No Mercy For Dogs Chapter 25

I returned to a city at war with itself.

 

After leaving Juan the Chivero’s ranch in the mountains of Chihuahua, I drove through the night.  I had nowhere to be, but this complete lack of purpose of direction drove me in the oddest way back to Monterrey.  There were other places I could have gone, but Monterrey had numerous advantages.  First, the percentage of Mexicans with a relatively high dose of French and Spanish blood was greater in Monterrey than in many other parts of la Republica, meaning my pale skin and “ojos de color” were not as abnormal there as they would have been in el DF or Guadalajara.  Second, due to all of the factories in the city, Americans were fairly common.  Third, Monterrey was the most modern of the large Mexican metropolises, and if I was going to find some kind of life in this nation, I wanted to do something other than build cabinets for men like Hector.  Lastly, Monterrey was the wild west, and I needed a highly corrupt environment if I was going to survive.

 

I wanted corrupt, and that’s what I got.  Overnight, several teams of sicarios had assaulted a number of police stations and one armory.  The government’s response was nastic, confused, and poorly planned.  More checkpoints were thrown up, the talking heads were all over the airwaves, and I heard that at least one section of the massive downtown mercado was raided for weapons.  I was still several kilometres outside of the city when the traffic slowed down to a crawl.  Roughly fifteen minutes later, I saw the reason why: stretched across an overpass was an immense banner that read: We don’t pay in noodles.  It was signed by someone called “el 18”, and proudly displayed the logo of the Zetas.  I didn’t totally understand the message until it was later explained in a news broadcast that night: apparently the Zetas had discovered that several SEDENA brigades had not received money from the federal government in months, and had been paying their soldiers in Maruchin noodles.  Other narco-banners promised a $500 starting bonus for any troops that defected.  Others listed the home addresses of commanding officers of these brigades.  “El 18,” as it turned out, was not one from the original GAFES soldiers that had started the Zetas, who all went by their original alphanumeric call signs; instead, he had acquired this nickname because he’d had two of his fingers cut off during an interrogation by a rival cartel.  He’d used the blood as lubrication, slipped out of his bonds, and then killed his captors with the leg of the stool he was tied to.  He was very popular in the narco-comics found in the mercados as a result.

 

I’d been up all night, and needed to sleep. The emotional high that had carried me west to Juan’s had worn off around midnight, and only sheer stubbornness powered me now.  I headed for the Macroplaza again, and parked the Rover in a lot near the Liverpool department store.  I debated the merits of leaving my money in the well versus taking it with me, and decided that I wanted it on me.  The car was a better target than I was, I figured.  I checked into a dive hotel a few blocks away and disappeared for eight hours.  By the time I awoke, the sun was setting.

 

I wandered about for awhile, looking for something to eat.  I noticed a nearby restaurant teeming with customers called “las Monjas”.  Thinking that popularity night equate to quality, I stopped near the door to read the menu.  Midway through this perusal I figured out the allure: the waitresses were all dressed up as skanky Catholic nuns.  I scanned the crowd again, noticing the heavy prevalence of young men, and then left.  The last thing I needed was a bunch of drunken frat boys, hooting and hollering as I tried to eat.  I mean, I’d already thrown away my guns, and I didn’t want to start regretting it.

 

I found myself drifting into the Asian enclave that I’d discovered before my trip to the mountains.  I couldn’t locate the Vietnamese restaurant I’d eaten in the last time, but I soon found another.  This place had few options, but that was okay, as everything they served was good.  A surly matron first plopped a bowl of crab-noodle soup down on the table.  This was followed by vermicelli, green mung beans, then sticky-rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves.  The meal was so satisfying – so incredibly not tacos or goat – that I jokingly resolved never to leave the district again.  I decided I might as well try to find the cyber café I used when I bought my phone, and see if I could figure out what my next move should be.  After an hour of wandering about narrow alleys and crowded markets, I gave up and returned to my room.  I watched an awful late night movie and fell asleep around 3am.

