There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.

The back matter of the book will only say this: If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her.

I thought to want regard was to want scorpions in your shower. I thought to speak was to ask for a muzzle. I thought to feel or to show you feel was to ask a sadist to make you flail. I thought to have a name was to have oneself abstracted and abstracted again into many bodies, some actual and corporeal or some ghostly or whiffs or some so strange, so far from you, they might as well be astral. I thought to have a name was to become an object. I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.

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. 

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.

He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.

She stuck the crescent dish just under his ribs. It hung out of him at an odd angle, as if finding a pocket. But he felt nothing, no pain. Maybe, he’d thought absurdly, he had mimicked pain for so long in movies that he’d become immune to it.

Billy’s lips were sealed around the fat boy’s. They shared the same air. At any moment it seemed the boy’s jowly cheeks might suck Billy in. Billy breathed deeply into him once, twice, and then the fat boy opened his eyes. “Rise,” Billy said. “Rise and walk.”