Who You Is When You Cross

The motel was in Del Rio, on the Texas side, three blocks from the border. Not the kind of motel that has a pool or a continental breakfast or any of the small courtesies that suggest someone has thought about the guest’s experience. This was a motel that existed because a building existed and someone had put beds in it. The parking lot was caliche and cracked asphalt and the ice machine out front made a sound like a man clearing his throat every forty seconds. I had taken a room on the second floor that overlooked the highway and, beyond it, the low brown hills that rolled south toward the river, which you could not see from here but which you could feel, the way you can feel a property line even when there is no fence.

Charles Portis was already in the room when I arrived. He was sitting in the only chair, which was upholstered in a fabric that had once been green, reading a water-damage-warped copy of the Del Rio News-Herald from what appeared to be 2019. He did not look up when I came in. He turned a page and said, “There is a man in this paper who stole fourteen goats from a ranch outside Comstock and tried to drive them across the bridge at night. They caught him because goats will not be quiet about anything, not even crime.”

I said that was a good detail.

“It is not a detail,” Portis said. “It is the entire border. Everyone trying to move something across a line that was not there a hundred and seventy years ago, and the things they are moving have their own opinions about it.”

Philipp Meyer arrived twenty minutes late, which I would learn was his practice — not rudeness but a kind of thermal regulation, letting other people establish the room’s temperature before he entered it. He came in smelling like cigarette smoke and outside air and he stood in the doorway and looked at the room and at Portis and at me and said, “This is where we’re doing this?”

“The accommodations are suitable,” Portis said, still reading the newspaper. “There is hot water and the door locks and I have not seen any vermin larger than what a man of reasonable constitution could tolerate.”

Meyer sat on the edge of the bed. The springs protested. “I’ve been driving since San Antonio. The stretch between Uvalde and here — you get into the brush country and the land goes flat and mean and the only structures are border patrol stations, these little white buildings with the trucks parked outside, and they’re spaced every thirty miles or so like watchtowers. Like a wall that hasn’t been built yet. The infrastructure of surveillance before the surveillance has a name.”

“It has a name,” Portis said. “They call it Tuesday.”

I laughed. Meyer did not. This would be the pattern for the evening — Portis saying something that was both a joke and the truest thing anyone had said in the last five minutes, and Meyer absorbing it like a man receiving a medical diagnosis he’d already suspected.

“The border,” I said. I had notes. I had been reading about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, about the Boundary Commission surveys of the 1850s, about how the Rio Grande shifts course and the border shifts with it, so that the line between nations is drawn by a river that does not care about nations. I had been reading Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain for the parallel-lives architecture. I had been reading McCarthy for the violence.

“The trouble with the border as subject,” Meyer said, “is that everyone who writes about it writes about crossing. The moment of crossing. The drama of crossing. But the border isn’t a moment. It’s a condition. The people who live in its shadow — on either side — they’re not crossing, they’re existing in a zone where the concept of here and there has become meaningless because here and there change depending on which direction you’re facing.”

“It is not meaningless to the people who live there,” Portis said. He set the newspaper down and looked at Meyer with an expression I could not entirely read — not disagreement, exactly, but the look of a man who has heard a younger man say something that sounds intelligent and wants to determine whether it is also true. “A woman in Acuna who crosses the bridge every morning to clean houses in Del Rio knows precisely the difference between here and there. She knows it in her knees, which is where the bridge hits you after twenty years. She knows it in her documents, which she keeps in a plastic bag inside her purse. She knows it in the forty-five minutes she waits at the port of entry while men in uniforms decide whether today is a day she is allowed to continue doing what she has done six days a week for two decades. The border is not a philosophical condition for her. It is a line, and the line has guards, and the guards have moods.”

Meyer took this. He did not flinch from it or try to recover his position immediately, which I was learning was his way — he let a correction land before he responded to it, gave it the respect of a few seconds’ silence.

“You’re right. The abstraction is a luxury of distance. But the story we’re writing — if we’re writing about the border as a zone, not just as a line — we need both registers. The woman with the plastic bag and the documents and the knees. And the condition, the larger machinery, the fact that the line exists because of a war that happened in 1848 and a treaty that was a bill of sale and a river that keeps moving, redrawing the terms without anyone’s permission.”

“You do not need both registers,” Portis said. “You need the woman. The machinery will be visible in how she walks.”