 

Seven hours later I hit the concrete again.  I found an Asian bakery selling doughnuts, sausage buns, and a sort of egg custard tart called something that sounded like dahn taht.  I ordered several of these and ate them on the go.  I found the cyber café within fifteen minutes, more out of luck than any legitimate ratiocination on my part.  The staircase hadn’t been cleaned since my last visit, the ammonia stench of urine even stronger, if that was possible.  A young Asian kid wearing a shirt that read “There are 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary, and those that don’t” was sitting behind a counter.  He waved me through the door after noting my arrival time on a card; I couldn’t tell if he was the same young man that had been working here during my last trip, but he seemed equally distracted and bored.  I paused upon entering the long hall, trying to remember which workstation was the one I’d spent hours sanitizing.  I knew the general region, but I didn’t find the machine with the partitioned drive until my third attempt.  I grinned as Knoppix booted up, then again as I checked the system and found that it was still remarkably clean.  After satisfying myself that one of my old proxies was still functional, I started screening the Texas newspapers, checking for any references to my crime.  I didn’t find anything new, and sat back in my chair, rubbing my nose and trying to figure out what to do next.  The place had filled up some over the past hour, with perhaps twenty-five of the workstations in use, mostly by young adults and children.  A kid of perhaps fifteen was clearly studying for some kind of exam, books open on either side of the keyboard.  It was summer break, but this didn’t really surprise me.  The power of Asian tiger mothers is trans-national.

 

I felt a headache coming on; I remember that.  I also remember feeling as if I was deflating, somehow.  The fear was leaving me, drip by drip.  I recall thinking this was a good thing, stupidly.  I had no idea what I was doing, and I welcomed the loss of feeling.

 

I was still leaning back when I noticed movement out of the corner of my left eye.  When I turned my head in that direction, the kid at the counter was talking on a cellular phone and looking straight at me.  His gaze shifted immediately to wander about the room, and then he stepped back, out of view.  I frowned, trying to decide if he had been looking at me specifically, or was just doing his duty by checking on the room while talking to his girlfriend.  The latter seemed more likely, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.  I felt this, but couldn’t connect this to any sense of self-preservation, the way I had for most of my time south of the border.  I chided myself for being paranoid, but decided I was done there anyway, and I might as well go find somewhere else to brood.  I shut down the machine and began walking towards the door, fishing several twenty peso notes from my pocket.

 

I was paying the bill when the man walked in the door.  I turned, gave him a hard scan.  He was smoking, something that I would come very quickly to realize was a universal constant with Tiejiang.  He looked at the kid behind the counter, then back at me.

 

“You guy that clean computer 39?” he asked.  Well, not really.  What he actually said is hard to describe.  If you were to toss a hefty dose of slang-infused Cantonese into a blender, then add a large dollop of the worst introductory Spanish imaginable, topping everything off with a few epenthesis-mutated English words learned from badly translated American movies and then mashed down on the button for a few minutes, you might approximate the verbal slurry that he sprayed into the air between us.  His words did have an edge to them, one that might have been intimidating to me a year before, but I was now made of sterner stuff.  For the briefest of moments I longed for one of Chespy’s 10 mms, but I banished this immediately and let my eyes go dead, sizing the man up.  A small smile curled up around the cigarette as he saw me shift into a more martial mental stance.  He immediately said something rapid and incomprehensible to the kid.

 

“He want to know if you is gwai lo who clean desktop 39 last year.”  The kid’s Spanish wasn’t much better, but at least it was largely comprehensible.

 

I turned back to the older man, but spoke to his obvious employee.  “Yeah, that was me.  You don’t like what I did, maybe you should learn to keep your house clean.”  I moved to push past him, and he stepped out of the way as his subordinate translated my words.  I was palming the door open when I hear the young man call out to me.

 

“Wait, please you wait.”

 

I turned back, observed the pair trade comments.  The kid finally turned back to me and pushed his glasses back on his nose.  “He want you clean others same way.  He want to know how much.”

