Both Sides Page 7

  “Please.”

  “No, why?”

  “Look, I’m just doing my job.”

  I snorted. Disgusted. I saw where this was all going, and frankly, I knew why she was doing this. Money.

  “Whatever. I know why. You’re so predicable and revolting. I saved one document I found, just for you.”

  Still standing, I leaned over the table and shook the wireless mouse to enliven the screen once again. I clicked forward a few blank slides to the one I’d pinned for this moment. One I had hoped I wouldn’t have to pull, hoping with the last, last, last thread I had of hope for humanity she would confess during my presentation and announce how she’d used my investigation as proof, as a way to call authorities to crash the sordid enterprise.

  But no.

  Money.

  Blossoming first onto the stark white was a .jpeg of a sheet with columns of names in miniscule font. I enlarged the image. The page was headed: CURRENT STAKEOWNERS OF BORDER CARE HOUSING, INC. Kristine was listed in the column with a forty percent return on investment, from two years prior to the then current “elected” tenure of the American Figurehead. The American Figurehead had been, for two years by then, notoriously criminal, objectively vile, shitting on the constitutional and humanitarian treaty rights of refugees and asylum seekers. In one year alone, at least seven children died in immigration custody. An untold number of adults had died. Children had been ripped from parents and shoved in freezing cages. And too many to count had been molested by government officials and private jail employees. Exactly like my fifteen-year-old Guatemalan pro bono client, an asylum seeker housed illegally, all my papers claimed, at Border Care Housing, Inc., in a town outside El Paso, Texas.

  “Border Care, Kristine? Border Care is accused of sexual molestation of asylum seekers. You know this, you know I’m involved. I have one of the clients. She’s pregnant, you know. And how’d that happen in an all-woman facility? She’s fif-fucking-teen. You knew. You knew I had this conflict. I didn’t know Stranderham had acquired Border Care. And here, fuck, here you’re set to reap profits?”

  She sucked her lips in. Didn’t speak.

  “Kristine?”

  “They cross the border illegally, they take the risk,” she said.

  “Fuck you. Fix this. I won’t be a part of a crime.”

  I walked out.

  I sent her a text: “You report this or I will. You have one week.”

  And as storms were brewing mad in the air, and my personal convictions and professional obligations were colliding, my rage grew and then amplified when I received two certified packages the very next week.

  One was a Motion for Temporary Injunction to stop me from speaking anything about Stranderham, which, the Motion said, would jeopardize their attorney-client privilege. Also included was a letter Strandherham, signed by Kristine, had sent to the Texas Bar complaining that I’d violated my ethical obligations.

  The second was a notice that my Guatemalan client, eight months pregnant, had been transferred to an ICE facility, out of Border Care Housing, fine, but straight into solitary confinement. She would be confined in the same small town outside El Paso. She’d violated the terms of her holding, they said.

  A text message came in from Kristine, who must have timed her message when she knew I’d have received these packages. It said, “I’ve always been better at timing. But you don’t listen.”

  She’d sent her messages. She used my client in our war.

  That was two years ago.

  Twelve hundred phone calls led nowhere.

  I had gotten in my car and drove west towards my client’s ICE facility.

  In my drive, the radio warned about surprise and fast-moving, colliding air fronts raging in and hovering around the entire state and beyond. The dramatic adjectives they used seemed to mirror the political fronts that had been colliding for two years by then, two years of furor and rage under the then American Figurehead and others like him in other parts of the world. The weather reports during my drive were, no other way to say it, apocalyptic: “Polar opposite temperatures of wild disparity”; “volatile winds, blowing at cock-eyed, broke-neck angles”; “vicious, speeding vortexes touching ground, helter skelter.” But I drove on, clocking the flatness of the road, the drop-dropping of the gray stew of sky, the bulbs and nodes of the ominous clouds blemished by the straight edges of rapture-preaching religious billboards. The insane weather adjectives likely amped my rage, but I tamped it down by staring straight ahead in a relentless trance. I had one mission: get my client out of solitary. Somewhere in the middle, half-way to the town outside El Paso, a minor hill broke up the monotony of the otherwise flat drive. After I crested and began to descend, driving on to more straightness, another blemish billboard came into focus. In navy font against a dingy white background, it read: “The Righteous Hand of God Will Eradicate The Dark Unwashed,” and in smaller font, “Donate to God through the GOP for a better world.” A red cross adorned a corner.

