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Exile

on land and memory

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Michelle O’Brien, 1997

In 1994-1998, while in high school and early into college, I wrote a great deal of science fiction. Most of it were post-apocalyptic short stories or novel openings. This was probably my best short story from that period, written during my first year at college in 1997. I include it here not because it's particularly remarkable, but to try to remember that period. I am trying to write science fiction again, and sharing some of my stories from back then is helping me reconnect with my work as a writer.

"Home--" the word pierces my dreams. Wandering memories torn, endless ruins and gnawing loss. Confused images of flesh and land rush. Try to grasp it, hold on. Home. Its like the Zone that time i returned and the sky was screaming. In my dream it has changed, blood and muscles grafted to concrete and stone. Home. Lost. "Wake up Caz, I’m asking you a question--" i lie, drenched and shaking; trying to clear my eyes of sleep and my vision of dream. "Do you want to just go," i hear, trying to bury my head deeper in the torn car seat. Home. "Home Caz? Wake up!" The word is drenched in yearning. "Should we go home?"

Sit up, looking across at her, crisscrossed by the metal grate between us. Her head silhouetted in the pre-dawn coming in blurry through the spiderweb-shattered window behind. "What did you say?" The air in the car is intensely stuffy and claustrophobic. Putting my shirt back on. Running my fingers the length of my scarred wrist veins, feel the beat. Rapid and irregular. Through it feel subterranean rumblings of sickness.

"I asked," she roars. "If you’re feeling wasted, do you want to go ahead with the hike, head South? Or head back home?" Trying to grasp at the conversation, struggling momentarily with the problem of context. Home. Wandering, exiled in bombed out flesh ruins. "Wake up for sake Caz!"

"It’s . . . it’s just the dreams . . . Like to hike." My throat is stale as i speak. Try to swallow. Kay wipes one fogged window with her sleeve, peering out into the early morning. The dawn light catches her face, blue threads trailing across a golden smile.

"Good. Let's go scrounge breakfast." She forces the door with a roaring crash can feel in the heartbeat on the inside of my skull. The outside image is familiar, echoing the images from the dream quickly fading from memory. Ruins, wreckage, desert. My red stains and pulsing arteries becoming mundane red spray paint and brown stencils on concrete and stone. Open my own door and follow, dragging out two backpacks. She grabs one, throwing it over her shoulder. Our car, a torn ancient police car wrapped in blood graffiti, opens onto the early dawn light of the brown sky over an earth of a slightly darker shade. "Come on Caz," she urges. "I know you’re starving too."

The ground feels unusually hard. Dry cracks split and spread across the clay. I see the rains are coming in the ground lines, earlier than expected. The sky is clear but tense, charged. The Italian weather satellite photographs show a low-intensity yet huge storm coming from the north. Can see Sato’s blue-green digital satellite graphics hacked from the Rome system superimposed on the early morning grey-blue sky above. World turned upside-down. I chuckle at the image. Reach back and grab my jacket from the car, tightening the straps of my sleeves and waist.

We are south of the Crater and the Leopold House. Beyond, after a few bombed-out buildings and the old Gila river snaking through, the desert becomes flat and endless, broken only by memories and history. The war-torn topography of the Zone. I look back at the car, tracing a grid of black lines that long ago i drew on its surface, weaving under and over the red spray-painted names. Had painted a street grid map on the car when the shit first started going down. Now a map into my past. The pained yearning of exile pulls at me. "Come on Caz!" she calls to me. Turn away, letting the memory and the dream slip. "What would you do without me? Fucking starve to death."

"Sorry. Sorry Kay. If we angle eastward as we head south, might find some edible greens. Remember the lat/longi-coords. Little, stubby like, with tight sunburst arms dressed in pale green. The roots make good teas, and the leaves are ok if fried little. If we leave some, they should be ready to eat again in another three or four weeks, regrown. Should be nuff for couple of days, maybe three. We can also take few to replant in the garden plot, there’s some space and bet all would like ‘em," i offer. We watch the dawn as it slowly stumbles over distant grey horizons.

She looks away from the sun to laugh, shaking her head. "You’re a doll, Caz," smiling at the compliment, i watch her take her thick black dreads and wrap them with a stone bead necklace. The tattoos play along her face and neck, blue spiderwebs laced with white cruciforms, disappearing under thick layers of leather and wool. They reemerge at the fingertips of her left hand, sticking out from the cut-off thick wool gloves. Chi lines. "How do you do that?"

Tapping my temple with a slight grin. "Mapped it out love, i mapped it out."

