The Mexican Year

This part of Zona Rio, the downtown commercial district, is like a sprawling outdoor department store. Merchandise overflows from shops onto the sidewalk, which is an obstacle course of folding tables and portable racks and boxes stacked up. Pedestrians dawdle along in the fading afternoon, browsing for bargains, forcing Nick and I to detour into the street around them. Then he spots a shoe store, a hip girlie one that advertises on billboards all over Tijuana, and drags me over to its massive facade.

I try to explain that I’m not into shoes the way most girls are. I’m almost six feet tall, which translates into big feet. Big hard-to-fit feet. And since most women’s shoes are designed to add inches to my height, the only thing harder than finding shoes in my size is finding shoes that don’t make me even freakishly taller.

Like that stops Nick from plunging into the racks flanking the store’s entrance. “Those!” he grins. “You gotta try a pair of those on.”

I follow his pointing arm to a pair of cute strappy sandals with a wedge heel. An intimidatingly steep wedge heel. “I don’t know…”

He’s already waving over a salesgirl and speaking to her in Spanish. I expect her to laugh out loud when she hears my shoe size, but instead she promptly disappears into the store. A minute later she’s back with the sandals — and in the right size.

The salesgirl produces a little stool for me. I sit down and kick off one of my flip-flops. The strappy sandal makes my foot arch in an unfamiliar way, turning my calf muscle into a diamond. I find myself liking the effect. I turn my leg from side to side, inspecting the sandal from different angles. Omigod. Waaaaay too sexy for me. “Well, what do you think?”

No answer from Nick.

I glance up and find him standing over me with arms folded. Except his icy blue eyes aren’t inspecting my extended foot and the sandal on it. They’re staring down my sundress.

The flat-chested girl’s dilemma — wear any kind of loose collar and tilt forward a little and you flash the whole world without even trying. Worse, I’m not wearing a bra. He can see everything, and now he knows there’s nothing to see.

I smile up at him miserably.

His eyes shift to meet mine. Nothing shows in the handsome angles of his face. No embarrassment, but no interest either. Then he looks away, his jaw a clenched semicircle from below.

Afterward we’re trapped in a bubble of silence, navigating the crowded sidewalks with only glances to join us. I know we’re headed in the general direction of a coffeehouse that Nick wants to visit, a tucked-away place that’s supposed to be a local hangout for countercultural angsty types. Lots of Mexican goths drinking cheap coffee and smoking clove cigarettes, photos and paintings on the walls, poetry slams every Saturday night. And no tourists, which is maybe the most important thing to him.

Below an overhanging sign that says El Astillero — the coffeehouse is named The Shipyard for some reason — we find an open stairwell with crumbling concrete steps leading up to a hallway. All sorts of things are pushed to the sides, like a wire bench and empty plastic barrels and a pile of small framed velvet paintings stacked almost to the skylight. Halfway down the hallway is a door hanging open with coffee aromas drifting out.

The coffeehouse turns out to be a big plain room with a counter and storage cabinets in one corner and a low empty stage in another. A few exposed I-beams rise to the ceiling. The walls are yellowing sheetrock and dotted with holes the size of fists. Xeroxed concert ads are the predominant decoration, layered so thickly they become wallpaper in spots. Percussive techno is leaking from speakers on tripod stands. Only a few patrons are hanging out, mostly students in backpacks. Their faces turn our direction, then turn back.

“You grab a seat,” Nick tells me. “I’ll get us drinks. What do you want?”

“Something cold. A Diet Coke, how about?” I pick my way across the room, which is haphazardly strewn with lounge furniture — low puffy couches that leak stuffing, ottomans with coffee-stained upholstery, beanbag chairs and pillows on the floor. I find a table by a potted philodendron tied upright to a broomhandle.

Nick is leaning against the counter, making smalltalk with the barista. I feel a pang of jealousy when she moves out from behind a glass bowl of biscotti and into my line of sight. She’s one of those elfin beauties, with a dyed-blond pageboy and tattoos snaking up and down her arms. She flirts with him shamelessly. Her long fake eyelashes keep batting, and she’s smiling all slutty at him a lot, and I basically want to throw up.