I wanted to talk about the second person. This was the constraint I had been assigned — the story told as “you” — and it was the thing that frightened me most, because second person in the wrong hands is an accusation dressed as a narrative strategy. You did this, you felt that. It points a finger. I told them I did not want to point a finger.

“Then do not point a finger,” Portis said, as if this were the simplest problem in the world. “The ‘you’ in a good story is not an accusation. It is a set of directions. You are here. You turn left. You see the bridge. It is the way a person talks to themselves when they are doing something they have done a thousand times and no longer think about — the way you talk yourself through a drive you’ve made so many times the car practically steers itself. You turn at the Pemex station. You take the second lane. You do not look at the man in the booth because looking costs time and time is the only currency you have.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“I know it is.”

Meyer was shaking his head, not in disagreement but in the way of a man working through something. “The ‘you’ can do more than directions. The ‘you’ can be the voice of a system. The way a bureaucracy addresses its subjects — you will present your documents, you will state your purpose, you will answer the following questions. The border is a place where you are always being addressed in the second person. You are being told who you are. You are being defined by someone else’s grammar.”

“Now you are doing two things at once,” Portis said. “The ‘you’ of the woman talking herself across the bridge and the ‘you’ of the state telling her who she is when she gets to the middle of it. Those are not the same ‘you.’”

“No. But they could live in the same sentence. That’s the structural opportunity — the reader doesn’t always know which ‘you’ is speaking. Whether the woman is narrating her own crossing or whether she’s being narrated by the apparatus that governs it. Whether her interiority is her own or whether it’s been colonized by the language of the checkpoint.”

Portis looked at Meyer for a long time. Then he said, “That is the most interesting thing you have said. It is also the most dangerous. If the reader cannot tell who is speaking, you have written confusion and called it ambiguity. There is a difference.”

“The difference is execution.”

“The difference is whether the writer knows. The writer must always know which ‘you’ is operating. The reader may not. But the writer must, or the whole thing collapses into cleverness.”

I said I thought I could hold both. Meyer and Portis looked at me with expressions that suggested they had heard young writers say they could hold two things at once before and had generally found the results to be one thing dropped on the floor and one thing held badly.

“McCarthy,” I said, trying to shift the ground. “Blood Meridian. The episodic structure — these scenes of violence strung along the border like fence posts. No cause, no consequence. Things happen and then other things happen. The Judge talks and the killing continues and the desert sits there, indifferent. I keep thinking about that structure. Not the violence specifically, but the way the border in that book is an environment that produces violence the way weather produces storms. It’s not that people choose to be violent. It’s that the conditions require it.”

“McCarthy believed violence was metaphysical,” Meyer said. “I don’t. Violence is economic. Violence is what happens when two systems of value collide and one of them has more guns. The border isn’t metaphysically violent. It’s structurally violent. The structure produces the violence. Customs and Border Protection didn’t arise from the desert’s moral emptiness. It arose from trade agreements and labor markets and the price of avocados in Chicago.”

“A man does not get shot over the price of avocados,” Portis said.

“A man absolutely gets shot over the price of avocados. He just doesn’t know that’s why.”

“Then the story should know. If the character doesn’t understand why he’s been shot, the story should. Otherwise you are writing a mystery and calling it a Western.”

I asked about parallel lives — the Boyle structure, two narratives running side by side, people who might pass each other on the bridge and never know it. A woman going north to clean houses. A man going south for reasons that are his own. Their lives a mirror with the river running through the glass.

“The mirror is a trap,” Meyer said immediately. “Boyle uses it well but it’s a trap. Two parallel lives suggest equivalence. The American and the Mexican, each with their struggles. But the struggles are not equivalent. The power differential is the entire point. If you write two parallel narratives and give them equal weight, you’ve implied a symmetry that doesn’t exist. The woman crossing north to clean houses and the man crossing south to — what? Open a bar? Retire? The man going south is exercising a privilege. The woman going north is exercising a necessity. Those are not parallel. Those are perpendicular.”

“You can write two stories that are not parallel and put them next to each other,” Portis said. “You can write a story about a woman and a story about a bridge and let the reader decide which one is about the other.”

“I don’t want the reader to decide. I want the story to know.”