From "Re/Mapping the Zone | Re/Telling Post-Revolutionary Geographies," Emmanuel Casing, ClayLines: A Journal of Art and Power, Winter 2019:

"Do you remember your parents?" i ask, wrapped in safety and warmth. We lie on an old sofa atop the twisted massive metal frame of the tower. We look west, facing the Leopold, though it’s hidden in the canyons of toppled scrapers. Golden evening light spills across the terrain with long shadows and a warmglow. The landscape is littered with fallen buildings, jagged bombed-out scrapers, and the settlements. Molded to fit into canyons and over ridges, the rounded amorphous adobe dwellings of the settlements remind me more of fungus or regrown flesh then their towering ancestors. Scraps of found metal, wood, or plastic are patched together with the adobe blobs, like cyborg buildings slowly crawling over the land. Terraced gardens and glowing windows are scattered to the far horizon. The bright colors of the settlements and ruins glow in the evening light, radiating blues, reds, yellows, greens.

Kay lies, curled up in my arms. A blanket we stitched together last winter covers us. We proudly scored a tunnel into an old clothing store two years ago, right after we first met. We lent out the clothes, promised stories, aspirations, or histories to accompany when the clothes were returned to us, too worn to wear. We wove the clothes into the quilt, painting and patch designing the stories into its surface. Searched through my old roles of maps to find an appropriate design. Dancing through the delineated territories are images of all of us. Kay and i waving from a porch of the Leopold - an orange house with a red door, Sato with his yellow people building the tower, Jahs with kids, all smiling in bright sunny clothing, Didi flying an airplane, Jasmine at a giant piano pounding out the keys, Maria standing on a mountain top. Memories, dreams, hopes--our lives framed by the color-coated districts and major avenues of "The Greater Moscow Metropolitan Area."

She twists her head and looks at me. Her face glows with the evening light. Her eyes are brown, thin threads of green in the iris and thicker ones of red, like rivers, in the white. "My parents? Of course. Well, not all that well, but i can see um, you know?"

"Yeah?" She looks away, down at an emaciated dog trotting between two giant concrete boulders. Not sure if she heard me. Liked the way we smell, sweat and dirt from the day’s salvage work, but also Jasmine’s curry we ate just before. "What were they like? What do you think about them?"

As the dog disappears behind another ruin, she begins, "They were ok, I guess. Mom was a musician, and a dancer. Played with a group of a few other women. Folk music, political shit. She went out at night a lot, brought me whenever I’d come. Her hair was a bright red, just leapt at you, but in a comforting way. Her partner, an accountant, she annoyed the hell out of me. Mom use to tell me stories, a lot about other places, about magic and the worlds collapsing into each other and all. Elves saving bums running from Nazi gas cans, shit like that. Faeries, not queers, the little people i mean, but not Sato’s little people, oh, faeries letting everyone out of jail after she had been busted at a big protest. About mountains where people speak languages that could open doors, or say shit to stop the tanks, or bring dreams. But shit, even we can do that. But it wasn’t all happy. Trenches filled with bodies, elves heaped in with peasants and labor organizers. Bombs burning cities so hot not even fairies could escape, their wings melted with the heat rising from below. She could see faerie, like me, I guess. Like you." We can hear music, flute, drifting from somewhere distant below. It’s joined by a song in an unfamiliar language. "Arabic," she says, answering the unasked question.

"Dad was a trip. I didn’t see him much. Would spend the summers with him in Mexico. He taught and wrote at the UNAM in the District. His parents were Guatemalan campesinos. Their village was wiped out during the war, in early 80s i think, and any survivors, my Dad among them, fled to Mexico. When i would visit him, he would take me on these long backpacking trips through the mountains in the liberated zones. We would meet with these guerrilla groups, i guess that’s what they were. I couldn’t have been more than twelve. He would write for long hours at night. Talk in fevered and slightly scary tones about the power of writing. It was just the beginning of Rev2 in Mexico, and major shit was going down. A neat guy, i guess. He liked me, i could tell that, but i never thought he paid enough attention. He was always so distracted, scattered. Had a hard time holding his life together, relationships and shit. Well, Mom did too, but for other reasons. His dog, a big German shepherd, was a spirit aid, took care of him.

"They both understood a lot. Just not how to keep hold of themselves. How to survive."

Run my hand through her hair, tucking it behind her ears before asking, "You said i could see faerie . . . What did you mean?"

"In your maps. The maps you're always drawing, those in your art. They aren’t . . . they aren’t of places, or at least not how i was taught to understand the term. They‘re of cities destroyed, some farther back than anyone remembers, or of people, of memories, or of places that have never existed. They’re mapping something much more . . . much more magical than the maps i remember. Like your mapping of the Zone--you put in streets and buildings and mountains and rivers and shit that don’t exist. Some of them are from before, others . . . others are faerie routes. Death routes. Ley routes."

