The Mexican Year

Dawn crests like a bloody wave, washing over the dusty blocks of Colonia Aviacion and turning the clouds into pink styrofoam. Past the rusty steel-and-chainlink fence are the massive light towers, going dark one by one, their racks of day-bright bulbs supplanted by the real thing. The last searchlight chopper is a droning finger of sunlight that vanishes toward the Pacific. Border Patrol humvees are emerging from shadow on the morning slopes, parked with doors open, their work mostly done until the next sunset. Retreating down the gravel road that deadends at the border fence is a despondent group of wannabe Americans who lost their nerve, joined by the neighborhood walking club of elderly women out for their pre-breakfast constitutional.

Tomorrow, for chrissake. It’s tomorrow already. Nooshin has kept me up all night, ever since we got back from clubbing on Avenida Revolucion.

She curls a little, laying her head on my chest and playing with my soft-on. Which quickly becomes a hard-on. Don’t ask me how. Even Viagra can’t promise this many erections. “Condoms are weird,” she says matter-of-factly, pausing to tear open a foil wrapper.

“What do you mean?” I yawn.

“I don’t know, really.” She peels the condom over my erection and unrolls it to the base. “It just seems like a weird form of birth control, doesn’t it?”

“Have you used condoms before?”

“Used them? I’ve never even seen them! Only once in sex ed, back in high school. Saman refused to use them. He said there was something in the Qu’ran against wearing one, but I think he was just making it up.” Nooshin runs her fingertips over the latex, then her fingernails. “Can you feel that difference?”

“Yeah. I can feel the difference. Wearing a condom isn’t so bad, you know.” The reduced sensation is probably the only reason I’ve been able to endure this sex marathon. I slide a hand across her spaghetti tanktop, the only thing she’s wearing. “I wish you’d get all the way naked again.”

“I’m feeling self-conscious.”

“Why? You know I love your boobs — um, your bumps.” I nuzzle her teasingly.

“Oh god. Let’s not talk about my chest right now. Are there any positions we haven’t tried yet?”

A reminder that she was a marital prisoner of the missionary position. I wasn’t pushing an education in the Kama Sutra, but that’s basically what we accomplished in the past two weeks. Her bedroom courage comes in little joys and awkwardnesses and sometimes even setbacks.

I roll into Nooshin’s slippery warmth and make her gasp with deep thrusts. She rocks beneath me as if tugged by an invisible lapping current of thick water, the slow undulating rhythm of heavy seaweed. The delicate angles of her face are pinched with need. Beads of perspiration magnify the tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. Tendons rise and fall in her neck as she stares at me — into me, through me — with eyes like dark oceans, the right one slowly drifting away.

Climaxing she becomes too beautiful to look straight at, but then the moment passes. She smiles faintly and slows into excruciating ecstasy, until the only movement is me throbbing inside her with every heartbeat, my ribcage pulsing against hers. We press together so tightly that emotions pass through our skin. I’m drowning in the deep irresistible undertow of her, pulled inexorably out of my body and into hers.

Panting, I roll off Nooshin and flop on my back. “Can we…get some…sleep now?”

“Let me reload the scanner first.” She plucks off the condom for me and wads it up in a kleenex. The bed rocks, then her footsteps pad into the bedroom-slash-office — with a brief pause to dump the wad in the bathroom wastebasket. “Guess how far I am.”

“How far…what?” I say around a satisfied yawn.

“Guess how far I am!”

“I’m too fucking exhausted. You guess for me.”

“Okay, fine. Be a poop.” Familiar sounds drift through the claustrophobic house, echoing off the cinderblock walls — paper rustling, clicks from a laptop keyboard, the scanner thunking into action again. “I’m on box 37 of 41.”

Something like adrenaline surges through me. “No shit?”

“Only 4 boxes left.” Nooshin returns to her side of my queen-sized bed. “It goes pretty fast when I keep reloading the scanner and just let it run like this.” Her profile is pleased, looking in the direction of the rhythmic thunking.

I’m propped up on an elbow now. “You’re going about twice as fast as I expected,” I say in wonderment. “That means I need to hurry up on the index. And start worrying about the rest of the archive.”

“The tax records in the family’s hometown?”