He returns with a sweating bottle of Diet Coke in each hand and a pleased look on his face. I watch as he settles himself, glancing back at the counter. The barista is hanging there, her intent gaze aimed in our direction but only at him. I might as well be invisible.

“You should go out with her,” I manage to croak.

Nick’s pleased look vanishes. “Say what?”

“Or maybe that woman who owns the travel agency in the stripmall. Every time we’re there she manages to bump into you.” I hold my hands out in front of my chest, making the universal gesture for cleavage. “You know, the woman with the really big — ”

“Just knock it off, wouldya?”

“You should,” I persist. “One of us should have a love life.”

His eyes are becoming more arctic by the minute. “If I wanted to go out with some chick, I would. But I don’t. I’m here with you.”

I twist open my Diet Coke and sip morosely from the bottle. “I feel like I just make you miserable.”

“You don’t make me miserable. Seriously. You don’t.”

“Oh yeah? How come do you always seem miserable around me, then?”

There’s a long dragging pause. Nick’s gaze darts around the coffee shop like a trapped thing. Underneath the table I hear his always-pistoning knee stop. “It’s not you, Nooshin. It’s the situation.”

“The situation? What situation?” I feel panic squeeze my ribcage. I didn’t even know we had a situation!

“This situation. Acting all professional towards you. I’m not supposed to get involved with anyone who works for me, you know.” He waves his unopened Diet Coke back and forth between us, indicating closeness and distance at the same time. “I thought I could deal with it, but it’s just making me fucking insane.”

I feel my eyelids fluttering in confusion. “Wait a sec. Are you saying you’re, you’re…” I’m trying to understand his words, which confound me with hope. “Are you attracted to me? Like, physically?”

Nick fixes me with an incredulous look. “You can’t tell?”

Fireworks are exploding in my heart. “Well, I knew you liked me, like my personality and stuff…but I didn’t think you were attracted to me physically!” Then all my emotions thud inside me. I peer across the table at him, darkly suspicious. “How can you be attracted to me physically?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he snarls, slamming his bottle into the table in frustration. “You know how much I hate that? The way you don’t even know how beautiful you are?” Underneath the table his knee starts pistoning again. “You should know how beautiful you are. Saman, he should’ve told you how beautiful you are. Your parents. Somebody. You should know. It’s just so…wrong…that you don’t know.”

And that’s when I burst into tears. But the happy kind this time. The kind of tears you cry when your body just can’t hold all your emotions anymore, all your joy.

Students around us are staring, including the barista behind her espresso machine. Her carnivorous gaze suggests that she’s reading our exchange all wrong, assuming Nick is breaking up with me. He pushes a napkin across the table. “Shhhh…”

I wipe at my cheeks desperately, trying not to make a scene. He doesn’t like women who make scenes. “I know how to resolve this situation. I quit. I’m not going to be your research assistant anymore.”

“Nah. You don’t have to — ”

“I don’t want you to have to be professional with me anymore. I just want you to be…” My voice trails off. I don’t know what I want him to be. All over me, I guess.

“Forget it. You’re not quitting.” Nick’s chair screeches as he pushes back from the table and stands up. “Come on, Nooshball. Let’s get outta here.”

I trail after him in horrible confusion. I’m not quitting? But then that means nothing is different. No, it’s even worse than that. It’s knowing things could be different but aren’t! How can he still want it this way after everything he just said?!? It’s like our conversation never even happened, like I just dreamed all the words, and everything I’m feeling –

Outside in the hallway he reaches over and touches my bare upper arm. I feel his fingers slide around the bicep, his grip tighten. He pulls me closer as we walk toward the bright rectangle of the stairwell and the glimpse of street below.

“Nick…” I almost sob.

Then he literally slams me into the wall, hard enough to make me gasp. I’m pinned against the flaking paint with his weight and mouth. Our kiss is violent with passion. I throw my arms around his broad shoulders, clawing tighter into his embrace. My veins are filled with burning gasoline, and I’m grinding my hips against him in wanton need, and I can’t breathe and I can’t think and I can’t stop, omigod I just –

Nick breaks away as suddenly as he moved in. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since I met you.” Then he spins on a heel and resumes striding toward the stairwell. Just like that. “And you’re not quitting!” he calls over his shoulder.