“Then you will write a thesis and it will be correct and nobody will remember it in ten years. Let the story not know. Let the story be as confused as the people in it. The woman on the bridge does not think about power differentials. She thinks about her knees and her documents and whether the man in the booth is the one who smiles or the one who does not.”

There was a long quiet after that. The ice machine cleared its throat outside the window. A truck passed on the highway, its headlights sweeping across the wall of the room, and for a moment the three of us were illuminated in a way that felt accidental and exposing, the way headlights catch someone doing something on the roadside they would rather not have seen.

“The ‘you,’” I said. “If the ‘you’ is the woman. If she is the story’s center. What does she want?”

“She wants to go home,” Portis said. “Both ways across the bridge, she wants to go home. In the morning she is leaving home to go to work. In the evening she is leaving work to go home. The bridge is the place where she is neither, where she belongs to neither country, where she is suspended over water that belongs to both countries and therefore to neither. The bridge is the story. Not the crossing — the being-on.”

“The being-on,” I repeated.

“Twenty minutes on the bridge, twice a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. That is roughly three hundred and fifty hours a year. In twenty years, seven thousand hours. What happens to a person who spends seven thousand hours in a place that is not a place? Who are they when they are on the bridge?”

“They are the border,” Meyer said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way that I recognized as the voice of a writer who has arrived at something he did not expect to find. “The woman on the bridge is the border. She is the thing that exists between two countries, that belongs to neither, that both countries need and neither country sees. She is the infrastructure. The invisible labor that makes both sides function.”

“Do not make her a symbol,” Portis said. “She is a woman. She has a name and a bad knee and a daughter who is studying to be a dentist in Saltillo. If she becomes a symbol, she stops being interesting. Symbols do not have bad knees.”

“I’m not making her a symbol. I’m saying the condition of her life is the condition of the border. That’s not symbolism. That’s material reality.”

“It is symbolism the moment you say it out loud. The moment a writer says ‘she is the border,’ you have murdered the woman and replaced her with an idea. Let her be a woman on a bridge with documents in a plastic bag and let the reader do the work of understanding what that means. You do not have to announce it.”

Meyer opened his mouth to respond and then did not. He stood and walked to the window and looked out at the highway and the hills and the darkness where Mexico was, invisible and present, the way a body of water is present beyond a dune even when you cannot see it.

“The Judge,” he said, not turning around. “In Blood Meridian. The Judge is the philosophical force. He says war is the ultimate trade, that all other trades are subordinate to it. I keep thinking about the customs officer. The man in the booth. He’s a small Judge. A petty Judge. He doesn’t philosophize about the nature of violence. He just administers it. Stamps, forms, questions, the power to say yes or no. The Judge scaled down to a booth with fluorescent lighting and a computer screen. And the woman stands before him twice a day and performs the ritual of asking permission to exist on the other side of a line, and he grants it or doesn’t, and the granting is a kind of violence, too, because the granting says: you needed permission. You needed me.”

“The customs officer is not the Judge,” Portis said. “The customs officer is a man with a government job and a pension and a lunch break. He may be kind. He may be cruel. He may vary between the two depending on whether his back hurts. Do not turn him into a force of nature. He is a man in a booth. That is terrible enough.”

I wanted to push back — the apparatus of documentation and permission and waiting was itself a form of the Judge’s argument, the state’s claim to sovereignty over a line in the desert as arbitrary and absolute as the Judge’s claim that war is god. But I looked at Portis and understood that his objection was not philosophical but technical. He was telling me that abstraction kills fiction. That the customs officer — the real man, with his back pain and his mood and his power to make a woman wait an extra ten minutes because he felt like it — was more frightening than any metaphor because he was real.

“The ‘you’ on the bridge,” I said. “Walking. The line of people ahead of her. The documents in the plastic bag. The sun. Tell me about the sun.”

“The sun on the bridge at seven in the morning in July,” Portis said, “is already an argument against being alive. It is the kind of sun that makes you understand why civilizations worshipped it. Not out of gratitude. Out of fear.”

“She has a hat,” Meyer said, still at the window. “A straw hat that her mother gave her. The brim is fraying. She has worn it on the bridge for twelve years and it has a salt line from her sweat and the salt line maps the history of her crossings the way a tree ring maps drought.”

“That is good,” Portis said. “Do not then tell me what the salt line symbolizes.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were about to.”

Meyer turned from the window and almost smiled, which for him was the equivalent of a standing ovation. “Fine. The hat is a hat. The salt is salt. The bridge is a bridge.”

