Jean Guerrero - Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir

Im sorry, Papi. Perdname. I know how much you hate to be pursued. Youve spent your whole life running. Now the footsteps chasing you are mine.

Papi, dnde ests?

I lost myself searching for you. Trees sprout from the vaulted ceiling. The sky stretches far beyond my feet. The wind sounds human when it whispers. The roads are cobblestone, conch and caracol. Everything is shape-shifting.

You say spies or spirits pursue you. My mother, a physician, blames schizophrenia. Im a journalist. I value the objective, the verifiable. In college, I minored in neuroscience. I studied the labyrinthine patterns of brain cortices, the chemical bases of hallucinations and delusions of persecution. But I am also your daughter, Papi. In Mexico, I discovered a mundo mgico: of corpses, chupacabras,curanderos. I learned that your great-grandmother was a clarividente. They called her La Adivinathe diviner. She was paid to commune with the dead.

Papi, quin eres?

A cursed curandero, a schizophrenic, a victim of the mind-control experiments you describe? I look into the mirror seeking clues. Your quests and questions consumed me, even though you were never there. The last time I saw you was the year the world was meant to end. When I close my eyes, Papi, all the clocks rewind to then.

You kick off your boots in the dark. You slip off your beanie, your leather jacket. Were in a double room at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt hotel. Im already in bed. You stretch and sigh by yours. Im twenty-four years old. Its the spring of 2012. Earlier in the day, we watched my sister graduate from San Franciscos Academy of Art University. I flew in from Mexico City, your birthplace, where Im working as a foreign correspondent and investigating your history. Months ago, a psychologist diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder tied to a near-death experience south of the border.

My nervous system thunders. I cant stop thinking about the last time we shared a room. I was eleven, in Autln de Navarro, Jalisco. It was my first visit to the interior of your country. My mother told me to be carefulMexico was a perilous place, and you were not normal. As I tried to sleep, I felt the danger of your country thrusting itself through the thin walls of our rural pueblo room, into you. Your skin was clammy and see-through. Your veins were vines snaking down your neck. Your eyes were protuberant and black. You had been smoking crack.

Were in the United States, in a nice hotel. You havent smoked crack in nearly a decade. In your fifties, you have a shamanic air, with a pimienta beard and long gray-black hair. Your eyes are chameleonic, shifting between shades of ochre. Your face is strikingcheekbones high and prominent, like plump aguacates, causing your eyes to crinkle with each smile. Your skin is copper-colored. A self-taught expert in natural medicine, you cultivate curative plants such as comfrey and ashitaba in the Mexican beach town of Rosarito. Some potions you concocted eradicated your mothers arthritis and restored vision to her once-blind Chihuahua, if Abuelita is to be believed.

You are still troubled: you binge-drink, you suffer dark dreams you cant describe, you are sometimes suicidal. You wrote me an email recently, requesting that I bury you without an autopsy, wrapped in a single blanket so as to decompose more quicklyanywhere in the mountains, hidden, perhaps in the Sierra Madre de Mxico. And please dont cry. Youre convinced you have a mysterious illness no doctor can detect. Your bones feel heavier than osmium. Sometimes, you can hardly take a step. But youre a different man from the one in Autln.

I watch your shadow by your bed. You unbuckle your belt. Slither it off. Slide off your jeans, sprawl out on the squeaky mattress. I think you fall asleep. I notice your peaceful breathing. As an infant, I often dreamed in your arms. I remember the rising of your chest against my cheek. A tranquil blackness consumes my thoughts, and slowly I fall asleep.

You leap from bed with a cry. I jolt awake. You scamper toward a wall. Youre gasping. Hyperventilating. You grasp until you find a light switch. Scan the room with terrified eyes. Theres someone in here, you say. Someones in here with us.