  That billboard. My nostrils flared at that billboard. I slammed on the brakes, moved over to the side of the desperate and desolate road. Brown dirt on both sides for miles. I got out of the car and stood and stared for a good long while, and I note now—as I stare down Kristine in France, who begs for entrance and forgiveness from atop my stone wallthat I focused on just one word: eradicate.

  I got back in my car and drove on to my client. The weather reports unhinged further: “Wind tunnels of freight trains”; “Furious plates of air mass fighting in the sky”; “Freefalling columns of artic air, spiking through broiling heat and angry humidity.” In a word, the weather was in chaos. Indeed, my car shook from the whipping wind. Tumbleweeds, branches from trees not visible from the road, a few pieces of torn-apart signs whipped around me. One gust pushed the car off the road, but I righted myself and jammed my foot on the gas until the pedal hit the floor. I sped on, fighting my shaking wheel. The muscles in my forearms burned.

  The sound outside the car was of invisible monsters screaming at each other in variations of high whistles and growls and howls and wales. The newscasters frizzled as the reception fried. “Shelter…take...[static]…gusts of unprecedented [static]” and so on.

  Scientists had never seen anything like it. They extrapolated what they knew, overlaid that knowledge on what they did not yet understand, and attributed the strange blowing winds and disjointed air streams to the undocumented shifts of climate change. The people who worshiped at rapture billboards said funnels were the literal fingers of God, eradicating the unwashed, picking them off, suggesting the weather was sentient and consciously choosing sinners by destroying their progressive-friendly organic farms and splatting their lust-filled bodies against barns. If a God-fearing worthy citizen was picked off, they said it was because God had raptured him up to paradise. For my part, I considered the unhinged weather an obstacle to me getting justice for my client, as it was slowing my drive.

  By some miracle, I arrived at the ICE facility. I parked my car. Grabbed my briefcase, which held the Immigration Judge’s affirmation of the USCIS’s officer’s finding that my client had, indeed, met the “low threshold of proof of potential entitlement to asylum,” required by law in order to obtain an asylum hearing. In fact, she’d blasted the low threshold by leaps and bounds, having a “substantial and realistic possibility of success”—which standard is even lower than the “preponderance of the evidence” standard. I never once heard anything about these standards and legal process facts when talking heads screamed their binary immigration positions on the news. My client had shown border control physical burns and knife wounds from being tortured for being a woman in her home country, plain and simple. I also never heard any of the pundits read from any of the country conditions reports, the ones that document all the horrors from these impacted countries. Maybe I had missed a segment. But I doubt it.

  Yeah, she met the legal standard. One particular group within ICE, however, taking advanta
ge of the tangled nature of multiple agencies and confused reporting lines, would not release my client on parole until her very legal asylum hearing.

  Am I bitter? Yeah, I’m fucking bitter. I’m living in a cave. I haven’t had a moment’s peace in two years, four if you count when the awful American Figurehead took office. I haven’t taken a proper, peaceful, hot bath in two years. Haven’t read a romance novel. My hair is half gray. Dirt is permanent under my jagged fingernails. I ran out of contacts, because I didn’t grab any before I fled, and the eyeglasses I plucked from an abandoned store three villages over are several degrees off my prescription. My eyes ache. I live on baguettes and wine. And I can’t tell if my lack of menstruation is from early menopause or unrelenting stress from being in constant survival/war mode. I have no lover here, so I’m doubly unable to get pregnant, it seems, which is the only silver lining. There’s no relief. But these inconveniences are merely that, inconveniences. Others have endured far worse, far longer.