“Yeah. Chirbampo. We’ll have to drive down there and scan the documents on-site. Juan already made a call to the family to let them know we’d be coming sometime soon.” A grin is spreading across my face. Juan Angel Santelana is my friend the Budweiser distributor. I can’t wait to finish preserving the Korea Textile maquiladora archive and name it after him.

Nooshin pulls the sheets up to her navel, belatedly covering the fuzzy juncture of her thighs. She’s more self-conscious about her top than her bottom. A forearm lies across her face, blocking out the creeping daylight. “Good night, Nick.”

The caramel sphinx-girl lying next to me doesn’t seem real. This doesn’t seem real. Three months ago life was a joyless grind — between Koreatown and UCLA, through academia’s flaming hoops of bullshit, into Phoebe’s torpedo-titted ennui. Now life seems like it could turn in an infinite number of directions at once, all of them thrilling with Nooshin beside me. That’s the upside. The downside is that I’m afraid of love and trust and partnering for a damn good reason, and the happiness can’t last indefinitely, and when it ends this girl will leave me with all the pieces of my heart in my hands.

If I had a peso for every time I hear Nick’s grimly cheerful motto — “Only in Mexico, man!” — my empty purse wouldn’t be so empty. It’s a constant refrain as the insanities pile up across the Mexican borderland. The discovery of a drug-flinging cross-border catapult in Mexicali. The rash of high-profile kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez, including the abduction of an entire troupe of jugglers from Michoacan. The revelation that the imprisoned head of the Tijuana drug cartel, Benjamin Arellano, was living like a king in the most-maximum security prison in Mexico, enjoying a steady stream of prostitutes and tequila and caviar. Last week jailed narcotraficantes in the Matamoros prison expressed their displeasure with the government by killing six guards and dumping their bodies outside the front gate, only to be attacked by the Mexican Navy 1,000 miles from any ocean because the cartels forgot to bribe them. A few days ago the Mexican Army declared martial law in Nuevo Laredo because the local police had simply disappeared, melting away like spilled ice on the kitchen floor.

But even Nick admits it’s getting bad when the US State Department warns American citizens to beware of northern Mexico. Suddenly the American ambassador is all over the local airwaves, solemnly blathering on the Tijuana stations in Spanish I can almost but not quite follow. When I flip to the San Diego stations he’s curdling blood with soundbites like “escalating violence” and “increasing numbers of murdered and kidnapped Americans in recent months.”

Nasrin intensely hates my Tijuana life, mostly because it means I’m with Nick instead of my husband. My safety is last on her list of worries, after our family’s honor and all the shame I’m causing them and whether they can repay my mahr to Saman’s family. If I died all my family’s problems would be solved. No wonder Nasrin argues with me in a triumphant tone of voice, convinced I’m living in a lawless drug-fueled war zone and putting myself in horrible danger.

And maybe I am. I can never figure out where the hype ends and the reality begins, you know? La Frontera doesn’t have enough pages to cover all the killings here, bodies that turn up in the desert dawn and sticking out of maquiladora machinery and stuffed into alley dumpsters on Avenida Revolucion and floating face-down in the beach surf. Talking heads on TV Azteca and Canal Once do voiceovers to footage of mercenary shootouts between the Tijuana city cops and Baja California Norte state police and the federales. Their San Diego counterparts report a “crime wave” against American tourists who cross the border to visit warm welcoming Tijuana and wind up getting robbed or raped or kidnapped instead.

But I haven’t experienced anything like that here. These dusty crumbling blocks are full of families doing what families everywhere do — disappearing to jobs and schools and reappearing again, drinking beer on the porch and fixing vehicles in the driveway and playing in the street, sometimes arguing loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. I’ve never felt anything but safe amidst the tourist eye-candy of Avenida Revolucion, or strolling through the glassy skyscrapers and shopping arcades of Zona Rio downtown, or even touring the grim half-dead slums that surround the maquiladora zones. The cops we’ve encountered don’t seem like bloodthirsty killers for hire, just ill-fitting uniforms filled with mexicanos who are always too fat or too thin. They almost seem embarrassed by their own fabricated bluster about this law we broke or that law we broke, and half the time Nick talks our way out of trouble without ever reaching for his wallet.