“Okay,” I say happily. It comes out like two words — oh…kay — because my chest is heaving. I stumble down the stairs in a total fog, delirious, absent-minded, trailing him across the street and almost getting run over.

Whoever started to build this tortilleria ran out of money to finish it. From a distance it looks like a lean-to. Just three cinderblock walls and an unsecured tarpaper roof that’s sliding off. The entrance is the missing wall, leading into a small dirt floor covered with the tools of the tortilla-making trade — bags of masa, hand-cranked tortilla former, black-iron griddle heated with a fire of plywood scraps, plastic jugs of water, and a supply of brown paper for bundling up the tortillas. Everything is portable and toted away after hours. This is a neighborhood where anything of value is never let out of the owner’s sight. Even cars are chained to poles at night.

Sitting on an overturned bucket is a Mixtec woman who looks old enough to recall the Spanish conquest. She chews tobacco like cud while selling me a bag of tortillas. Her seamed face doesn’t betray any surprise, not even a flicker of curiosity. Maybe all her customers are sunburned gringos who drive up in trucks with Iowa plates.

I wander back into the afternoon sunshine. A Tijuana transit bus — just an old converted schoolbus, probably a hand-me-down from the San Diego County United School District — is barreling down the hillside, kicking up a cyclone of dust and scattering feral dogs. Its hurtling shape misses my parked Ford, which is all I care about. I climb into the truck and try calling Nooshin again. Three rings later, I get to leave another brief voicemail. Heya, howzitgoin, adios. Maybe she’s finally catching up on all that sleep she wasn’t getting.

Unlike her, Professor Francisco Chavez is answering his phone. “Happy New Year, champ,” he says with a smoker’s coughing punctuation. “I was wondering when I’d hear from the department celebrity. Nick Roberts, now spending a supplemental research grant. How does it feel?”

The Explorer’s windows are down, so I lower my voice. “It feels like an extra $16,000 bucks.”

“It should feel like a million, given the exchange rate down there,” Frankie grumbles. “I suppose you’re wondering how the new semester is going?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. Let’s see… The dean gave us approval to add a colonial Caribbeanist. Enrique finished another chapter of his dissertation over the holidays. Marta got an article accepted by Andean Review.” There’s a significant pause. “And I’m presenting at the US-Mexico Border Symposium.”

“That big NAFTA thing at San Diego State?”

“You know it. Feel free to drive across the border and bask in my greatness. It’s even being televised.”

That cracks me up. “Too bad you’ve got a face for radio.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go fuck yourself, pal.” Frankie laughs wistfully. “It pains me to feed your ego like this, but the program isn’t the same without you. You and Javier. We miss Javier’s intellect and we miss your bullshit.”

“The program can always find another bullshit artist like me. Replacing Javier, that’s gonna be tough.” The bag of tortillas is heating up my crotch. I grab one and toss the rest into the passenger seat. “Has Hercules said anything about my research assistant?”

“Just that you hired your girlfriend. Sorry, let me correct that — girl friend. But don’t kid yourself. Hercules knows she’s living with you.” He lets the tension build. “Do we really want to have this conversation?”

I’m letting the tension build myself. “I haven’t decided yet,” I say after a while.

A grim chuckle is filling my ear. “Listen to yourself.”

“What?”

“Okay, fine. We won’t have this conversation.”

“Frankie…” I say pointlessly.

“What are you after, my permission?” A lighter clicks, then he sucks at a fresh cigarette. “Wise up about this shit, chief. You don’t want to get sideways with UCLA’s academic code of conduct. No porking the hired help, in other words. Keep it professional.”

“But — ”

“But nothing,” Frankie cuts me off. “You don’t keep it professional, you make yourself vulnerable to anybody who wants to fuck with you. One phone call from Hercules — or me, for that matter — and you’d be in the crosshairs of every political agenda on campus. A white male coercing sex from his minority female employee, who might even be physically disabled because of her eye thing? The university could sell tickets to that disciplinary hearing.”