 

I very nearly told him I wasn’t looking for work, then stopped, admitting to myself that this was more or less exactly what I was needing at the moment.  I still couldn’t feel anything, no warnings, no risk.  This must be what it’s like to be dead, I thought.  I looked around the place, buying time.  From the very first second of my very first visit, hadn’t I labelled the place as bisecting the underworld in some way?  That was the whole appeal for me originally, the way it was so obviously, unapologetically dirty.  I returned my stare back to the older man.  Yeah, he had scoundrel written all over him.  He would understand the requirement to pay in cash.  He would also know that his network was a mess, and that it would take time to fix.  Hell, it was better than construction work, and safer than dealing with the cartels.  Maybe.  I decided to leap.

 

“Depends on whether you want to actually pay for the software you will need to get rid of all of that malware.  If you do everything legally, it’s going to cost you thousands, and I’ll want twenty dollars American per hour.”

 

The boy translated this.  The response came quickly.

 

“If he no want pay legal?”

 

“Twenty per hour, and I don’t want to hear a word about it if a bunch of Silicon Valley lawyers show up at your doorstep.”

 

This got a yellow-toothed smile from the older man.  I managed to kill this almost immediately when I asked for an advance on my first ten hours of labor.  I didn’t actually expect him to pay this.  I really just wanted to see how the man would react.  After a long pause he said something, and his employee said someone would bring it down to me.

 

“One hour,” I responded, returning to the hall.  They brought me ten twenty-dollar bills fifty-two minutes later.

 

Of all of the odd jobs I worked in Mexico, my work for Tiejiang was easily the oddest.  I honestly have no idea who I actually worked for.  Wong, the young man whose job it was to collect the usage and print fees, clearly worked for Tiejiang.  So too did Jiang.  I’m pretty sure they were all from either Guangzhou or Hong Kong.  Tiejiang seemed to own part of the building that housed the cyber café in its basement.  Wu Zhenlin also appeared to own parts of this tower and the one next door, and I’m pretty sure he was also Chinese.  His boss was Luo Xiannian.  I’m certain of that.  I think he worked for Chen Biao, who I only met on a handful of occasions.  It was kind of infuriating, attempting to keep track of the hierarchy, so I mostly kept to myself and went about my work.  The only reason I even knew all of these people in the first place was that the community was incredibly insular.  Many of the people I knew never left the roughly dozen blocks of the Asian quarter.  There were other foreigners there, I noticed, though we never really interacted.  Tiejiang seemed to appreciate that I seldom spoke.  I appreciated that he never even asked me my name, not once in almost sixty days.  Everyone simply called me gwai lo, which I initially thought was an attempt to pronounce guedo.  Wong cracked up when I tried to correct his accent.

 

“No, no; no wedo.  Gwai lo.  You say.”

 

“Gwai lo.”

 

“Yes.  Mean ‘ghost person’ for you skin.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Also mean ‘foreign devil’.”

 

“How…how could the same word mean two totally diff…you know what?  Never mind.”

 

The building above my lair was as convoluted as Tiejiang’s organizational structure.  The street level was taken up by two clothing markets that seemed to be rented by the same family and sold, to my untrained eye, the exact same items.  Near the corner was a fruit and vegetable market, and next to this were a series of small stores that sold a variety of trinkets, statues, DVDs, and general kitsch: pretty much the same stuff as the mercado near the elevated train.  I have no idea what was on the second floor.  I was told it was “storage space”, and I suppose this might have been true.  I never wanted to know what exactly they were storing, which everyone seemed to take for granted.  It took me a little over a week to mostly sanitize the network.  I spent a large number of (mostly paid) hours showing Wong how to be at least semi-competent as a sys-admin, though I suspect I would have had to redo a lot of the same malware sniping I’d completed that week, if I’d remained employed there longer.

 

Tiejiang wasn’t really one for compliments, but I suppose he must have been pleased with my work because he invited me up to the third floor the afternoon I finished schooling Wong.  I don’t know what the building had originally been built for back in the early 70s, but by this point the floors had been divided and subdivided so many times that I think even King Minos would have been impressed by the anarchic spider web of low doors, small rooms, and clutter that constituted this labyrinth.  The west hallway on the 3rd floor was set up for residential space, though I hardly ever saw anyone coming or going from those seven or eight doors save for an elderly lady that carried an immense blue, red, and white bag that was nearly half her size.  There were some small rooms near the elevator that remained opaque to me.  Most of the rest of the floor was taken up by an open warehouse, the space only broken up by the dozens of concrete of columns that rose from the floor and speared into the ceiling, and crate upon crate of burnable CDs and DVDs.

