Hieroglyph (16 page)

“Mariposa?” the old man asked.

Ulicez nodded.

“Teeth hurt?”

He nodded again.

Tejón sucked his teeth and spat. Such was the extent of his commentary on that particular subject. As they headed for the highway, the ads began to diminish, the surfaces rendered inert by their shared demographics and direction. The last bus stop woke up as they shuffled by. It noticed the logo on Ulicez's backpack and gave him the old bit about working at Walmart, where it surely must have come from. It told him how you could train at the nearest location and go anywhere with that training, because the system was the same everywhere, world without end, amen.
Siempre más trabajo. Siempre.

“Jesus,” Tejón said. “That ad hasn't changed in, what, ten years?”

“It was around when I was little.” Ulicez whistled the jingle and the old man laughed. They each waved good-bye to the ad (it was bad luck to be rude to the ads) and kept walking. At the highway interchange, Ulicez went ahead to help Tejón over the guardrail, but the old man threw his leg over without any trouble. They stood together on the rise by the crossroads, the old city at their backs and the new one burning white like a star in a field of glittering black. Above them, the real stars were winking out. Beyond the mountains, the night sky crinkled away from the horizon like burning paper.

“Have you been back here, since?”

“For school. Once. Field trip.”

Tejón laughed. It came out all at once in a sharp bark. “Field trip.
Puta madre.
” He shook his head and spat again. “Did they tell you how many people used to die here, on your field trip?”

Ulicez said nothing. Of course they hadn't mentioned it. They were there to look at the solar farms, after all, not to relive ancient history. The corporate outreach lady stood in front of his class with her transparent tablet shimmering in her hand and never breathed a word about the war. The guns. The heads.

“They don't know, do they? About before?”

Ulicez shook his head.

“Well, they'll never hear it from me,” Tejón said.

TEJÓN SAID NOTHING AS
Ulicez approached Mariposa. There was a clear demarcation between the farms and the town; the farms grew in gleaming black rows behind neatly cut curbs, and beyond the curbs were
maquilas,
and beyond the
maquilas
stood Mariposa, the city of transformation. The hum in Ulicez's teeth stopped and he turned to mention it to Tejón, but the old man was already gone.

Then the
maquilas
began to trill the end of the night shift. Squinting, he thought he saw Tejón drifting into the crowds of exhausted factory workers hustling toward the buses that would take them home. Or maybe it was just another old man with salt in his beard. For a split second, Ulicez wished he could access the logs from all the drones they had passed under during their walk. It would help him confirm that Tejón had really been there. It was like that in the night, way back when. One minute the old man would be at his side, or his father's, hefting a shovel or pickaxe or flashlight, and the next he would be gone, having disappeared down a bend in the tunnel like the badger he was.

Now Ulicez faced the white stucco wall and the tiled arch that bridged its welcoming gap alone. He peered up at the lantern they'd hung from its center. It flickered, golden, with artificial candlelight. Slender palms, bereft of any dust, grazed the edge of the wall. He stepped through the arch.

Nothing happened.

He looked to his left, then to his right. No guards. No helpful theme park types, no strategically placed neighbors circling him like sharks. This early, no one was out. He saw another brown guy delivering mail. The mailman lifted his eyebrows at him, gave him a silent nod, but said nothing. And maybe that was that. The mailman's eyes had clocked him. Maybe that was enough.

He pushed forward into town, past the rows of bone-white stucco homes with pretty new red roofs. Why did everybody do that Spanish Revival thing out this way, Ulicez wondered, when it just made the houses look like shopping malls? Here everything was raw: the pavement black and even and soft as the soles of new shoes, the skinny little lemon trees leaning perilously over fresh sod lawns, the botflies so clean and quiet he didn't notice them until they flitted away. Here they didn't drain your blood, or chew your tissue; botflies harvested only data.