Okay, I admit it — I got a little scared when those local gang-bangers checked out the two mysterious Americans who’d moved into the neighborhood. Maybe that visit could’ve ended in a hail of gunfire and I would’ve died without ever becoming more than Nick’s buddy. But he made smalltalk about his doctoral research and gave them beers and we haven’t seen them since.

Nasrin fills my ears with words like “stupid” and “foolish” and worse, and maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m all of those things and I’m going to wind up in a ditch and how I got there will make people shake their heads. But if that happens, at least I finally lived — finally actually lived! — before I died, and maybe even loved and was loved in return.

Imagine standing on a broad elevated stage that recedes into spotlights. Imagine looking up to see a gigantic banner emblazoned with US-MEXICO BORDER SYMPOSIUM and sponsor logos — San Diego State University, the United States-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, Institute of the Americas, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Imagine being the focal point of 200 yawning people and several TV cameras for C-SPAN. Now imagine the huge projection screen behind you refusing to display anything but a cable feed called NO SIGNAL, no matter how desperately you try to get it to acknowledge your laptop’s Powerpoint presentation. And now imagine the confusion and then panicky disbelief and finally utter Hulk-smash rage that –

“You want that button,” a SDSU tech whispers in my ear, pointing at the row of nondescript buttons embedded in the podium. I stab it so hard I almost break my finger. The laptop’s presentation suddenly materializes on the screen.

“60 seconds,” the moderator warns, hearing something in his earpiece. He’s a dead white male in corporate uniform — pinstripe suit, crimson power tie, shiny wingtips. Nothing sparks in his flat stare, in his arms akimbo posture. He traded his soul for a paycheck and a long, hard slog up the orgchart. My future, if I’m not careful.

I check my own appearance for the umpteenth time. Nothing I can do about my bald spot, other than hope it won’t reflect like a disco ball in this spotlighting. My hair feels like astroturf after styling with industrial-strength gel. I smooth it down anyway. Ditto for my mutton chops and soul patch. Then I brush any remaining lint off my coal-black suit, which I’ve paired with a white oxford — unbuttoned at the neck, no tie — and my Steve Madden ankle boots. A vaguely subversive look that still says “single heterosexual male academic”.

Somewhere my suitcoat is ringing. Oh yeah. My cellphone. Forgot to turn it off. But I check the number on the display first. The caller makes me sigh. “Yeah?”

“You forgot to turn your phone off,” Hercules rumbles in my ear, dour and growly. “And Nick? Don’t fuck up.” Somehow my dissertation advisor always knows the exact wrong thing to say. He’s uncanny like that.

I watch the cellphone go dark. It almost squirts out of my hand when I put it away. My palms are that sweaty. The TV cameras are pointed at the podium like rocket launchers.

“Welcome back from break, everyone,” the moderator says into his microphone. There’s a heartbeat of lag before the same words boom down from the ceiling-mounted loudspeakers. “Please take your seats. We’re going to resume. Please, everyone. Take your seats.”

The auditorium fills with scant enthusiasm. I’m distracted by the stragglers, don’t ask me why. I did four years as a teaching assistant. God knows I’ve dealt with enough tardy undergrads who couldn’t be on time if their lives depended on it. I’m even more distracted by the cellphones constantly ringing a bazillion different cutesy idiosyncratic rings. Another thing to hate about southern California. Cellphone etiquette? What cellphone etiquette?

“I’m very pleased to introduce our next speaker, Nick Roberts of the University of California, Los Angeles. Nick is a doctoral candidate in Latin American Studies. His dissertation research focuses on the economic trajectory of small family-owned maquiladoras in Tijuana. Nick’s dissertation advisor is none other than the legendary Hercules — Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez of UCLA, who was a leader of the Brown Panther movement in the Sixties before becoming a world-renowned academic.” The moderator pivots toward me and throws out an arm. “Nick, take it away.”

“Thank you, Roy.” I nod at the dead white male, then turn to face the audience. And the C-SPAN cameras with their blinking indicator lights. Shit. I’m on the air. “Uh… Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. And thanks to San Diego State and all the sponsors — ” Here I point at the logo-emblazoned banner overhead. ” — for making this important event possible.”

In my peripheral vision I can see the moderator nodding vigorously. He even claps, a solitary set of echoes drifting across the auditorium. If there was a sponsor on stage, he’d probably drop to his knees and give them a blowjob.