And that’s how the call ends, with me staring at the cellphone in dismay, a cold tortilla in my hand. Keep it professional? That’s what I’ve been doing ever since I met Nooshin on Avenida Revolucion last year. I kept it professional while she became my friend and so-called buddy, and then my research assistant, and now my roommate. I keep it professional even when my desire for her is a blowtorch burning. I’m sick to fucking death of keeping it professional. But I never forget that she’s still married, and coping with a psycho husband and dysfunctional family, and may have zilch interest in anybody who doesn’t believe in the Qu’ran. And thanks to this conversation with Frankie, I’ll never forget that I could be throwing away my spotless academic record, whatever goodwill I’ve accumulated, even my shot at a Ph.D.

I haven’t been able to sleep since I plunged into the frigid Pacific, provoking Nick to save me again. It was the culmination of our first fight. I can’t stop reliving that afternoon at the beach — the argument with Nasrin, my overwhelming frustration at Nick’s aloofness, the angry tenderness of his blanketed embrace and commands to “Never do anything like that again!” Those memories have left me with an insomnia that never goes away for long, and is always different when it comes back. A million shades of desperately awake.

Now my sleep deprivation is so bad that I’m past exhaustion and into something special, a rare state of heightened consciousness. 2 AM and all the usual sensory boundaries are just…gone. I can feel every tooth in my jaw, and hear individual helicopter blades whirling far beyond the border fence, and see through my eyelids as if I don’t even have any. At first the hypersensitivity is unspeakably cool, then unnerving when the effect doesn’t go away, and finally terrifying.

I hope to remedy my condition by paging through one of Nick’s thick tomes about academic this or that. Maybe a dose of severe boredom will help me come down, or even fall asleep. But walking out of my bedroom on bare feet that feel every molecule of the concrete floor, I discover the living room is lit with monochromatic flickers. I’m surprised to find Nick wrapped mummy-like in blankets on his bed — our couch, during daylight hours — and watching Casablanca. Dubbed. Humphrey Bogart is speaking in a laughably ultramacho voice. The sound is so intense I can almost taste it.

Nick is surprised to see me too. I probably look pretty spooky, since I’m seeing every pore in his skin. “Still can’t sleep?” he asks.

Eons lapse between the time I think of saying “yeah” and the vibration that passes up my throat and through my opening mouth.

“Same here,” he nods. The reflective pools of his eyes return to the TV screen. “I still can’t believe you just walked into the ocean like that.” His timbre is haunted.

I watch a strangely disembodied hand reach down to the hairy leg jutting out from beneath the blankets. It’s a muscle memory from my fantasies. The hand glides along the bony ridge of Nick’s shin, blazing with warmth, following it to the knob of his knee –

“Hey. Nooshin? What the hell are you doing?”

I’m in flight without understanding how or even why, my body a streaming buzz of sensations. I feel air batter my face as I move through it too quickly. Then the bedroom door is slamming behind me, a painful thunderclap, and I’m submerging beneath the sheets, trying to drown in the cloying darkness, searching for a cold unlit place where desire can’t reach.

“Are you sure this is the first call you want to make with your new cellphone?”

Nooshin glances over from the passenger seat of my truck. Her hair is dangling into an open Telcel box in her lap. Finally she has a replacement for that crappy pre-paid cellphone. Plastic shrinkwrap has been plundered, the manual already tossed aside. Her long fingers play with the new razor-phone. “I would call you, but you’re sitting right across from me.”

Following the highway signs that say PLAYAS — beaches — I manage to sigh through gritted teeth. Calling the same family that tried to send her back to Saman? She got up on the dumbass side of the bed today. “Think about it, Nooshin. If your family really wanted to talk to you, they would’ve called you on your old phone.”

“I wanted to get the black version,” she says breezily, pinning the silver clamshell to her ear. “But black in Spanish is negro, and I felt weird about buying a negro phone, so — ” She breaks off with an apologetic gesture. “Um, hey? Nasrin? It’s your sister. This is my new number in Tijuana.”

I muscle the Ford through a couple lanes of protesting traffic and into a parking lot that snakes along the side of the road. Through the dirty windshield I see a municipal beach of grayish kelp-dotted sand. A rust-red cargo ship struggles through the Pacific, glimmering with sunshine. Towering thunderheads hover like tiny artillery bursts on the horizon.

