So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.

Do you have it with you?

I bent down to unzip my backpack. When I’d pulled it out and handed it to her the officer began turning the pages of my second passport slowly, by the edges, like you handle a postcard whose ink isn’t yet dry.

When do you use this?

Very rarely.

But under what circumstances?

Whenever I enter or leave Iraq.

And does that give you an advantage?

What sort of an advantage?

You tell me.

If you had two passports, I said evenly, wouldn’t you use your British one whenever entering or leaving the UK?

Of course, she said. That’s the law. But I don’t know what the law is in Iraq, now do I?

I didn’t mean to, but I smiled. And faintly, she flinched. Then, still holding my second passport—which is to say the only passport I had left—she nodded slowly, comprehendingly, tapped it lightly once on her knee, and stood up and walked away.

In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.

The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.

The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.

The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.

“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things, the sense in what we do when they run from us, scattering into the brush, leaving behind their water jugs and their backpacks, how to explain what we do when we discover their lay-up spots. Of course, what you do depends on who you’re with, what kind of border agent you want to become, but it’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze, and Christ, it sounds terrible, and maybe it is, but the idea is that when they come out from their hiding places, when they return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize their situation, that they’re fucked, that it’s hopeless to continue on, and they’ll save themselves right then and there, they’ll struggle toward the nearest highway or dirt road to flag down some passing agent or head for the nearest parched village to knock on someone’s door, someone who will give them food and water and call us to take them in—that’s the idea, the sense in it all.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

We found them one by one, huddled in the brush and curled up around the trunks of palo verde trees and cholla cactus. Not one of them ran. We made them take off their shoelaces and empty their backpacks and we walked all 10 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 Michoacán. It’s beautiful there, I said. Yes, he replied, but there’s no work. You’ve been to Michoacán? I nodded. Then you must have seen what it is to live in Mexico. And now you see what it is like for us at the border. 

At the station I processed the man for deportation and after I had taken his fingerprints he asked me 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. I understand, he assured 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 the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. 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.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.

This is how you know we’re hella-early. The screen is dead and gray and the only human in the theater besides us is a slender (true, I got nerve calling dude slim) attendant sweeping a row a few rows up. Minus dude, this scene would’ve been prime for us (the us being me and my boys), who weekends would run CIA-like subterfuge on movie workers. We’d hop a back fence, dash through a low-trafficked exit, and trade the rest of our day for the gem of free flicks.

Maybe they’re too preoccupied to notice we don’t (or do) fit the neighborhood profile, but maybe, just maybe, they ain’t.

Scratch what I said about the pistol offering comfort. It’s an onus.

The back and forth, the back and forth, Ibullshityounot, if you snatched off the top of my head, you’d hear me pop and fizzle. 

Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.

It was at this time that the captain called me long-distance from Tunisia and said, “I need a man. Get over here.”

“I’m sick,” I said. “I don’t know how much help I can be to you.”

“All I need is arms and legs,” he said. “Do you still have arms and legs? Then buy a ticket for Cagliari and meet us in Carloforte.”

The captain was a grey giant out of Tel Aviv.  One holiday I had seen him surrounded by his daughters, by his sons-in-law, his grandchildren, his pretty young girlfriend, and I thought:  This man has something to teach you about what a certain kind of happiness is in life, so learn it, you dummy.

I already felt at sea, as they say, lost in familiar places is another thing they say. I decided to spend some time at sea, where my bewilderment might make more sense, because disorientation and chaos would actually be happening.

Why do people feel things and go places, tell me if you know.

Once I admitted how much I wanted to kill and eat the children who had been entrusted to my care, I tried to forgive myself for any harm I might have done them over the years, for all the crackling bolts I had hurled from my cloud of self-serving ignorance, and I left that institution of learning to resume my position of nothingness in a world where I had no power to abuse my subordinates because I had no subordinates, where I had no authority save whatever I might seize by force or by cunning—where, as each day proves afresh, people will walk smiling through puddles of your blood, smiling and talking on their cellular phones. They’re going to the movies.

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

“That’s mighty white of you,” my mother might say to my father when he offered to stack his plate and saucer but not to take them to the sink or wash them. Subtending familial relationships in Southern white households then with narrow perspectives, weakened heritage, and no initiative beyond economic betterment was the master-servant template, demanding allegiance and compliance, expecting parry and subterfuge, and rehearsing moreover Old South subject positions, casually racist in their ventriloquism and chilling anachronism.

As the bristles gave resistance, I stood and stepped on the top of the brush, and then the earth accepted the whole thing rather easily, snugly. Only the brown wood button top of the brush was at last visible. To bury it entirely seemed wrong somehow. Uncovered, it has a touch of authorship, this penny-sized honey brown button above grade; and perhaps the organic, even potentially nutritive essence of Frank’s hair is aerated a bit this way.

By the time he was infamous enough to sell out bullfighting arenas, the Caruso C was a sort of burlesque number.  He would inch to it from the frequencies below, nearly embrace the note, and then flat a bit before trumpeting, C! with full tenor fury. Toscanini chided him for grandstanding, but this in-and-out tease worked well with German and Latin American houses, which particularly enjoyed the punishment of a loud flirtation.

To hear that girly voice escape the concertmaster’s staff and push into secular, structural ecstasy must have felt like a peep show from behind the veil. In [the castrato] Farinelli’s highest note, they might have heard a terrifyingly private sound, one usually made by a woman, smirking at them from the mouth of a breathtakingly lovely man.  Maybe the women felt anyone who sang sounds so close to their own must understand the root tone of the noises women make.

Did men feel the same way two centuries later, upon hearing a square-jawed, shoulder-padded Lauren Bacall hit a baritone C2 for “put your lips together and blow?”

The third scream, I think, is the scream that won it. You can hear me lose a battle in my throat.  You do not have to assume that I will be mute for days afterward; you know it.  Because on the e of that last “Stella!”, the sound sinks lower into my neck and starts ripping. Imagine the margin of a piece of paper torn, notch, by notch, from a spiral notebook, or an anvil dropping through floor after floor of a cartoon tenement.  I did not tell myself to make this hurt, but there I am, punching lower and lower into myself to see what comes up.  The noise is just awful, but it is mighty loud.

Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.

Cora was troubled at night by the thought of the child lying in the cold earth. Had they put it in a box? Or had they merely wrapped it in the flour and sugar sacks used for dishcloths? She wanted to know, but she dreaded to hear what Belle might say. She was shocked too deeply to speak about it, yet she understood in her soul what had happened. Belle had not liked the child. She wanted to forget that it had ever existed.

What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride’s remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?