“The bridge is a bridge and the woman is on it and she has been on it for twenty years and the story is told in the second person because that is how you talk to yourself when you are doing something so familiar it has become a form of self-erasure. You cross. You wait. You show. You walk. The ‘you’ is the sound of a life that has become a procedure.”

We sat with that. Or rather, Portis sat and I sat and Meyer stood at the window. The motel room felt smaller than it had when we started, the walls closer, the air thicker with cigarette smoke and the things we had said and the things we had not yet said.

“The ending,” I said.

“There is no ending,” Portis said. “She crosses in the morning and she crosses in the evening and she will cross again tomorrow. The story ends because the story stops. The woman does not.”

“That’s the ending I’m afraid of,” I said. “It’s too clean. Too perfect in its refusal to end. It becomes a statement about endurance and endurance becomes its own kind of sentimentality.”

“Then dirty it up,” Meyer said. “Something happens on the bridge. Something small. A delay. A new officer. A question she’s never been asked before. Something shifts in the procedure and for one moment she is not the ‘you’ of routine. She is the ‘you’ of attention. She is being looked at. And being looked at, after twenty years of not being looked at, is the most violent thing that happens in the story.”

Portis folded the newspaper and set it on the nightstand. He stood and put on his jacket, which was a canvas work jacket of the kind that could have been purchased at any farm supply store in any border town in the last fifty years. “You will want to write the bridge beautifully,” he said. “You will want the river below to do something with the light and the woman’s shadow to fall a certain way and the sky to mean something. Resist that. The bridge is concrete and steel and it smells like exhaust and the river is brown. Let the ugly things be ugly. The beauty, if there is any, is in the woman’s shoes. She wears the same shoes every day. They are white and they were cheap and she cleans them every Sunday with a toothbrush and bleach. That is the most beautiful thing on the bridge and you must not say so.”

He left. The door closed with the heavy mechanical sound of motel doors.

Meyer stayed at the window. I could see his reflection in the glass, overlaid on the darkness and the distant lights of what might have been Ciudad Acuna or might have been nothing.

“The second person is going to be harder than you think,” he said. “Because the ‘you’ asks the reader to become the woman. And the reader — our reader, the English-speaking reader who buys this kind of story — is almost certainly not a woman who crosses a bridge every day with documents in a plastic bag. So the ‘you’ is an imposition. It says: this is you now. And the reader has to decide whether to accept that or resist it. The ones who accept it will feel something they haven’t felt before. The ones who resist it will feel accused. Either way, the ‘you’ does work.”

“Which do you want?” I asked.

“Both. I want the reader who accepts and the reader who resists. I want the ‘you’ to be so specific, so grounded in the sensory reality of that bridge — the concrete under the shoes, the exhaust, the sun, the documents, the waiting — that resistance becomes its own kind of confession. If you can’t step into this woman’s shoes, the story wants to know why. And it won’t ask. It’ll just keep saying ‘you.’”

He turned from the window. “The hardest line will be the one where ‘you’ becomes ‘they.’ Where the woman looks at the other people on the bridge and they are ‘they’ and she is still ‘you’ and the reader has to hold both — the interiority of one crossing and the anonymity of a thousand. That’s the border. One person, a thousand crossings, and the apparatus that counts them all the same.”

He picked up his keys from the nightstand. “I need to drive back tonight.”

“It’s three hours to San Antonio.”

“I know how far it is.” He opened the door and the outside air came in, warm and smelling of dust and gasoline and the particular stillness of a border town at night, which is not peace but the absence of the daytime machinery.

He paused in the doorway. “The shoes,” he said. “The white shoes she cleans every Sunday. Don’t make them a symbol. But don’t forget them either.”

Then he was gone and I was alone in the room with the folded newspaper and the green chair and the ice machine clearing its throat outside and the border out there in the dark, not a line but a zone, not a wall but a bridge, not a concept but a woman in white shoes walking across concrete in the sun, and the story was already writing itself in the second person, saying: you cross, you wait, you show your documents, you walk, you do this again, you have always done this, and the ‘you’ was not an accusation and not a set of directions but something in between, something that sounded like a life being lived in the grammar of someone else’s language, which is what the border is, which is what crossing is, which is what the story would have to hold without explaining, because explaining would be the one unforgivable thing.