Make money doing the work you believe in
Mexico City
Naida, processed. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
In Mexico City they did the paperwork on me.
That's the word they used, near me, not to me, the way you'd talk about a shipment in front of the shipment. Processing. I had to be processed. And that day I learned the thing I'd been dreading without a name, worse than the men, worse even than the road. The calm of it. The clipboards in Tapachula had been the start. Mexico City was the whole machine, lit up by a buzzing tube in the ceiling, run by people who were neither cruel nor kind, because cruel and kind are things you are toward a person, and I wasn't being treated like a person. I was being treated like a correct entry.
Somebody took my picture. Not for me, not a photo anybody would ever look at with love. A document shot, flat light, hold still, this little machine that spat out a square that developed right in front of me into a girl I barely knew, grey and stunned and seventeen, and then a hand took the square before it even finished becoming a face and clipped it to a card. I watched myself get filed. I watched a clerk write something in a column and not look up. Somewhere I turned into a row. I had weight and age and origin and a number, and the number was the realest thing about me now, realer than my name, because my name wasn't written on anything in that room and the number was written on everything.
You think you know what it is to be treated like an object. You don't, and I hope to God you never do, and I'm going to fail to make you understand it on purpose, because the understanding is its own kind of harm and I won't hand it to you whole. I'll give you the edge of it and nothing more. It's not being hurt. Being hurt at least means somebody bothered to aim at you. It's being handled. It's being a quantity in somebody's afternoon. It's finding out the machine doesn't hate you, doesn't have any opinion of you at all, that you could die on its floor and it would just fix the entry and move the next one up, and there's no appeal, because there's nobody to appeal to, only clerks doing a job right, only the tube buzzing, only the stamp coming down.
My body, my faithful loud body, did its work even there. Heart speeding up under the fluorescent light. A flush of pure animal wrongness crawling over me when the camera flashed, the body knowing before I did that getting recorded like this was a death of a kind. Sweat at the small of my back though the room was cold. The body kept insisting I was alive, kept filing its own true report in flush and chill and that ache under my jaw, while the clerks filed their false one in ink. Two records of me getting written in that room at the same time. Theirs said inventory. Mine said girl. I lost that one on paper. I won it in the only court that turned out to matter, the one that kept my pulse going long enough to get me to a desert.
Here's what processing gave me, the gift inside the cold. Up to Mexico City my hate had been hunting for a man. Carlos, the coyotes, the gentle-voiced ones at the doors. After Mexico City I got it: the men were clerks too. Replaceable. Behind every set of hands was a system that had drawn me as a number and would draw the next girl exactly the same way, forever, and the thing I needed to hate was bigger than any face and couldn't be burned, only outlasted, only someday, somehow, made to lose one entry off its books. Me. I decided, under that buzzing tube, that I was going to be the row that didn't balance. The number they couldn't close out. I had no idea how. All I knew was they'd made the mistake of writing me down while my body was still keeping its own books, and the two were never going to agree, and I was going to make them pay for the difference with everything I had left, which by then was almost nothing, and which turned out, in the end, to be enough.
