New West Fiction

The Feeling of Waking Up In Your Own Bed

By Don Zancanella, Guest Writer, 4-29-11

I can’t tell you whether the tunnel is in New Mexico or Arizona, but find the most lightly guarded stretch of the border and you’ll know you’re close.  Every night we escort a group across, sometimes as a many as fifty at a time.  We don’t ask for any information about who they are or where they’re from.  We take whoever shows up.  Once they arrive on the other side, we guide them to a hidden location where we have several nondescript vans waiting to take them into the interior.  We have yet to lose a single individual, although when we finally drop them off they’re on their own.  I’ve never been a believer in borders.  They’re just imaginary lines, the location of which is usually an accident of history.  If borders exist, they exist for one reason and that is to be crossed. 

The particular model he owns is a Raycor/Voss with tungsten-carbide blades and four 250 horsepower motors capable of producing 159,00 foot/pounds of torque.  Before Curtis brought it here, he used it to dig utility tunnels in places where it wasn’t feasible to dig an open trench, such as under an existing building or under a freeway that can’t easily be torn up.  It’s all done by remote control. 

For the entrance of our tunnel, we chose a site about six hundred yards north of the border.  From there we went down eighteen feet and then straight south for over a mile, passing beneath the new anti-immigrant fence the government has built before bringing the machine back to the surface in a dry wash near a low sandstone cliff.  Having a machine like the Raycor/Voss made the digging difficult for anyone to detect, but that didn’t mean we were unconcerned about getting caught.  Even though this is a remote area, Border Patrol agents make periodic checks, and lately, there have been airborne drones as well (which, according to the newspaper, snap pictures from 19,000 feet that are sharp enough to reveal if your shoelaces are untied).  We also had to keep an eye out for “Minutemen” and other paramilitary-types. However, if we’d been found out, I don’t think they could have done anything to us.  The people we’re moving aren’t undocumented Mexicans headed for the US; they’re ghosts and they’re headed south.

I first learned that the dead can still move about and talk and even have their own needs and agendas from Juan Rulfo’s classic novel Pedro Páramo.  It’s considered by most to be a work of fiction, but it turns out the part about the corporeality of the dead is entirely true.  Before reading Rulfo’s book, I, like most people, was unable to even distinguish the living from the dead, let alone interact with them.  After I read it, however, I began to notice that large numbers of ghosts were coming through the desert in an effort to get into Mexico and that, like the living, they found it difficult and dangerous to cross. 

Why do dead souls from the U.S. want to go to Mexico?  For the most part, it’s the temperature.  Although some religions, most prominently Christianity, associate heat with hell, that’s an incorrect assumption.  The deader you are, the colder you are, and the more you feel yourself drawn toward the tropics.  In fact, a disproportionate number of those who seek to cross come from iceboxes like Chicago and Detroit.  After spending their entire lives shivering, they want nothing more than to get warm.

The other common reason they cross the border is to get back home. Early on, I asked one woman why she wished to go through the tunnel and she said, “When you die you want to go back to the place of your childhood.  It happens to everyone.  You’ll see.” I’d never thought about it but as soon as I did, I realized she was right.  I pictured the small town where I grew up, the houses with green lawns, the enormous sky, and the cottonwoods lining the streets, their leaves turning a creamy yellow in the fall.  Yes, that’s exactly where I’d like to go when I die. However, this thought confused me because part of my disdain for borders comes from a feeling that one place is as a good as another.  If location matters, then shouldn’t borders matter too?  I’d always resisted the idea that one should seek to defend one’s “homeland” or that one should feel naturally and automatically “patriotic” about the location of one’s birth.  I shared my concern with Curtis, who tends to be more level-headed and less inclined to over-thinking things than I am. 

“You’re confusing nationalism with nostalgia,” he said.  “She just wants to go home. She didn’t say anything about keeping others out.”

“But suppose so many of them want to move to a particular place that it starts putting a strain on their resources?  And what if such an influx increases the competition for jobs?”

