few minutes of silence, Morales asked Cole why some of the agents at the station called him "Black Death." He laughed and pulled a can of Copenhagen from his shirt pocket. You have to be careful, he said, the Indians out here, when they"re drunk and walking at night between the villages, they fall asleep on the f.u.c.king road. He packed the can as he spoke, swinging his right arm and thumping his forefinger across the lid. When it"s cold out, he explained, the asphalt holds warmth from the sun, even at night. A few years ago I was working the midnight shift, driving down IR-9, and I saw this f.u.c.king Indian asleep in the middle of the road. I stopped the truck and woke his a.s.s up. His brother was there with him, sleeping in the bushes. They were drunk as h.e.l.l. Cole pinched a wad of dip into his mouth. His lower lip bulged, catching the green light from the control panel. I gave the guys a ride into the next village, he said, dropped them off at their cousin"s place. Told them not to sleep on the G.o.dd.a.m.n road. Cole grabbed an empty Pepsi cup from the center console and spit. Maybe nine or ten months later, he continued, same f.u.c.king spot, I ran over the guy, killed him right there. Same f.u.c.king guy, asleep on the d.a.m.n road. I never even saw him. After that they started calling me Black Death. Cole laughed and spat into his cup and a few of us laughed with him, not knowing exactly what kind of laugh it was.

Just after midnight, a blacked-out truck roared across the spikes and three of its tires went. We tore after it, speeding blindly through a cloud of dust until we realized the vehicle had turned. We doubled back to where the tire sign left the road and followed it until we found the truck abandoned at the foot of a hill. In the back of the truck we found two marijuana bundles and a .22 rifle. Cole sent us to scour the hillside with our flashlights, but we only found one other bundle. It"s a f.u.c.king gimme load, Cole said. I asked what he meant. It"s a G.o.dd.a.m.n distraction, that"s what. They"re waiting us out. But my cla.s.smates and I didn"t care, we were high from the chase. We drove the truck into a wash until it became stuck, and slashed the unpopped tire, leaving it there with the lights on and the engine running. On the way back to the station, I asked Cole what would happen to the truck. He told me he"d call the tribal police to seize the vehicle, but I knew he wouldn"t. Even if he did, they wouldn"t come for it, they wouldn"t want the paperwork either. They too would leave it here to be ransacked, picked over, and lit on fire-evidence of a swirling disorder.

4 April After sundown Cole sent Morales up a hill near the highway with a thermal reconnaissance camera. Let me borrow your beanie, vato, he said to me, it"s cold out. I handed it to him and stayed inside the vehicle, waiting with the others. An hour later he spotted a group of ten just east of mile marker five. We rushed out of the car and set out on foot as he guided us in on the radio, but by the time we reached the group, they had already scattered. We found them one by one, huddled in the brush and curled up around the trunks of paloverde trees and cholla cactus. Not one of them ran. We made them take off their shoelaces and empty their backpacks, and we walked all ten of them single file back to the road. For a while I walked next to an older man who told me they were all from Michoacn. It"s beautiful there, I said. Yes, he replied, but there"s no work. You"ve been to Michoacn? he asked. I told him I had. Then you must have seen what it is to live in Mexico, he said. And now you see what it is like for us at the border. Pues s, I said, we"re out here every day. For a while we walked silently next to each other and then, after several minutes, he sighed deeply. Hay mucha desesperacin, he told me, almost whispering. I tried to look at his face, but it was too dark.

At the station I processed the man for deportation, and he asked me after I had taken his fingerprints if there was any work at the station for him. You don"t understand, I said, you"ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. They"ll take you to Tucson and then to Nogales and then you"ll be back in Mexico. I understand, he a.s.sured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I"m here to work, that I"m not a bad person, that I"m not here to bring in drugs, I"m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

7 April.

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