“When you think of a maquiladora, what’s the first image that comes to mind? I bet it’s the stereotype — a giant manufactory for a multinational corporation that leverages cheap Mexican labor.” I tap the laptop’s keyboard and a stereotypical maquiladora appears on the projection screen. The prefab concrete building is ginormous. A quartet of smokestacks barf into the sky. Workers swarm in and out like ants.

Then I click to a picture of Korea Textile, abandoned and clinging to a Tijuana hillside. “In reality, most maquiladoras are small, family-owned, and pay higher labor costs than found in the rest of Mexico.” I pause to let that revelation sink in. “Why do Mexican families think they can compete with multinational corporations? How can they afford equipment and modernization and other capital-intensive investments? How do they manage their labor issues when workers are often relatives? What is their survival strategy in the 21st century? That’s what we’ll explore during the next 15 minutes.”

Whew. I made it past the introduction. If I was going to fuck up, I was going to fuck up at the beginning, before I overcame my TV jitters. Now I can put my mouth on autopilot. I’ve memorized this presentation word for word, slide for slide. 15 minutes of blah blah fucking blah. My simple rule for these kind of high-profile performances — memorize everything, risk nothing.

Before I know it, my 15 minutes of fame are over. My mouth has run out of blather, the huge projection screen has reached my final slide. The moderator trots into the podium’s spotlight. “Nick, what a great presentation. Thanks for that fascinating insight into small family-owned maquiladoras. I for one can’t wait to read your finished dissertation. Now we have 10 minutes for questions and answers. Does anyone in the audience have a question for Nick?”

Forget the spontaneity of an audience member just opening their mouth and asking a question, and me just answering it. All questions need to be broadcast over the loudspeakers. That means people have to raise their hands, and wait for an intern with a cordless microphone to scamper down the aisle, and finally ask their questions. I’m not the only one frustrated by the delays. People sitting in the middle of rows get mikes tossed at them. Anything to speed up the mike-passing bucket brigade.

The questions run the gamut:

An American corporate type asks why we should care if small family-owned maquiladoras go extinct. Isn’t it just the dynamic process of job creation and destruction?

I feel my jaw clench. “Why should the rest of us care if your corporation goes belly-up and you lose your job and your family winds up on the street? Same difference.”

A labor activist wants to know if small family-owned maquiladoras are better environments for workers. A small size implies more contact and relationship-building between management and workers. And family ownership implies the possibility of benevolent paternalism, especially if family members and relatives constitute the workforce. Right?

“I can tell you’ve never worked in a small family-owned enterprise,” is my bitter comeback. “Conditions are usually worse. Like a friend reminded me the other day, there’s a reason why small and petty are synonyms — even in Spanish. And the family is the most exploitative labor regime that’s ever been invented.” As both Nooshin and I can attest.

A Los Angeles Times reporter wonders if the collapse of small family-owned maquiladoras has caused more illegal immigration to southern California. Could the tide of illegal immigrants be attributable to the failure of this maquiladora sector?

“Partly attributable, sure. But the problem is proving it,” I say, mindful of all my door-knocking in search of former Korea Textile workers. “There’s no effective tracking mechanism, no data sets to analyze. These workers, they just…disappear.”

A Mexican bureaucrat asks how his government can support micro-maquiladoras. Tax breaks? Subsidies for capital investment? Better integration into NAFTA regulatory bodies?

I can’t remember my answer. I just remember that term — micro-maquiladoras Now that’s sexy! Way better than “small family-owned maquiladoras”. I file it away for future appropriation. Like great artists, we great academics steal.

Then the questions dry up. The audience is whispering to each other, playing with their cellphones, even typing away on their laptops. One dude is falling asleep in his seat, nodding off and startling awake, again and again. The four mike-wielding interns slump in their folding chairs. I glance over at the moderator, begging for an intervention. He listens to his earpiece, smiling beatifically. We’re going the distance of my Q&A time allotment, every fucking minute of it.

When the break finally arrives I’m ready to kneel down and kiss the podium. I survived! Except I haven’t yet. I find myself trapped off-stage, mobbed by questioners who for some inexplicable reason didn’t ask their questions during the Q&A that dragged on like an excruciatingly bad date. I volley answers back at them, sidling toward an auditorium exit and the cool sunshine outside.