Mariposa extended fifteen miles from the border on either side, subdivided into a compass rose of quadrants with their own set of homes, businesses, schools, and service centers. In the center was a brick-paved plaza. And in the center of that stood a labyrinth of cacti and other succulents. They grew exactly where the old border crossing station used to be. He knew the spot all too well. Blindfolded, he could have pinpointed it on a map. They must have planted the maze on sod; obviously, they had not dug very deeply. Ulicez had seen aerial views of it: a twisted, thorny spiral buried deep in the new city's heart. Try as he might, he could never plot the way out. The thorns meshed together too tightly.

Now he stood before it, fingers curled tightly around the scorching wrought iron that made up its fence, and peered inside. He lifted one hand and poked his index finger between the thorns. Beside him, one of the dusty pink prickly pear flowers in the garden unfurled. “Are you lost?” it asked.

“Not really,” Ulicez said. “Actually, I'm going home to my wife.”

“You should take one of my flowers, then,” the cactus said. Ulicez could not spot the speaker doubtless hidden somewhere in its folds, but that didn't matter. “It'll score you some points at home.”

It wasn't until he was walking away that Ulicez realized the cactus had made a joke.

THE HOUSE LOOKED LIKE
all the others on its street: eggshell white with an unscuffed wood door in muted turquoise and a dusty red tile roof, with a stubby little palm tree out front and some pink gravel in the yard. It was like that book about the kids who go to different worlds, and on the final one all the kids come out and bounce their balls in unison. Ulicez couldn't remember the title, or even what the story was about. All he remembered was that image: all the kids outside, bouncing their balls in rhythm with one another, like the whole street was really just made up of two mirrors reflecting one very lonely child. It had given him nightmares. Now he lived there.

Elena opened the door before he could even knock on it.

He'd been hers since he saw her step off a bus and into the driveway of his school, holding a melting bottle of frozen water to her bare neck. The sight of her rooted him to the spot, as though he'd accidentally shocked himself on the old metal plate surrounding the streetlight across from his building. She had looked up and smiled, and for the first time in his life, he had not looked away. He had looked right back. She walked over to him, held out the bottle of water, and asked him if he was thirsty. And that was that.

Now she stepped through the door, wrapped her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss worthy of a telenovela. Lots of sucking, lots of licking. She cheated a little to her right as she did, and he couldn't figure out why she was turning him in that direction until she kissed his right ear and whispered: “There's a camera in the planter just over there.”

She pulled away and gave him a big smile. “You walked?”

He plastered on his own smile. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” He looked her up and down and squeezed her wrists. “You look great.”

In truth, Elena looked WASP-ish in her little white sundress and her tiny gold sandals and her baby-pink fingernail polish. She'd washed her hair and ironed it flat. If she'd been wearing black, he'd have thought her on her way to a funeral. Instead, he noticed the way she'd done her makeup. It was streaky with inexperience: the stuff under her eyes was paler than it had any business being, somehow highlighting the shadows there instead of hiding them. She didn't meet his gaze.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked.

Her smile's wattage increased substantially. Her voice climbed an octave. “No, nothing. Come inside.”

He followed her. The house was pure MUJI: bland, brand-free, everything all eggshell and fake white pine, all the way down to the pearly tile floor in the foyer and the not-quite-Mason-jar pendant lamp above it. It seemed bigger inside, airy. The kind of house white people had on network television.

“Let's have a shower,” Elena said.

Maybe constant surveillance and performing a good marriage would have fringe benefits beyond citizenship. “Twist my arm.”

The mirror smiled at them as they entered the bathroom. “CUSTOMIZE PROFILE DATA?” it asked, when Ulicez stood in front of it. He said no, thank you, and started stripping. It blanked once his nipples were reflected in its surface.

“They shy away from nudity,” Elena said. “Automatic. Antilitigation factory default.”

Not for the first time, Ulicez realized that Elena was the brains of their particular operation. He touched her elbow and turned her around and kissed her for real, this time, just something simple and closed mouthed with a long hug at the end, like normal people who hadn't seen each other in a long time. A sigh shuddered out of her. Something really was wrong.

“You missed me that bad, huh?” he asked.

Something coughed up out of her: a laugh, a sob, he couldn't tell. She hugged him tighter. “Yeah.”