“No I haven’t talked to him. I’ll never talk to him again. He beat me up, Nasrin!” Nooshin pauses, a stricken look on her face. “What? How can you say that? You think I deserved to get my stupid nose broken?” Another pause. “That’s so not fair. You leave Nick out of this. He’s the only one who helped me!” The conversation devolves into angry back-and-forth Farsi for a while. Then she snaps the cellphone shut and bursts into tears. Immediately it begins ringing in her small fist.

Of all the things I could say at a time like this, I can only manage a fake-cheerful “We’re here!” But at least it’s better than I told you so! which is the soundtrack to this scene in my mind. The faint tang of saltwater floods the truck when I open my door.

Nooshin starts crying harder. She’s trying not to — I see her ribcage strain as she tries to choke off the sobs — but it doesn’t work.

I hang an arm from her knee, a gesture that’s supposed to be reassuring but just comes off awkward. “Come on,” I try again. “Let’s go for a walk, at least. We don’t have to stay if you don’t want.” The Explorer finally rocks with her exit as I’m retrieving our beach gear from the back.

Together we wander from the parking lot into the sand, which is grainy with shell fragments. On a weekday afternoon there are only scattered tanners reclining on beach towels. Kids are kicking off their shoes, rolling up the sleeves and pantlegs of their school uniforms. Teen soldiers in ill-fitting fatigues patrol back and forth, M-16s slung over their bony shoulders, defenders of a country you couldn’t give away.

We arrive at the ocean’s edge. A few brave swimmers bob in the cold water, curling ashore in waves that haven’t seen land since Japan. The wind flecks my lips with salt. Next to me Nooshin is a medusa of thick whirling locks.

“What’s a nadadora?” she asks the empty horizon.

“Huh?” I’m busy kicking sand into the surf.

“Those kids that just went by, I heard them call me a nadadora. Except I thought a nadadora was a swimmer. I’m not even wearing a swimsuit.” And she isn’t. Her rib-knit tanktop is riding up on her waist, revealing a slash of caramel skin puckered with her navel. Drainpipe jeans fall in long scarecrow lines. One of her Nikes is untied and trailing its shoelace.

“Nadadora is slang for skinny. Like, even skinnier than flaca.”

Nooshin twists around, watching the kids stroll down the beach. “I don’t think they were calling me skinny. Does nadadora mean anything else?” She turns back to me, her right eye jerking in accusation. “It can mean something worse than skinny, can’t it?”

Sure it can. It can also mean boobless, which is what the kids were actually laughing about. Nooshin is flatter than the pubescent girls in the group. But I’m not telling her that. “Let’s walk down the beach a ways.”

I make smalltalk to distract her, explaining that this beach extends all the way down the coast to Rosarito, 10 miles away. That’s called the “suburban” beach, and I describe it from unfond memories — timeshares staring down from the coastal highway, parking lots choked with California license plates, tourists snapping tons of pictures. Not my kind of place, since I’d rather avoid my fellow Americans than bump into them. That’s why we’re at the “city” beach. Just follow the border fence west. You can’t miss it.

I toe aside kelp to spread our makeshift beach towel, just an old blanket that used to cover my futon, while Nooshin watches a dog fight gulls for god only knows what. Then we settle on the faded rectangle, her sitting Indian-style, me propped on an elbow. Nearby an old lady is seeping out of her one-piece and reading a novel with a lurid cover. Little kids — her grandchildren, probably — are building sandcastles. Their voices carry on the wind, a blur of Spanish punctuated with English words like SpongeBob and Batman.

I lay back and settle my Kangol hat on my face. The sunshine seeps into my clothes, slowly toasting me. My arm hairs stir in the cool gusts off the ocean. From the other side of the blanket I hear a sob, then another. “Why did you want to call your sister anyway?” I ask crossly.

“I feel so alone here, that’s why.” The sobs are quickening. “I miss my family, especially Nasrin. I even…”

“You even what?”

“Maybe you won’t understand this, but — I even miss Saman, sometimes.”

