Crux Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Jean Guerrero

  Map copyright © 2018 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Guerrero, Jean, author.

  Title: Crux : a cross-border memoir / By Jean Guerrero.

  Description: First edition. | New York : One World, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017035196 | ISBN 9780399592393 | ISBN 0399592393 | ISBN 9780399592409 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adult children of drug addicts—Biography. | Adult children of immigrants—Biography. | Adult children of alcoholics—Biography. | Schizophrenics—Biography. Classification: LCC HV5132 .G84 2018 | DDC 362.29/13092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017035196

  Ebook ISBN 9780399592409

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover photograph: Jean Guerrero and her father on the coast of La Misión, Baja California, 1989 (author’s collection)

  FRONTISPIECE: My father tosses me in the suburbs of San Diego, California, in May 1989.

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map

  Author’s Note

  La Nada

  Part I: The Road to Xibalba

  The Summons

  La Misión

  VHS Vortex

  Días de Los Muertos

  Curative Books

  Fat Flies

  Brain Implant

  Part II: House of Darkness

  Fertility

  Maternity

  Part III: House of Razors

  Wicca

  Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

  Fairy-Tale Neurons

  Part IV: House of Cold

  Curse

  CIA Torture

  Flight

  Part V: House of Jaguars

  El Monstruo

  Blood Eden

  Drowned

  Part VI: House of Fire

  The Root

  Part VII: House of Bats

  Larvae

  The Devil’s Tick

  Chamán

  Caxcan: An Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I heard my blood, singing in its prison,

  and the sea sang with a murmur of light,

  one by one the walls gave way….

  OCTAVIO PAZ, Piedra de Sol

  “They shall worship you first. Your name shall not be forgotten. Thus be it so,” they said to their father when they comforted his heart. “We are merely the avengers of your death and your loss, for the affliction and misfortune that were done to you.” Thus was their counsel when they had defeated all Xibalba.

  Popol Vuh, ALLEN J. CHRISTENSON translation

  It is important to be on the lookout for the occurrence of positive synchronicities, for they are the signals that power is working to produce effects far beyond the normal bounds of probability.

  MICHAEL HARNER, The Way of the Shaman

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is divided into seven segments, corresponding to different parts of the ancient K’iche’ Maya creation story in the Popol Vuh. The legend tells of two twins, the Sun and the Moon, who venture into the underworld, Xibalba, where their father has been trapped. They overcome several challenges and resurrect him.

  This is a work of nonfiction. Parallels with the Popol Vuh are coincidences. I used memories, interviews, videotapes, diaries, immigration documents, prison records, baptismal files, history books and more to re-create the past. Dialogue with quotation marks is from audio recordings or notes; dialogue in italics comes from recollections.

  LA NADA

  I’m sorry, Papi. Perdóname. I know how much you hate to be pursued. You’ve spent your whole life running. Now the footsteps chasing you are mine.

  ¿Papi, dónde estás?

  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. I’m 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 mágico: of corpses, chupacabras, curanderos. I learned that your great-grandmother was a clarividente. They called her La Adivina—the diviner. She was paid to commune with the dead.

  ¿Papi, quién 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. We’re in a double room at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt hotel. I’m already in bed. You stretch and sigh by yours. I’m twenty-four years old. It’s the spring of 2012. Earlier in the day, we watched my sister graduate from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. I flew in from Mexico City, your birthplace, where I’m 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 can’t stop thinking about the last time we shared a room. I was eleven, in Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco. It was my first visit to the interior of your country. My mother told me to be careful—Mexico 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.

  We’re in the United States, in a nice hotel. You haven’t 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 striking—cheekbones 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 mother’s 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 can’t 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 quickly…anywhere in the mountains, hidden, perhaps in the Sierra Madre de México. And please don’t cry.” You’re convinced you have a mysterious illness no doctor can detect. Your bones feel heavier than osmium. Sometimes, you can hardly take a step. But you’re a different man from the one in Autlán.

  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. You’re gasping. Hyperventilating. You grasp until you find a light switch. Scan the room with terrified eyes. “There’s someone in here,” you say. “Someone’s in here with us.”

