The Weight of Shadows (25 page)

When one thinks of a shadow, one typically imagines an absence—a type of nothing—but this is fundamentally wrong. In Varo's painting, the visual space where the viewer assumes a man once was, or should be, is occupied by a shadow. The black three-dimensional figure fills the rounded contours of a body, except it is made of darkness. The darkness walks,
while the image of the man is relegated to the flat world of silhouette. A shadow is not the absence of light but a relationship of light with itself and with an observer. This is why we can see shadows within shadows and the textures of objects and surfaces upon which shadows are cast. This is why shadows do not exist in totally dark rooms. Nevertheless, our association of shadows with nothingness remains.

Nothing
is supposed to signify no one, no place, and no thing—not anything, not at all, no single thing—yet when we investigate what's referred to by
nothing
we invariably find something. In a shadow, for example, there is always light, and it is blue—not always the same blue, because it changes depending on the distances between objects, light sources, and observers, but some light always radiates into the area alleged to be absent of it. If we think about the physical sciences, a vacuum is often synonymous with and supposed to represent a kind of nothing, but even the most sophisticated laboratory equipment and processes cannot evacuate space of everything. In fact, in the discipline of physics, a vacuum is not understood to be nothing, but rather only a space absent of particles with which photons are known to interact. Where we think there is nothing, we always find something.

A disappearance is said to have occurred when something ceases to be visible. In cases of human disappearance, this definition could not be farther from the truth. When a person disappears, the missing becomes hyper-visible, hyper-present. In Argentina the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose children were disappeared by the military junta of the 1970s, continue to visit police stations holding worn photographs and articles of clothing of their disappeared children, demanding to know where, what, how, and why. Some of the adolescent siblings of desaparecidos say when their brothers or sisters were taken they were made orphans because their parents disappeared too, psychologically and emotionally, never able to think about anything but
the missing, never out of an excruciating cycle of compulsive thoughts. If their disappeared children lived at home, some of the mothers have kept guard over their rooms making sure that not one object is touched or moved, not one open book closed, not one pen capped. Ashtrays sit full for forty years. The missing do not truly disappear until those who surrounded them, those who felt deeply for them one way or another, are gone too.

One of the most common human practices across cultures through millennia is the enactment of funereal rituals that center on the body of the departed. Not everyone buries their dead, but everyone has the need to mark the passage from life to death by acknowledging the evacuation of personhood in viewing the stillness of the body, attempting to ensure happiness in the afterlife by adorning the body, granting safe passage into another world by cleansing the body, forging closure in speaking good-byes to the body, ensuring entrance to the afterlife by anointing the body, precipitating the voyage to another realm by destroying the body. Without the body, the desperate mind latches onto the most unlikely of hope against all reason. Without the body, or at the very least without the knowledge of death having occurred, it is difficult, if not impossible, for loved ones to find closure. The trauma of ambiguous loss is daily inflicted anew. It remains a gaping wound that will never close, never heal, never cease to excruciate. To this day, mothers roam the Atacama, a vast desert spanning 105,000 square kilometers, combing the arid grounds looking for fragments of their sons' and daughters' bones.

The total number of people who have died attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is unknowable. According to Customs and Border Protection there were 6,330 “Southwest border deaths” between October 1, 1998, and September 30, 2014, but this number is all but certainly low. The figures for any given period vary depending on the source. When
asked about the discrepancies by a reporter for the
Arizona Republic
, Frank Amarillas, a Border Patrol spokesman for the Tucson sector, said the Border Patrol counts deaths encountered only by agents or deaths referred to them by local law enforcement officials. “We are not notified in every case,” he said. Other cases do not meet the narrow criteria for being counted by CBP. William Robbins, Border Patrol spokesman for the Yuma sector, told the
Arizona Republic
that in order to be counted, skeletal remains had to be recovered near the border or on a trail known to be used by migrants. Cases in which local police, private citizens, other migrants, volunteers of civil society organizations, or medical personnel are the first to come in contact with a migrant's remains may not be included in CBP's numbers. It is not common practice or standard operating procedure for CBP to contact local authorities to inquire about found remains.

When the truth of forced disappearances eventually breaches the armor plating of official narratives and begins to be acknowledged, numbers remain a site of contestation. By assigning a number and claiming it represents “Southwest border deaths,” CBP is staking a claim in our collective past, present, and future; in history; in individual memory, perception, and evaluation. Rather than reflecting the reality of death due to US policy, the CBP figure much more accurately represents the number of remains recovered in certain arbitrarily and inconsistently determined zones on the US side of the boundary line and, of these, only those for which CBP agents were the first responders. Nevertheless it orients our understanding of reality because it is the official figure. It comes to represent a fair estimate of death along the border. But if we shift just one metric to include estimates for migrants killed in Mexico, the actual human cost of immigration and border policy begins to look radically different. Some civil society groups estimate that the number of migrants disappeared between 2006 and 2012 in Mexico
is as high as seventy thousand. If we don't only measure the human cost in fatalities but consider that individuals fit like necessary vectors in family dyads, triads, and so on, that each of these disappearances reverberates beyond the boundaries of the individual, that each represents a missing brother, sister, son, daughter, father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, best friend, confidant, or casual lover, the cost begins to feel catastrophic. And it is. It's not uncommon to visit the countryside in Mexico and find all of the men of a certain age are gone, and no one can tell you where they have gone. Families wait each day anticipating communication of any kind, communication that never comes.