That revelation sinks in like groundwater contamination. “Listen to yourself, for chrissake. You miss the shitbag who broke your nose and tried to drag you back to Kansas City?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but…” Nooshin sniffles wetly into her arm. “I wasn’t a very good wife. Otherwise I wouldn’t be in this position. I wouldn’t be hurting the people I love. Now my husband might lose his green card, and my family is screwed because they have to repay the mahr, and I’m not even allowed to talk to my niece and nephew anymore. Oh god, it’s all my fault…”

“Not it wasn’t all your fault. Nothing that’s happening right now is your fault. You stayed in your marriage for five years, which is about four years and 364 days longer than anybody else would’ve stayed married to Saman. You even went back to him and tried to work things out.” I blow a calming breath into my hat. “Take it from me. There’s nothing like a little time and distance where family is involved.”

“But it’s different for you! You don’t need people the way I need people. The way most people need people.”

Another one of her laser-guided observations. I feel diminished in its aftermath, as if I was born incapable of feeling the full spectrum of human emotion. “Well, that was your New Year’s resolution, right? To be more like me.”

She snatches the hat off my face and peers down at me in tear-stained anger. “I know what it’s like to be you, Nick. I can see for myself. You’re alone in a foreign country where no one knows you, and that’s just the way you like it. Your family might as well be dead to you. The only Christmas card you got was that form letter from Phoebe that her company sent out. Remember how you were laughing about it? ‘Straight from the heart, baby!’ You spent four years with her and it’s nothing but a big joke to you.” She throws the hat into my face and rolls onto her haunches.

I struggle onto an elbow, feeling sand shift beneath the blanket. “You gave me a real Christmas card.”

“I wish I hadn’t. You can never need me like I need you.”

Nooshin bounces to her feet, making a brisk escape toward the curling lip of surf. I watch her boy-butt snap back and forth with furious strides. She marches through a spread-out line of elderly fisherman, tending their poles and the occasional dark wriggling shape, and wades into the ocean fully-dressed, deeper and deeper, until the waves knock her over. When she surfaces again, shivering like a drowned junkie, I’m already knee-deep in the Pacific, spilling a trail of sand from the blanket I’m holding open for her and yelling motivational things like “Get out of the water this fucking instant!”

I’m in the passenger seat of Nick’s old Ford Explorer, the seatbelt cutting into my shoulder as we rattle over washboard roads. The cab is filled with the pinkish light of the rising sun, climbing above the jagged mountain lip of the horizon. We’re traveling through a foreboding landscape, just barren desert and the detritus of human civilization. Plywood shacks dot the hills. Ditches are lined with trash and barrels and even dead rusting cars. Signs on chainlink fences and open plots of dirt proclaim PELIGRO and CONTAMINACION — danger and contamination. Gigantic plumes of smoke drift overhead. Welcome to Maquiladora Alley.

Nick is explaining that there are two maquiladora zones in Tijuana — “Maquiladora Alley” which runs east along the border fence, and “Maquiladora Valley” which runs southeast through a narrowing slot in the Tecate Mountains. Maquiladora Valley is served by the Tijuana-Tecate railroad line, so it resembles a twisting snake of heavy industries and petrochemical plants. Maquiladora Alley is only served by road, so the factories I’m seeing focus on products that can be shipped by semi, like clothes and pottery and things.

“And increasingly, electricity,” he adds, pointing at a powerline passing overhead. “There are something like 50 energy projects planned in Maquiladora Alley right now. All these American companies like Sempra Energy and Shell Oil are building powerplants hooked into the southern California grid.” He points again, tracing the powerlines’ relentless march northward. “Little-known fact? Tijuana isn’t even hooked into the Mexican national power grid.”

“Are those companies building powerplants in Mexico to get around environmental regulations in America?” I ask through gritted teeth, bracing myself against the dashboard.

“Uh, basically. Goddamnit! This fucking road…” Nick slows a little, then a lot, until the truck finally stops tossing us around. “Locate a generating plant on the American side of the border fence and it costs you decades and millions of dollars in legal overhead. The environmental impact statement. Dealing with the EPA and all the state regulating agencies — the California Energy Commission, Electricity Oversight Board, Air Resources Board. Downwind communities suing to stop construction. Protesters at the construction site.” He glances across the cab at me, rolling his shoulders in an isn’t-it-obvious? shrug. “Locate that same plant on the Mexican side and you never have to deal with any of that shit.”

I can feel dismay splash across my face. “Exporting pollution and importing electricity? I want America to be better than that.”

