Meet Me in the In-Between Page 19

  Cálmate, John was instructing them. “We’re here looking around, understand?”

  They nodded, wary—mouths split narrow as we passed. John, once again, disappearing ahead. Behind us, the boys imitated his accent and laughed.

  An eternity of seconds, then a low feral sound echoed around the concrete walls. A tentacle of fear stirred in my stomach. “John!”

  Another moan, though animal or human, it was hard to say.

  I clutched at Vicente. His eyes looked like peeled eggs in the dark. “Run, rabbit, run,” he recited. “Dig that hole next the sun.”

  Instinctively, I corrected him: “Dig that hole, forget the sun.” Then my foot skidded on something—a moon of soured milk from a busted carton.

  “John!” I yelled.

  Something snapped under my shoe—a spent hypodermic, and now I could identify John’s voice mingled with a Spanish-speaking one, angry and swearing.

  “Come on!” I dragged at Vicente, but he had his fingers stuck in his ears, like a child who’s being told about his parents’ divorce. “Run rabbit, run rabbit,” he recited over and over, speeding up like a record cranked from thirty-three rpm to forty-five. I thumped him, and he started—not, as it happens, unlike a rabbit. He looked at me unseeingly, eyes bulging, teeth grinding, and then—before I could stop him—turned tail and scampered back the way we’d come.

  For a minute I stood in the echoey quiet, bogged down by garbage, trapped by fear. As much as I’d have liked to follow Vicente, I couldn’t abandon John. Truly I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Instead I descended into slo-mo, my body’s entirely unhelpful response to danger. It was a strangely detached state, a mixed-genre feeling, as though I were a pleasantly stoned hippie who’d been accidentally dropped into a horror flick directed by Arlo Guthrie. So, hey, uh . . . looks kinda like John’s dead or being set upon by, like, giant evil creatures or something! Bummer, man. Wonder if I should lend a hand? But even as I peered around, a thunder of feet, more shouting, closer this time—and here was John, barreling down the tunnel and, for some inexplicable reason, grinning broadly.

  “Run!” he yelled.

  Vicente rested his tiny gerbil cojones on a stool in the relative safety of the Alubia. He dragged on a bottle of beer, avoiding my eyes.

  “So what’s with this Pink Floyd thing, Vicente?”

  “Qué?” He gazed with intense curiosity into the middle distance. Mistaking this for a come-on, a woman nursing the dregs of a tequila gave him the eye. He flushed and looked away.

  “Pink Floyd songs brings good memories to Vicente. Many beyooodiful memories of childhood.” He drank and I sighed. Off the agenda, apparently, his failure as my protector. I still didn’t know exactly who or what had happened down there. John hadn’t been sure himself. In the dark, it had been no more than knees and arms and elbows—the limbs of phantoms living fragments of lives. This was not Vicente’s worry, though. Far as he was concerned, we crawled, we saw, we ran. Deal done, tip expected.

  “Maybe you think it’s easy living on this side of the line,” he said defiantly. “Each day closer to death . . . just little bricks in the wall.” He made a Shakespearean gesture through the Alubia’s window towards the actual wall, then slammed his bottle onto the bar.

  “Steady on, old boy,” John said gently. “We’ve got your back.”

  Vicente was not to be quieted. “Roger Waters, Nick Mason, they’re OK, man, they’re great, but David Gilmour is Vicente’s hero, you know?” He laid his head in his hands. “I swear by the Virgin of Guadalupe and all her sister saints, if I ever got to meet Dave Gilmour, man . . . that would be like, well—that would be the best thing that could ever happen to Vicente.” His eyes moistened.

  “Yeah, well.” I choked down a slightly unkind laugh. “Good luck with that, my friend.”