  Right now, shadows dance on the limestone walls, light casting off the fiery torches, held aloft in the hands of the approaching soldiers. They are closing in on Kristine, but she can’t see, because she faces me. And she’s ignoring the shadows on the cave wall behind me, because she was never smart enough to read Plato. On a flat rock at the cave’s entrance, I pick up a chipped mug of red wine I’d set there. A light and fruity Brouilly, bottled at a vineyard not far from here. Mona, a soldier, one of the ones approaching, in fact, it’s her vineyard. I barter baguettes for her wine. I take a sip, watch Kristine.

  “Say the word. Say ‘enter’, please,” she pleads. Her knees are bent as if she’s about to jump forward onto my land, closer to this cave. If she does, she knows the rules require me to eradicate her.

  I say nothing. I sip my wine. I listen to the advancing soldiers’ shouts and footsteps, crunching leaves in the forest. I think my favorite solider, Kenterwil, hoots, and her companion solider, Mona, hoots back.

  A grove of crickets hum in the underbrush. The full moon in the clear sky pulses gray to white, white to gray. A purple haze hangs in humid mists atop the lavender field in the beyond. And there’s the roof of my barn, light within aglow, movements inside choreographed. Other soldiers are readying the vats. The blistering vats.

  I contemplate my decision again, silent, head cocked, Kristine screaming and begging right in front of me.

  I take another sip of wine.

  There I was, two years ago, in the ICE parking lot in Texas. After all those rapture billboards and hysterical weather reports, after the mindless drive under a dropping gray sky and brown sand on all sides, my temper was a hurricane. I could not stop the cyclical rage in my brain over Kristine’s intentional actions after my PowerPoint. How she went to work right away to silence me and then punish me, by punishing my client. She was the hand on the crank of the machine, grinding my client into solitary. She was the architect, and so she was the architect of the country’s disintegration into chaos and humanitarian blight. She, as far as I was concerned, was the American Figurehead. In my mind, every single thing, every single rage, was due to Kristine’s entitlement to more money, more return on investment, which, and I’ve done the math, amounts to, at most, at the tip-top most, $20,000 at her investment level and tax bracket. Twenty grand for her to upgrade her Toyota to a Lexus, is what it all comes down to. Last week, the short wave said the entirety of downtown Hong Kong had burnt to the literal ground. Millions perished.

  Two years ago in Texas, I stepped toward the one-floor gray concrete ICE facility, which was a square with two side rectangle wings. No windows. Four white trailers spoked out like sun dials off the sides of the side wings, and those looked to be administrative offices.

  The howl of a train blared to my left, making me drop my briefcase. But there were no train tracks anywhere in this part of the state. And to my right came the sudden whooshing engines of an aircraft. I froze, stuck in the center of these colliding noises, as officers with ICE in yellow letters on navy shirts exploded out of the white trailers and out of the cinderblock building. A few people in civilian suits and khaki pants spilled out as well.

  I overheard all I needed to know to know what the jet sound was to my right: “Air Force One is making an emergency landing. The tornado. The tornados.” I heard fractured variations of these frenzied reports from isolated pockets of shouting. “Manchester is on board.” “Air Force…” “Category Five, off the charts.” “Three funnels. Converging here.” “Thirty more, all throughout the state and beyond.” “Nowhere safe, nowhere safe.” “Cover! Get cover!”

  Manchester was the Secret Service code name for the then American Figurehead.

  I looked to my left, toward the howling train in the sky, which sounded closer and louder, a barreling train off its tracks, mutating like some malevolent Transformer into a carnivorous wooden rollercoaster with rusty tracks and metal-wheeled carts with no ball bearings. Clinking and clanking in a loud surround, as if we were in a factory with a thousand unoiled conveyor belts dumping empty paint cans into a thousand steel drums. Long ago, I watched Helen Hunt’s movie Twister, riveted by the funnel the graphics team had concocted. Cows tossed in the sky, street signs thrust like murderous spears. But this was nothing like that. This was so much bigger, so bad, so deadly, so otherworldly and alien, so fast and furious, and actually spinning in three separate phases like an upside down, three-headed dragon, the gray merged clouds of the bulging sky the body. Off in the distance where the three funnels coupled and uncoupled and coupled again, I watched an entire prairie house leveled and disintegrate in the air. Human figures in and around the prairie house were visibly sucked up like ants in a vacuum, and I could not see where they landed, if they landed.