  * * *

  •

  At the turn of the millennium, after Autlán, you disappeared for several years. We thought you were dead. You were traveling through Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium and Mexico, fleeing alleged CIA mind-control experiments. You believed the government was torturing you with remote electromagnetic or radio-wave technology, sending voices into your skull and painful electric shocks into your body. The agency’s goal, you believed, was to demonstrate the technology’s ability to radically alter human behavior by eradicating your addiction to crack. It worked. You quit. You came home and buried healing seeds.

  On my twentieth birthday, in 2008, you began to tell me things you had never told anyone. Your stories were fascinating; you spoke in Spanglish, with the vocabulary of a voracious English-language reader, sprinkled with startling mispronunciations (“in-im-IT-able”) and improvisations (“They ‘symptomized’ me.”). You didn’t seem crazy. What you described sounded similar to Project MKUltra, an actual covert CIA mind-control experiment that began in the 1950s. They targeted drug addicts, illegal immigrants, prostitutes and other minorities who lacked credibility or influence so that nobody would believe them if they complained. Those documents have been declassified. For the first time, Papi, I wondered if you had in fact been the victim of secret government torture. I felt it was my duty, as a journalist and as your daughter, to pursue every conceivable line of inquiry.

  * * *

  •

  You drop to your knees. Search beneath your bed. Search beneath mine. Jump to your feet and dash into the bathroom. You swing open the cabinets.

  “I can hear ’em,” you cry.

  “Hear who?” I ask.

  You dash to the room door. Throw it open. Step into the hallway. Nothing. Inspect the bathroom again. No one. The closet. Nada. You stop and stare at me.

  “Papi, you must have been dreaming. There’s nobody here,” I say, suddenly afraid you might hallucinate that I’m a government spy. “You must be hearing someone upstairs. Or downstairs. Or next door. We’re in a hotel.”

  I beseech you to go to sleep. You march back and forth. Inhale. Exhale. You crawl back into bed. I realize I’m holding my breath.

  Almost as soon as my body unclenches from consciousness, you jump to your feet with a howl. “What?” I cry. You sprint to the door, twist and jiggle the knob. Once more, you search: beneath the beds, inside the bathroom, behind the curtains, the closet. You pace. Remove your sweat-soaked shirt. When you collapse again, I know I won’t fall back to sleep this time. My body quakes with an apocalyptic pulse. You shout and whimper, shifting under the blankets. All night, I hear you suffer as you dream.

  In the morning, you rise, wearing only white boxer briefs. Pale light pours into the room and illuminates you. The sight inhibits my speech. The last time I saw you shirtless, Papi, I was a child. You were strength personified, flesh invulnerable as the tezontle of ancient Mexica pyramids. Here you are now: mortal, mutilated, marred. A large, gruesome cicatriz protrudes from your chest. Two lines of white skin intersect in the shape of a cross. A pale halo of skin surrounds the top of the scar. Creases of skin blur and bend inside, like the curving grooves of brain coral. Your secrets are scrawled on your skin.

  * * *

  •

  ¿Papi, quién eres? I grasp your shoulders and search your yellow eyes. But the light in them flickers and recedes. You are always running away from me.

  I drowned while chasing you. My soul floats bloated in the Gulf of Mexico, strangled by starfish and squid. Hechizos haunt my hollow flesh. It has become cliché to talk about your country as if it were cursed. But Mexico’s own citizens proclaim it. A kind of fairy-tale physics operates. The only way to escape El Monstruo is to move constantly. Surviving becomes another way to die. Either way, you disappear.

  You are the ultimate migrant, Papi. You traveled across countries fleeing shadows that chased you. You visited the future in dreams, migrated back and forth between the United States and Mexico, died and came back from the dead. You lost your mind and recovered it. You abandoned me, returned to me, spoke all your secrets, then fell back into silence and sleep. How often the theme of crossings comes up in your story. Border crossings. Crossings between madness and sanity. Crossings into parallel worlds. A cross-shaped cicatriz. What secret do these crossings spell? Where have they led us?