 

I gaped stupidly as I took in the size of the operation.  Near the center of the room, two rows of sturdy tables stretched for nearly thirty meters.  Siting on top of these were computers of the same sort, though I’d never seen their like before.  When Tiejiang walked us closer, I took in the long, narrow stacks of disc trays, and figured out that these were CD and DVD burners.  I’d never really thought about exactly where the tens of millions of discs on sale in he mercados came from before.  I did some quick calculations and decided that it would take dozens of facilities like this one to supply even one of the big markets.  I wondered how many of them were in this building alone, considering there were ten floors above this one that I’d never entered.

 

I was introduced to a man of perhaps forty years of age who went by Jiang.  His name sounded so similar to that of his boss that I had to ask him to repeat the introduction.  Jiang’s English was okay – certainly better than Wong’s bastardized Spanish.  It only took him a few minutes to show me how to work the burners; the software was simple and everything was pretty much point and click.  It took me a lot longer to decipher the paperwork detailing the orders to be filled.  I guess it seemed natural to Jiang, but it may as well have been the solution to the Hodge conjecture for all I knew. Jiang ended up circling a number on some of the forms until I learned to identify that one number amidst the undulating ocean of Chinese glyphs.  After that we worked in peace.  I continued to coast, disconnected.

 

We were paid based on the number of work orders we completed.  It never quite matched the twenty bucks an hour I’d gotten for my initial job, but on many days it was pretty close.  In Mexico, this was a fortune.  I ended up renting an apartment several blocks from the tower.  It was furnished with cheap appliances, a hideous orange couch, and it had a glorious view of a brick wall, but it was anonymous and quiet.  It was enough.

 

Tiejiang ran three eight-hour shifts in the production center on the third floor.  Jiang and I were the 3 to 11pm crew.  He tried to teach me some of his language, but it didn’t really take.  Everyday, either on the stairs or in the office, he would greet me with “Nei ho ma?”, to which I always responded “ho”.  I was told this meant “okay”, but wouldn’t be incredibly surprised to learn that someone in Shenzhen just spit coffee all over their keyboard, laughing hysterically at the joke Jiang pulled on me.  Sometimes he would say (something like) “sik tzo fanmei,” which is some kind of general greeting that also has to do with food.  Much of Jiang’s life revolved around what he inserted into his mouth.  He had a nuclear reactor-grade metabolism, because he ate constantly and somehow managed to remain no more than 130 pounds.  I gave up trying to learn all of the Cantonese terms for food after his attempted lesson on rice: mai was plain rice, I was told, cooked rice was faan, rice porridge was juk, and unhusked rice called guk.  There were a few other varieties, but memory fails me.

 

Despite the fact that our communications always required a hefty dose of hand signals and repetitions of simple phrases, Jiang seemed to like me.  I think he recognized a fellow castaway.  I had no idea who all of these people were, but I know a fugitive when I see one, and I was surrounded by them.  This should have made me feel… something, but I was just too far gone.  In any case, Jiang was forever inviting me out to eat with him after work.  I resisted for a while, but he eventually wore me down.  I’m glad he did.  I never would have found the hole-in-the-wall places he took me to, restaurants saturated with the smells of steamed vegetables and fish, dozens of sauces, and stir-fry oil.  I never got down with eating fish eyes, but the prawns and crabs in black bean sauce was a discovery I am thankful to have made.  Shark fin soup was new, too.  Boc choi and choi sum were common, as was a double-boiled soup made with duck, mushrooms, and tangerine peels.  For all that, the most common meal on Jiang’s outings was dim sum.  There’s a sort of ceremony or etiquette to one of these meals, apparently.  Tea is served first.  On top of one’s plate is a set of faai jee (chopsticks) and a white card.  Each time one of the trolleys laden with wicker baskets filled with dumplings passed by, the waiter would write something on the card.  Jiang was far more adventurous than I was; I mostly played it safe with siu mai, ha gow, and cha siu bau, followed by a fried pastry with sesame seeds called jian dui.