Silent for a moment, thinking of what she said. "Thank you." Try to think of what to say. "What happened with your parents?" She pulls up her sleeve. Focus on her forearm, the blue lines and tiny white symbols that fill them. She points to two, white circular shapes on her blue fleshnet i know represent her parents. Then i feel her shift, resting her head on my shoulder, pulling the blanket tighter, ready to sleep.

"Hmm. They drugged Mom with so much shit she saw what they wanted her to see and stopped making music. I think she’s still in SF, empty and happy. Dad was offed by a death squad when Mexico City starting really getting out of hand. Machine-gunned his car. He had refused to go underground. I took off for Argentina, from there Cuba, and the States, into the Zone just after it was formed, San Diego. San Diego, my fucking god. Never seen anything like that. . . . Was probably about fourteen, fifteen when i hit Argentina. Eventually made it here, to the Leopold House. But those -- those are other stories."

"Here it is! Got it, ready?" The dining room is crowded with voices and sounds, light spilling across the table. Dishes heaped with food passed back and forth, all garnished with touches of bright flowers. We quieting down waiting for Chandra to continue.

"taste of flowers spring/laughing, among love. peaceful/yet remembering" Chandra been on a haiku trip all week. We are beginning to delight in those sketches of language. Yet remembering.

"Today's it. May 29. Endra." Sato says quietly. Endra was killed five years back, a former resident of the Leopold. She had been doing a recon scouting run in preparation for our '18 raid in the Corozon, a military concentration camp. An incredible woman; a dancer, a storyteller, a poet. "Yet remembering. It's been five years."

"We can do a ritual time tonight around her," Esperanza says after a moment, bringing the potatoes in from the kitchen. "Tell some stories, light some candles."

After some moments, noise and light flows back into the room. A few are talking about Endra, about all the losses through the years. Find myself talking with Casey across the table. Casey's just turned 13, and is an immense pleasure to be with. She is charged with intense curiosity and critical delight i never stop enjoying. We work in the gardens a lot together, something she knows far more about than me. She's holding a raw potato as she talks, explaining how you can learn a lot about the history of a potato -- how it grew, under what conditions, the texture of the soil, the techniques in digging it up and preparing it -- all by the texture and pattern on its surface.

"How 'bout you, What's been bouncing around in there Caz?" She throws the conversation back.

"Lately been thinking a lot about maps. They've been showing up in my art this last year, and i'm thinking of doing some writing on maps." Scoop some peas into my bowl.

"What kind of maps?"

"Oh, all kinds." Glance around the living room trying to explain. "For example . . . what you were saying about the potato. It's a little map memory writes."

"Exactly!" She exclaims after thinking about it. "If you pay attention, everything tells its story. Like your arms." Choke on my food for a moment, startled at her comment.

"Now what do you know about that?" My throat is tight with anger and shock.

"Esperanza told me you used to hate yourself and your arms will always remember that, even if you like to pretend you forgot. Little maps leading back." Casey darts into the kitchen for water leaving me gasping. My arms are scarred -- razor cuts, burns, pock needle marks. From more difficult times don't often talk about.

"Going Home/Mapas de la Casa," compiled by Emmanuel Casing. Photography exhibit. Feb 2022. Gomez-Peña Arts and Creativity Center, Agua Prieta. Excerpt from a review by Camas Springwind, published in the London zine toast:

Audiotape. 21 Dec 2013. Emmanuel Casing interviewing Esperanza, of the Zone Healers Federation and Colectivo Madrugada of the Insurgent Alliance.

Journal entry. 14 Feb 2014. Emmanuel Casing.

II

Shortly after the demilitarization i prepared an installation piece for an art fair. The art fair was to "mark the chance to map our grief, our mourning, our future, amidst the scarred landscapes of Earth and memory, cities and ourstory," as the program i helped prepare for the event explained. Thousands poured in from all over the Zone and liberated lands throughout America to participate in the post-revolutionary celebration.

My piece was a collection of desert refuse--cactus pieces, rocks, clippings of primrose or mesquite, sand, rusted metal fragments, torn car parts--glued and woven together with maps and old photographs. Together they form a sculpture of a small boy, about four feet high. His hands are cut, the sand and photographs that make up his fingers stained with blood. Behind him, desert objects litter the art center’s floor, tracing his trail through the building. He is stumbling, staggering. He wears a halo of wrapped ocotillo, bands of spiked cacti. The piece earned me the honor of becoming the coordinator of community art projects.