  For so long I followed your footsteps that I forgot the route back to earth. But I still have my notebook; I still have my pen. I am a reporter, after all. I have not forgotten the tools of my trade: fact-based research, the quest for primary documents, formal interviews. I will retrace time until I find the place where you became lost—and where I, in pursuit of you, lost my own way. By clarifying the basis of our suffering, I believe I can find a cure. Is it neurochemical, otherworldly, technological?

  I will start with my mother, the M.D., the expert in diagnoses. She fell in love with you when you were on top of the world. She can help me locate the crossroads. I will follow the thread through my memories, searching for you in the negative spaces of my childhood. I will plunge into your past, your mother’s and great-grandmother’s, creating a trail of factual paragraphs. Did you lose yourself looking for your own father? I’ll find him for you. With the ropes of letters and the chains of ink, perhaps I can pull us out of these depths. I cannot escape this place without you. Our fates are tangled up. But you are so deep inside this world. I can hear your voice in the breeze. I am in the place without borders, you say. You’ll never find me here. My mother raised me to believe I can do anything, so long as I am sure of my objective, so long as I take step after step in its direction. And so I venture deeper—to the time before I was born, to the time before you were born.

  Octavio Paz says the Mexican is the son of “nothingness.” He comes of contradictions coalesced, of crucifixes and demons, of conquistadores and priests, of Cortés and Cuauhtémoc. The modern Mexican is masked mobility, fleeing from and searching for his ouroboros roots. If you succeed in catching him, you’ll find a fiction. Unmask him and you’ll find time stretching back a thousand years.

  I’m sorry, Papi. Perdóname. I know how much you hate to be pursued. But the past has swallowed me. All roads before me lead straight back to you.

  THE SUMMONS

  Interstate 5 slices north–south and serpentine along the West Coast of the United States, parallel to the Pacific Ocean for more than a thousand miles. In the south, it curves into one of the world’s busiest border crossings—the San Ysidro Port of Entry, where San Diego and Tijuana touch. A green sign hangs over the highway: “Mexico Only.”

  In the summer of 1986, a young Puerto Rican physician drove on a southbound lane just north of the juncture. She sought an exit called Bonita Road. But there is no such exit on I-5, and never was. It exists on I-805, to the east. The woman who would become my mother had just arrived in San Diego, in quest of the American dream, and her suitcase-stuffed rental vehicle was on a straight course to Mexico.

  * * *

 
; •

  Jeannette Del Valle grew up on the western tip of Puerto Rico, suffering asthma her father blamed on the sugarcane pollen of their pueblo, Aguadilla. She had big, startled eyes that struggled to see—diagnosed with myopia at age twelve—and curly ash-blonde hair her mother did not let her cut, so that it grew long and thick to her thighs, a heavy cloak on her bony limbs. Her classmates called her Esqueleto, or Skeleton. From her earliest memories, her throat constricted against her will. She tried to pull oxygen into her convulsing lungs; she could not. Raised Catholic, she prayed to God for help. It came in the form of Doctor Mendoza, a chubby, gray-haired man who gave her shots of epinephrine and steroids, consoling her with a competent, bespectacled gaze. At night, she was alone in her battles against death. Her father purchased a nebulizer and an oxygen tank. Blind in the blackness, she sucked air into her esophagus. She survived each time to see the dawn.

  Her father, Luis, was a studious, brown-skinned mechanic with thick glasses that hung low on his broad nose. Despite his five-foot stature, Jeannette’s father had a towering, storybook tale. He became a provider for his two younger siblings as a teenager, when his mother died of tuberculosis. His father, a police officer married to another woman, refused to recognize him as his son until later in life. Luis shined shoes in the street. He learned to build and install central air-conditioning units. On the hot island, his skills were in high demand. He helped establish the Colegio de Técnicos Refrigeración y Aire Acondicionado de Puerto Rico, to give the island’s previously informal cool-temperature trades a licensing structure. He married Luz, a lean blonde with skin like carne de noni.