The Ghost Code

CHAPTER 3

North

He had no plan. He had a direction.

North meant the border, and the border meant the other side of it, and the other side of it was America, which was where people went when there was nothing left on this side. He had heard this from men at the site, from cousins of neighbours who had made the crossing and come back with money or come back with stories or not come back at all. He had listened without storing it as information that would ever apply to him.

Now it applied to him.

He walked for six hours before he allowed himself to sit, and when he sat it was on a culvert at the side of the road where a truck driver who was going north anyway let him climb into the back without asking questions. The man had a kind face and the particular tiredness of someone who had been making this run for twenty years and had stopped finding it remarkable. He dropped Miguel at a depot outside a town three hours further north than he had been, said nothing except “take care of yourself,” and drove away.

Miguel sat in the depot’s gravel lot and looked at his hands.

They were steady. He had expected them to shake. They did not.

He understood, sitting in that gravel lot in the early afternoon with the sun pressing down and no one around who knew his name, that grief was not always loud. Sometimes it was this: a specific and complete stillness, like the moment after a loud sound when the world was absorbing what had happened to it.

He stood up. He started walking again.

        

It took him eleven days to reach the border, and the crossing itself took four hours and cost him two-thirds of the money from the jar and a pair of boots that were better than the ones he was given in exchange.

The man who arranged it was not cruel. He was simply efficient, which was a different thing. He moved people from one side to the other and charged a rate that the market had established and did not feel the need to apologise for the rate or for the conditions. Miguel was one of nine people making the crossing that night: an older woman travelling alone, two young men from a state Miguel did not recognise by their accent, a family with a child of about four who slept through most of it pressed against his mother’s shoulder.

They moved in single file through a section of scrub that smelled of dust and dry grass and something chemical Miguel could not identify. The guide moved quickly and without conversation. The older woman at the front of the line kept pace without complaint.

They stopped once, for twelve minutes, in a depression in the ground that gave them just enough shadow to disappear from a certain angle. Miguel watched the child sleep against the mother’s shoulder and thought about nothing at all, which was the only way he had found to keep moving.

When they were through, the guide pointed northwest and said the road was forty minutes in that direction and left.

The group dissolved. People moved in directions they had apparently planned before tonight. The family went northeast without looking back. The two young men went together. The older woman began walking in the same direction the guide had pointed, and Miguel found himself walking beside her without quite deciding to.

She was perhaps sixty-five, heavy-footed, deliberate. She had a bag on each shoulder and a way of breathing through the effort that suggested this was not her first border.

They walked in silence for a while.

Then she looked at him.

“How old are you?” she said.

“Seventeen.”

She made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disapproval. She looked forward again.

They walked another few minutes.

“You walk like someone already dead,” she said. Not unkindly. Simply as an observation, the way someone might remark on the weather.

Miguel did not answer.

She did not seem to require one. They reached the road. She turned left. He turned right. That was the last time he saw her.

He filed the line away somewhere he could not yet name and kept walking.

The first town on the American side of the crossing had a gas station with a small shop attached that was open at three in the morning because it was the kind of place that was always open, staffed by a teenager who looked at Miguel without curiosity and asked him what he wanted.

Miguel bought water and a sandwich he could afford and stood at the far end of the shop near the rack of road maps to eat it.

There was a small television mounted high on the wall behind the counter, tuned to a business news channel. The volume was low. The teenager was looking at his phone.

On the screen, a woman in a dark jacket was being interviewed in front of what appeared to be a glass building in a city Miguel did not recognise. She was perhaps mid-thirties, with the particular composure of someone who had been in front of cameras many times and found them entirely manageable. She was talking about something financial, interest rates or emerging markets or currency flows, Miguel’s English was not strong enough yet to follow precisely. But she spoke with a precision that cut through the low volume and the bad audio and the distance across the shop.

He watched her for a moment.

Not because of anything specific. More because she was the only thing in this gas station at three in the morning that looked like it was operating from a position of complete certainty about where it was and where it was going. Her hands were still. Her eyes were steady. She was not performing confidence. She was simply occupying the space as though it belonged to her.

The interview ended. A commercial replaced it.

Miguel finished his sandwich, put the water in his jacket pocket, and went back outside into the dark.

He did not think about the woman on the screen. There was nothing to think. It was simply a face in a gas station television, one moment in a night that contained many moments, and the mind catalogued what it catalogued without asking permission.

But her stillness stayed with him. The way she had occupied that interview. The way she had not needed to raise her voice or change her expression to communicate that she was in control of everything happening around her.

He thought about that as he walked. He thought about the men in the kitchen. About the silver-haired man who had given instructions in the same calm register, the same stillness. The same control.

He walked faster.

Los Angeles was eleven hours further by the bus he caught the next morning, paying with the last of the border money, sitting in the back seat with his jacket across his lap and his eyes on the window.

He watched the landscape change. Desert giving way to something flatter and then to the sprawl of a city that seemed to begin before it had any reason to and continue long after it should have stopped.

He arrived at the bus station in the middle of the afternoon.

He sat on a bench outside with his jacket and the photograph inside it and the few bills he had left and looked at the city.

The city did not look back. It had no interest in him. He was undocumented, alone, and completely invisible within it, and it occurred to him, sitting on that bench, that invisible was the only thing that had kept him alive eleven days ago, and perhaps invisible was not the worst thing to remain.

He stood up.

He started moving.

His name was Miguel Ramirez and it had been for seventeen years and it was beginning, right now, in the afternoon light of a city that would not remember him, to mean something different from what it had meant before.

He did not know yet what it would mean instead.

That, he decided, was a problem for a boy who had survived the first part. He had survived the first part.

He kept walking.

The photograph inside his jacket pressed against his chest with each step. His sister squinting into the sun. His mother laughing at something just out of frame. The only things he had brought with him from the house with the latch that finally held.

He walked until the light began to fade.

He found a place to sleep in the doorway of a building that had closed for the night, and he curled into the corner of it with his jacket pulled tight and his back to the brick, and he did not dream of anything at all.