It traced one of my most striking memories from my youth -- getting lost in the desert when i was ten. Spent a major part of my childhood hiking what we called then Arizona -- the Pinals, the Sierra Ancha, the Brandshaws and the basin and valleys of the Gila. My older sister and i would go out together, sometimes accompanied by our father, sometimes not. Walking for hours following old maps through the desert, we would stumble on new development, new cities, new copper mines, new military bases -- all from after our map copyright dates. Once we were accidentally separated. Climbing over a ridge, i expected an abandoned colonial Mexican town the map identified. It wasn't there. The geography unrecognizable. An abandoned pit mine lay where apparently a mountain had, a drainage ditch of dried mud where the map showed a river. An abandoned convenience store where the old town should have been. A new highway cutting through the entire scene.

Walked for hours along the highway, winding down out of the mountains into the flat lowlands. Located rainwater gathered in the hollows of a boulder and again in the crumpled corrugated tin rough of a collapsed gas station along the road. At one point i realized the brown spot on blue high above was a hawk, following me. Strange for this country. It soared, circling my path, watching. I remember faintly wondering if the hawk could show me its map, traced from such heights.

When i finally, in exhaustion, laid down in the strip of shade beside an overturned pickup, it circled lower, finally descending rapidly to snag a mouse from behind a pile of rocks. The hawk brought it over near me, stepping carefully in the cooler shadow. As she began to eat the mouse, i felt something fall away. Something that had been stirring inside rushed to the surface through delirium and heat stroke and filled my vision. A pattern in which i found and lost myself. A map of creation. Boundless and infinitely intricate.

I awoke in freezing water in my bathroom, submerged by the strong hands of my mother.

From "Re/Mapping the Zone | Re/Telling Post-Revolutionary Geographies,"

"It’s breathtaking." Home. So many maps and i can never return. Feel the rhythm of the paint brush, the course silence of thick strokes. Stepping back, i run my marked hand wet through my hair, smiling. Select another can, crimson, no not at all. A spray can of khaki. The basic pattern is laid out. On one end, tight lines of highways emerging from the Mexico City, 1968, snaking and framing through a featureless territory, cities reduced to tiny dots forced to hold the lives and memories of millions. The lines then begin to fall apart, becoming wild, loose, flowing. Momentarily they are a splice of a microchip schematic. Near the middle they form a cross section of the 1863 map by a white land speculator of the Rio Grande during flooding. He commissioned the map, though it could never have been made without his Indian guides. By the right end of the mural, they form the veins and hair emerging from the head of a woman, or possibly a man, who might or might not have been Kay. Or me. Their head is thrown back, the muscles in the neck taught, the eyes closed. From their scalp explodes the dream of the world. "Just gorgeous."

"Not done at all." Look back at Kay, standing framed in the stone archway on the far end of the courtyard. "Not at all." She steps out from under the turquoise wall across the square red tiles. She clutches a steaming mug. The mug is brown, uncolored, from a batch the House fired together almost a year before.

"What’s next?" she asks as she pulls up a stool, wrapping her legs around the bottom rung. Kay’s bathrobe, yellow, we dyed from a batch of fifty white ones we found in an old clothing store raid.

"The map is only underlying the full play of the dream itself. Here a mushroom cloud that becomes our Lady of Guadeloupe, and here Marcos, a guerrilla from a 90s Chiapas rebellion, and here the District skyline from 2010, and here of Teotihuacan, circa 648. Yesterday was Diego’s birthday, so i have him here, that beige thing that looks like a featureless blob from where you’re sitting. It's his kind of shit, you know, la historia de madre mejico materialized in a mural . . . " i say, not quite sure i understand. She steps closer, traces a thick line with her finger tips.

"What’s this?" gesturing to the thick paint under closest to the skull.

"Mi pelo, from when cut it last summer. Glued onto the canvas and painted over with black paint." She looks up at me and grins.

"Care to come in for a lunch break? Didi and i were going to cook up some of that rice we traded for . . . "

"Un momento. I want to finish this part."

"Qué es?" Wipe my fingers on my overalls, pulling a newspaper clipping from my chest pocket and handing it to her. She takes it, frowns for a minute, then her face fills with a moment’s shock. Been reproducing the newspaper photograph in grey watercolors in the lower let hand corner. Wrapped up in my mural’s face of Che, it is a tiny girl in a summer dress standing nervously in the middle of a thick overgrown lawn, next to a crouching smiling young mestizo man.

"My god, where did you find this?"

"In the Corre La Voz, a paper from the District of Mexico, July 7, 1999. From an archivist in the East." she hands the photo back with a shaking hand. Take it and put it back in my pocket. Her face is near tears. She quickly goes inside. I follow her in, ready to hold her, perhaps heat up some tea. The headline accompanying the picture, if i remember correctly, was ‘Escritor Manuel Guiterez Tum y Hija Sophia Fueron Matados en Asasinato del Ejercito.’ An author and his daughter killed in a recent rash of military-style assassinations. The article, toward the end, had explained, ‘La otra hija y esposa de Guiterez, Kara Guiterez Hammon y Sandra Hammon, ambos viviendo en San Francisco, EEUU, no estaban disponibles.’ La otra hija, the other daughter of the author, Kara Guiterez Hammon, Kay, is sobbing, curled up in our sofa in the corner, being comforted by a confused friend Chandra.