“Ghosts don’t have jobs. What we’re doing isn’t going to have any economic or political impact whatsoever.  If I were you, I wouldn’t think of it as social action.  I’d think of it as a hobby, something to keep you occupied in your retirement.  It’s better than fishing, don’t you think?”

I decided he was right and put the questions I had about the ethics of what we were doing out of my head.  I used to be a mechanical engineer, so I’m more comfortable thinking about the process than the meaning anyway.  And the process was going reasonably well.  By then the tunnel had been open for four weeks and the problems we’d encountered had been minor.  For example, one afternoon a Border Patrol agent stopped near the tunnel and got out of his truck.  He walked away from the road, moving directly toward the heap of brush that obscures the entrance. Just when it seemed he would begin pulling the brush away (he paused to put on his thick leather gloves) a member of the group we were preparing to escort across maneuvered behind him and made a sound like a rattlesnake.  He whirled around, took several steps sideways, and then, having forgotten about the brush pile, made his way back to his truck. The next day, we removed the brush and created a better-camouflaged entryway, this time from a big slab of plywood to which we glued dirt and rocks, something I’d learned from a movie about East Germans escaping under the Berlin Wall to the West.

Another time, a small party of Mexican immigrants discovered the inlet south of the border and tried coming north.  Curtis was taking a group across at the same time and he ran smack into them.  No one, having come so far and risked so much, wanted to back up.  Passage through the tunnel is not easy.  The original diameter has been reduced in some places by cave-ins, so there are now stretches where one must crawl and others where it’s filled with waist-deep water (we’re constantly pumping; you’d think a tunnel in the desert would be dry but no such luck).  The two groups finally squeezed past one another but it took more than an hour.  It was possible only because the dead are so thin. 

I’ve sometimes wondered what the paramilitary groups would think if they knew how much activity was taking place under their noses.  Maybe they’d consider the outflow of dead souls to be a good thing.  But they would also be confused by the fact that with ghosts, linguistic and ethnic differences tend to fall away.  At first I just assumed all those who wanted to use the tunnel were from Mexico or Central America, but as time went on, I realized that wasn’t always true.  Not long ago we took a group across that included a man from Copenhagen and a woman from Minsk. And once I thought about it, it made sense.  By now just about everyone has read Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat or, if not, they’ve heard enough about it to understand his thesis—the movement of goods and services and bodies from nation to nation is becoming the norm.  The problem is, he doesn’t go far enough.  He should have included the spirit world in his discussion.  In the old days, people lived and died in the same communities and their ghosts stayed put.  Now they’re world travelers, moving great distances in death as they did in life.  In fact, with language and ethnicity no longer perceptible, the most obvious characteristic of the dead is what I can only call “directionality”—the compass point toward which they’re most inclined to move.

Curtis and I have told no one about our enterprise, but I if we did, I expect they’d have some questions.  For instance, why do ghosts need to go through a tunnel? Why don’t they just walk across?  Well, until recently they did.  But now that the government has built the new fence, they can no longer cross any easier than someone who is still alive.  Whatever the fence is made of repels spirit bodies just as effectively as flesh bodies.  Even with my knowledge of materials and the principles of engineering, I have been unable to figure out how it manages to do so.  Maybe it’s just a technological accident.  Or maybe Homeland Security took the dead into consideration when building the fence.  I wouldn’t be surprised. 

Occasionally the world of the living and the world of the dead collide.  Last week, a party of men and women and even some children crossed over from Mexico the ordinary way, by climbing the fence. But then two teenage girls got separated from the group and what with one hundred degree afternoons and no water for miles, we knew they had to have died.  In the days that followed, I kept looking for them, expecting they’d come back this way.  It was over a week before they finally showed up.  I knew I should feel bad for them—for the loss of their young lives—but they didn’t seem particularly sad or upset. 

“Where have you been all this time?” I asked.  “Just wandering in the desert?”

“No, we went into _________.” (As I said, I don’t want to give too many clues about where we’re located).  “We’ve been eating pizza and driving around in cars with boys.” The one who spoke was tall, with long hair that reached the middle of her back. 

