The Book of Unknown Americans(23)

Then, less than two weeks before we were scheduled to go, two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City and another one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The country went into shock and we went right along with it. My dad called my mom from the diner, where, on the television above the counter, he had just seen the second plane hit the second tower. “They’re blowing it up!” he apparently told her. “It’s just like El Chorrillo. They’re destroying it!” And my mom, in her nightgown, rushed to the set and stood in front of it, watching with her hand over her mouth. I had been eating cereal in the kitchen. I carried my bowl over and stood next to her and kept eating, which, when I thought about it later, seemed kind of messed up, but at the time we didn’t know what was happening. The world hadn’t stopped—just stopped—like it would later that day and for days after. Everything was still just unfolding in front of our eyes and we had no idea what to make of it.

It didn’t take long before everyone in our building was knocking on each other’s doors and convening out on the balcony, standing around stunned and shaking with fear. Nelia Zafón just kept repeating, “What is happening? What is happening? What the hell is happening?” I heard my mom say to someone, “We moved here because it was supposed to be safer! Where can we go after this?” All day long she kept herself no more than an arm’s length from me and my brother, hugging us against her and then letting us go, like she wanted to assure herself that we were still there and that we were okay. Enrique, who was old enough by then that he usually squirmed away from my mom’s embraces, must have known the situation was serious, because he let her do it. I let her, too, even though every time she did, instead of comforting me, it only made me more scared.

By evening, everyone’s front doors were open and people were roaming in and out of each other’s units, watching each other’s televisions as if a different set would deliver different news, checking to see if anyone had heard anything new, getting tedious translations. Benny Quinto led prayer circles in his living room and offered to smoke with anyone who needed to calm their nerves. “Weed,” Enrique told me when he heard Benny talking about it. “Nice.” Micho Alvarez paced up and down the balcony, talking on his cell phone and jotting things in his notebook. Gustavo Milhojas, who was half-Mexican and half-Guatemalan, wrote a letter to the army telling them that as of that day he was 100 percent American and that he was ready to serve the country and kill the cowards who had murdered his fellow paisanos. At the end he wrote, “And here is a list of people who are willing to join me.” He drew a few blank lines and spent the afternoon trying to recruit everyone in the building. When my mom saw what it was, she said, “More killing? That’s what you want? More?” And Gustavo said, “Not killing. Justice.”

That year around the holidays we were all miserable. Holidays were always bad—my mom in particular got homesick sometimes like it was a genuine illness—but that Christmas was the worst. We were depressed and on edge, still shaken up about September 11, and then re-shaken when someone tried to blow up another plane by hiding a bomb in his shoes two days before Christmas Eve.

My aunt called, which cheered my mom up for a while, but once that wore off, she was more down than ever, shuffling around the house in her slippers, no makeup, her hair a disaster. She carried tissues in the pocket of her bathrobe and made a big show of dabbing her nose with them every so often. Eventually, my dad came up with an idea. “You want Panamá?” he said. “A beach is the closest thing you’re going to get.” He hustled us out the door and down the street, where we took a chain of buses for an hour and a half to Cape Henlopen in southern Delaware. It was snowing when we arrived—Enrique kept complaining that the snow was going to mess up his beloved Adidas sneakers—and everything was so colorless and barren that it looked like the moon. I had to hand it to my dad, though. With the water and the sand, my mom said it almost was like a little piece of Panamá. The waves roared in toward us and then silently pulled back again, slipping over the shore. Even with the falling snow, the air had the sting of salt water, and we crunched broken sea-shells under our shoes. But one beach isn’t every beach. And one home isn’t every home. And I think we all sensed, standing there, just how far we were from where we had come, in ways both good and bad. “It’s beautiful,” my mom said, staring out at the ocean. She sighed and shook her head. “This country.”





Gustavo Milhojas


My name is Gustavo Milhojas. I was born in Chinique, El Quiché, Guatemala, in 1960, the year hell came to that country. I arrived in the United States on November 14, 2000. Before that, I resided in México.

My mother is of Guatemalan descent, while my father’s bloodlines run through México. However, my father was not part of my life. My mother raised my three brothers and me by herself in Guatemala. She did her best, working two jobs and attempting to teach us right from wrong, but there were forces beyond her control.

The military in Guatemala at that time became too powerful, and the people revolted. The army began kidnapping citizens who they suspected were against them. They were burying people alive. They were raping women thirty times a day. They were laying babies on the ground and crushing their skulls with their boots. How could a baby be against them? Perhaps it was a way to torture the parents.