The police car draws me to it. We sleep there when we are beginning a southern hike. Behind it, a thick cluster of toppled buildings, now serving as the complex of La Casa de Las Madres, home to forty or so women of various ages and an occasional son. Kay lived in the Casa when she first arrived in the Zone, like most of the women i know who have at one point or another passed under its immense carved concrete archway. Those of us at the Leopold learned a lot about community from La Casa.

The car faces into the heart of the Zone--south. The flat expansive terrain stretches endlessly. At first, crumbling towers lie amongst patchwork housing complexes and dense gardens. Past the Gila, a river that still traces its ancient route, the buildings taper off to the desert. A few peaks, Montezuma visible from the car, before it begins to level out. Stretching a several days walk farther through the desert, and you arrive at the Wall: a crumbling concrete ditch lined with collapsing walls and cut rolls of barb wire, laid amongst bombed-out army barracks and abandoned rangers.

When the army finally out of the Zone as a whole, they left behind a lot. Anything big that wouldn’t shoot or drive for scavengers to dismantle and take away. A devestated, burnt desert that finally, after fifty years of ecocidal development, was free to try to heal. Memories of incomprehensibly massive brutality. Sterilized soil to try to scratch out our gardens. Bombed out cities in ruins in which to construct our homes. Rapids from the old damns. A people who found something in struggle they would never again give-up. A physical and social geography utterly unrecognizable from the old maps.

Come back to the car to stare at it. Black lines run under multicolored writing and drawings.. The graffiti: names of artists, gangs, tribes, slogans of warring ideologies, factions or aesthetics. A social mapping of power relations, territorial disputes, shifting identities, unstable in time. And my own map. Intricate, completely unlabeled, just a maze of black lines--and the mapping of my longing. A memory of wealth, prosperity, a history of passing. While static, the map serves as a reminder of the temporality of spaces. It is a map of the city before it became lost in the Zone. A city map of a now bombed out ruin. Pheonix, Arizona. Before the sky opened and screamed and denied the possibility of ever turning back.

Its a map of a home, of a past that i've lost. No turning back.

III

"Court Transcript, 9th Circuit, Los Angeles, California. February 12, 2007. The State of California vs. James Wind-dancer." My voice drifts around the empty kitchen, finally resting on the floor tiles. The table before me is covered in old documents pulled from an empty plastic box on the floor beside my chair. Articles, transcripts, maps, photographs. Adjust the candle. "Page 39," and continue reading silently.

"What are you reading?" Glance up as Kay comes into the kitchen.

"White supremacist bullshit," responding, tossing the document to her. "Want some coffee? Tea?"

"Tea, please. What is this?" I get up and lit the stove, reheating the kettle.

"A transcript of a trial. Of an old and very, very dear friend. Been looking through my old documents," gesturing at the crowded table. She sits on a stool, tucking her feat on a rung. Pull myself up, sitting on the counter. "Remembering."

"What happened?" Sigh, not sure i want to tell the story, or how.

"An occupation of a LA tv station . . . There were a bunch, you remember them, right? We were the first, I think--held it for five hours while we broadcasted footage from the war throughout the Zone. The stations had been running nothing but savages and aliens, terrorists and wackos, commercials and propaganda, like more prisons and malls would fix it all."

"We?" she asks. Haven’t talked much at all about my life before we met.

"I don’t know if it still matters. An splinter armed cell formed out of AIM. We were affiliated with the Insurgent Alliance and Underground Media United. The IA gave us tactical support, UMU the videos. We had been operating for a few months."

"Aim?"

"American Indian Movement --"

"Oh yeah. The footage?"

"Done by some kids, punks. UMU was distributing vidcams in those days with basic classes in shooting and editing. These thrash gangs were coming out with shit that left the fucking corporate PR-specs stuttering in terror. Good shit, gorgeous footage. Lots of interviews, lots of following people around, lots of maps."

"Maps?"

"They were hard to come by . . . The pigs and corps had tight control . . . Blueprints, streetlayouts, city plans. Maps mean a lot in warfare. You’ve mentioned this when talking about running in Buenos Aires . . . ’specially important for underground passageways, power and water lines, private burbclaves, highsec facilities and the really poor barrios . . . and the kinds of maps too."

