The Empathy Exams (10 page)

In a 2010 op-ed in the
New York Times
, Elmer Mendoza reports that when a troop of Niños Exploradores (something like Boy Scouts) was brought to welcome officials visiting Ciudad Juárez, their scoutmaster took them through a call-and-response routine. “How do the children play in Juárez?” he called. The boys all dropped to the ground.

At a drug checkpoint, our entire van is emptied out. Larger vehicles inevitably attract more suspicion. The soldiers empty our bags. It all feels pro forma, but still—of a climate, of a piece, setting a tone. As we drive away, I glance back and notice that another soldier, this one standing on a truck, had his machine gun trained on us the whole time.

There are no flashy clubs in Mexicali, no zebra burros, no drink specials. You couldn’t find a smoking frog to save your life. You can get plastic bags full of chopped cactus or cigarettes for cheap. The closest thing to a Spanglish shot glass is the sound track at a club called SlowTime, where a woman’s voice moans over and over again: “Oh, you fucking me makes me bilingual.”

The light is harsher in this city, everything dustier. The hotels advertise rates for four hours instead of one. I don’t know what this means, but it seems to mark an important difference in civic culture.

Chinatown is alive and well aboveground. Restaurants serve bean curd with salsa and shark-fin tacos. I eat lunch at Dragón de Oro, whose parking lot runs up against the border itself, a thick brown fence about twenty feet high. The stucco homes and baseball diamonds of Calexico are barely visible through the slats.

We are fifty strong, we
encuentro
-goers. There’s Oscar, a poet who tells me his vision of Heidegger over chilaquiles one morning, and Kelly, a simultaneous interpreter who is writing a Spanish glossary of erotic language. There’s Marco, another poet, who walks across the border to buy a new pair of Converse in Calexico. Marco informs me that he abandoned his “lyric self” about a year ago, once his city grew so violent he got scared to leave his house. He needs a new poetry these days. He’s interested in repurposing in general and Flarf in particular—an experimental poetic practice that involves sorting and distilling the vast innards of the Internet, whittling by way of search term, juxtaposing odd results, often to the point of absurdity, hilarity. Marco believes in hilarity. Marco teaches college students. His life sounds a lot like mine until it absolutely doesn’t. The night before coming to Mexicali, he stayed up till one thirty to finish grading a batch of papers, then decided to reward himself the next morning by hitting the snooze button. Fair enough. As it turned out, a grenade explosion woke him anyway, two minutes later, followed by a volley of machine-gun fire. “Like a conversation,” he says, “one voice and then the response.” He says it wasn’t anything unusual.

I meet the founder of something called the Shandy Conspiracy. Every time he sees me, he asks if I’m ready to be Shandyized. All I know about this process is that it will involve subtlety and darkness. He puts out a magazine (the epicenter of his conspiracy) whose masthead features a lion attacking a zebra. Instead of blood, the zebra’s neck issues jets of rainbow fluid. It’s Darwin on acid. I catch myself looking at all the artwork here in terms of sociopolitical fractals: How can I see the narco war contained in every illustrated zebra? It’s a strange feeling, watching quirk spew from the jaws of war—like a guttural cry, flayed and searing, this absurd fountain of rainbow blood. I bend everything according to the gravity of conflict.

More accurately put, I bend what I can understand. There’s so much that eludes me. In a crowd of bilingual writers, my Spanish is embarrassing, and this embarrassment starts to shade into a deeper sense of political and national shame. I’m afraid to talk about the current landscape of the narco wars because I’m afraid of getting something wrong. Americans are known for getting things wrong when it comes to conflicts in other countries. So I listen. I gradually get a sense of the terrain. The Sinaloa Cartel controls much of the Western Seaboard—where most of the weed is grown, and a frontier mythos maintains the drug dealer as outlaw—while the Gulf Cartel operates along the Gulf, trafficking coke and Central American illegals called
pollos
, peasants whom they either smuggle or extort.

Reading about the drug wars is like untangling a web of intricate double negatives. One cartel pays a prison warden to set prisoners free at night so they can act as assassins targeting the key players in another cartel, then the targeted cartel captures a police officer and tortures him until he admits to this corruption. They tape and broadcast his confession. The authorities step in, the warden is removed, the prisoners riot to bring her back; the reporters who cover the riots are kidnapped by the rivals of the cartel that released the videotape of the tortured officer. They counter-release their own videotapes of other tortured men confessing to other corruptions.