 

I began to learn the neighborhood.  Tiejiang wanted me to get a phone, so I ended up buying another cheap unit at an electronics shop in Luo Xiannian’s building.  It wasn’t anything special, just a simple tool.  I purchased 1500 pesos’ worth of minutes, stuck it in my jacket pocket, and almost never used it.

 

Mistake number one.

 

It was on one of these nights that Jiang took me to the Palace of Yama.  That wasn’t its real name.  As far as I ever knew, the bar didn’t have an official name, or a permit, or even ontological existence, according to the vast number of the citizens of Monterrey.  I bet Julian knew of it by that name, though, as I’m pretty sure it was a smugglers’ haven.  It was located on the top floor of a building a block and a half from Tiejiang’s base of operations.  I don’t know why, but the elevators listed floors 1 through 13, skipped 14, and then finished with the bar on 15.

 

I should have been fascinated by the Palace.  It was a remarkably democratic and egalitarian safe haven, a quiet place of shadows populated by men who almost certainly were all using names different from those they were born with.  It looked like a temple, and I suppose in many ways it was.  The main doorway had a spirit wall inside of the frame, and red lanterns hung on either side of the aperture to offer additional protection.  Chinh, the owner, seemed to favour lots of chardin-blue phoenixes, fake Sung paintings, and statues of fish, for some reason, though none of these was as large or dominating as the stone figure that towered over an altar in the northeast corner.  When I asked about this, Jiang referred to this as Quonti, the exact pronunciation evading me for many years.  I’ve studied Buddhism since 2008, but hadn’t ever come across reference to this character until a friend here shared a book on Taoism.  Kuan Ti is an alternative name for Mo, the god of war.  I suppose that fits.

 

I’d never really been to a bar that quiet before.  There were seldom more than twenty customers on any given night, and very few women. There was music, but I’ve never studied classical Asian songs before, so I couldn’t identify the artists.  Neither had I ever been to a bar where table games were the major diversion.  I didn’t have much better luck on the chess board at the Palace than I had with Julian.  I tried to figure out a game an older man labelled as “Chinese Chess”, but I sucked even worse at this version than at the Western variety.  The one game I expected to see wasn’t present.  When I asked Chinh why there weren’t any Go boards in the building, he gave me a long stare before responding with “We are a long way from Tokyo, gwai lo.”  I let it go.

 

Unlike with the Hammer’s coyuntura, the classes mixed at the Palace.  I saw Tiejiang there often, along with other building owners.  I met Mr Wu and Mr Luo, who both spoke better English than Jiang, the latter of which took a strange interest in me.  Luo was always accompanied by his Jack Russell terrier, who we were all required to refer to as “little Pan Fusheng”.  Luo would become enraged if someone called the annoying little devil anything else.  There wasn’t a man in the room that hadn’t seriously considered punting Pan Fusheng out the window at least once.  The tattoos on Luo’s arms were a sufficient deterrent for me, though.  Houston has an immense Asian community, and I wasn’t so ignorant that I didn’t know what the “14k” glyphs meant.

 

Chinh was the owner of the Palace, or at least he acted as such.  Mostly he could be seen seated at tables, having quiet conversations with quiet men.  Sometimes he would step behind the bar, sometimes he would take a turn dealing cards.  The first time he sat down across from me in my booth, I was reading the newspaper.  Out of reflex, I nodded and said, “zou tau.”

 

“I look Chinese to you?”

 

I set the paper down, gave him a deeper inspection.  “Honestly?”

 

He grinned.  “Let me guess, we all look alike to you.

 

It became a sort of game between us, attempting to guess where the other hailed from.  He had some advantages over me in this contest, considering he knew before he sat down that English was my primary language.  Still, he didn’t press this.  Chinh was accustomed to playing slow games.

 

“Hey. Memphis,” he’d say upon seeing me.

 

“Swing and a miss, Cambodia.”

 

“Fuck Cambodia.”

 

“Oookay.”