Loved ones of the disappeared need to know. The ambiguity becomes so unbearable that some pray simply for the knowledge, the confirmation, that their loved one is dead, but an integral part of this phenomenon is the production and maintenance of ambiguity. For decades after the fact, authorities declared there were no mass graves in Argentina, and that no one had been flown in military planes, drugged, blessed by military chaplains, and dumped into the Río de la Plata off the coast of Buenos Aires. No one had been incinerated. Pope Francis, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a leader in the Jesuit order of Argentina during the Dirty War, could do nothing, could say nothing. The military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet did not scatter the remains of anyone in the Atacama. There are no mass graves in Chile. No one was flown over the Pacific and thrown from helicopters. Jute sacks containing bodies were not dumped in lakes and rivers throughout Chile. The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States knew nothing of it. It had not trained Pinochet's army. It had not funded them. The Sonoran Desert is not scattered with unrecovered, unidentified souls. The riverbed of the Rio Grande is not embedded with unidentified family members. There are no mass graves in the United States.

Before leaving the desert, another volunteer and I had been driving to a remote location when our truck stalled on a hill and wouldn't start. We radioed camp, and another crew said they would drive out to get us. Within two minutes the heat inside the truck became so intense both of us had soaked through our clothes, and I was having trouble drawing breath so we had to step out. Within another minute it became apparent we needed to find shade, but it was noon, so the sun was directly overhead, and everywhere we turned there were nothing but short, thin mesquite trees, barrel cacti, and sotol. We couldn't wait inside the car and, because of the position in which it had become stalled, there was no room to crawl under it. We sat down for a moment in the middle of a small clearing, but again the sun became so intense that my shoulders burned, even through my shirt, and I felt several moments of overwhelming panic. The urge to tear off my clothes cut through reason because it felt like I was suffocating in them, and I remembered hearing that many dead migrants were found naked because in their last moments they'd become crazed with desperation under the savagely brutal sun. I ran to the truck and emptied half a gallon of water over my head. My partner followed, dumping the other half over his. We radioed the other crew again, and they said they were about half an hour away. I remember feeling a pinprick of terror, despite having a truck full of water. Then I remembered I had a large green raincoat in my backpack. I gathered brittle, thorny branches and collected them in a tall pile, throwing the raincoat over the top, making a sort of canopy that produced just enough shade for us to crouch beneath.

As we waited, my temples began to throb, and all I could think about was how this heat and this sun helped make things disappear, how the desert as landscape—preexisting and natural—was a refinement of the torture centers that had existed in places like Chile and Argentina. Those black
sites had been housed in preexisting buildings so that after the deeds were carried out, knowledge of them could be scrubbed away and the buildings reintegrated into daily life. The desert was that and more, helping not only to carry out the deeds but also to obfuscate lines of causality and responsibility. It made those who died in it seem responsible for their own disappearance.

The final place of unrest for these unidentified dead is a section of Tucson's Evergreen Cemetery. Most of the grounds are tree-lined and lush despite the arid climate, but beyond a certain point the grass ends and there is only hard, bare dirt. This austere periphery rarely sees mourners; it's where migrant remains are deposited when no identification can be made. The area looks like an abandoned lot. There are two rectangular grave markers on the dirt next to each other, which read “JOHN DOE UNK 1992” and “JOHN DOE UNK 1995.” Someone stabbed a small bouquet of red plastic flowers between the slabs long ago. The petals have since been beaten down by annual monsoons and have faded to a dull pink. In 2004 the county ruled that unidentified remains found in the desert would be cremated to save space. The above-ground columbaria look like brown dumpsters, with ceramic slabs that open to dark niches where the metal boxes of unclaimed ashes are placed and will remain in ambiguity.

An older white stranger in his fifties buys me drinks well into the night. He's one of those lonely types who rambles continuously without stopping, maybe because he lives alone and rarely has occasion to speak aloud. He's saying something about his brother who he hasn't seen in over twenty years because of a fight they had. Around closing time I don't need to let my eyes go crossed for everything to look soft. The bare, hanging bulbs bloom into orbs of light that look like white hydrangeas. When he pays our tab I give him a hug before we part—because he looks like he really wants one. He says he can't remember what the fight was about, but it's too late because they've gone too long hating each other, and now it's just about that hate. “Call your brother,” I say before we say good-bye. He gives me a cigarette for the road, and I take off walking down a random street without direction. I feel like walking, and so I do, for hours. I tend to do this in every city I find myself in, wander around at dawn listening to the hollow sounds of urban spaces at night. Tucson has its own pitch, but it also sounds like all the others, like an empty iron hull, similar to putting your ear to a seashell only much grander because this is the rushing static of highways and commerce in the distance. I must have walked for four
or five miles before making my way to the house where I'd arranged to stay. I didn't see a soul the whole time.

I open my eyes before my alarm goes off. It's dark and the unfamiliar orientation of the room throws me. Then, just as my eyes adjust to the darkness and I see a white cat staring at me from a window ledge on a redbrick wall, I remember I'm in Tucson.

The woman who hosts volunteers in Tucson lives in an old adobe structure that used to be a market. Five-foot nopales line the front, some of which still have purple fruit on them from the monsoon. The federal courthouse is just a couple blocks away and, as I leave the house, I cut across a parking lot about the size of a football field. In the middle of this huge black lot, I come upon the desiccated remains of a small white scorpion—no larger than a quarter, perhaps crushed underfoot.

In the middle distance, the federal courthouse mars the landscape. It has the look of a research hospital or an urban juvenile prison. I approach a short woman with jet-black hair who stands at the stoplight across the street from the entrance. Her hair is like thick wire, and from behind she looks like my mother, with whom I haven't spoken in weeks. At the desert camp, getting cell phone service required walking up a hill that was heavily patrolled by Border Patrol, so I didn't make any calls. Besides, I would have had to come up with a series of lies about where I was and what I was doing, and she always knows when I'm lying to her.