Planes are things you always hear coming, like prairie tornadoes and my father in a shitty mood. Here they begin as a low turning rumble in the east, somewhere over the distant sawed-off peaks of the Tecate Mountains. Above the maquiladora sprawl of Ciudad Industrial their sounds become distinctive and cut right through this cheap shoebox of a house, wedged into the dusty blocks that separate Tijuana International Airport and the border fence. The passenger turboprops are a buzzing whine far away, a tractor pull up close. The twin-engined jets are a muddy howl until they’re directly overhead, when the Boeings sound throatier than the Airbuses. But nothing can compare to the noise of the monstrous four-engined 747s, a stupefying droning shriek that flakes paint right off the goddamn walls.

Standing outside on the scrap of front “lawn” — just pink and mint-green patio pavers — the jumbo jet looks as if it’s on a crash course instead of final approach. It barely clears the maquiladora smokestacks and powerlines, shrouding them in a cloud of milky exhaust. The massive bulk hovers closer in ear-splitting noise, its shadow rippling along the border fence. I can make out the flaps and ailerons subtly altering its silhouette, individual turbofan blades spinning, faces in the cockpit –

Then the 747 is literally on top of me. I crane my neck to watch the underbelly scrape overhead in a single sun-blotting instant, wheels so low I can almost touch their smooth rubber, each engine bigger than my truck, decals that say JET FUEL ONLY –

And then it’s past, leaving a backwash of noise and fumes and suction. I’m rocked onto my heels, holding my meshback to keep it from blowing off. “Que padrisimo!” — how fucking awesome! — I yell, so deafened I can barely hear my own voice.

Only in Mexico can you live at the end of an airport’s runway. Only in Mexico, man.

Nobody echoes me in neighborly camaraderie. The gravel road is empty in both directions — north to the rusting steel sheafs of the border fence and America behind it, and south to the intersection with the main drag. Flanking the road are ramshackle homes that were assembled, rather than built, from a mishmash of cinderblock, stucco plaster, plywood, corrugated aluminum, and blue tarping. Some are two-story with pole-mounted satellite dishes that almost interdict the air traffic. Most are a single level of working-class domesticity. All seem to be locked up with curtains drawn, their occupants returning to extended families in the Mexican interior for the Christmas holiday. Tijuana is a migrant city where 1.5 million people have eddied.

Ears still ringing, I go back inside. I’m greeted by home sweet home — bare concrete floors, plain dirt-streaked walls, windows filled with security bars. The living room’s decor is limited to the papasan chair and my TV, sitting on cardboard boxes that I haven’t unpacked yet. My sleeping bag covers the bedroom floor, since my futon “disappeared” from the U-Haul trailer while I was moving in. The bathroom door is kept shut to hold in the seeping stink.

None of that bothers me. After all, what can you expect from a $300-a-month casa de alquiler in Tijuana? What bothers me about this rental house is that nothing works. Outlets are useless things and lightbulbs dangle like taunts. I’m camping indoors, cooking on a propane stove and sleeping in a zero-degree bag and navigating by flashlight. And that’s bullshit. I may not be paying for the lap of luxury, but I’m damn sure paying for electricity.

My service calls to the electric utility are refresher lessons in south-of-the-border patience. Manana they promised me yesterday. Manana they repeated today. Tomorrow it’ll probably be manana again. Just goes to show that manana is an elastic and largely theoretical unit of time in Mexico.

At least my cellphone is working again. Today I visited the local Wal-Mart — identical to an American Wal-Mart except for the language on its displays and the currency on its price tags — and bought a cigarette lighter recharger for my rustbucket Ford Explorer. I felt like an earth-hating asshole, burning a couple gallons of fossil fuel just to resuscitate my cellphone, but what the hell. Makes it easier to nag the electric utility and keep in touch with Nooshin.

She answers on the first ring. “Does this mean you have electricity?”

“Uh, not exactly.” I decide not to admit I worsened global warming to make this call. “So how’s it going?”

“Don’t ask me that right now.” There’s an interlude of tinny echoing silence. When Nooshin’s voice comes back, it’s small and frayed. “Do you ever feel like life is something you’re doing all wrong?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. A feeling that I’m really bad at life. Worse than most people. Incompetent, even. I have it all the time lately.”

I’ve been kicking dustbunnies along the baseboards, trying to corral them into a corner. Now I flop in the papasan chair and focus on our conversation. “What happened today?”

She sighs. Evasively.

“Come on, Nooshin. Tell me.”

“But — ”

“No buts,” I interrupt, reminding her of my rules of engagement. “No standing me up. No disappearing again.”

Another pause, this time with sniffling in the background. “Nasrin, she told me…things. Things about our family. And nothing can ever be the same. When I look at her, my feelings are all different now. My feelings for Dad and Mom and my aunts.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand either.” Nooshin’s voice frays even more. “I try to get it, I really do. Like, if I was them, and I had a sister or daughter or niece as imperfect as God made me? But still, I couldn’t do what they did. Not even if it was for the good of the family.”

The good of the family. How many times have I heard that excuse for incestuous codependent circle-jerks and emotional blackmail and lies lies lies? That’s why I put 1,700 miles and one international border between me and the Roberts farmstead. I leap to my hiking boots and begin kicking dustbunnies along the baseboards again. “What did your family do to you?”

“Maybe it’s a Persian thing, I don’t know. I’m too tired to explain it.” More sniffling, and a nose-blow into kleenex. “Saman is coming out here tomorrow.”

“Saman? What for? Are you getting back with him?” The possibility is a chainsaw ripping away beneath my navel. “You’re not going back to your marriage, are you?”

“No way. I’m never going back. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted.” Nooshin shimmers with a sad decisiveness, as if amputating her past. “But we have to work out the family stuff. His family stuff, and mine.”

“Does that mean you’re getting divorced?” I ask the question warily. Her answer could lead anywhere.

“Well…” she says, making the word a debate with herself — we-lllllllllll…

“Well what?” I prod after a while, trying to neuter the long dragging silence into a pause. But it doesn’t work. Nooshin remains mute. I picture her in the shadows of the guest bedroom, hugging herself on the bed. Even in my imagination she turns away, vertebrae dotting the back of her t-shirt in a slumped arc, inhabiting a solitary maze of pain. Our magnetism seems to wane, dwindling into a torrent of hissing static, until my cellphone reports CALL WAS LOST.