 

The sole bartender usually left around 2am, and random people would simply step behind the bar when they wanted something.  Chinh had plenty of bottles, but it was a really weird collection.  I was surveying the chaos one evening and decided to play a sort of trick.  I found some dry gin, orange curacao, two kinds of bitters, and a bottle of lime juice.  A few minutes later, I set a cocktail glass down in front of Chinh, who looked up at me with heavily lidded eyes.

 

“It’s called a Pegu.”

 

“I see,” he responded, not willing yet to reach out to taste my concoction.

 

“You know, Pegu.  It’s a mountain range in – “

 

“Myanmar, I know.  I’m not Burman.  My first name has more than one letter.”

 

“You never told me your first name.”

 

“It’s Denver,” he responded, taking his shot.

 

“Not even close.”

 

Two nights later I spent ten minutes making a complicated drink, after I discovered a bottle of Nuoc Mau in the back of a cupboard.

 

“It’s supposed to have a dash of red wine vinegar, which we are having to do without.  It’s called a ‘Mekong’,” I informed him, setting the glass down on a napkin.

 

“I’ve never even been to Vietnam, Tex.”

 

I raised a brow.  “I hope you don’t mind, but I left my herd of cows in your lobby.  I had to make room on the ranch for my new oil derricks.”  That got a laugh, and I’m pretty sure he bought the deception.

 

As so it went.  I didn’t bother with Tokyo Tea, given his stance on Go.  He nearly waved me away when I offered a Java Pirate Mary.  I was running out of Asian themed drinks when I scored a direct hit with a Singapore Sling.  He actually removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and waved it around.  “I give.  Now you.”

 

I paused, thinking things over.  I knew I had essentially given up, and had regressed to the same point of mental exhaustion I had experienced when I’d told Julian I could no longer act in my best interest; all that had shifted was my geographic location.  I was simply too numb to play anything safe anymore.

 

“Back pocket or jacket?” I asked, looking him in the eyes.

 

“Jacket,” he responded at once.  I wasn’t surprised he knew exactly what I had meant.  I reached into my jacket and removed one of my wallets, and laid it down on the bar, open so he could see my Canadian driver’s license.  Chinh looked this over and then removed it from the wallet, holding it up to the light. 

 

“Mmm, good.  Complete package?” 

 

“Passport, birth certificate, healthcare card, student ID from a university in Vancouver.”

 

“And the other?”  I removed the billfold from my pants pocket, handed it over.  He flipped the various Mexican IDs, pausing to look at the digital fingerprint on the backside of the IFE card.  “This real?”

 

“I was told so,” I responded, pouring a finger of scotch into a glass and then taking a sip.

 

“You were told so.”

 

“I have no reason to doubt the people that acquired them.”

 

“Any reason to trust them, Canada?”

 

“Ah,” I sighed, downing the rest of the glass.  “If you put it like that, I suppose not.”

 

“Then you should get a new one.  I know a guy.  Colonel in the Army.  Can get anything.”

 

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to tell him that this was almost exactly the same description Chespy had given me about the man behind the IDs I already had.  Had to be the same guy, I decided.  It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to swap identities every once in a while, I decided.  And this guy had already proven himself to be qualified and trustworthy.

 

“You can put me in touch with this guy?” I asked, returning everything to my person.

 

“Yes.  You will need to get photographs made first.  I have a guy for this as well.”

 

I decided to take him up on the matter.  I was making money, and while 3 grand was a lot of cash, it seemed a cheap price to pay to put a firewall between me and Chespy’s people.

 

Mistake number two.

 

I had the photos made the next week.  Chinh’s “guy” was actually a lady, and she spent an evening making subtle digital alterations to the images.  I assumed this was designed to defeat facial recognition software, something Chespy’s people hadn’t bothered with.  Chinh had a courier deliver these to the Colonel, along with my new cellular number.  I was told everything would be ready in ten days.  Chinh asked if I wanted one of his men to pick everything up when it was ready, but I decided it might be a good idea to establish a relationship with the man, in case I had to use him again in the future and Chinh wasn’t available to oversee the connection.  I was given an address on the highway to Apodaca, and went on about my life.

 

Mistake number three.