She pulled away and they stripped off the rest of their clothes. Even the shower mechanism was absurdly minimalist: you had to wave your hand to start it, and then do some complicated gesture-fu to make it warmer or colder. They'd obviously been going for
Minority Report
and wound up with
Close Encounters
instead. Finally the water reached a reasonable temperature and Elena stepped in. They'd got their hair wet when her eyes finally met his.

“I'm late.”

It was as though the water temperature had dipped suddenly and steeply. Out of habit, he remained perfectly still. They used to do that, in the tunnel, when they heard someone walking above. Now he did it every time he felt the slightest shift in adrenaline.

“Aren't you going to say something?”

His voice had disappeared along with his motion. He worked his mouth a little to get it back. “You sure?”

“My app is.”

“But you have an IUD.”

“I know.” She swallowed. “I checked. The strings are still in. But the test still came back positive. It's in a drawer over there, if you want to see.”

“I'm not going to go look at your old pee stick. Gross.” He frowned. “What, did you think I wouldn't believe you?”

She looked away. That was that. Two weeks in this little Uncle Sam theme park town, and they were already distrusting each other. He leaned back against one wall of the shower. So far Elena didn't look any different. Her mascara was running, and when she paused to wipe the water from her face it smeared away from her eyes, making her seem instantly younger.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't . . . I wasn't . . . I know we can't stay, if we keep it . . .”

“That's just a rumor. We don't know that for sure.”

She gave him the look that meant he was being stupidly hopeful and hopelessly naive. “Remember what happened to Maria and Guillermo?”

Christ. She was right. Guillermo should have been a perfect candidate. He was supposed to be teaching magical realism to bored freshmen by now, putting his double Ph.D.s to use. His wife had a degree in early childhood education. They had a good relationship: the kind where everybody picked up their socks and the coffee was always fresh and the dishes got stacked at night. Exemplary. And they were doing well in Mariposa, or so they'd said: the kids at the daycare loved Maria, and Guillermo stayed out with his students, but not too late.

Then they'd gotten pregnant and come back to Nogales.

“Anchor babies,” Elena spat. “Fucking anchor babies. That's what they're worried about.”

“That's not it. It's just the cost—”

“It's the same fucking thing, Ulicez. The exact same fucking thing.”

He checked the dial. Their time was running out in more ways than one. “Come on. The water's about to get cold.”

He helped her out and reached blindly. “Where do we keep the towels?”

“Oh. Sorry. Shit. I was going to set some out, and then . . .” Her breath hitched. She was still digging in the closet. She leaned inside it with her back to him. “Oh, shit, Ulicez. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I thought we'd be okay. I mean, it's .6 percent. Six-tenths.
Six
fucking
tenths
.”

Despite himself, he smiled. He reached past her, into the closet, and grabbed a towel. He hung it across her shoulders. “Well, at least we've got one thing going for us.”

“What's that?”

“You're getting better at swearing in English.”

THE NEXT DAY WAS
orientation. Ulicez had to set up a separate appointment, because he'd come in earlier than the others on the bus, and he'd missed a last-minute time change that only the guys on the bus heard. That suited him just fine. He had enough to worry about and didn't want to have to sit through a lecture on folding chairs with his fellow competitors.

The guy at the Newcomer Processing Center said his name was Paul. He seemed like a grad student: sandals, tawny curls in a ponytail, finally developing a real tan, occasionally pausing to check that the tattoo inside his left wrist was just as edgy as he remembered. The NPC was a big, airy building with exposed pipes and finished white oak beams against deeply saturated pastels: creamy mint, shrimpy pink. Ulicez guessed he was supposed to feel like he was in an artist's converted loft space, and not an immigration office. Paul called up some forms and toggled them over to a glass panel on his desk. Together, the two of them looked at Ulicez's file. It was all there: his height and weight and color stats, his birthdate, every address, every job. Every job they knew about, anyway. He had never been paid for the other work. That was really his dad's job, anyway. Sometimes his dad needed help. That was all.