  Back in my own city, London—a good town, a nice town, where for some the living is easy, especially in summertime—Mac and I were at a party for a restaurant on the river. People had gathered on the wharf under the cottony haze of sunset, all manner of nice, interesting people, chatting and eating delicious things, and I should have been out there too. Instead, I’d found the only liminal space possible under the circumstances, the ladies’ room, where I was crouched on a closed loo seat feeling disconnected, feeling other. Transition between home and away was always a question of untangling my own hopelessly knotty lines. I should have been happy, but I was unable to track back to any emotion other than confusion. I couldn’t explain this love affair with the border, other than I’d lost sight of home—not the immeasurable sweetness of my children, never that—but home as in the entity Mac and I had created between us. Stepping into the lives of others made it easy to put my own life on hold, and even as I stared at my reflection in the cubicle mirror, the wall behind me morphed into the shimmer of desert. I turned slowly to find I was standing on the brink of it, vast, uncompromising, and utterly compelling.

  Outside I snatched a drink off a tray, and that’s when I saw him. No more than three feet away, his back to the viscous, greasy flow of the Thames. Live! In person, breathing in the air, right here, right now, on the light side of the moon.

  David Gilmour.

  I was staring, moronically staring, and backing away too, some sort of ghastly grimace on my face. Famous people belong in their world and I in mine, and any question that we might have to share a realm is horrifying. But . . . but . . . it seemed so disloyal to Vicente. That tear-jerker speech had got to me—of course it had. So I firmed up my own teeny tiny cojones and approached.

  Back on the border a few weeks later—this time without John, to do a ride-along with the Border Patrol—all I cared about was finding Vicente. His cell phone had been disconnected, so it was back to the sweet corn lady, the blind man with sunglasses, and the pooping mongrel. I left messages with them all, even the dog: I would wait for Vicente every day between six and eight p.m. outside the Santa Crista pharmacy.

  This was my first time solo, but Nogales is a generous town. It had taken me in and shown me its secret places. Here, in this warren of barriers, walls, and checkpoints, paradoxically, I felt free.

  After a third fruitless evening of waiting, I fell in with a gaunt man who loped up out of nowhere to scold some federales for hassling me about filming in the street.

  When one of the cops turned pettish, the man grabbed my arm and said, “I’ll take her,” as though offering shelter to a skanky kitten who would otherwise have been humanely put down. He guided me through the traffic with all the assiduousness of a lollipop man at a school crossing, signaling an obliging driver here, acknowledging the hoot of a horn there. I didn’t ask where we were going, but turned out to be his home—a park bench. From behind a shrub, he produced a plastic sandwich baggie containing his worldly goods: his ID papers, which had been nibbled by a mouse, a harmonica, and a faded picture of his wife holding a tiny baby.

  “Is she here, too?” I questioned, tentatively.

  He gave me a look of distaste, as if to say, You think I’d drop an uncut diamond like her into this pile of dung? Then, indicating my camera, asked whether I would like to hear his story. But I was storied out. I’d heard so many in the past few days that they’d merged into one long dissertation of misery. When I suggested meeting for breakfast the following morning, his face contracted. “You’re not hungry now?” he asked, and I felt like the world’s biggest shit.

  “This is the first restaurant I’ve eaten in for three years,” Gabriel confided from our corner booth, and I could well believe it. His skin was translucent, his eyesight too poor to read the menu. I ordered him the highest-protein dish I could find, but he wasn’t happy—the señora must not pay! And I was unable to make him comfortable until I hit on the idea of showing him a forged BBC press pass I’d brought along as a last-resort get-out-of-jail-free card.

  “The British government will pay for both our dinners!” I told him. “Drinks too!”

  Gabriel stroked the laminated card in wonder whil
e I made a big show of switching on the camera. I was doubtful of getting much. His inability to grasp the difference between yes and no, combined with a habit of dropping his t’s, made understanding his English a guessing game somewhere between Pictionary and charades.

  Gabriel’s story was one of family separation. He’d sneaked into the United States, got married, had a kid, racked up a few unpaid parking tickets, and ultimately run foul of the government’s retrospective “three strikes, you’re out” policy. Deported, he’d paid a smuggler, got caught, and tried again, this time under his own steam. Lost in the desert he’d collapsed, waking only when someone stamped on his arm.

  He put down his harmonica and, reaching for my hand, guided my forefinger over a pebble of bone sticking out of his wrist at a queasy angle.

  “Will you try again?” I asked him.

  “No, but I can’.”

  Yes, he wants to cross, but he can’t.

  “I can’ cross because of this.”

  “Your hand?”

  “No. And because of this.” Now he was dragging up his nylon shirt.