 

If you read the AFI reports detailing my arrest, they make a great hullabaloo about their abilities and brilliance, talking up the sophistication of my tradecraft and how complicated my capture had proven to be.  Poppycock: I walked right into them.  What none of us had known – not Chinh’s people, not Chespy’s, and certainly not me – was that the dear Colonel had managed to get himself pinched in April.  Part of his plea deal was to continue to run his massive identity creation operation for one calendar year.  When he received my photos, the police initially had no idea who I was.  I was just another narco, looking to become someone more anonymous.  They made the call, set up the meet, and then liaised with the army.

 

They showed the video during a pretrial hearing.  I arrived at the restaurant wearing a grey suit, white shirt, and sunglasses.  I took a table in the rear, facing the street.  This caused the army to change their tactics.  They couldn’t have known that I was unarmed, that I had ceased to even wear the Halo on my wrist weeks before; they were expecting a gunman, and got me instead.  They came in through the kitchen.  In the surveillance footage, everything happens very quickly.  In a matter of about two seconds, the space between me and the swinging door to the kitchen is filled with men in black tactical gear wielding automatic weapons.  The first I knew of this is when an arm begins to press across my throat, and when I heard a voice in my ear whisper “tranquilo”.  I don’t know what my first thought was.  They asked me this later.  You don’t think in moments like this; they happen too fast for that.  I suppose my brain was running on a theory of a kidnapping; this was Mexico, after all.  My right hand had been about to grip my glass of water when I was attacked, so instinctively I used this to smash against the face of the man behind me.  He screamed and fell backwards.  I started to stand, spinning around, which is when three men tackled me to the ground.

 

Much was made of this.  My reaction was said to illustrate my utter viciousness, that I would be willing to attack, unarmed, an entire military assault element.  The simple truth: if I had known how many weapons were in the room and pointed in my general direction, I wouldn’t have moved.  Probably.  There have been moments during these later years when I have sometimes felt that perhaps being gunned down in 2005 by Mexican special forces might have been preferable to everything that followed.

 

I was cuffed, shackled, blindfolded, and tossed – literally – into the backseat of some sort of SUV.  The ride back to the detention facility took roughly twenty minutes.  Several officers pretended to place bets on how many of my ribs they would need to break before I told them who I was.  I tried to feel something – fear, relief, anything – but I was floating, not even touching the cloth of the seats I was laying on.  I closed my eyes behind the blindfold and willed my heart to stop.

 

The initial beatings were appetizers of what was to come.  I was dragged into a concrete room with what felt to be a drain under my feet.  My cuffs were attached to a chain above my head, and I heard a wench activate a second before my arms were pulled upward.  I was lifted up until I could barely stand on my toes.  My blindfold stayed on.  They took turns punching me, while several men kept up a running line of insults and threats of future torture.  At one point, one of them bet another that I was going to start begging for mercy in less than ten minutes, and I started laughing, slowly at first, then it all just spilled out of me, each guffaw feeling like dynamite going off in my chest where they’d been wailing on me.  “Es possible que no sabes, hermanos?” I gasped, hearing them fall silent. “Es este mundo, no hay ninguna misericordia para los perros.”  The men started grumbling about me being crazy.  They left, promising to return shortly.  They did.  I never knew their names, but I will never forget their voices.

 

In those first few moments, I thought I knew what was coming.  I thought I’d learned enough about toughness and resistance to handle anything.  I thought I was ready.  I was wrong.  Despite everything, I would actually be surprised when Fort Bend deputies refused to take photos of the bruises on my body, the way they laughed about needing “some justice like that” in the United States.  I would actually be shocked when Fort Bend prosecutors claimed that they had never signed an agreement with Mexico to take the death penalty off the table as a condition of my extradition, even though several treaties required this very thing.  I would stumble from surprise to rude awakening to a state of numb exhaustion for years over the nearly infinite gulf separating the actual evils found in the prison system versus the ways that most Americans perceive that same system.  It bewilders me still – in the ancient sense of that word, meaning to be taken into the wild far from civilization and left to die.