"What happened after the action?" The water has started to boil. I pour a second mug, dropping in a tiny wooden cage filled with peppermint leaves. "Thank you,"

"You’re welcome," i continue. "James was sentenced to life in prison despite major fuck-ups with the cops procedurals. The guy had fucking identifiable torture scars from the police interrogation, completely unprecedented. It was the last of the major publicity trials -- after that they started the disappearances. Two of us had escaped underground from the station, Sarah and me. We had the maps," with a slight smirk that quickly vanished. "One person on the team, Joseph, was killed when SWAT stormed the building, along with two hostages. They captured James in the raid. After the trial, LA erupted in the third major riot of the year. That one, however, didn’t stop. They shipped James to a camp in Idaho after the wave of SoCal prison uprisings, before the IA started the liberation raids. Got knifed by nazis soon after. I moved back here. Organized some murals with the street gangs . . . "

From "Re/Mapping the Zone | Re/Telling Post-Revolutionary Geographies,"

"Did you say here? Did you say you moved back here?" Silently swirl my coffee mug, i watch the grains rolling over themselves in the bottom. "You’ve been so silent about your past Caz," she goes on. "You’ve made murals or clothes or blankets or tattoos or rooms or something out of the stories of everyone we know. But you never talk. Goddamn historian doesn't say a word. I feel vulnerable, talking about my past without you responding, and it isn’t pleasant. I don't even fucking know where you're from."

Silently get up and turn to walk to the door. "My God. Well fuck you too," she snaps across the room.

"No, I’ll show you something. Come on." Gesture to her. My mind is flooded with images from my dreams, devastation and loneliness. She glares at me for a moment, questioning, than gets up to follow. "Bring a coat."

The moon is near full and there is a great deal of light. People are about setting up for the market the next morning. We walk together in tight concrete canyons lined with blankets and booths waiting for the coming morning market. Follow the paths in my mind, tracing the geography across the car map, a path over the rear driver-side door toward the roof. Leading deep, to the edge of memory and ourstory. To the empty burnt frame of my longing. "Do you know what was here before?" i ask.

"I had never heard of this place, before . . . and i haven’t talked with anyone about it. A city, what was it called?"

"Phoenix." We’ve been climbing for about twenty minutes beyond the far edge of the market. The nightmares have been building steadily, pushing in on my waking consciousness. I climb up a twisted metal ladder to the top of a rusted water tank. "My family has lived in this land for a long, long time. We had maps going back hundreds of years of this area. Now, i am exiled." As Kay gets to the top i gesture around: "Downtown Phoenix. My home, where i grew up, is right over there. Everything i loved, everything i knew, every connection i had that counted for shit was here. Now i am left. I am exiled."

Stretched out before us lies an immense crater. Extending far beyond our moon-illuminated horizon of sight, the crater consumes the landscape. Inside, the crater's rounded sides are lined by asphalt, glass and steel. In a few spots, scavengers have begun to dig out the bowl, leaving a few gashes, but mostly we have left it alone. The moonlight glitters off the glass, melted and resolidified in slender grooves amidst the crushed steel frames of unrecognizable buildings and cars.

A wall stretches through this part of the Zone, Las Puertas de los Desaparicidos--the Doors of the Disappeared. The brick wall extends for some miles, stretching from the eastern market to the crater. Taggers and muralists leave it alone. On each brick is carefully carved a name and a date. Names marked with early dates, from the late seventies and eighties, are Guatemalans, Salvadorans, a handful of Argentineans, Chileans, Peruvians. Toward the last part of the nineties, and the first part of the new century, nearly all the names are Mexican. Beginning in 2008, they are of all ancestries. Folks from the states, with parents and grandparents from across the globe.

No one calls it a wall, it is Las Puertas, or sometimes just La Puerta, The Door. It is a gateway, not to the dead, but to those we can only pray have long since died. It is a map, taking us to them, taking us to our grief. Disappearance leaves scars so deeply because it does not let people heal. When you must visit the morgue every day and pray that the tortured, mutilated and unidentifiable corpse before you might be your parent, child, lover, so that their suffering might be over, you cannot heal. When you must do this day after day, never learning the truth, never seeing justice brought to bear, never being able to talk of the disappeared, never being able to fight back or speak out, never having acknowledgment of your reality, you cannot heal.

So they come here. This wasteland of immigrants, of refugees, of exiles. They come here to live and work, to pray and fight. And they come here to map the memory. To relink the personal memory and collective stories, to transform them both within an emerging present. To seize space to document their reality and their stories. To record it. To remember, to acknowledge, to grieve, to heal. Alongside thousands upon thousands of others, they come to map with time, space and identity the way to their loved ones; to open with will and passion the way to our healing.