  The tornado, tornados, I’d call a collective Category Fifteen, roared on toward us, coupling and uncoupling, and so on. Out of the disparate stampede of officers and civilians coming from the trailers and building, an ICE officer, like a charging football player, grabbed around my waist and thrust me up on his shoulders. He ran toward some far-off distance, and I didn’t fight him, but I watched behind us as he ran, my stomach on his shoulder, my feet bare—I’d lost my shoes somehow—at his stomach.

  A huge white barrel of a bird cut through the gray mass overhead and dropped fast toward the ground—its jet engine kicking up the loose dirt into brown clouds, the sound deafening, drowning out the howling dragon tornado. The parking lot, I noted then, served as a runway of sorts, given the cleared strip between parked cars and the ICE facility. Officers and civilians, likely lawyers like me, ran in the same direction my officer was taking me, albeit, nobody in straight lines. The Air Force One bird was about five feet from touching down on the makeshift runway, when a phase of the Category Fifteen dragon uncoupled from its mates, sped up, and chugged straight on forward, smashing head-on with the plane. The tornado didn’t change course, instead it slowed, as if it found itself a righteous meal, and ate the plane like a glutton, chomping metal and gears and blades and those Air Force One letters, in a humiliating meal. Pieces and parts of the plane dropped and flew around the parking lot and overhead, some landing on some of the running people. But somehow, nothing hit me or my officer. The other two phases of the Category Fifteen spun and picked off all of the other running people, tossing them hundreds of feet in the air and either consuming them whole or spitting out their bones to fields of dirt. But my officer and I were spared.

  He stopped running, thrust me down to stand beside him, bent, lifted a hatch, pushed me to stairs, and told me to climb down, “Now, now, now.” Which I did, and he followed.

  When we got into a steel-reinforced bunker, about twenty-feet belowground, the clanking, screaming, conveyor belt sounds softened some, but I could still hear the roar of those judicious funnels.

  The officer looked at me.

  I looked at him.

  “The Commander in Chief, and his entire staff and family, were on that plane.”

  “I
saw. I heard.”

  “They’re all dead. Everything is different,” he said.

  “We have to let the refugees out. Everyone’s gone, no one to take care of them.”

  He sucked in his cheeks.

  “I’m the one in charge now at this base. My commanding officer was in that prairie house, blown apart.”

  “Well then,” I said. “As soon as it’s safe, we release the refugees and we get out of here.”

  “I…”

  I stared.

  “We’ll release them,” he said.

  And that’s what we did.

  I don’t know whatever happened to the ICE officer. Don’t even really know what happened to my client, once we released her and the others. I knew I had to leave the country and get to France before the borders closed up everywhere. This catastrophic event was the one the cards and the clouds and the broiling tensions of two full years of the just-obliterated American Figurehead was working up to. Nobody anticipated an Act of God would be the catalyst to all of the tensions boiling over. Everyone had anticipated a colossal act of man-made violence, something beyond even the horrors of daily mass shootings. But they were wrong. The catalyst was climate, a three-headed dragon tornado. One might say God’s wrath was gorgeous that day. One might say weather is, despite all our studies and calculations, charts and Dopplers and sensors and graphs, unpredictable. Unhinged. And I say Mother Nature is a vengeful, merciless bitch, and thankfully, she left me unharmed that day.

  They named the funnel that ripped Air Force One apart “Maple”.

  My car had been untouched. After the twisters passed, and after we freed everyone, I drove through a littered minefield to the closest airport. I always had my passport on me, something my father, a man of dual-citizenship, had taught me. I bought a one-way to Charles de Gaulle, made my way to my family property, and waited. And the world burned for two months. Revolutionaries took the opportunity from the Big Event in Texas to fight all the growing dictators around the world. After two months, different sects of revolutionaries convened and agreed on a set of rules and a mission statement to eradicate the complicits. And it is this ground war, this mission, the world has been living under ever since.