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Tapachula
Naida, at the Mexico line. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
In Tapachula I crossed into Mexico, and I learned the difference between a man and a machine. A man you can reason with. A machine you can't. You can only feed it.
We came over the river on rafts made out of truck inner tubes and planks, the kind of thing kids would build to mess around on, except nobody was messing around, and the men poling us across did it with the bored face of people who do the same thing forty times a day. That's the detail that stuck. Not danger. Boredom. The guy who handed me down onto the raft was thinking about his lunch. I could see it on him. I was the biggest, worst thing that had ever happened to my own life, and to him I was the ninth tube ride before his break.
On the other side there was a place. I don't have a better word for it. Not a house, not a jail. A place. Concrete, hot, a tin roof that ticked and swelled in the sun, and a smell of bodies and bleach fighting each other and both losing. They moved us through it the way you move anything through a place like that. There was a man with a clipboard. Sit with that, because I sat with it for years. A pinche clipboard. He looked at me, looked at his paper, made a little mark, and I'd been received. Like a delivery. Like a crate of something that'll go bad if it sits too long.
In Managua I'd been a girl with a plan. On the bus I'd turned into one of many. Here I turned into a line item, and the part I'm almost ashamed to tell you is that it was a relief. It's easier to be a line item. A line item doesn't have to hope. The hoping was the heaviest thing I was carrying, heavier than the fear even, and somewhere in that ticking tin heat I just set it down.
That's what numb is. People think numb means you stop feeling. It doesn't. It's deciding, without knowing you're deciding, to quit feeling the size of a thing because the size of it would kill you to hold. I couldn't afford to understand, all at once, that I'd been swallowed by something with a clipboard and a schedule and no face to beg. So I understood it a little at a time, in pieces small enough to carry, and the rest of me went somewhere cool and far back and waited.
My body didn't get that luxury. My body stayed. It sweated and itched and went hollow with a hunger they fed late and bad. It flinched when a door banged. Once a woman pressed a heel of bread into my hand without a word and was gone before I could even look up, and my stomach cramped so hard at the sight of it that my eyes ran, and I ate it crouched with my back against a wall like an animal, and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted, and I hated that it was. I hated that they'd turned a piece of stale bread into the best thing I'd ever tasted. The living machinery kept doing its loud work whether I was there for it or not. Remember that. The body kept its own books even while I was learning to leave it.
There were new men here. The ones from before went back south, I guess, to bring up the next raft of us, and a new set took delivery, and from how smooth it went I understood I didn't have an owner. There was no single villain at the bottom of this I could someday find and burn. Just the next set of hands, and the next, all of them passing me forward, none of them mine to hate, because you can't hate a relay. I wouldn't get a face to put my hate on for a while yet.
So I started watching instead. How the men moved. Who they listened to. Where the doors were, which ones had a man by them and which didn't. Not because I had a plan, the planning girl was gone, but because watching was the only verb I had left that felt like mine. I catalogued the machine. I wasn't building toward anything, I told myself. I just watched, and watched, the way you press your eye to a coin-sized hole in painted glass, because the looking is the last thing they haven't taken.
I didn't know I was building something. You never do, when it's survival. You only find out later, when you need it, that your hands already know the shape of every door.