There’s no reply. Nick is losing interest in our conversation, distracted by the shuttered and dead maquiladoras which start materializing out of the hillside squalor. He slows even further to note them, muttering into his handheld tape recorder.

Under his tutelage I begin to see maquiladoras where I didn’t before. Some are barely more than shacks with signs nailed onto the front. Others have been turned into dumping grounds, so littered with junk that I can’t even recognize their manufacturing origins. I’m astonished by how many there are.

“The graveyard of small maquiladoras,” Nick says, reading my mind. “They were undercut by cheaper labor markets. China, especially. But also India, Thailand, Vietnam.”

“So these maquiladoras, they just…closed?”

“Only as a last resort. The owners, the employees, even the Mexican government, they all tried to find economic substitutes. Something else they could manufacture at a profit. And later, alternative uses for the factories, or just the land they’re sitting on. But you’re looking at the outcome.” His face twists into a caricature of judgment. “The future is, there is no future.”

I’m struggling to untangle the threads of our conversation. “So that’s what your dissertation is about, the fate of small maquiladoras?”

“I don’t know what my dissertation is going to be about yet,” Nick laughs, grinning sideways across the cab. “But this is what fascinates me. Not the way it ends up, with all these dead and dying maquiladoras. The bigger story — the struggle of ordinary Mexican businessmen and entrepreneurs to leverage their own integration into the North American economy.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say.

“And yeah, I’m interested in their workforces too. Who are these laborers, and how do they cope with economic cycles in a small maquiladora setting? Are their worklives better than the laborers at big multinational maquiladoras? Do they earn more? Less? Stay longer and like it better, or not? How do they describe and contextualize their experiences?”

I’m glad when Nick trails off, because trying to keep up with all those questions is making my head hurt. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. Something obvious and plain. Maybe it was the words he used, or the way he’s squinting into the sun. Insight teases me, teases –

“Is it kinda like running a family farm? Running a small maquiladora, I mean.” I study his profile nervously, hoping he doesn’t frown. I know he doesn’t like to be analyzed.

“Are you asking if my upbringing is why it fascinates me?” Nick asks, cutting to the heart of my question. “Partly, I’m sure. There’s also the David-versus-Goliath drama — oh wait, are you familiar with David and Goliath? Is that story in the Qu’ran too?”

“Yeah, it’s in the Qu’ran.”

“Okay. Cool.” The steering wheel moves back and forth in his hands for a while. “Uh, what the hell was I talking about?”

“Reasons why you’re fascinated by small maquiladoras.”

“Oh yeah. God it’s a long list. For example, something that’s really fascinating is how entrepreneurs are socialized to deal with failure, and the social stigma attached to it in Mexico. That’s why some of these maquiladoras are called really weird things, named after other countries and stuff, so that their owners have a way of saving face if it all goes belly-up. They’ll say shit like The Korean company that was funding the maquiladora pulled all their support! even when there was no Korean company.”

Saving face. Those words turn daytime into night, stranding me in memories of Saman and the arguments we’d have. Always late at night, after he came home from work or we’d returned from whatever social function lured him away from the TV. Those were the only times it was acceptable to argue with him. Otherwise he’d lose face if any of our disagreements were public, if his wife questioned him over the phone or in front of others.

Nick is finishing his drive-around survey of the maquiladoras and shifting attention to the surrounding neighborhood, if you can call it that. Shacks erode into the desert in every direction. I can’t believe — don’t want to believe — that this is home for families who abandoned their lives someplace far away, chasing a paycheck northward to Tijuana, and wound up living in this hell.

My Spanish sucks at best, so I stay in the Explorer and watch him ricochet from one hovel to the next, searching for interview subjects. I’m amazed how few doors are slammed in his face. Most of the Mexicans welcome him warmly, gracious even in their poverty, happy to give the tall smiling gringo the only thing they have — a few minutes of their time. I watch Nick disappear and reappear across the neighborhood, counting my sad strange blessings.

I can cross the border into America. I can return to a safely married life. I can accept my destiny as written in the Qu’ran.

Easy to say, impossible to do. Because Nick…

That word. Omigod, that word. Have you ever wished your future was a single word? Because I do. Nick. My friend, my roommate, and now my boss. And my so-called buddy, the only term of endearment I have for him.