“Do you tell the boys who you are?  I mean, assuming they’re alive.”

“Oh, we tell them,” she said and they both dissolved into laughter the way teenage girls sometimes do.

“But now you want to go back . . .”

She nodded.  “_________ is boring.  It’s also a little too cold at night.”

“I’m sorry you got lost,” I said.  “If you’d only . . .”

She cut me off.  “I have no regrets.”

“Well I regret it,” said the other one.  She had a round face and dark eyes. “If I hadn’t listened to you I’d be with my boyfriend back at home.  Do you think he’ll want me like this?  Maybe for a while but not to marry.”

“What about a ghost-boy?” I asked.  “We see plenty of those around here.”

“I’ll consider it,” said the tall one. “But the ones I’ve met so far are very self-involved.  They spend all their time looking in the mirror and wondering why there’s nothing there.”

It was the longest conversation I’d had with any of them.  Usually, they just gather around the mouth of the tunnel—which they seem already to know about—and wait until either Curtis or I take them across. The impersonal nature of the transaction sometimes makes me feel bad, so it was nice to finally talk.

Since the girls looked exhausted, I drove them to my house and let them shower and wash their clothes. Then I fed them lunch.  They reminded me of my daughters, when they’d been teenagers.  Late in the afternoon we went back to the tunnel and waited for Curtis to say it was time.

“I’m going to give you my phone number,” I said.  “Do me a favor and call when you get home.  I’d like to know you arrived safely.”

They both shrugged--again, as teenage girls do—and it seemed likely to me they’d forget the minute they were out of sight.  As they walked down the hill toward where the others in group were gathered, the tall one made a sound like a hoot owl and they both laughed. 

However, a week later I was eating breakfast at home when my phone went off. 

“It’s me,” she said.  Her voice sounded different from how I remembered it, but somehow I knew who it was
. 
“Oh, thank you.  I was hoping you’d call. We take so many people across and it gets kind of . . .”

“We’re back home now.  I’m not sure we did the right thing, but I guess it’s okay.”

“I see.  But you must be pleased about . . . about your . . .” I started to say “final resting place” but that didn’t sound right.  “About where you ended up.”

“Let me put it this way:  You know the feeling you get when you wake up in your own bed after a long trip?  And even though you know it’s no better or worse than any other bed, it just feels right?”

It seemed like an awfully pedestrian description, but I understood.  “So that’s it?  You’ll
stay there from now on?”

There was a long pause then, so long that I wasn’t sure she was still on the line.  But at last she spoke again. “I need to tell you something.  You were very nice to us, so I have to be truthful. We did get lost from our group coming across, but we didn’t die.  We just went to ____________ and hung out for a few days.  Then we got bored and decided we wanted to go back home.  We’d heard about your tunnel but didn’t think you’d let us use it.  So we just acted like we thought the dead would act. It’s not hard to figure out.  Even so, we were surprised when it worked.”

I tried to picture what they’d looked like when they were here.  I’d spent several hours with them so it didn’t seem possible I’d made such a fundamental mistake.  But now, listening to her voice again, I had to admit she didn’t sound very ghost-like.  More like a sixteen-year-old who had spent enough time around ghosts to pick up some of their mannerisms and get good at mimicking how they talk.

I hung up in a daze, feeling that our entire operation had been called into question. Either I had been conned or they had been dead when they were here but now they were alive. It made me think the boundary between the living and the dead might not be much different from the boundary between two adjacent countries. Maybe it too is permeable in both directions, a product of history, and subject to being ignored.  Which would mean crossing over doesn’t have to be irreversible. I asked Curtis for his opinion. He looked south and said, “Think of death as a location instead of a state of being.  Then follow the logic on out.”

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Don Zancanella is the winner of an O. Henry Award and the author of the story collection Western Electric, which won the John S. Simmons/Iowa Short Fiction Award.  He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is currently working on a novel. 

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