Got it?

Tracking the particulars is like listening to a horrific kind of witty banter in a language built for others’ mouths, finding yourself participating in a conversation in which you have no ability to speak. “Conversation” means something new in this place: a flood of words I can’t understand, the call-and-response patter of semi-automatics I’ve never heard.

I get to know another cast, not authors but killers: There’s El Teo, vying for control of the Tijuana Cartel, who likes to kill at parties because it makes his message more visible; and there’s El Pozolero (“the Stewmaker”), who dissolves El Teo’s victims in acid once their message needs to turn invisible again. The most famous drug lord in Mexico is El Chapo (“Shorty”), head of the Sinaloa Cartel and currently ranked sixtieth on
Forbes
’s list of the most powerful people in the world. That puts him behind Barack Obama (2), Osama bin Laden (57), and the Dalai Lama (39), but ahead of Oprah Winfrey (64) and Julian Assange (68). The president of Mexico didn’t make the list at all. In Mexicali, I find myself learning the statistics of two economies—authors don’t get paid advances for their work, hit men in Ciudad Juárez get two thousand pesos a job—and the contours of two parallel geographies, one mapping the narco wars and another the landscape of literary production. This first topography is tissued like a horrible veil across the second. Durango, for example, is where El Chapo found his teenage bride, but it’s also home to a poet who wears combat boots and spits when he reads his poems, which are mostly about tits. Sinaloa is home to its namesake cartel, but it’s also home to Oscar and his Heidegger study groups. The capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán, has a cemetery full of two-story drug-lord mausoleums, impeccably furnished and air-conditioned for the comfort of mourning friends and family. Across town from these palaces, Oscar lives in a house with his kitten, Heidie. I imagine an entire menagerie: a dog named Dasein, two birds named Tiempo and Ser. I imagine an air conditioner humming quietly next to the ashes of a man. I am trying to merge these two Sinaloas, to make them the same.

The geography lesson moves east: Tamaulipas is a region famous for the August massacre of seventy-two illegals who wouldn’t pay up when the Cártel del Golfo asked them to.
Wouldn’t.
Right. Couldn’t. But Tamaulipas is also home to Marco, the poet interested in Flarf. When I think of Flarf, I think of poems that deconstruct and splice together blog posts about Iraqi oil and Justin Timberlake’s sex life. It’s true that Marco is up to something like this, but his project is made of different materials and perhaps a bit less irony. He is repurposing the language of the conflict for his poems. He trolls Internet message boards full of posts from people sequestered in their homes. He takes phrases from the signs that cartels leave on the corpses of their victims, and scraps from the messages they scribble onto the skin of the dead. He cuts up quotes; fits the puzzle pieces of fear back together to make his poems. This is a new iteration: Flarf
from
and
for
and
of
the narco wars. Narco-Flarf. I wonder how this kind of work preserves that part of Flarf that feels so central: its sense of humor. I wonder whether this matters. To judge from how often Marco laughs (very), it matters a lot.

The whole
encuentro
is an odd mixture of revelry and seriousness. People speak constantly and painfully about the narco wars but they also do a lot of coke. They do it off one another’s house keys, just like I imagined they would, and I find myself wondering about those keys and the locks they turn. How many locks do people have in their homes? More than they did before? How often do they go to sleep afraid?

Just a few weeks before coming to Mexicali, Marco presented his work at a Los Angeles gallery called LACE. He named his piece
SPAM.
It was a wall hanging that showcased a poem he’d made from message-board fragments—in this case, posts from residents of Comales, a barrio on the outskirts of Tamaulipas that had essentially become a cluster of hideout bunkers.

Marco called the neighborhood
zona cero.
Ground zero.

On the Internet, and in Marco’s work, these
zona cero
voices find a mobility their bodies have been denied: “
no se trabaja, no hay escuela, tiendas cerradas … estamos muriendo poco a poco
” (“there isn’t work, there isn’t school, the shops are closed … we are dying little by little”). The language isn’t “poetic” because it didn’t start as poetry. It started as a cry. And now it’s something else. Marco, of course, abandoned his lyric self last year. Now his poems have no single speaker but a mass of ordinary voices that speak these desperate words, coaxed into cadence by his own sequestered hands.

