Infinite Country(40)

I hope when Talia arrives she’ll tell us about our father. Our mom’s stories are limited to fifteen years ago and the bits she caught from her mother before she died about his life in Bogotá, and then what he reveals over the phone, which isn’t much. You say your single wish is to be able to vote in this country and made me swear to register as soon as I turn eighteen so I can cast ballots in every election since you and Mom can’t. But I know your even bigger wish is to have our dad in front of us, included in all our corny family photos. Learning his habits as well as we know our mother’s. How she stirs her coffee with her finger instead of a spoon so she can tell how hot the water is before it touches her tongue, she says, how the sight of rain makes her release a long, whistly breath, or how on chilly days she’ll always say it feels just like Bogotá. I guess what I’m trying to say is that having Talia return to us feels like a piece of our father is coming too.



* * *




You pointed across the river in the direction of Sleepy Hollow. You were talking about ghosts haunting that land, souls at unrest beneath the water, the dead buried in the mountain, sacrificed to history. I hadn’t heard you talk so much in a while, so I let you go on uninterrupted. In a couple of weeks, you’d graduate high school. Second in your class, though everyone knows you tied for first but the administrators had to decide which girl got to make the big speech at graduation and they picked the other one. You told Mom that in our town, with taxes so high the school may as well be prep, they couldn’t have a valedictorian who’s only planning to take a class or two at the local junior college when that other girl is on her way to the Ivy League. All year long there was talk of admissions tests, college tours. Seniors chose their schools by sports teams, family legacies, weather and lifestyle. Not you. You don’t get to be a part of that.

You earn your money babysitting and dog walking since none of the shops in town will hire you. You were too scared to apply for DACA when you were eligible. You said it was another trick to sniff you out in exchange for a work permit and two years of a semi-documented existence. And maybe you were right, now that the government froze the program, knows where everyone is, and can do whatever they want with that information. I know you’ve been thinking of ways to bring in more cash to pay for your classes since Mom forbids you to work off the books for a restaurant. But I didn’t expect to see your computer left open to a site with ads looking for webcam girls. No experience necessary. Must feel comfortable showing face and total nudity for paid subscribers. Work in studio or in comfort of your own home. After dinner, when our mom went back to the main house to put Lance to bed, I asked what you were looking up such crazy shit for.

It’s just research. I want to know what job opportunities are out there for someone like me, you said, like it was the most normal thing. Like I caught you bookmarking scholarships or financial aid funds instead.

I wanted to come down on you like you came down on me last summer when I started talking to those recruiters prowling the mall about joining the military, when you said our mom would fall into a grief coma because she didn’t bring me into this world to kill or be killed, that they would use me as a bait dog and I was totally fucking expendable. The government knew it, you all knew it, the only one who didn’t know it was me. You’re a talented artist, you said. You need to go to art school, use what you have and become excellent, not waste your gift on learning to murder instead. I wasn’t sure I believed you. I still don’t know if I do. But I didn’t argue, because you’re the one who made the library your second home, who says if you can’t go to college you can read every book there, memorize this country’s narratives and myths, study history even the most educated people never learned or have forgotten, about laws written and unwritten and rewritten for people who come here looking for a better life than the one they left and people who were brought as babies, so nobody can say you’re ignorant about your status, no matter how arbitrary it is, this undocumented condition they talk about like it’s some disease.

All these years we’ve been watching out for the government and you’re ready to hand yourself right over, you told me. I let you think you won the argument, but the truth is I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I wanted to be convinced to stay.





TWENTY-FIVE


At the Palisades with my brother, I noticed crows swarming the river basin. I read somewhere that crows aren’t usually found in estuaries and are more inland prone. People marvel at the miracle of animal instincts for migration to ensure their survival. Hippos, zebras, and lions were imported to Colombia by drug lords for private menageries, then abandoned when the arrests and extraditions began. Some animals starved, others were given refuge, and still others found ways to roam free and populate hills and valleys with their offspring. They’ve adapted and thrive in terrain for which they have no genetic memory. Unless you believe, as our father told our mother long ago, that the first beings traveled every inch of this earth, claiming it as home for all creatures.

Our mother was captivated lately by the news story of a Colombian woman lost in the Amazon jungle for nearly forty days with her three children. The fruits they found had already been eaten by animals, so they dug for seeds and worms. By day, monkeys threw their shit at them. At night they covered in sticks and leaves, though rain still drenched them, sometimes flooding to their necks, and insects burrowed in their ears, noses, and eyes. The woman held her children close while creatures approached—owls, armadillos, snakes, maybe tapirs or animals whose names she didn’t even know. In the black jungle night, she couldn’t be sure. Once she heard an undeniable jaguar call and knew it could be their end. She prayed it wouldn’t track their scent and never heard it again. She believed the forest duende, said to be fond of mestizo children, made them get so lost they couldn’t find their own footprints and protected them now, though not from the ticks and maggots fattening on their blood that they pulled from their raw feet and open wounds. She told her story from a hospital in Putumayo, where she and her children were treated for hunger, dehydration, and parasites after an Indigenous fisherman saw them drinking water from a riverbank, thin as spirits, almost too weak to stand, as if the gentlest wave might sweep them away. Our mother seemed most affected that this woman had no idea hundreds of volunteers, police, and army helicopters upturned the jungle looking for them with no luck, that she and her children had traveled so far searching for a way out that they’d left the Colombian Amazonas and entered territory claimed by Peru, and once rescued, her husband confessed that with his family lost to the selva he’d already planned his suicide.