The last questioner trails me outside. His footsteps follow mine toward a bench. I can hear the noises of nicotine addiction — the rasp of cellophane, a lighter click, coughing. “Nice job, champ. I’m sure you made Hercules proud.”

I’d recognize that voice anywhere, that use of generic nicknames. “Frankie!” I whirl in minor panic. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The thirtysomething professor contemplates me through a puff of cigarette smoke. He’s rico suave in a cashmere blazer, silk dress shirt, and pleated wool pants. His youthful glamor is accentuated by slicked-back hair that curls against his neck. Frankie wears a name badge that says PRESENTER — which he was, until Hercules cut him out and cut me in. “Hercules went too far this time. That’s what I’m doing here. Now everyone will know what an asshole he is.”

The official reason for my last-second substitution — Frankie was sick. Hercules never thought his neocon arch-rival would disprove it by showing his pudgy face at the symposium. Never in a million years.

I collapse onto the bench, my laptop bag heavy in my lap. “All this over a colonial Caribbeanist.”

“All this over the balance of power in the program,” Frankie corrects, taking another drag on his Marlboro. “If the new hire sides with me, the rest of the program will too.”

“Why do you have to challenge Hercules? Why can’t you just bide your time until he retires or dies? It can’t be long now. You’ll be the departmental jefe after him, guaranteed.”

He sits down next to me, our knees knocking. “Hercules had a good run. A 25 year run. But he’s a fossil now. Who the hell buys into his victimology of race and gender and class anymore? We’re past that as a society. Look who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination — a black man and a white woman.”

“It’s still a bunch of rich white males on the Republican side,” I point out.

“That’s why a Democrat will win the White House. I hate to admit this because they’re my party, but the Republicans are still living in the Reagan era. Just like Hercules is still living in the Vietnam era.” Frankie drops his cigarette and stomps it out. The butt is immediately lost in the other stomped-out cigarettes surrounding the bench. Apparently this is a popular smoking spot. “You know what people say about the program? We’re fucking irrelevant. Nobody good wants to study Latin America from a marxisant ideological perspective. That’s why all the best minds are going into Economics and Business and Statistics.”

Truth is, I agree with Frankie. The program is a joke, and Hercules is its maestro jokester. But my agenda isn’t to change this petty fucked-up corner of the world. My agenda is to get a Ph.D. as fast and cheaply as possible. That’s why I need Hercules’ ongoing support. Say what you will about the old reptile, but he always delivers.

“What are you thinking?” Frankie asks.

“At least Hercules knows my name. That’s what I’m thinking.”

“I know your name, Nick. See? Nick Roberts. I know. Although names aren’t my strong suit. I admit that.” His look is unabashed, even hostile. “Did you even put up a fight when Hercules sprang this on you?”

“Yeah. I tried to turn him down. Believe it or not, dude. But he threatened me with a loss of funding.”

“You think that’s a threat? I could end your career with a complaint to the Office of Academic Conduct. What’s to stop me from spoiling your little lovenest in Tijuana?”

“Nothing, I suppose. Nothing except…”

“Except what?”

“Except then the archive doesn’t get digitized. It might as well be lost to history, just as certainly as if it burned.”

That’s worth an elbowing laugh from Frankie. “You assume I give a damn about a small maquiladora archive in the possession of a Budweiser distributor.”

“Beats not giving a damn.”

“That’s not much of an insurance policy, sport. What’s your backup plan?”

“You,” I say after a pause.

“Me.” He goes menacingly cold. “This isn’t some reality TV show where you run around stabbing people in the back.”

“No shit. But if you want to take Hercules down, you’ll need my help. I’ve got more dirt on him than all your colleagues combined.” The side benefit of being Hercules’ spy. I always glean more than he intends. Maybe I’m even ready to play connect-the-dots to an embarrassing scandal.

Frankie stands up abruptly. He cuffs me on the back of the head — pretty motherfucking hard. “She doesn’t want to meet me. Not when I’m in a mood like this.” His figure recedes into my peripheral vision, returning to the auditorium.

The “she” is Nooshin, loping around a bike rack toward me. Her face is animated with concern and maybe even a little pride. “Nick…” she starts to say, hovering next to the bench, her bare legs shifting nervously under her sundress.

“Do me a favor. Don’t watch C-SPAN anytime soon, okay?” I mutter.