SPAM
was made in Tamaulipas and shown in Los Angeles, but it’s composed of materials from an immaterial network (the Internet) that hangs suspended, contrapuntal and infinite, in between these places and essentially in no place at all. The piece has some faith in the Internet but also understands how it abstracts experience into something nonsensical or illegible (spam!). The piece mocks borders but speaks explicitly toward them: “
La pieza intentará crear diálogo más allá de las fronteras
…” The piece is not simply a dispatch, Marco writes, but rather part of a conversation—the same conversation, I can’t help thinking, as the grenade explosion on his street.

Calexico

It’s right
there
, Calexico, just past the brown fence. You can see recycling bins overturned on its asphalt driveways. But it takes more than an hour to cross the border. And this is four thirty in the morning, when we go, and this isn’t even Tijuana. San Ysidro can take five hours if you hit it at the wrong time.

For some Mexicans, the border isn’t a big deal. Some lucky few get the border’s equivalent of a freeway E-ZPass. Marco thinks nothing of crossing here for a new pair of sneakers, though he shies away from crossing near home because the border is more dangerous in Golfo territory.

For others, the
frontera
is the edge of the world. Manuel, a keyboardist, explains that he’d love to play a gig in California but knows he never will. He can’t even spare the money for the phone call to make the appointment for the visa interview, much less sport a bank account flush enough to get one.

I cross from Mexicali with Marco and a Peruvian novelist. We’re driving a dusty red Jeep. Our variety pack of nationalities sets the officer on edge. He doesn’t seem reassured by our explanation. An
encuentro?
Interesting. He gives me a hard time. This is also interesting. I’ve returned to America from many foreign countries. I’ve never been given a hard time. I’m always profiled, and it always works to my advantage. Now I’m with company. I’ve forgotten to remove a yellow-fever vaccination certificate from my passport, and apparently this is a problem. The border officer shoves the paper in my face. “What’s this?” he says. “You have a dog?” I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I don’t have a dog and I tell him so. “But you’re from the States?” he says, as if I’ve contradicted myself. I tell him I am, but I can hear something strange: the inflection of a question trilling faintly through my voice, as if I’m no longer sure. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong. Marco explains: “They try to trip you up.”

The truth doesn’t necessarily serve you too well, either. Let’s say you’re an old Mexican woman with grown children who live in the United States. You’d better not mention them at your visa interview. You might think they’d be a reason to grant you entry, but really they’re the best possible reason to keep you out. This woman was real, Marco tells me. He stood behind her in the consulate line. There are probably six of her, ten of her, a thousand of her all across the border. As they say:
she actually happened.
She’d already been denied three times, kept paying a hundred dollars to apply again, kept talking about her kids, was running out of cheeks to turn, was running out of money.

Calexico is a small town with an ugly main drag full of
casas de cambio
(currency exchanges), but the fields on the outskirts of town are lush and emerald in the dawn. Everything around Mexicali was dry, dry, dry. “The grass is always greener,” says Marco, and I laugh. Is this all right, that I’m laughing? I think so.

We pass an interior immigration station, a second layer of defense constructed in lieu of designing any kind of decent immigration policy. It flaunts its statistics like the scoreboard at a sporting event: 3,567 immigration arrests, 370 criminal arrests, 9,952 pounds of drugs seized. Marco asks, What do these numbers
mean?
There are no dates. The figures are simply toys, emptied of context and significance. Presumably, the stats are meant to scare illiterate
pollos
by osmosis or maybe flood the hearts of visiting Americans with that elusive sense of national security we crave.

I start to think maybe it’s another kind of poem, this board of numbers. It wants to make people afraid and to console them at once; it wants to give them the sense that they are in the middle of something larger and more powerful than they can ever understand—this traffic of drugs and bodies, this barely tethered and unquiet thing,
danger
itself, so porous and fluid. For every 3,567 immigrants caught, we imagine, there are always another ten thousand who aren’t. The persistence of fear can be a useful thing. Official pronouncements are full of loud gaps and festering line breaks and margins throbbing with unspoken threats and promises.