  I shoved my plate aside. Running vertically from lower abdomen to breastbone was a scar so thick and ragged it looked as though it had been made with a harpoon.

  “Jesus, Gabriel, what happened to you?”

  “Cops,” he shrugged. “Mexican.”

  “The cops did that to you?”

  “No.” He shook his head vigorously in the affirmative.

  There had been two of them, one who stamped on his wrist, the other his head. When he came to, they told him he owed them money for saving his life. But no worries! This was his lucky day! Did he not know that he could pay his debt by having his riñón removed, and the good news was that he’d still have fifty bucks left over to send to his family?

  “A riñón is a kidney, right?”

  “No,” he said emphatically.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure,” he said, looking doubtful.

  I pushed harder. Gabriel became muddled and even more so when I started barking body organs at him in an attempt to guess which one, precisely, had been removed. OK, so liver? Spleen? Rhymes with “queen”? One syllable? Two?

  Suddenly I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror behind him. Gonzo babe, the glittering, ugly face of hypocrisy. Although, right then and there, I would have done anything, taken on every branch of Homeland Security to piggyback Gabriel over the line and reunite him with his wife—at the same time, God help me, the organ I most wanted him to be missing was the biggest badass organ he owned. Had he hauled up his shirt to reveal the pulsing, hemorrhaging void where his heart had once been, I still can’t guarantee I’d have been happy.

  I felt a shift in my own heart, a soft click onto some higher setting of shame I hadn’t known existed. It didn’t matter how many nights I spent pacing my hotel room with men like Gabriel haunting the periphery of my consciousness. On ride-alongs with the Border Patrol, out with the repulsive California Minutemen, it was the same. A thrilling game of “catch me if you can.” And if the poor bastards we rounded up were photogenic—as in, roughed up a little—it was all good copy.

  Was this what my other self became when unchecked? Tell the story. Wasn’t that what it was about? But I knew that any halfway decent impulse of mine was poisoned by a desire to walk on the wild side and “find” myself amongst lost people and lost causes. I couldn’t help Gabriel and I couldn’t help me. Suddenly I felt complicit in the crime that had been perpetrated on him. What was the point of observing pain if you were unable to provide a salve? I could come here and steal as many stories as I liked, and this was all I could give in return? A Mr. Rancheros steak with a side basket of tortillas?

  Still, with the aid of Gabriel’s napkin and a pen, we did, in the end, establish that, yes, of course, it was a kidney that had been ripped out of him.

  Gabriel tipped back in his chair. “Kidney, yes,” he agreed with a satisfied smile.

  “Yes, kidney. Good,” I said, feeling sick.

  The following morning, having given up all hope of finding Vicente, I bumped into him on the street. To say he was astonished was an understatement. He fell about my neck and clasped me in a hug that felt more like a Rolfing technique. This was nothing to his reaction when I whipped out the Pink Floyd CDs. Wordlessly, he turned the cases over in his hands. To Vicente, David Gilmour had scribbled in elegant pen, love David.

  Vicente slowly traced a finger over David, then the word love, and without warning burst into tears. When he demanded I go with him to meet his friends, I wasn’t keen. I was still feeling raked over from supper the previous night, my emotions as bare as a tree that has shed its last leaf.

  After Gabriel and I were done eating, he had escorted me to the wall. On the way, I’d tried to give him what cash I had on me. He refused. I shoved it into his shirt pocket. In exchange he fumbled his harmonica into my hands.

  “No.” I brushed it away, mortified at the idea of accepting what constituted 30 percent of his sum possessions. “You’ll play again one day.”

  But he shook his head. When the moment had come for me to walk through the pedestrian turnstile to the US there was such a tornado of rage spinning round my head that I’m pretty sure I was shaking more than he was. Tunnels, airports, borders. I’m fascinated by these spaces because I can move freely across their divides, but what thrills me is the thing that would ultimately kill him.