“We don’t get C-SPAN anyway.” She smiles brighter than a bank of spotlights and folds herself onto the bench next to me, patting my knee once.

That’s the only thing I want to remember about my first time on TV. The comfortable silence of Nooshin sitting next to me, almost-but-not-quite touching, twin shadows cast across the concrete and cigarette butts. Because remembering the other details will just make me insane — Hercules and his machinations, the excruciating Q&A, Frankie’s hostility.

I’m digitizing an archive. How cool and unique is that? An experience that only a few people will ever have. The kind I couldn’t even imagine when I was just a wife whose dreams stopped at the kitchen stove, piles of laundry, the dirty toilet bowl. It gets even better when I say it in Spanish — “Yo estoy convertir un archivo a digital.” Mexicans light up and thank me for preserving their patria, whatever that means. I need to remember to ask Nick for a translation. Anyway, for the first time in my life I’m remarkable to strangers in a good way, not because of my ungainly height and board-flat chest and crooked wandering eye. I’m a research assistant who’s digitizing an archive.

I just wish it wasn’t so boring. All I do is load a stack of yellowing pages into the scanner’s sheet feeder, press the SCAN button, and listen for the hissssssssss KA-CHUNK of another page scanned, another page loaded. Wash, rinse, repeat. I almost welcome paper jams and the occasional need to burn data to a DVD-ROM. Anything for a break from the monotony.

The best is whenever Nick calls to check in. His voice passes through me like an electric current. He updates me on the interviews he’s taping into an oral history of the Korea Textile maquiladora. He describes the view from his truck, so vividly that I feel like I’m seeing with his eyes. He talks lazily of kids with smiling faces and pickpocketing fingers, powerlines that sag with illegal hookups, vehicular near-disasters. “Only in Mexico, man!” he keeps laughing.

But this time it isn’t Nick ringing my cellphone. The number on the caller ID makes my heart stop. It’s a number that was mine until five years ago. The number I never gave to boys, since I wasn’t allowed to date. My parents’ number in East Los Angeles. “He–hello?” I manage to stammer.

“Nooshin. My daughter. I’ve missed you so.” Dad’s voice, as washed-out as the ghost he’s become. I haven’t spoken to him since the failed negotiations between our family and my in-laws, since Saman broke my nose and tried to kidnap me back to Kansas City. Maybe that’s why he chooses our mother tongue, speaking to me in Farsi. “Remember when I said that if Saman didn’t change his ways, he would prove he isn’t a faithful Muslim and you could divorce him?”

“I remember,” I say warily.

“That time has come. Not every marriage can last, as even God recognizes. Especially not when the husband abuses the wife.” His pause is full of remorse. “But this isn’t the way to end it. Come home and live under our roof. Before the scandal gets any worse.”

“What scandal? How I’m independent and living on my own?”

“You’re not independent and you’re not living on your own. That’s the scandal I’m talking about.” Dad sharpens with irritation. “You’re writing our good name in shit. And your reputation, too. How do you expect to remarry?”

“Remarry.” I blink at the documents materializing on the laptop’s screen. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I’m being serious. Making sure you’re married is part of my responsibility as a father. Marriage is the destiny of any godly woman, just as it’s the destiny of any godly man. And I can’t ensure your remarriage prospects unless you come home and live under our roof.”

“You already had your chance.”

“What do you mean?”

My anger can only be expressed in English. “You bought and sold me, Dad. My whole future for a $35,000 mahr. I’ll never forgive you for that!”

“You’ll address your father with proper respect!” he booms, and I hear him creak in his recliner. “Listen to me, Nooshin. You don’t understand the burdens of being responsible for the family. Your aunt Kohinoor had more medical bills than she could ever pay, and your sister needed to move into a new house — ”

“And Saman needed entry into America and a green card. It worked out for everyone except me!”

Suddenly my rage becomes an impossibly heavy thing in my head, blotting out thought, and I keel over. But there’s no danger in it, hardly any open floorspace to hit. I bounce into stillness on the queen-sized bed that doubles as a couch. My cellphone lays open in close proximity to a lingering wet spot from this morning. A minuscule voice is bleeding from the speaker. I prefer my father this way, shrunken into a harmless tinny noise.

Eventually he bellows loud enough to hear. “Nooshin! I said answer me!”