 

In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare writes of the “infinite varieties of the quality of mercy.”  Of this, I cannot say.  As I write these words, I am roughly sixty days from my potential death.  For almost a decade, I have been preparing a sort of experiment that may, from a certain angle, look something like mercy or even grace.  I suspect very strongly that many people will desire to view the choice I am about to lay at the feet of Governor Greg Abbott as an opportunity for mercy, people’s beliefs on the subject being what they are.  I once saw the topic of clemency through this lens, certainly.  As the years have gone by and my proficiency with the subject improved, as I monitored closely the ways that our state government denied petition after petition, I’m afraid I have lost this pleasing yet naïve perspective.  It has become apparent to me that everything really reduces down to a calculation of the political capital Abbott will accrue from either my execution or my survival.  If enough of his base expresses their desire for my continued existence – and there’s no doubt that amongst this crowd, the idiom of mercy will dominate – he can grant me my life and pretend that his decision had everything to do with him having a conscience.  If that base remains quiet or is drowned out by voices of other humans the Governor detests, he will bank instead on the goodwill obtained from his supporters for being a staunch advocate for their version of justice.  This is a question about power and perception, not mercy.  I’ll know in just under sixty days if I have judged the currents of this strange river correctly, you, whenever you eventually read these words.  It would have been nice to have lived in a society where a genuine attempt at self-correction and evolution meant something when it comes to questions of clemency, but we have a long way to go before we get to that point in Texas.  

 

So, I’m not sure I really know much about the infinite varieties of the quality of mercy, at least not in all the ways I would like to.  I do know about the quality of hurt, the quality of pain, the quality of fear.  They have tried to instruct me on the infinite varieties of the quality of hate, but I grew weary of the lessons and dropped out of class.  I have learned, and continue to learn, some of the qualities of love, and solidarity, and maybe – again, from a certain angle – the quality of redemption.  It is a strange and terrible thing to be eternally defined by one’s worst act, to be told that one is incapable of changing for the better because the path one has chosen out of the Shadow doesn’t happen to synch up enough with a series of incoherent Levantine folktales.  I wonder if I would have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I had clothed myself in the vestments of religion and began spouting a bunch of Kum-bah-yah-my-lord stuff instead of heading off into the lands of humanism and rationality.  I suspect my chances of survival would be much higher at the moment, but the cost – the cost!  I am convinced in this moment that I did as I had to do, and that it is better to die genuinely healed (if unbelieved by the faithful) than to survive as a hypocrite.  I say this, I believe it, and I guess we will see if I could feel this way on the morning of 22 February. 

 

There is a thing I have done for years, something I have never spoken about with anyone, and certainly never written about.  It’s a sort of meditation, different from my regular attempts at shamatha or vipassana, something I engage in when I’m weighed down by the guilt I’ve carried around on my shoulders for the past fifteen years.  I picture a balance.  On the one side, I place 10 December 2003, the beliefs that led up to that night, the blood, the lies.  On the other, I lay a thousand acts of generosity that I have willed into existence since my fall from citizenhood.  Generally these aren’t worth mentioning to people: small acts of kindness that we convicts engage in within this concrete hell as a form of resistance.  While certainly not equivalent to the swirling, pulsing black hole piled up on the other side of the scales when compared as individual moments, collectively, they start to add up to something. In this model, the balance never zeroes out, and it never will; I’m nowhere near optimistically arrogant enough to think such a thing is possible.  The point is to keep piling up the weight, to never stop.  It helps to have a sort of gallery of positive memories available to be taken out and cradled when the night is long and the stone-throwers are active.

 

For it’s all too easy to find yourself laying there, staring at the ceiling or looking out the window at a sky made starless by the security lights, and fall into the habit of perceiving within all of that emptiness the idea that concepts like mercy and redemption are insignificant when compared to pain and ignorance and hate.  You need to be able to reach out to the other side of the scales and pick out a memory, to be able to look further than the bars and catch a glimpse of Juan sitting on his porch, Blackie laying next to him, his huge anchor of a head resting on his master’s leg, and to know that you did that.  That’s not much, I know.  It makes me smile every single time, nonetheless.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it is the value of learning to smile in the face of annihilation.  It’s the only real power we humans ever have.