"Thank you, here you go. Could you help out Caz? It’s getting a little hectic here." Kay asks. Tuck the sketch pad and pencils under the table. Didi, Kay, Jasmine and i are working the stand today. The market is thick with people and booths. Have been trying unsuccessfully to draw something that feels like the thick chaos of clothes and booths. Salvage surrounds us--tires, intact windows, wood, sheet metal. A small line has formed around our small table and fortress of refuse.

"Buenos Dias, Señora, que necesitaría hoy? Ah sí, es doscientos. Entiendo, pero ventanas como está . . . " i haggle over the window for a few minutes with Valdez, a tiny filipina woman before me. A few minutes later the crowd died down.

Gesturing to where Valdez was standing, Kay asks, "You know her?" She noticed i sold the window for half of what is worth.

"Yeah, i do." Lately begun to talk about my past more with Kay as the weeks came. "She gave me a place to stay . . . just before i met you. Was really fucked up, didn’t have shit, but she took me in. Gave me a space to make my art, to try to heal. Basically fell in love with her son, a strapping English ‘gent by the name of Richard. Well, strapping English-Filipino ‘gent. ‘ventually hooked up with you and all, but Valdez helped on a lot of healing. Some of," gesturing at my long sleeved arms covering unmentioned razor scars, "Some of these are from that time, and just before. Wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for her. Just promised to get over to see her this week . . . She has a gorgeous little maroon house over on 24th, lives with Castro and Riverrun, a few other folks. You could come if you’d like."

"I’d like that."

IV

"14 August 2010: first aerial fire-bombing of the Zone in the city of El Paso, Texas." Jahs voice washes down the stairwell, mingling with our footprints of dust as we climb. As we reach the top of the stairwell, everyone tosses their tools on a canvas laid out in the middle of the room. "Where were you? Why? What’s your story?" As we scatter around the floor of the abandoned building, everyone ponders the date. Watch everyone as they fall into their tasks. Two--Marisol and Chandra--had become a part of the group within the last few months. Marisol had wandered in from the chaos in the north, asking for respect and a place to raise her child. Raz, as i think she was introduced, is visiting as a friend of Jahs. Four children in all, Casey, Ulysses, Batone, and Ikana. There are fourteen of us in all right now, the Leopold House. I find myself with Jahs as we begin tearing the boards off on old window frame. "Sat? You first." We are in the new place. With the new arrivals, we had made the decision that four people would move out into a salvaged apartment. Our first split-off community. The stories are part of its christening. I’ve promised Jahs a set of furniture, mapping both the stories of the abandoned apartment and the histories of our friends.

Sato, peeling wallpaper from across the room, glances around to make sure everyone is in sight and earshot. "‘Zip-Ten? I was in school in Shanghai, studying cybernetic engineering. A tremendous breakthrough in London had just come through in artificial intelligence, and the school was hysterical with excitement. Impossible problems in the control system on a series of janitorial drones we were producing were suddenly trivial." As he spoke, he rubs his arms, gesturing at them absently. "This breakthrough," turning his wrists upwards revealing a detailed tattoo in red of a schematic. "It opened the path for the little people, which i began to create later that year. I fell in love the first time in that month, with a third-year Mathematics grad student by the name of Andrew, from Australia. We were together for three months, which at the time was a miracle for me. I remember bits and pieces on the riots that were sweeping China, but i wasn’t paying much attention. Nothing about the Zone, the US had stopped being relevant to us years before. It wasn’t until later that me and the little people would find ourselves through the struggle, that we began the journey that brought us here . . . That’s all, i guess." As he spoke a furry teddy bear, about seven inches high, peeks from an opening in his backpack in the corner. After a moment, the teddy bear, a little plastic doll and a large metal bug crawls out and then under the pile of wallpaper that is accumulating at Sato’s feet. Stopping, he scratches the bear behind the ears. The metal bug continues the work of clearing the wall.

"Casey?" Casey is crouching, watching Sato’s plastic doll as it walks toward her.

"Yes?" she asks, looking up at Jahs.

"2010? What is your story of that year?"

"That’s the year i was born." Casey seems a little embarrassed, isn’t quite sure what to say.

"And?"

"Um . . . I was born in New Delhi, my mom was there for a conference . . . what was it Mom?" The doll climbs into Casey’s laps, watching us contentedly.

"IA’s global ‘Mapping Desire’ conference, for revolutionary erotic authors and artists," comes the response, from Jasmine in another room.

"That’s it. We moved back when i was a few weeks old. I think my dad was waiting for us in Puerto Rico, but I’m not sure. He had been active in the Independencia, but was killed when i was one."

"Chandra?"