I scoop up the phone. “What?”

“I made the best match for you and the family that I could.” There’s a grasping tone to the words, as if my father is trying to hang onto his self-conviction. “You had a good marriage. Saman, he was a good husband.”

“He beat me up. And tried to kidnap me back to Kansas City,” I say with odd detachment. That happened to a long-ago Nooshin, the girl who inhabits the first of my photo albums.

“Saman wasn’t like that when he married you. America, it changed him. This country changes all of us.”

For a while there are only more recliner noises. He’s trying to find a comfortable position. I can picture him from childhood memories, a taciturn balding spindle of a man. He roiled in the Laz-E-Boy between the two jobs he worked, watching TV with eyes that seemed shut from the inside. Grandfather worried that his soul had gotten lost on the journey from Iran.

“This country has stolen you from me,” my father finally mumbles. “Even when you were little, I could see it happening.”

I can understand his words. Or the sentiment behind them, at least. Over the years it’s become a refrain where my family is concerned. But underneath is something that’s always been there, something I sense rather than understand. The sad chasm between us grew from it.

“But it’s not too late. The Qu’ran promises that it’s never too late. You can come back to me. To all of us,” he continues. “All you need to do is come home and live under our roof. Your mother and I are waiting for you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Listen to me. You’re living in mortal sin. You fornicate while still married — and with an infidel! This isn’t just a scandal against our family, this is a scandal against our religion. You’re choosing to offend God and every one of his 99 names!”

“I’m choosing to be me.” I test the dampness of the lingering wet spot with a fingertip. “I want you to know that I’m happy now. With Nick, here in Mexico.”

My father’s silence is stony.

I poke at him with my happiness, trying to provoke a reaction. “I’m working as his research assistant, digitizing an archive. We live in this tiny house by the border fence that I fixed up for us. A casita you call it in Spanish. He takes me all over Tijuana. There’s so much to see and experience here — ”

“Jendeh dagoori! Jendeh dagoori a koss-paareh!”

The epithet hits me worse than Saman’s fist to my face. My father just called me a cheap whore. A cheap whore with a torn pussy. Reeling, I listen to a torrent of vulgarities, the blistering condemnation of a stranger. Because my own father wouldn’t call me those things. He loves me, he’s always loved me, even if I speak crappy Farsi and crave my own paycheck and would rather visit Mexico than Iran. When I finally snap the cellphone shut, there’s another wet spot on the bed, caused by tears soaking into the mattress.

From this vantage point, the Universidad Iberoamericana doesn’t look much different than any university in southern California. I’m relaxing on a third-floor balcony that overhangs the campus plaza. Low sand-colored buildings recede in a jagged parallel line, flanking the cement walk that constitutes the heart of campus. Splashes of emerald green dot the view, a landscaping of cacti and flannelbush and iceplant — which is classified as an invasive species north of the border, just like other Mexican immigrants. The only movement is an untidy procession of undergrads who attended daily mass on campus. They clot back toward the dorms, some of them busty chicas in low-cut blouses. If only I was two floors lower.

My cellphone vibrates, teasingly close to my crotch. I fumble it out of my front pocket. “Yeah?”

“Where are you?” Nooshin’s voice, coming from somewhere inside the same building. The Biblioteca Loyola — Loyola Library — is plenty large enough to lose yourself in, let alone another person. “I’m on the second floor, where I saw you last, but now I can’t find you!”

“I went up on the third floor. I’m out on the observation balcony. Find the curving stairwell up and hang a left. Did you get your library card?”

‘I wish,” she sighs. “The girl at the counter said I can’t get one because I only have a tourist visa.”

That makes me laugh. Nooshin is still too innocent to realize when she’s being asked for a bribe. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you get one.”

“Okay, you stay there. I’m coming up.”

I snap my cellphone shut and return to the view. The Universidad Iberoamericana is located in Playas de Tijuana — literally Beaches of Tijuana — a posh suburb of subdivisions and condo developments. They sprawl across the scrub-covered hills and down to the sandy lip of the Pacific. It’s a nice hangout if you can afford it. I can’t, since I’m a starving graduate student. I live miles inland, just like the rest of Tijuana.

My cellphone is vibrating again. “Lost much?” I answer.