  The morning I bumped into Vicente, I’d been hoping for an arm-shot of normalcy—shopping, calling the children—but now he was dragging me past the toy emporium, past a shop of forlorn bridal gowns waiting for Miss Right, through the bright tumult of the flower markets, until a long flight of steps nearly finished him off. At the bottom he leaned against a pair of ornate gates, panting noises coming out of his chest as if from a faulty air-con unit. A man in dark glasses unwound the heavy chain, and suddenly we were in a basement room lit by a few bright coins of sun. From the corner came the sound of muffled crying.

  No, I thought, no, no, no.

  My eyes adjusted. Three men were sitting around a table, united, apparently, by some dreadful collective misery.

  Oh, dear Lord. I shot Vicente a furious look.

  “Ah, sí.” He made an unnecessarily dramatic sign of the cross. “Today, death is with us.”

  One of the men sniffed obligingly.

  “Well, yes, so sorry.” I backed swiftly out of the room, wondering whether it would be tacky to ask about cabs. Vicente grabbed my hand.

  “Mis hermanos,” he addressed the men solemnly. Eyes turned—puffy, red-rimmed. My embarrassment at interrupting some family mourning intensified when Vicente suddenly raised my arm as though I’d won Olympic gold. “This is the writer I was telling you about, remember?” he said. And for a wildly uncomfortable moment, I thought I was going to be called upon to say a few words.

  “Now, when I first tell you about her,” he scolded, “you don’t believe Vicente. You say Vicente is on drugs, that he gets hiiiigh.” He yanked my arm up again. “But here is proof!”

  The men acknowledged me courteously.

  Undeterred, Vicente ratcheted up his performance. “So on this terrible day of sadness”—he produced the CDs from his pocket with a magician’s flourish—“Vicente has brought a milagro! That means miracle,” he whispered in my ear.

  More watery smiles. Vicente sighed and handed around the cases. Finally, as it dawned on them what was written there, I heard sharp intakes of breath, followed by much whooping and backslapping, all of which Vicente absorbed, the smile of the vindicated on his face.

  Still, while I’m as giant a fan of the Floyd as anyone, while David Gilmour’s signature was beyond cool, these guys were treating me as if I’d just patented a cure for the common cold.

  “What’s going on, Vicente?”

  Vicente stared at me, then slapped the side of his head. “She doesn’t know!” he squawked. “She doesn’t know!”

  A newspaper
was shoved into my hands. A full-page, grainy black-and-white picture. A familiar face. Donkey jacket, collar turned up. Muerto! The headline screamed. Syd Barrett es muerto!

  I sat down. It was too much. Some sort of hoax. What does coincidence become when it’s impossibly unlikely?

  “You remember Syd Barrett?” Vicente asked.

  Founding member of Pink Floyd. Well, yeah, kind of. I remembered hearing a story that he’d once stuck crushed quaaludes on his head before a concert and then stood immobile, neither playing nor singing, while they melted into his scalp under the heat of the stadium lighting.

  “He was some kind of crazy diamond,” said one of the other guys, shaking his head in admiration. “You know, without Syd Barrett and his poor messed-up soul, man, there wouldn’t be no album Wish You Were Here.”

  “Yeah, shine on, brother,” Vicente said solemnly, producing a lit candle from God only knows where. “We will never forget you.”

  The irony. Oh the irony. Not so much the bittersweet serendipity of my timing, but the fact that while I was crying over Gabriel and the other pitiful stories generated out of this strip of land, these guys were mourning a sixty-year-old eccentric Englishman who’d lived in Cambridgeshire.

  Vicente made introductions: Bashful Esteban. Jaimé, who was dressed like a geography teacher in a minor public school. The big weepy lunk was Jorge, a Mexican Lennie Small. “We used to be one more, you know,” Vicente said. “Little guy with an órgano bucal. He wasn’t so skilled, but he put his heart into it.”

  Esteban picked up his guitar and the mood brightened. Jaimé sat down next to him, and began plucking at his own strings in duet, while Jorge slammed his hands on the table in a magnificent effort at syncopation. They were good—properly good. Somehow, amidst this cache of talent, Vicente had landed himself the job of lead singer. I would love to report that when he opened his mouth out poured the burbling haiku of doves, but even lubricated by beer his voice sounded like peppercorns jumping on a hot skillet. “All in all,” he croaked, as the party moved outside and began to attract a crowd, “we’re just little bricks in the wall.”