"I was only thirteen. Living in Rome with my mother. We had come from Somalia only the year before." Chandra is emptying and cleaning out a closet. Like much of the material in the old flat, she would save the old newspapers lining the closet floor for my projects. "It was hell. Just that week i guess, maybe earlier, Dad had gotten beat by a group of Nazis, and then rounded up by immigration and immediately deported, three days apart. Mom was working two jobs, cleaning hotel rooms. Was in school, begging much Mom to let me work. I had three sisters and two brothers. i was the second oldest. My 17 year-old brother had joined the EU army. She was . . . I mean he was participating in its occupation of Morocco. I hated Rome, hated Europe, and hated white people. Loved my family, and i loved writing, which i had the chance to do in my sixth grade class, not much. My teacher, Mr. Gitelli, thought my stories were incoherent, but Nadia, my best friend at the time, loved them, so it was ok. I have some of my stories from that time . . . " Jahs and i finally tore through the wood blocking the window, revealing the afternoon overcast light coming in through the branches of an old tree.

"I’d appreciate seeing them sometime," i call back to her. Am thinking of the project for the apartment . . . perhaps a table covered in the old newspapers now lying piled by our tools. Overwritten on their headlines would be our stories, in crayon, with small crude sketches of our faces.

"Didi."

Didi stops his task of sweeping and returns to his bag. As he talks, he brought around a water bottle for us all to drink. "In 2010 i was working as a commercial transport pilot with Global Package Service, mainly flying the route between Moscow and Melbourne. When i wasn’t working i lived in a slum in Moscow and played. At the time i was mainly into guitar, playing old Russian folk tales in bars and what not. I was getting sick of flying, perpetually single, and didn’t feel like i was really growing in my music. A year later i would take early retirement to walk through Siberia to learn about the music traditions. There i ran into the guerrillas who at the time were mainly fighting the private security of the major logging operations." As he finishes talking, he lights candles, putting them in the darker corners of the room. Pausing in one corner, his face is brightly illuminated with golden light and dancing shadows. He wears his circular gold-rimmed glasses, and rubs his thick beard.

"Do you have scars?" Raz asks.

"From later. Too deep to see," he says, tapping his temple. "I spent six months in a Singapore interrogation facility." He turns and looks around the room at us. "I’ll tell you all some of my dreams later on . . . not now. That’s all."

Jahs lets the silence spill through the room, and then gestures Esperanza to begin. "I was working with street kids in Tijuana. My parents were pretty well established as professionals in San Diego, but i . . . "

From "Re/Mapping the Zone | Re/Telling Post-Revolutionary Geographies,"

"The problem must be on the roof, with the solar," say to Kay. We stand by the manhole looking down at the water pump and recycling unit beneath. The candle light from our living space shines out through narrow window slits, casting long shadows across the outdoor yard. Around lies stacked the salvage waiting for the next market. Each week we set up our booth, trading old windows, wood, steel rods, wheels and tires. Occasionally a household artifact we dig up. Use the old maps to locate buildings buried in the rubble. The salvage covers the House’s necessary food we can’t grow, and a few other items. The sky above is a immense pack of stars on black. Still cry when i see it, my heart so dense with love and memory.

"Yeah," Kay’s voice is weary as we turn to walk back the house. "I’ll go look it at tomorrow morning. We can leave the dishes until then."

"We’ve got a good group here, you know? Good people," i say. She holds the door open for me and smiles. Sorting through the long evening of conversation, stories, food. After working at renovating the new flat, we returned to eat dinner and tell more stories. Kay and i are on clean-up tonight.

"They are." We start picking up the scattered mugs and plates around. Kay stops, running her fingertips over the painted quilt draped on the large easy chair. Finished it this month. Around a circle bisected by a cross, the group dances. Our friends here from the Leopold House, but others too. My family, James, my old comrades. Kay’s family, and her elves. Friends lost in the war and in the hard few years since. Other figures approaching the circle from the outside, being welcomed-- nomads bringing food, buzzards descending, guerrillas coming in from the desert to feast with us, immigrants walking from distant continents, brother coyote wandering in. "A home space. That’s what you created for me, and what you’ve helped make for everyone. Our friends come and go, to and from places I’ve often never heard of, but they are always at home when they come here." The living room around us is bathed in lamplight. The ceiling and one wall is a deep earth red, the windowsills bright blue. Kay picked the colors, reminding many of us of Mexico.

Sit on our couch as she talks, staring out into the tiny garden and dark courtyard. My seat is covered by another huge quilt, a crazy quilt made from scraps. "That’s what i dream about," i begin. "You always ask me what i see, what happened when i wake up at night. They’re always about trying to go home. About using all my maps to find it, locked away somewhere. Somewhere deep. And i can’t. I can’t! Because it’s gone. I never can."

I feel her sit next to me, her hand rubbing my shoulder. Have begun to cry. "Oh Caz . . . We’re all exiles, all migrants. . . . But we’ve made something, right here. Something that counts."

-Dec 1997