“Mr. Roberts?” The gravelly voice of my dissertation advisor is confused. “Is that you, Mr. Roberts?”

“Professor! Sorry, I didn’t realize it was you calling.”

Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez is impatient as always. No social niceties, just a dismissive grunted hello. “Are you in Tijuana?”

“Uh — what? Yeah, I’m in Tijuana. At the Biblioteca Loyola.” The Loyola Library is the first public library in Tijuana that grants full access to the public. Grasp that contradiction and you’ll understand Mexico. “How are you? How are Eugenia and the kids?”

“They’re watching a DVD inside.” So Hercules is puttering around in his garage, enjoying some quiet time. Good for him. “Mr. Roberts, I need a favor.”

My eyebrows climb into my Kangol hat. In the four years I’ve known the old reptile, he’s never asked me for a favor. Quid pro quos, sure. Dirt on other graduate students, plenty of times. But never a no-strings-attached favor. “A favor?” I echo warily.

“That’s right. You’re aware of the US-Mexico Border Symposium?”

“The big NAFTA conference that starts tomorrow at San Diego State? Yeah, I’m aware of it.”

Hercules takes a raspy breath. “Then you knew that Professor Chavez is presenting.”

“Frankie? Of course I know that Frankie is presenting.” I slide a palm under my hat and start polishing my bald spot. Something is wrong here. A big something, if I’m feeling the vibe right. “I plan to be there for his presentation. Sitting in the front row, even. If that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly…what?”

He clears his throat momentously. “I want you to take his place.”

“What are you talking about, Professor? Did something happen to Frankie? Can’t he make it?”

“I’m responsible for picking a representative from our department. It’s a little last-minute, but I’ve decided to take the privilege from him and give it to you.”

Hairs stand up on my neck. Hercules has a mean streak as big as his name, but this is fucking insane. Taking a presentation opportunity away from another professor and giving it to a mere grad student — and with almost zilch warning? Godfuckingdamn. What could Frankie possibly have done to deserve this? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless…

The world slows into crystalline clarity as I remember my last conversation with Frankie. The dean gave us approval to add a colonial Caribbeanist.

“Frankie wants to hire some kind of neocon to be the new Caribbeanist, doesn’t he?” Just saying it out loud, I become convinced that’s the angle. The youthful and rightist archrival of Hercules is machinating for a political ally in the department. “You need to show him who still runs the program. You need to freeze him out. Is that it?”

“Remember who you’re talking to!” Hercules thunders. For a while there’s only the hiss of static. I know he’s waiting for me to apologize, and knowing it just makes me more obdurate. Finally he groans in surrender. “A presentation to the US-Mexico Border Symposium will look great on your curriculum vitae. You can even claim a television credit. C-SPAN is recording the event.”

I sag over the balcony railing in misery. “You’re asking me to screw Frankie, dude.”

“My name isn’t dude. And Frankie isn’t your dissertation advisor. Frankie didn’t get the supplemental research grant and hire you with it. Frankie couldn’t even stop the rest of Javier’s funding from going to Maria, instead of you.” The words are heavy with menace. Hercules giveth, Hercules taketh away.

“Assuming I do this, what the hell am I supposed to present?”

“That’s your problem, not mine.”

“Fucking fuck,” I sigh.

“Will you or won’t you? I need an answer.”

Somehow I find the balls to say, “I’ll think about it. Talk to you later.” It’s just posturing, really. I already know that I’ll screw Frankie. My bread is buttered on the Hercules side, and all three of us know it. But I don’t want to act like a pushover. Neither Hercules nor Frankie would respect me if I did.

By the time Nooshin arrives I’m draped over the railing at an even more dangerous angle. She bursts into motion and grabs my t-shirt, yanking me backwards. “Don’t scare me like that!” she gasps, maneuvering me against the cool stucco next to the balcony door. Her kiss ends with a brief glance down at the plaza and its procession of good Catholic students. “What were you doing, silly? Trying to look down some girl’s shirt?”

I feign a blush and make embarrassed noises, letting her think I was ogling boobs. If only life was that simple. Then I grab her bony elbow and pull her back into the Biblioteca Loyola, leading the way down several flights of stairs to the library card counter, where I’ve already resolved to give Nooshin a lesson in how a little bribery goes a long way in Mexico. Just as it does in my little fucked-up corner of UCLA.